1. Years ago our local community college offered a six week wine-tasting course that promised to teach people how to appreciate good wine. (This was back in the days before my frequent migraines, so drinking wine wasn't the problem that it is now.) We were super excited about it and signed up immediately. But as the course approached, we started having second thoughts, and we ended up canceling our registration (the continuing ed office was thrilled since apparently there was a long waiting list). The reason we canceled was because we figured if we learned to appreciate good wine, we wouldn't want the $12 bottle anymore, we'd want the good stuff. And if we got really enthusiastic about it, we'd turn into snobs and end up spending thousands.
Of course there are plenty of good reasons to want to be a wine connoisseur. Maybe you were raised in a family that has a long history of appreciating good wine, or maybe you are a chef, and understanding how wine and different foods interact is important to the work that you do. Maybe you just really love wine. But for us, it made a whole lot more sense to leave well enough alone.
2. About a month ago, I listened to a couple of very smart men on a podcast talking about Buddhist meditation practices. They both have engaging personalities, and the conversation was fascinating. But there were two things about the conversation that I've been thinking about ever since. One of them I'm saving for another time, but for the purposes of this post, the part of the conversation that interested me was listening to them try to come to terms with the Buddhist concept of "no self."
Traditional Buddhists believe that the self, as a separate, well-defined entity, doesn't exist. The question of "who am I?" is not answerable to a Buddhist. The podcasters really got into the weeds about what it means that none of us has a self. They had some good points about why this is a useful belief-- for example, if some aspect of your beliefs about yourself is irrevocably changed (maybe you are a professional musician, and a car accident renders you unable to play your instrument), the harder you cling to the way you define yourself, the more traumatic the experience will be.
But for the average human, does it really matter? OK, so we should hold ourselves loosely and with a bit of humility. But how important is it to devote yourself to upholding this particular teaching? Is it really that important to buy into the idea that there is no such thing as a self? I mean, if you knit me a scarf for my birthday, I didn't knit the scarf, you did. If you're reading this post, you're reading it, and I wrote it. If you're sitting at a table eating dinner with eight people, you are each an individual person with your own history, experiences, tastes, and opinions-- and you all know this and understand it, and the conversation would be super boring if that weren't true.
For all practical purposes, for normal everyday life, having a deep, well-considered understanding and belief in the concept of "no self" is an academic interest. If you find the Buddha's teachings fascinating and illuminating and you want to devote yourself to the study of his ideas, then yes, by all means, go there. Or if you have some other reason to dive deep into the idea, then do it. But most of us are going to get through life just fine without even knowing that that particular teaching exists. And feeling all superior about yourself because you know you don't have a self when some other ignorant slob is still laboring under the delusion of selfhood-- well, that just makes you a snob.
3. So where the heck am I going with this. This stuff is so complicated to talk about, and so emotionally loaded. But I've heard some people who are progressives, liberals, far left thinkers, who have thought themselves way out on a limb about identity, race, gender, orientation, whatever. If you're interested in deconstructing culture, it's fascinating. It's practically addictive. But does everyone need that understanding for everyday life? Is that level of detailed analysis genuinely helpful in our current public conversations? Is it creating constructive change in the culture? or is it just tearing it down for the joy of intellectual superiority? I mean for an academic whose life work is understanding social structures and how they work, yes, of course it's important knowledge. But for most of us, it just makes us into snobs, disdainful of people who haven't been initiated into the unending, ever-deepening minutiae of cultural criticism. It creates a gulf of understanding, instead of helping us understand each other.
I've been that person. I can argue with this myself. But at some point we've got to start reaching across the aisle instead of making the aisle wider and wider. Surely we know that if we're going to live in a diverse society and support each other in our diversity, some of the other people are going to be conservatives? There are going to be people who have every right to their opinion and their beliefs and their religion who believe things that are exactly the opposite of what we do. That's just basic to the whole idea of democracy. And if we're not willing to be supportive of that, we're part of the problem.
I would never have posted this before I turned off the RSS but you know, this is the new me.
Same as the old me. (Insert brilliantly clever remark about my self here.)
Related: The Vanilla Ice Cream Problem
and this one from 2010(!!) back when I was in grad school: ooooh shiny!
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