Buddhism and this newsletter

NZN’s hidden agenda, revealed at last

A couple of months ago this newsletter got a big influx of subscribers—thousands of them—who are interested in Buddhism. They had earlier signed up for my online course Buddhism and Modern Psychology, and that course was moving to a new platform, and I craftily used the occasion to encourage them to sign up for the newsletter.

So first let me say something I should have said two months ago: Welcome, new NZN subscribers with an interest in Buddhism!

Second, let me say something I also should have said then: I hope you’re not feeling too disoriented! I know this newsletter is very different from the Buddhism course, both in tone and, ostensibly, in subject matter.

In this issue of NZN I’d like to say a bit about why I put the word ostensibly in that last sentence—why, actually, I think this newsletter, appearances notwithstanding, is pretty Buddhist in spirit. And I’ll try to do that in a way that has value even for readers who aren’t particularly interested in Buddhism; I’ll try to cast the newsletter’s mission in a slightly new, and I hope useful, light. 

Before I do that, let me remind everyone that all NZN subscribers can get access to the Buddhism and Modern Psychology course (which is based on a course I was teaching at Princeton at the time I created it) at this top-secret URL.

OK, now back to revealing NZN’s hidden Buddhist agenda.

I can understand why, if you just strolled over to this newsletter from my Buddhism course—or started reading it after perusing my Buddhism book—you might wonder about the newsletter’s obsessions. Why do I spend so much time pondering, for example, how Vladimir Putin views the world? And why, more broadly, am I so interested in the Ukraine war? And why do I repeatedly lament the direction of American foreign policy? And lament the polarized state of American politics (one of my main pre-Ukraine-invasion obsessions)? What do these things have to do with my interest in Buddhism?

One reason these are natural questions is that most Americans who evangelize on behalf of Buddhist practice—like, meditation teachers you encounter at retreat centers—seem to shy away from politics and geopolitics. Sure, they may allude to their concern about climate change and about the damage done to the world by the materialistic values they associate with unfettered capitalism. And they may lament war and other forms of violent conflict and say there would be a lot less of these things if more people followed Buddhist practices and precepts. But meditation teachers don’t generally get into the nuts and bolts of politics and policy.

Which is understandable! Running a meditation retreat, or even a meditation course, is hard—the last thing you need to do is get some of the meditators riled up by spouting controversial opinions. Still, I think Buddhism offers tools with such powerful potential application to the world’s big problems that somebody who advocates their use needs to talk specifics, and wade into the political and geopolitical muck. Why not me?

Before I get into these practical applications of Buddhism, a few words about its sheerly intellectual appeal:

If you read much about trends in modern psychology, you’ve probably come across the observation that, the more we learn about the brain, the clearer it becomes how finely intertwined affect and cognition are. Whereas psychologists used to draw a clear line between feelings and thoughts, depicting them as two generally distinct kinds of mental phenomena that occasionally bump into each other, now the idea is that affect and cognition are intertwined so subtly and pervasively that disentangling them can be a challenge. 

Buddhist psychology was way ahead of western psychology here. Very old Buddhist texts emphasize how naturally our everyday perceptions evoke feelings and how subtly feelings shape our train of thought.

I once did a two week meditation retreat under the guidance of a teacher named Akincano Mark Weber, and at one point (during one of his nightly “dharma talks”) he said, “Every thought has a propellant, and that propellant is emotional.” One point of doing mindfulness meditation—especially the deep version of it you can do on retreat—is to get better at actually observing the process he was describing; actually seeing the way your cognition and affect interact at a fine grained level, an interaction you wouldn’t ordinarily notice. Another point of mindfulness meditation is to alter the relationship between affect and cognition—to make your thoughts less reflexively obedient to feelings.

In short, Buddhist teachings have long (1) recognized the intimate relationship between affect and cognition; and (2) offered tools that help us recalibrate the relationship between affect and cognition.

And here is a bedrock belief of mine, a belief that also has a firm grounding in Buddhist teaching: The relationship between affect and cognition is in urgent need of recalibration! Some of the world’s biggest problems result from the way affect and cognition naturally interact, when we don’t subject their relationship to reflection and adjustment.

For example: During a war—any war—people on both sides tend to notice and embrace and amplify information that reflects favorably on their side or reflects unfavorably on the other side, and they tend to ignore or dismiss or minimize information that reflects unfavorably on their side or favorably on the other side. This dynamic not only helps sustain wars but helps start them in the first place. And this dynamic depends on natural patterns of interaction between feelings and thoughts. For example:

One driver of this dynamic is confirmation bias, and though confirmation bias is called a “cognitive bias”—as if the problem were confined to the realm of “cognition”—it is driven by affective forces; you embrace information that reflects favorably on your side or unfavorably on the other side because embracing that information feels good.

Another cognitive bias that contributes to war—and that in general does an underappreciated amount of damage to the world—is attribution error. I’ll spare regular readers yet another excursion into attribution error (less-than-regular readers can explore it here). My point today is just that attribution error is like confirmation bias in the sense that it is called a “cognitive” bias yet is mediated by feelings. Via attribution error, for example, the feeling you get when you think about an enemy or rival can trigger a warping of your conception of their motivations and world view and so compromise your ability to predict how they’ll react to things you do.

Now, I don’t have hard evidence that mindfulness meditation can erode the power of these cognitive biases. It’s one of those claims that is hard to corroborate scientifically, and I’m not aware of anyone who has tried. Still, I feel pretty sure that the kind of person I am at the end of a good silent meditation retreat—after a week or two of intensive mindfulness meditation—is less prone to these biases.

If you’ve never done this kind of retreat you have a right to be skeptical of that claim, but if you have done one you probably have a sense for what I mean: By the end of the retreat your way of perceiving and interacting with the world has changed significantly, maybe even radically; it’s less driven by sharp emotional reaction and harsh judgment; there’s more space between feeling and thought. (Such changes tend to be hard to keep intact as you re-enter the real world, but a daily meditation practice can sustain them in some measure.) 

You might ask: If I’m so convinced that meditation can help make the world a better place—that it could tone down political polarization and decrease the frequency of war—then why don’t I fill my newsletter with exhortations to meditate and explanations of how to meditate?

My answer to that question is another question: Do you think there’s a shortage of guidance on how to meditate? Like, not enough books and articles and apps about that? Seems to me like there’s a whole lot of that stuff.

Which I suppose leads to another question: OK, if I think there’s already plenty of generic meditation guidance, why don’t I offer some less generic guidance? Why don’t I fill the newsletter with exhortations to meditate in ways specifically geared to preventing or winding down war?

For example: I’ve argued that doing a better job of exercising “cognitive empathy” toward Russian leaders over the past three decades—better understanding how they see the world, and pursuing America’s foreign policy goals in light of that understanding—could probably have prevented the Ukraine war. And I’ve argued that exercising cognitive empathy toward Putin right now could be in the world’s interest (helping us, for example, avoid nuclear war). So why don’t I give tips on how to use meditation to cultivate cognitive empathy toward Putin? After all, if feelings of enmity trigger attribution error and thus warp our thinking about what’s going on in his brain, how about some meditation that lessens the power of those feelings? 

To which I answer: I can’t think of a surer way to be dismissed as some kind of new age crank than to say, “Hey folks, I’ve been thinking about ways to end the Ukraine war, or at least keep it from going nuclear, and I thought maybe if we all got in a circle and meditated on Vladimir Putin…”

And the problem here wouldn’t just be that people misunderstand the purpose of meditation—don’t realize that it can be a tool for clarifying your perception of the world and hence your understanding of people like Putin. The problem would be that people don’t agree that we need to clarify our understanding of Putin in the first place; they either discount the value of such clear understanding or think they’ve already attained clear understanding. (It’s of course in the nature of cognitive biases to leave people under the impression that their view of things isn’t biased.)

Are you starting to feel sorry for me? If not, let me try to remedy that by putting my predicament in a nutshell:

Though I think Buddhist practice (and here I’m thinking of mindfulness meditation, which of course is a long way from being the only part of Buddhist practice) can have effects that could make the world a better place, few of the people I’d most like to reach with this message share my belief that those effects are needed in the first place. So arguing that mindfulness meditation could help realize those effects is, in this context, almost pointless. It’s the value of the effects themselves—effects like better understanding the perspective of other people—that I need to sell people on.

Hence what this newsletter spends a lot of time doing: making the case that a clearer view of various people and things—certainly including our rivals and adversaries and enemies and the history of our relationship to them—would be good for the world, and that right now we’re a long way from getting such a view.

So, for example, what may seem like an exercise in media criticism—an NZN piece arguing that mainstream media, in covering the Ukraine war, are too dependent on a hawkish think tank called the Institute for the Study of War—is, to my mind, Buddhist in spirit; it’s an attempt to show people that the view of the war we now have isn’t a clear view. So too with a piece arguing that many Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans don’t do a good job of understanding how Trump supporters view the world—and that this lack of understanding is bad for America.

The importance of understanding how others view the world—of exercising cognitive empathy—is of course one of this newsletter’s official obsessions. As I explore that obsession in future issues, we’ll get into the interaction between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy (the feel-their-pain kind of empathy) and I’ll argue that this is another context in which the relationship between cognition and affect needs recalibrating.   

One way to put one of Buddhism’s central claims is like this: The reason we suffer, and the reason we make other people suffer, is that we don’t see the world clearly.

In that sense, lots of people who try to clarify our view of the world are serving the Buddhist vision, whether they think of their mission that way or not. And in that sense the claim I’m making for this newsletter isn’t all that exceptional.

Note: This post is available in its entirety to all subscribers, paid and unpaid. Lots of NZN posts aren’t—either they don’t get sent to unpaid subscribers or they’re sent to unpaid subscribers with a paywall inserted partway through the piece. These restrictions are in some ways regrettable, but they are also, among other things, a way to keep the newsletter in the black so that we can keep putting it out. If you’re not a paid subscriber but you think what we’re doing at NZN is worth supporting, I hope you’ll consider becoming one.  

Image of the Buddha from a temple in Sapporo, Japan.