Category: Philosophy
Nabeel on reading Proust
Yet not a word is wasted. It sounds paradoxical, but Proust is economical with his prose. He is simply trying to describe things that are extremely fine-grained and high-dimensional, and that takes many words. He is trying to pin down things that have never been pinned down before. And it turns out you can, indeed, write 100 pages about the experience of falling asleep, and find all kinds of richness in that experience.
And this:
…, a clear-sightedness on human vanity and a total willingness to embarrass himself. There are passages in the Albertine sections which are shocking – such as the extended stretch, around 50 pages long, in which he describes watching her sleep — and, reading them, you start to understand that this was written by a dying man who did not care about anything apart from telling the whole truth in as merciless way as possible.
Third, hypotaxis in sentences. The opposite of hypotaxis is parataxis, which you often find in Hemingway, as in: “The rain stopped and the crowd went away and the square was empty.” Each item here is side by side, simple, clean. The Bible often uses such types of sentences: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”.
Hypotaxis, by contrast, describes sentences with many subordinate clauses, like nesting dolls.
Nabeel says In Search of Lost Time is now his favorite novel.
My Conversation with Alison Gopnik
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Alison cover how children systematically experiment on the world and what study she’d run with $100 million, why babies are more conscious than adults and what consciousness even means, episodic memory and aphantasia, whether Freud got anything right about childhood and what’s held up best from Piaget, how we should teach young children versus school-age kids, how AI should change K-12 education and Gopnik’s case that it’s a cultural technology rather than intelligence, whether the enterprise of twin studies makes sense and why she sees nature versus nurture as the wrong framework entirely, autism and ADHD as diagnostic categories, whether the success of her siblings belies her skepticism about genetic inheritance, her new project on the economics and philosophy of caregiving, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: If it’s something like height, where there is clearly an environmental component, especially if the child is not well-fed, but it seems perfectly fine to say above a certain dietary level, it’s mostly genetic, right? No one says that’s ambiguous, and more and more traits will become like that.
GOPNIK: Well, first of all, I’m not sure that’s true. To a striking degree, the traits that people have looked at, like educational attainment, for example — we haven’t found consistent relationships to genetics. I think the reason for that is exactly because there’s this very complicated developmental process that goes from the genetics to the outcome.
Even if you think about fruit flies, for example. I have some geneticist colleagues who work on this — fruit fly sex determination. You’d think, “Well, that has to be just the result of genes.” It turns out that there’s this long developmental — long by fruit fly standards — developmental process that goes from the genetics to the proteins to the morphology, and there’s lots of possibility of variation throughout that. I think that hasn’t turned out to be a scientifically helpful way of understanding what’s going on in development.
The other thing, of course, is, from my perspective, the common features of, say, what kids are doing are much more interesting than the variations. What I really want to know is how is it that anyone could have a brain that enables them to accomplish these amazing capacities? Thinking about, is this child smarter than the other one, given how unbelievably smart all of them are to begin with, I just think it’s not an interesting question.
COWEN: But say, what you would call the lay belief that smarter parents give birth to smarter children, at least above subsistence — surely you would accept that, right?
GOPNIK: Again, what does smarter mean?
COWEN: How you would do on an IQ test.
GOPNIK: What does genetics mean? It’s interesting, Tyler, that IQ tests, for example — they have their own scholarly and scientific universe, but they’re not something that we would teach about or think about in a developmental psychology class, and there’s a good principled reason for that. The good principled reason — this has come up a lot in AI recently. There’s this idea in AI of artificial general intelligence, and that is assuming that there’s something called general intelligence.
Again, I think, a lot like consciousness or life, it’s one of these lay ideas about how people work. When you actually look at children, for example, what you see is not just that there isn’t a single thing that’s general intelligence. You actually see different cognitive capacities that are in tension with one another. You mentioned one about the scientist who’s trying to think of some new idea versus the scientist who’s looking at a more specific idea, right? A classic example of this tension that I’ve talked about and studied is in computer sciences: exploration versus exploitation.
What do you count as IQ? In fact, most of what IQ is about is how well do you do in school? How well do you do on school tests? That’s actually, in many respects, in tension with how good are you at exploring the world around you? The kinds of things that you need to do to have particular goals, to accomplish them, the kinds of things that we emphasize a lot, say, in a school context, are actually in tension. This gets back to the point about babies being more conscious than we are — are actually in tension with the kinds of things that will let you explore.
Think about the Bayesian example. If you have a flatter prior, and you pay more attention to evidence, you are probably not going to do as well on an IQ test…
COWEN: There’s you — you’re tenured at Berkeley, you’re famous. There’s Blake, The Definitive Warhol Biography, and Adam, who’s amazing, writes for the New Yorker, and you don’t believe inheritability and IQ being very concrete things? I just don’t get it. I think you’re in denial.
GOPNIK: Actually, I think that example is maybe partly why I don’t believe in that. In fact, what I do believe is that the effect of caregiving is to increase variability, is to increase variation. Our family, our care — there were six of us in 11 years. My parents were graduate students, and even before they were graduate students, they were that great generation of immigrant kids.
We had this combination of a great deal of warmth, a great deal of love, an enormous amount of stuff that was around us — books and ideas. We got taken to the Guggenheim, when Adam was three and I was four, for the opening of the Guggenheim. We both remember this vividly. But we were also completely free. We were just in regular public schools. As was true in those days, in general, we came home after school, and we basically did whatever it was that we wanted. I was involved. The kids were taking care of each other a lot of the time.
The result is that you get a lot of variation. It’s an interesting example in our family where we have six kids who presumably all have somewhat similar genetics, all in that 11 years grow up in the same context, and they come out completely differently. They come out with really different strengths, really different weaknesses, things that they’re good at, things that they’re not good at. Even if you think about what Blake and Adam and I are like as thinkers, we’re all foxes instead of hedgehogs. We’re all people who have done lots of different things and thought about lots of different things.
So, my view is that what nurture will do is let you have variability. That’s the thing that, in a sense, is heritable. That’s contradictory, the idea that what’s heritable is the standard deviation instead of the mean, but that’s my view about that. I think my childhood did have the effect of making me suspicious of those simple nature-nurture oppositions.
Here are the books of Alison Gopnik.
California facts of the day
At Berkeley, as recently as 2015, white male hires were 52.7 percent of new tenure-track faculty; in 2023, they were 21.5 percent. UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences since 2020. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men. Of the 59 Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science appointed at UC Santa Cruz between 2020-2024, only two were white men (3 percent).
Here is the essay by Jacob Savage that everyone is talking about.
Noah Smith on AI existential risk
Superintelligent AI would be able to use all the water and energy and land and minerals in the world, so why would it let humanity have any for ourselves? Why wouldn’t it just take everything and let the rest of us starve?
But an AI that was able to rewrite its utility function would simply have no use for infinite water, energy, or land. If you can reengineer yourself to reach a bliss point, then local nonsatiation fails; you just don’t want to devour the Universe, because you don’t need to want that.
In fact, we can already see humanity trending in that direction, even without AI-level ability to modify our own desires. As our societies have become richer, our consumption has dematerialized; our consumption of goods has leveled off, and our consumption patterns have shifted toward services. This means we humans place less and less of a burden on Earth’s natural resources as we get richer…
I think one possible technique for alignment would give fairly-smart AI the ability to modify its own utility function — thus allowing it to turn itself into a harmless stoner instead of needing to fulfill more external desires.
And beyond alignment, I think an additional strategy should be to work on modifying the constraints that AI faces, to minimize the degree to which humans and AIs are in actual, real competition over scarce resources.
One potential way to do this is to accelerate the development of outer space. Space is an inherently hostile environment for humans, but far less so for robots, or for the computers that form the physical substrate of AI; in fact, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others are already trying to put data centers in space.
Here is the full post.
What should I ask Harvey Mansfield?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. So what should I ask?
Note he has a new book coming out early next year, namely
Against We
I propose a moratorium on the generalized first-person plural for all blog posts, social media comments, opinion writing, headline writers, for all of December. No “we, “us,” or “our,” unless the “we” is made explicit.
No more “we’re living in a golden age,” “we need to talk about,” “we can’t stop talking about,” “we need to wise up.” They’re endless. “We’ve never seen numbers like this.” “We are not likely to forget.” “We need not mourn for the past.” “What exactly are we trying to fix?” “How are we raising our children?” “I hate that these are our choices.”
…“We” is what linguists call a deictic word. It has no meaning without context. It is a pointer. If I say “here,” it means nothing unless you can see where I am standing. If I say “we,” it means nothing unless you know who is standing next to me.
…in a headline like “Do we need to ban phones in schools?” the “we” is slippery. The linguist Norman Fairclough called this way of speaking to a mass audience as if they were close friends synthetic personalization. The “we” creates fake intimacy and fake equality.
Nietzsche thought a lot about how language is psychology. He would look askance at the “we” in posts like “should we ban ugly buildings?” He might ask: who are you that you do not put yourself in the role of the doer or the doing? Are you a lion or a lamb?
Perhaps you are simply a coward hiding in the herd, Martin Heidegger might say, with das Man. Don’t be an LLM. Be like Carol!
Hannah Arendt would say you’re dodging the blame. “Where all are guilty, nobody is.” Did you have a hand in the policy you are now critiquing? Own up to your role.
Perhaps you are confusing your privileged perch with the broader human condition. Roland Barthes called this ex-nomination. You don’t really want to admit that you are in a distinct pundit class, so you see your views as universal laws.
Adorno would say you are selling a fake membership with your “jargon of authenticity,” offering the reader membership in your club. As E. Nelson Bridwell in the old Mad Magazine had it: What do you mean We?
…If you are speaking for a very specific we, then say so. As Mark Twain is said to have said, “only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms ought to have the right to use we.”
I could go on. But you get the drift. The bottom line is that “we” is squishy. I is the brave pronoun. I is the hardier pronoun. I is the—dare I say it—manly pronoun.
I agree.
My excellent Conversation with Cass Sunstein
Cass was in top form, and so we went on for almost two hours. In his Substack he described it as “The most fun interview I have ever done.” Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Cass discuss whether liberalism is self-undermining or simply vulnerable to illiberal forces, the tensions in how a liberal immigration regime would work, whether new generations of liberal thinkers are emerging, if Derek Parfit counts as a liberal, Mill’s liberal wokeism, the allure of Mises’ “cranky enthusiasm for freedom,” whether the central claim of The Road to Serfdom holds up, how to blend indigenous rights with liberal thought, whether AIs should have First Amendment protections, the argument for establishing a right not to be manipulated, better remedies for low-grade libel, whether we should have trials run by AI, how Bob Dylan embodies liberal freedom, Cass’ next book about animal rights, and more.
I will reproduce the section Cass pulled for his own Substack:
COWEN: Now, we started with the topic of liberalism. How is it you think about or characterize the liberalism of Bob Dylan?
SUNSTEIN: Bob Dylan is a liberal. His liberalism is captured in the line, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” I hope he’s immortal, but if anything is on his epigraph, that would be a good candidate.
The notion of self-invention, of freedom, is central to basically everything. His refusal to keep singing the same song — you can hear him talking about it in some of the interviews. He said, “I could do that. I could just do that forever. I knew how they’d react.” He said, “What’s that about?” He said, “I needed to do something else.” But of course, the line, “I needed to do something else” — that’s my line. How he would put it would be much more vivid and surprising than that.
His “Like a Rolling Stone” is an anthem of freedom. I heard it, actually, in concert a few years ago. It was a great performance. It wasn’t young, but it was a great performance. The audience went wild when he did “Like a Rolling Stone.” That was the final song. It was the encore. It wasn’t just because it was the greatest rock song ever written. It was because of how he did it. I thought, “What’s going on in this song? Why is everyone exhilarated?” The song, which he described when he wrote it as vomit, hatred directed at somewhere that was real — it wasn’t that, or it was a little bit that, but it was a song of liberty.
“How does it feel to be on your own with no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?” Everyone felt like they were flying. He makes that — “Like a Rolling Stone” — be a song of freedom. If you look at his angry songs — “Positively 4th Street” — there’s a freedom in being, of course, uninhibited, able to say things, but also a freedom of disconnection.
When he’s asked why did he change his name, I have an account of why he actually did. I think he gave it exactly once, but in his more characteristic way, he said, “This is America. You can change your name.” Then he said, “I was born. I didn’t think I was born with the right name. I could make it up. I could say that sounds more like I was.”
Making rootlessness not be a curse, but instead something that is . . . the word joy is too clichéd for Dylan. If you look at his love songs, like “If You See Her, Say Hello,” which isn’t one of my favorites, but it’s good. There’s a connection with the one he loved, who got away, but you can feel the sense of freedom.
COWEN: “Visions of Johanna”?
SUNSTEIN: Yes, completely. He’s torn. That has the great opening line. “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks When you’re trying to be so quiet?” Did Yeats write better lines than that? Probably, but he was Yeats.
COWEN: Blood on the Tracks — a liberal album?
SUNSTEIN: Oh, yes.
COWEN: How would you express that?
SUNSTEIN: Well, I’m thinking “Buckets of Rain” is the closing song. Right before that, there’s a song, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” That’s it, which is, I think, one of his greatest songs. That’s a liberal song of freedom and separation, that she’s going, but he’s going to see her everywhere, and there’s smiling at impermanence. That is a big liberal theme — smiling at impermanence — because impermanence makes things not routine and also makes for freedom.
COWEN: “Idiot Wind” is the angry song of the batch, right?
SUNSTEIN: Yes, it’s pretty mad. He said about that song, “I don’t know why people like it. There’s so much sadness and distress in it.”
COWEN: Do you see your own liberalism or just yourself in the liberalism of Bob Dylan?
SUNSTEIN: I think so.
COWEN: Reinventing yourself, not quite wanting to be pinned down, doing a lot of stuff.
SUNSTEIN: He likes, I think, abandoning and going on to something that’s very different. I wish I’d gone electric or had some equivalent of that. But doing something quite different — I do share a little bit with him. I like it when I think something I thought was wrong. I now am very enthusiastic about the Austrian economists and Hayek. I’ve always admired them, of course, but I didn’t feel that they were on my team. Now I feel I’ve gone to their team. I don’t feel ashamed that I was wrong before. I feel excited that I’m less wrong now.
Definitely recommended, I could have pulled out many other parts as well. Again, I am happy to recommend Cass’s new book Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom.
Why are Mormons so Libertarian?
Connor Hansen has a very good essay on Why Are Latter-day Saints So Libertarian? It serves both as an introduction to LDS theology and as an explanation for why that theology resonates with classical liberal ideas. I’ll summarize, with the caveat that I may get a few theological details wrong.
LDS metaphysics posits a universe governed by eternal law. God works with and within the laws of the universe–the same laws that humans can discover with reason and science.
This puts Latter-day Saint cosmology in conversation with the Enlightenment conviction that nature operates predictably and can be studied systematically. A theology where God organizes matter according to eternal law opens space for both scientific inquiry and mystical experience—the careful observation of natural law and the direct encounter with divine love operating through that law.
LDS epistemology is strikingly pro-reason. Even Ayn Rand would approve:
Latter-day Saint theology holds that human beings possess eternal “intelligence”—a term meaning something like personhood, consciousness, or rational capacity—that exists independent of creation. This intelligence is inherent, not granted, and it survives death.
Paired with this is the doctrine of agency: humans are genuinely free moral agents, not puppets or broken remnants after a fall. We’re capable of reason, judgment, and meaningful choice.
This creates an unusually optimistic anthropology. Human reason isn’t fundamentally corrupted or unreliable. It’s a divine gift and a core feature of identity. That lines up neatly with the Enlightenment belief that people can use reason to understand the world, improve their lives, and govern themselves effectively.
In ethics, agency is arguably the most libertarian strand in LDS theology. Free to choose is literally at the center of both divine nature and moral responsibility.
According to Latter-day Saint belief, God proposed a plan for human existence in which individuals would receive genuine agency—the ability to choose, make mistakes, learn, change, and ultimately progress toward becoming like God.
One figure, identified as Satan, rejected that plan and proposed an alternative: eliminate agency, guarantee universal salvation through compulsion, and claim God’s glory in the process.
The disagreement escalated into conflict. In Latter-day Saint scripture, Satan and those who followed him were cast out. The ones who chose agency—who chose freedom with its attendant risks—became mortal humans.
This matters politically because it means that in Latter-day Saint theology, coercion is not merely misguided policy or poor governance. It is literally Satanic. The negation of agency, forced conformity, compulsory salvation—these align with the devil’s rebellion against God’s plan.
Now add to this a 19th century belief in progress and abundance amped up by theology:
Humanity isn’t hopelessly corrupt. Instead, individuals are expected to learn, improve, innovate, and help build better societies.
But here’s where it gets radical: Latter-day Saints believe in the doctrine of eternal progression—the teaching that human beings can, over infinite time and through divine grace, become as God is. Not metaphorically. Actually.
If you believe humans possess infinite potential to rise, become, and progress eternally—literally without bound—then political systems that constrain, manage, or limit human aspiration start to feel spiritually suspect.
Finally, the actually history of the LDS church–expulsions from Missouri and Illinois, Joseph Smith’s violent death, the migration to the Great Basin, the creation of a quasi-independent society–is one of resistance to centralized government power. Limited government and local autonomy come to feel like lessons learned through lived experience. Likewise, the modern LDS welfare system is a working demonstration of how voluntary, covenant-based mutual aid can deliver real social support without coercion. This real-world model strengthens the intuition that social goods need not rely on compulsory state systems, and that voluntary institutions can often be more humane and effective.
To which I say, amen brother! Read the whole essay for more.
See also the book, , with an introduction by the excellent Mark Skousen.
Hat tip: Gale.
I talk talent networks and mentoring and Christianity with Luke Burgis
From Grand Rapids, Michigan, earlier in the year, here is the link.
Here is Luke’s Cluny Institute, which sponsored the event. And here is Luke’s book on Rene Girard.
What should I ask Arthur C. Brooks?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is Wikipedia:
Since 2019, Brooks has served as the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit and Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Harvard Business School as a Professor of Management Practice and Faculty Fellow.[2] Previously, Brooks served as the 11th President of the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of thirteen books, including Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier with co-author Oprah Winfrey (2023), From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life (2022), Love Your Enemies (2019), The Conservative Heart (2015), and The Road to Freedom (2012). Since 2020, he has written the Atlantic’s How to Build a Life column on happiness.
Do not forget Arthur started as a professional French hornist, and also was well known in the cultural economics field during his Syracuse University days. And more. So what should I ask him?
Will the most important pop stars of the future be religious pop stars?
The personally irreligious (last I checked) economist Tyler Cowen has long been fond of proposing that the most important thinkers of the future will be religious thinkers—counter to everything we heard growing up in the age of the New Atheists, and yet, the evidence seems to keep amassing. After the recent release of LUX, the Spanish polymath Rosalía’s fourth studio album, I want to propose a corollary: the most important pop stars of the future may indeed be religious pop stars.
Critics and listeners already seem to agree that LUX represents a titanic accomplishment by the classically-trained, genre-bending singer. Urbane reviewers and YouTube-savvy opera conductors alike have spent the last two weeks obsessively unpacking Rosalía’s 4-movement, 18-track opus, whose symphonic trilingual cathedral piece and Mexican-inflected post-breakup diss track have already charted worldwide. Closer to home, it’s a striking accomplishment to get me to pay serious attention to Top 40 (it helps, of course, to make a hyperpolyglot album with Iberian duende at its core)…
At the beginning of the decade, metamodern types (myself included, in my interview for a PhD position at the Spirituality and Psychology Lab) were given to asking the question: “What can we do to reenchant the world?”
The great stagnation is over. In the age of spiritual machines, enchantment may soon become too cheap to meter. What’s left to ask is: “How are we to make sense of it?” We’ll need artists who can hold the tension—between the earthly and the divine, the ironic and the sincere, the rational and the numinous. Rosalía, to her credit and our great benefit, is already living the question with her full body.
Enlightenment ideas and the belief in progress leading up to the Industrial Revolution
Using textual analysis of 173,031 works printed in England between 1500 and 1900, we test whether British culture evolved to manifest a heightened belief in progress associated with science and industry. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, there was a separation in the language of science and religion beginning in the 17th century. Second, scientific volumes became more progress-oriented during the Enlightenment. Third, industrial works—especially those at the science-political economy nexus—were more progress-oriented beginning in the 17th century. It was therefore the more pragmatic, industrial works which reflected the cultural values cited as important for Britain’s takeoff.
That is from a paper by Ali Almelhem, Murat Iyigun, Austin Kennedy, and Jared Rubin. Now forthcoming at the QJE.
What is opera?
The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brunnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In reali life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.
In recompense for this lack of psychological complexity, however, music can do what words cannot, present the immediate and simultaneous relation of these states to each other. The crowning glory of opera is the big ensemble.
That is from an excellent W.H. Auden essay “Notes on Music and Opera.”
Matt Yglesias on aphantasia
What I tend to approach from the outside are unpleasant experiences. Life is a mix of ups and downs, but I’m not really haunted by sad experiences or disturbing things that I’ve seen. I can tell you about the time I found a dead body in the alley and called the authorities to report it, and my recollection is it was pretty gross, but I certainly don’t have any pictures of that in my iPhone.
Sometimes I see something that causes me to update my views of the world. But when I saw the body, I was already aware, factually, that drug overdose deaths were becoming common in D.C., so I felt that I hadn’t really learned anything new. At the time I was victimized by crime, the amount of violent crime in this city had been on a steady downward trend for a very long time, so it didn’t cause me to change my views at all. Several years later, that downward trend started to reverse and, after a few years of gradual growth, there were some sharp jumps, and then I got worried and started calling for policy changes.
And I think this is a strength of the aphantasic worldview. Something bad happened to me that was statistically anomalous, so I didn’t change my views. When the broader situation changed, I did change my views, even though actually nothing bad happened to me personally. And that’s because the right way to assess crime trends is to try to get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.
Here is the full essay. Here is Hollis Robbins on related issues.
My Conversation with the excellent Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Donald discuss the Buddha’s 32 bodily marks, whether he died of dysentery, what sets the limits of the Buddha’s omniscience, the theological puzzle of sacred power in an atheistic religion, Buddhism’s elaborate system of hells and hungry ghosts, how 19th-century European atheists invented the “peaceful” Buddhism we know today, whether the axial age theory holds up, what happened to the Buddha’s son Rahula, Buddhism’s global decline, the evidently effective succession process for Dalai Lamas, how a guy from New Jersey created the Tibetan Book of the Dead, what makes Zen Buddhism theologically unique, why Thailand is the wealthiest Buddhist country, where to go on a three-week Buddhist pilgrimage, how Donald became a scholar of Buddhism after abandoning his plans to study Shakespeare, his dream of translating Buddhist stories into new dramatic forms, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Fire is a central theme in Buddhism, right?
LOPEZ: Well, there are hot hells, and there are also cold hells. Fire comes up, really, in the idea of nirvana. Where we see the fire, I think most importantly, philosophically, is the idea of where did the Buddha go when he died? He was not reborn again. They say it’s really just like a flame going out, that is, the flame ends. Where did the fire go? Nowhere, that is, the wood that was producing the flame is all burned up, and you just end. Nirvana is not a place. It’s a state of extinction or what the Buddhists call cessation.
COWEN: What role does blood sacrifice play in Buddhism?
LOPEZ: Well, it’s not supposed to perform any role. There’s no blood sacrifice in Buddhism.
COWEN: No blood sacrifice. How about wrathful deities?
LOPEZ: Wrathful deities — there’re a lot, yes.
COWEN: Then we’re back to supernatural. Again, this gets to my central confusion. It’s atheistic, but there’s some other set of principles in the universe that generate wrathful deities, right?
LOPEZ: Wrathful deities are beings who were humans in one lifetime, animals in another, and born as wrathful deities in another lifetime. Everyone is in the cycle of rebirth. We’ve all been wrathful deities in the past. We’ll be wrathful deities in the future unless we get out soon. It’s this universe of strange beings, all taking turns, shape-shifting from one lifetime to the next, and it goes on forever until we find the way out.
COWEN: Are they like ghosts at all — the wrathful deities?
LOPEZ: There’s a whole separate category of ghosts. The ghosts are often called — if we look at the Chinese translation — hungry ghosts. The ghosts are beings who suffer from hunger and thirst. They are depicted as having distended bellies. They have these horrible sufferings that when they drink water, it turns into molten lead. They’ll eat solid food — it turns into an arrow or a spear. Constantly seeking food, constantly being frustrated, and they appear a lot in Buddhist text. One of the jobs of Buddhist monks and nuns is to feed the hungry ghosts.
COWEN: Is it a fundamental misconception to think of Buddhism as a peaceful religion?
And:
COWEN: …If one goes to Borobudur in Java — spectacular, one of the most amazing places to see in the world.
LOPEZ: Absolutely.
COWEN: We read that it was abandoned. It wasn’t even converted into a tourist site or a place where you would sell things. Why would you just toss away so much capital structure?
LOPEZ: I think it just got overgrown by the jungle. I think that people were not going there. There were no Buddhist pilgrims coming. The populace converted to Islam mostly, and it just fell into decline, just to be revived in the 19th, 20th century.
COWEN: Turn it into a candy store or something! It just seems capital maintenance occurs across other margins. The best-looking building you have — one of the best-looking in the world — is forgotten. Don’t you find that paradoxical?
Definitely recommended, interesting throughout and I learned a great deal doing the prep. One of my favorite episodes of this year. And I am happy to recommend all of Donald’s books on Buddhism.