Karma

This post will discuss my understanding of the Buddhist concept of karma. It is not an orthodox understanding. As far as I’m concerned, all Buddhist orthodoxies have failed in their attempts to reconcile the doctrine of individual rebirth with the doctrine of no self. (If there is no self, who gets reborn? They all claim to have answers, but none of those answers makes sense to me.) I find it necessary to reject the doctrine of individual rebirth. That is, I reject the idea of rebirth as an event where one specific individual is reborn as another specific individual. None of this Shirley MacLaine crap!

My understanding starts with a thought experiment. Suppose it were possible to upload and download a person’s memories lock, stock, and barrel. I don’t think this will ever be possible technologically, but it should always be a theoretical possibility: memories are just information, so why not upload and download this information? Now consider two people, call them Tom and Mary. Using this upload/download process, switch the information in their brains. When Mary wakes up, she will say something like, “Holy crap! I’ve turned into a chick.” With Tom’s memories, Mary will have no idea that she’s really been Mary all along.

I don’t necessarily expect others to be convinced, but to me, this gedankenexperiment shows that the Buddhists are right about “no self.” Why do I believe I’m the same person that I was ten minutes ago? Because I remember being that person. But memories, the thought experiment tells me, are totally arbitrary. So I’m really not the same person.

If I can’t define myself in terms of memories, how should I define myself? A Buddhist philosopher might say, “Define yourself in terms of consequences.” If what this person did ten minutes ago caused what’s happening to you now, then you are the same person. “I” drank a cup of coffee, so now “I” feel alert.

The obvious “problem” with this idea is that consequences do not go strictly from a single individual to a single individual. For example, I brewed a pot of coffee and poured cups for me and my wife, so now (having drunk it) we both feel alert. But this is only a problem if we let it be one. My suggestion is to accept this new definition of self without reservations: when one person does something, everyone affected by their action becomes, to some extent, that person. “My wife” is now partly me. Everyone who borrows or lends dollars at a floating interest rate is now partly Ben Bernanke.

Once you accept this definition of self, the concept of karma falls right out. No longer do we need some mystical process whereby good and bad karma attach to the individual. It happens by definition. If I do something that benefits people, it benefits me, because I literally become those people. Rebirth also becomes a trivial issue: I am constantly being reborn in the people affected by my actions. In a past life, I was Ben Bernanke.

Buddhism and Economics

…or perhaps I won’t be too busy to post. We can relax the assumption that I would spend some time sleeping this week…


Apropos of my mention of Buddhism in an earlier post, battlepanda asserts:

Instead of focusing on love and hate, for one's friends and enemies respectively, Buddhism focuses on suffering and mercy, which is the alleviation of suffering. It is the only religion I know of that aligns with utilitarian elements

In the light of this, it occurs to me that Buddhism is related to economics. A rational Buddhist is like the hypothetical social planner that economists use to generate social optima in welfare models, because maximizing social welfare is equivalent to maximizing good karma. (That is, the social planner is maximizing his or her own good karma by acting to maximize social welfare. There might be a problem, though, because some interpretations of Buddhism argue that, while good karma is better than bad karma, it’s even better to have no karma at all.)

OK, maybe that’s just an excuse to write about Buddhism in a blog that’s focused on economics. I don’t really need an excuse, but I will be posting about Buddhism occasionally.

Interestingly, the phrase “Buddhism and economics” (in quotation marks) gets 102 results in Google, with apparently only a little bit of redundancy. I haven’t looked at any of them yet.

Against Optimism

The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault
It rains into the sea
And still the sea is salt

The world is a horrible place. It has always been a horrible place. Barring some huge and unforeseen miracle, it will always be a horrible place. The sooner people realize this, the sooner we can start having realistic political discussions.

Conservatives seem to think that the world is OK – maybe not great, but OK – if only governments would stop screwing things up. To anyone who takes off his or her rose colored glasses for a few minutes (as liberals generally do from time to time, if only to see how conservatives are wrong), this point of view is nonsensical. The world is clearly not OK, and government intervention – while it might cause some harm – cannot seriously be thought a sufficient explanation, given the severity of the world’s not-OK-ness.

Liberals, on the other hand, think that the world’s problems – most of them, or enough of them, anyhow – can be solved. To anyone who thinks through the issues (as conservatives do occasionally, if only to see why liberals are wrong), this point of view is nonsensical. When you try to solve a problem (“you” being a hypothetical political leader with the aid of an inefficient bureaucracy and subject to the usual political motivations), you typically create bigger problems, and you seldom succeed in solving the original problem.

Though I’m rather a social liberal myself, I think the only people who are close to having it right are certain religious conservatives who believe that the fallen state of the world is a punishment for man’s sin and that the only hope of redemption is religious rather than political. In some cases, these are people who do foresee the “huge…miracle” that I earlier described as “unforeseen.”

As for me, Osama Bin Laden has convinced me that religion – Western monotheism, anyhow – is not the right way. And moreover, somehow, I no longer understand how the idea of Original Sin ever made sense to me. (I won’t get into the theological details here.) Maybe I could buy Buddhism (you know, “Life is suffering; there is no self; all is emptiness”), if only these damn American Buddhists would cut their hair and dress like Episcopalians.

(Am I the only person that still reads Housman?)

(Apparently not; Sognaluna does. Jivacandra does. So does St00pidN00bie.)

Against Liberty

Yesterday was Patriots Day, the day when New England residents commemorate the beginning of the American Revolution, the war “for American liberty.” I don’t want to in any way disparage the contribution of Paul Revere and his fellow revolutionary patriots, but I take issue with the rhetorical justification usually offered for their rebellion. I am against liberty.

I don’t mean to say that we were better off with George III. Quite the contrary: the problem was precisely that the British were availing themselves of too much liberty. For example, British soldiers took the liberty of staying in houses without the consent of the owners. And while the Declaration of Independence pays lip service to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” its list of George’s tyrannies is not so much about excessive restrictions on liberty as about refusal to allow appropriate restrictions, beginning with, “He has refuted his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”

When we speak of any tyrant – Hitler and Stalin in the 20th century being perhaps better examples than George in the 18th – it is often suggested that this tyrant committed a great evil by depriving people of their liberties. But the greatest evils these tyrants committed were the things they did, not the things they prevented others from doing. The Nazi holocaust, and the Stalinist purges, these were liberties that should not have been permitted.

I don’t deny that liberty can be useful. It is useful to allow people to make decisions for themselves because they have the best information about their own needs and the strongest motivation to take care of those needs. It is useful to allow markets to function freely because free markets are an efficient way to optimize production and distribution. Liberty, in my view, is a necessary evil – not exactly necessary, really, but something often worthy to be tolerated for the benefits it confers rather than for any inherent virtue.

If, however, you want to argue for limited government (and all civilized people, I think, believe that government should have some limitations), it makes little sense to me to argue that limiting government promotes liberty. To limit government is to restrict the government’s liberty. Limiting government may in many cases have the beneficial side effect of increasing economic efficiency, but that is not the best reason to advocate it. The best reason is that limitations on government take away the government’s liberty to do horrible things.