Back in February I started a series on how the great solutions like Christianity, Buddhism, Capitalism, Marxism and many more have tried to fix the problems created by our ability to invent creations, like agriculture, industrialization and, indeed, the internet, which wind up doing us vast harm.
Start by reading:
Fire From The Gods: the Original Sins of Agriculture and Industrialism And Hope For The Future
Then read the first post, about Buddha’s quixotic quest to end suffering.
Then I wrote the third article on how Buddhism goes wrong and realized that most of what I was writing about what actually applicable to most religions and I stalled out: perhaps I had been wrong or perhaps I didn’t understand the situation as well as I thought (not quite the same thing.)
So I’m going to continue this series now with the ways that religions, in general, go wrong, before returning to how specific ideologies (remember, religions are just a subset of ideology) go wrong. Since I’ve already started, I’ll make Buddhism the primary example religion.
I was caught on the horns of another dilemma before even the first attempt.. If one is going to talk honestly about mysticism, not just religion, and great religions are born from mysticism even if they often lose it over time, one can’t adopt a secular materialistic worldview. And when it comes to this I have a particular problem: I’ve done a lot of work and had experiences that standard materialism, as a metaphysics, can’t explain and that “skeptics” would consider bullshit.
The problem with religion in actual practice is that “weird shit” happens. I can’t think of any advanced practitioner who I’m friends enough with to allow honesty (because talking about this is a bad idea) who hasn’t dealt with world-view shattering weirdness.
To write this article without talking about that at least a bit would be dishonest. At the end of the day, I have only one rule of blogging, I tell the truth as I know it. I may be wrong; I might be full of shit, but I don’t write what I don’t believe to be true.
So let’s get to it. Since I know that most people won’t have clicked thru to the articles I linked, I’m going to quote a chunk of the Buddhist piece, on what the Buddha was trying to do.
…the essence of the Buddha’s question is heroic to the point of being quixotic. Siddhartha saw suffering and instead of saying “well, it’s inevitable, I just have to accept it” instead determined:
Fuck suffering. I refuse to accept it is inevitable and I will dedicate my life to finding a way to end suffering.
Now that’s heroic to the extent of imbecility, except that he seems to have succeeded.
This is the core of all great ideologies, of which religions are a subset. The are based on a heroic ideal: a heroic conception of what it is possible for humans to achieve. Something extremely idealistic, often to the point of near insanity.
Now the first thing to note is that Buddhism, as preached by the Buddha, is based on genuine belief in reincarnation. The Buddha famously refused to discuss almost all metaphysics, but rebirth was baked into Buddhism at the start. You’ve been born before and you’re going to be born again. This was horrifying to Indians of the time, and rightfully so. I’ve never understood why people who believe in only one life think reincarnation is a cop-out mechanism: nothing says you’re coming back to nothing but good lives or that horrible things won’t happen. And each time, you start over from near scratch.
This belief in reincarnation is important, it is part of the social contract between Buddhist monks, who often did not have monasteries, but wandered around like medieval European friars, begging for food and owning nothing they couldn’t carry, and the lay people who supported them, kept them alive and if they did have monasteries, were often the ones who built them.
I remember reading about how when a forest monk was found to have left the forest near a Thai village, the villagers decided that he was enlightened and holy and built a monastery for him. They built it because they felt they received something from having a monastery with an enlightened master in charge.
In the same book, the author, who was trying out to see if he wanted to become a monk, and thus following some of the rules, when begging for food said “thank you”. The woman who gave him the food was so offended she went to the Abbot (no longer the original master) and told him she and her family would never give food to the monastery’s monks ever again.
She wasn’t giving food to the monks out of charity. It was a bargain: I give you food, and your lineage owes me. Thank you was considered an attempt to make her act into charity.
This is based on the idea that monks who make actual progress get powers. They owe the people who supported them while they were working, and their lineage owes those people as well. In exchange they use their powers to help those people, perhaps in this life and perhaps in future lives, including helping them have future better lives and, when they are read, to become enlightened themselves.
Christian monks had the same deal going in many cases: huge amounts of money, land, treasure and people were given to monasteries because they prayed for the souls of the dead and their prayers were held to help those alive.
Now to a materialist, this is obviously a crock of shit, and intended to defraud the lay people into supporting monks who can then just laze around. And often enough it is.
But, again, if you do enough spiritual work, weird shit starts to happen or you see weird shit. I knew a guru who could pluck specific words and phrases out of my mind, even over the phone. He wasn’t cold reading me, the knowledge was exact and precise, not just “you’re thinking about X”, but the precise words in my head. I’ve seen other things.
Weird shit is real, and people who do a lot of spiritual work often develop what might as well be called powers. This isn’t D&D or movie magic, they don’t throw fireballs, but it’s stuff that the materialist paradigm doesn’t explain.
So the social deal in a lot of communities is “we support the monks, and they help us.” Some of that is absolutely basic stuff like giving good advice, teaching the lay members and so on, but some of it is “we help you, you use your magic powers to help us and even if we don’t get enlightened in this life, you’ll help us get enlightened in a future life.” This was especially true in the past, but it is still true in some of the most Buddhist countries in the world, like Thailand and Burma.
This goes wrong in a lot of ways. The simplest is that many monasteries and monks are not sincerely working to get enlightened. Thai monasteries are famous for fat, lazy and greedy monks; for entire monasteries full of people just looking for an easy life. This has been a problem all thru Buddhist history.
In Christian monasteries, drunk monks were common, corruption was common, in some particularly egregious cases nuns were prostitutes, though in general, as time went on, the nuns had a better reputation than the monks.
The second is something that Buddhist literature brings up again and again: magic isn’t enlightenment. Having powers does not mean you are enlightened in the sense of “not suffering.” It sure as hell does not mean you are compassionate or good.
People do a bit of spiritual work and they get powers, some of which are not magic, but simply applied psychology based on remarkable feats of control over consciousness, and people who are suffering go to them for help. But as they aren’t good people or enlightened, what they do may be better for them than for the people looking for that help, or it may be well- meaning but ineffective.
This is especially a problem in Buddhism because Buddhism isn’t about getting “powers”, it is about ending suffering. In Christianity this is dealt with as the dichotomy of those who get their powers from God and those who get them from Satan.
As is always the case, there are a lot of people who are unhappy and suffering and looking for a savior or saviors. It’s hard to make any big gains, to radically change your life for the better in a way that doesn’t fall pray to falling back to your “normal” level of happiness. When that does happen, people tend to get fixated on whatever or whoever they feel was responsible.
It’s easy to leverage “spiritual” attainments into worldly power and wealth. In the modern world this is greatly on display with the Indian “God Men”, who are some of the richest and most powerful people in India and whose support is one of the main factors in the current Prime Minister’s rise to power, which he has used to embrace xenophobic and fascist policies and to oppress Muslims and other non Hindu inhabitants of India, of whom there are hundreds of millions.
Tibet was a feudal theocratic, complete with horribly mistreated serfs and nasty dungeons. “We have special knowledge and/or powers and/or virtues you must serve us” is a way that all major religions go bad and Buddhism is not an exception.
But most of what we’re talking about here applies to all religions, not just Buddhism. The monastic abuses happened in Christianity as in Buddhism: it’s an issue with the form. Christian monks were absolutely trading divine blessings for secular support, and if those blessings were often of a different form than Buddhist ones, the problems were essentially the same: monks without attainments, fat and lazy; or monks who were not holy but had some accomplishments abusing those accomplishments.
In all these cases, however, the central goal is forgotten or perverted. Buddhism’s goal is to end suffering and when it’s not possible (yet) to end it, to reduce it. Thus the Buddhist Indian emperor Asoka instituted laws against abuse of animals, for example, and in Tibet excavation for buildings would include carefully removing the dirt then sorting thru it to remove all the insects and worms so as to not harm them. Vegetarianism is often associated with sincere Buddhism in places where it’s possible (it’s not in Tibet) and for the same reason: to reduce suffering of animals.
In Christianity the goal includes certain moral attainments, including certain actions. If you get powers and you aren’t a good person, well, you’ve missed the boat. In Buddhism, the goal is to end suffering, and if you haven’t done that for yourself or you aren’t at least reducing suffering in others and yourself, you’re off the boat.
Implicit in Buddhism, and a problem it shares with other religions which seek enlightenment, is the idea that enlightenment is the “best thing”, better than anything else you can ever have. As with Spanish conquistadors and priests burning pagans to death because they believed that would allow them to avoid Hell and the torment is nothing compared to an eternity in Hell, Buddhism is prone to abuses in the name of getting people enlightened.
The doctrine of “expedient means”, which is not something the Buddha ever said himself, allows one to lie to and mislead people. The metaphor is that if children are in a burning building and lying to them is necessary to get them out of the building, you do it. Enlightenment is the best thing, lying is justified.
This is different from the more standard Buddhist test for what to say, “is it both true and helpful.”
In Christianity, we have the crusades and the inquisition, and it is hard to see how one can justify that from a religion worshipping a man-god who said “love they enemies” and “turn the other cheek.”
Likewise, while a lot of guru abuse is because of Gurus looking out for themselves, some of it is because the Guru genuinely thinks that the abuse will help the student become enlightened. (Gurus are particularly a thing in Hinduism andTibetan Buddhism, but Zen Buddhism has often had a real problem with masters beating students. A rap with a stick and a beating are quite different.)
Any religion or ideology which believes in a redeemed state will lead to otherwise evil or immoral acts being considered acceptable in the name of the cause. Of course this is true of every major ideology: capitalism, Marxism, and democracy, among others.
The “best thing” problem exists in all great ideologies I can think of: there is a type of life; type of person, or both, who is best and that person is idealized and allowed to do things no one else is. In our modern world it might be the “job creators” in the European Middle Ages it was rulers (chosen by God), knights and monks/priests/hermits. The best life was either the life of glory and honor, or a life dedicated to God.
Some of these best people will always abuse their power and privilege and the percentage of them who do so is a good indicator of how corrupt a society is and how far an ideology has fallen.
Likewise the best life sucks energy and resources away from other lifestyles and hurts the people who are not in the best life. Tibetan serfs were treated abominably, as were European ones. Low caste and casteless Hindus are treated worse than cows. In our modern world those who don’t make much or any money are generally treated terribly, and since the suburbs was (and still is, to many) the ideal life, other types of life were sacrificed to create those houses with white picket fences.
At the base of any ideology; an religion, is a heroic view of the world. A great dream. But by prioritizing towards that great dream, classes of good people are created. Classes of good lives are created. Creating those good lives denigrates other lives. This isn’t automatically bad, but it’s very easy for it to go bad. “Good” people are entitled, we feel to more power and resources. Bad people to less. It is the nature of the process, you can’t create the good without creating the bad. (This includes fairly simple things like being peaceful is good therefore being violent is bad, so don’t believe that creating the bad is always, well, bad.)
We’ve talked about religions here, but we’ll return to show, even more, how the common failure points of religions have their failure points in ideologies. (One that some readers may have picked up on is the similarity between monastries and corporations.)