March 2009 Archives

There is a major piece in this month's Atlantic Monthly on politics and our economic meltdown, available here. It's been getting a lot of attention, as the author is a very credible voice with alarming insights. Here's the lede:

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

I've bolded passages of Johnson's argument that I find particularly striking:

Instead [of using violence or bribery], the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. . . . Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn’t.

Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions, or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here. . . . The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump “cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.” This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression—because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big. We face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries, a weakening of confidence among individuals and firms, and major problems for government finances. If our leadership wakes up to the potential consequences, we may yet see dramatic action on the banking system and a breaking of the old elite. Let us hope it is not then too late.

I support President Obama in general, and I was heartened by his progressive budget, and overall I think he will prove to be a fine leader in many respects. But I remain disappointed in his economics team, headed by Summers and Geithner, having had a strong sense from the start that they are incapable of making the kind of transformation changes that are necessary to wrest our economy (and nation) back from the oligarchy that has usurped it, as Johnson outlines. Perhaps, even with the right people, the Obama administration won't have political capital to do what needs to be done. But I'd love to see him try, and I really doubt it will happen with Summers and Geithner in charge.

I started reading this book, The Couch and the Tree: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, edited by Anthony Molino. It is a compilation of essays, the first of which is titled “Psychology in Primitive Buddhism,” by Joe Tom Sun, published in 1924. The essay is a paragraph by paragraph comparison of basic Buddhist concepts with basic Freudian thinking.

This paragraph was particularly interesting to me:

"Profound insight into the psychology of the conscious mind was attained and later expounded in their [Buddhist] philosophy. Emotion, for example, was frankly stated to be due to ignorance. A casual glance at the underlying motive for the majority of emotional outbreaks will make it clear that these are due to the mechanism of displacement, a by-product of ignorance, lack of psychic insight. Furthermore, a morbid emotion is not cured by merely teaching a patient its etiology. Its cure is, however, brought about by analysis (vijja, wisdom) which is characterized by instruction and the deepest of meditation – that is, free association and being led gently backwards from the present effect to the past cause" (7).

Strange wording aside, I liked how Joe Tom Sun compared wisdom and analysis. It implies a deep understanding of one's emotions and where they come from as being a key component of mindfulness. This is something that resonates with me. My "emotional outbreaks" are almost always due to my own lack of understanding about my reaction to an event or something someone says, and letting it spiral out without stopping to analyze it.

What do you guys think?

Facebook, twitter, internet radio - I love all that stuff. The interconnectedness, the interdependence: I find myself fascinated by how these online communities grow and change, both in themselves and how they change us.

I'm not the only one of course; An earlier post on the dharma of Facebook generated lots of interest. Maybe Facebook and Twitter are one big interactive sociology experiment; one megabrain that arises from us and is both more and less than us collectively. As Bugs used say, "mmm, could be!" And maybe not.

But I'm also fascinated by how and why these spaces or entities are funded. Because no one works at Facebook or Twitter just for hte fun of it. They are not volunteer-maintained. Companies are spending a LOT of money to invest in and exploit social media. It's interesting to see how consumption, consumption, consumption is driven in social media.

I read MediaPost.com, for the heck of it, and this recent blog post caught my eye.
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Ripple6 is a Gannett company that provides both publishers and brands with a range of social media tools. For Proctor & Gamble's Rouge Magazine site at www.rougemag.com, Ripple6 built a closed community ("The Salon") where invitees from the P&G mailing list could converse about beauty regimens generally as well as a specific product P&G was promoting. One of the aims of the project was to find advocates and activate them outside of this closed community.

According to Ripple6 CEO Sang Kim, a number of analytic tools can be used to identify potential brand cheerleaders. "What was cool is that one of the things you could see was peer helping," he says. "Someone would say that they had tried something and it didn't work, and then someone else would chime in and say that they had experienced the same thing and here is how it worked better for her. That is clearly an advocate -- someone who doesn't just say this is great but actually shows you how to get greater value out of the product." In other words, the conversation revealed a behavioral gesture the brand would want to enlist: the propensity to reach out and advise.
. . . Once an advocate has been identified, simply slamming them with messages or product to spread around is a mistake, Kim finds. "You really need to embrace them and communicate with them first."

In a closed or branded community, the advocates can get special access to the product and the company. Then you can give them the tools to recruit. In the case of the P&G program, "it was a very explicit viral program. The goal was to actually have the advocates bring their [external] network into the community."
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So "peer helping" doesn't just have karmic benefits, it seems. It has measurable monetary benefits to advertisers, as well. And being able to measure that impulse is an expertise to be sold.

Altruism, or compassion for another suffering human who just can't get that damn exfoliator to work, makes one an effective shill to drive consumption. People who can measure your altruism can sell their services.

And don't think our every click, our frequency of interaction, our time of interaction -- every move we make on FB isn't being measured. It doesn't matter if they can't tie an activity to a particular person. We are a herd, being observed. I don't particularly think this is evil, just very interesting. What to do with knowledge of the herd? Shall we sell it more crap or share the dharma? Very interesting to see how every action, every impulse, is not what we think it is. My impulse to help another might just help destroy the planet. Whoops, there goes that interdependence again!

In my continuing project to identify instances of honest Buddhist thought appearing in Western culture, I would like to discuss the writer Lydia Davis today. Davis is a short story writer whose work blends poetry, philosophy and fiction. Many of her pieces are only a page long, or a sentences or two. I came across the following story in her 2002 collection, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. The story, typed below in its entirety, is called "New Year's Resolution."

"I ask my friend Bob what his New Year's Resolutions are and he says, with a shrug (indicating that this is obvious or not surprising): to drink less, to lose weight... He asks me the same, but I am not ready to answer him yet. I have been studying my Zen again, in a mild way, out of desperation over the holidays, though mild desperation. A medal or a rotten tomato, it's all the same, says the book I have been reading. After a few days consideration, I think the most truthful answer to my friend Bob would be: My New Year's Resolution is to learn to see myself as nothing. Is this competitive? He wants to lose some weight, I want to learn to see myself as nothing. Of course, to be competitive is not in keeping with any Buddhist philosophy. A true nothing is not competitive. But I don't think I'm being competitive when I say it. I am feeling truly humble, at that moment. Or I think I am—in fact, can anyone be truly humble at the moment they say they want to learn to be nothing? But there is another problem, which I have been wanting to describe to Bob for a few weeks now: at last, halfway through your life, you are smart enough to see that it all amounts to nothing, even success amounts to nothing. But how does a person learn to see herself as nothing when she has already had so much trouble learning to see herself as something in the first place? It's so confusing. You spend the first half of your life learning that you are something after all, now you have to spend the second half learning to see yourself as nothing. You have been a negative nothing, now you want to be a positive nothing. I have begun trying, in these first days of the New Year, but so far it's pretty difficult. I'm pretty close to nothing all morning, but by late afternoon what is in me that is something starts throwing its weight around. This happens many days. By evening, I'm full of something and it's often something nasty and pushy. So what I think at this point is that I'm aiming too high, that maybe nothing is too much, to begin with. Maybe for now I should just try, each day, to be a little less that I usually am."

I appreciated Davis's style, her whole approach to writing. She has certainly written longer stories, but much of her work, such as the above flash fiction (though I am not a fan of that term because, well, it's too flashy), I would in fact categorize as Buddhist in nature. What might that even mean? Well, perhaps mindful, heartfelt, psychological/philosophical, concentrated in form.

Certainly Davis brings her own questions to the table here: Does the Buddhist approach to life essential amount to a continual effort to be a little less that we usually are? A little closer to nothing than we were the day before? Isn't that the idea? Om gate gate?

And I would raise my own questions about writing in general—and about fiction writing in particular—in response to this piece: How does a Buddhist approach the art of narrative? How does one begin to tell one's story, or the story of others, when the emphasis of the view is always to let go of the idea of self altogether? How does one express one's self without a firm sense of ego and ego's ambition?

I know there are some fiction and narrative writers out there, and plenty of fiction and narrative readers, too. What do you think? Lastly, for what it's worth, this question is not theoretical for me—it affects how I approach my work at the writing desk each and every day.

This week on the podcast is part 2 of a great guest lecture by Purna Steinitz titled "Crushed by Love".  Purna leads us through his process of "studying untruth" in our relationships and the practice of turning every poison on our path into medicine.

Purna Steinitz is the founder of the Trimurti community based in Bozeman, Montana and Freiburg, Germany, as well as HeartStream Education, a non-profit organization that works to transform the lives of women and men who are incarcerated. Purna offers a perspective about transformation that people from many different backgrounds and paths find immediately useful. For the past thirty-three years he has been a student of Lee Lozowick, a western teacher in the Baul tradition of Bengal, India.

The talk was recorded in NYC on March 16, 2009.   You can download Part 2 of the talk here, and Part 1 from last week here. Get a full list of podcasts here, or subscribe via iTunes.

Our Sit Down, Rise Up Guest Lecture Series is underwritten by the Trust for the Meditation Process.

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