TEN COMMANDMENTS OF COMMON SENSE
‘Serenity, balance, personal growth, proportion ….’ ‘Yes,’ I say to myself, with some complacency, ‘nothing here that can’t be managed with the aid of a weekly dose of Vipassana meditation’ (the preferred spiritual practice of the author of these ‘better’ (i.e. ‘anti-religious’) commandments). But then I catch myself blinking to refocus on the words I have just read, so out of place they seem in the context. Those words, I now confirm, are: ‘selfless love’. Now that is something less easily achieved.
The words strike me instantly with a feeling of awe and a sense of personal inadequacy. I’m not thinking of romantic love. I’m thinking of the kind of nurturing relationships one may have with a child; or, more impressively, one hears of caring foster-parents or carers showing to wayward teenagers who could so easily go off the rails. Or I think of an elderly bachelor in my local church who took an ex-prisoner, and later the ex-prisoner’s son, into his home. The kind of intense personal investment that could all so easily go wrong …. And one thinks: ‘Now that is selfless love’. I have just about sufficient nodding acquaintance with the phenomenon to know it’s something pretty impressive that we’re talking about, to suspect that my life would be radically transformed by a dose more of it, and yet, inwardly, to shrink … Now how does this awe-inspiring, passionate, and totally off-balance thing come to figure in the same ball-park as achieving ‘balance’ and ‘serenity’? Is it even compatible with those gentler virtues? Or with normal family life, for that matter?
On the other hand, perhaps I’ve got Miller wrong here. Perhaps by ‘selfless love’, what he means is just practising a bit of occasional therapeutic altruism – like sometimes giving to OXFAM …. Or alternatively perhaps he means by ‘serenity’ etc. something less obvious than I have supposed – maybe some inner quality of mind that could indeed be consistent with selfless love …. So let us suspend out judgment for the moment.
A consistent moral vision?
Nevertheless, I have begun with this reaction of mine because it seems to me the first question we ought to ask of a book purporting to offer a modern, non-religious alternative to the ancient Judaeo-Christian ethical path is whether it maps out a coherent moral vision (as opposed to offering a rag-bag of fashionable but inconsistent maxims). From my own perspective, I would really like to use this book, and others like it, in order to characterize such a moral vision, and then be able to compare and contrast it with the moral vision of Christianity. Maybe James Miller’s book could be of service.
Yet even from the point of view of someone seeking practical guidance, it is important to judge whether the pursuit of these rules is likely to lead us anywhere in particular, or cause us just to zig-zig around inconsequentially. The general direction of these commandments may or may not be conducive to our flourishing, and I guess one could determine this by trying them out. Either way, we would have learnt something. If, on the other hand, the experiment just leads us nowhere in particular, our time and effort could have been spared!
Self-fulfilment for oak-trees
So let us resume our examination ….
Miller begins his better ten, so he tells us, with the commandment he regards as most fundamental – much as the Author of the original ten began His. Cdt. 1: BE THE BEST VERSION OF THYSELF. This is a more memorable formulation of the obligation to ‘seek self-fulfilment’. Contrary to what some might suppose, Miller maintains such an endeavour is by no means a selfish one; rather it will often involve enabling others to fulfil themselves. Our nature is apparently so constituted that helping others to attain their full potential is often the means by which we achieve our own. This, I guess, is one of reasons why Miller claims human nature is fundamentally good.
Were we in any doubt as to the primordial importance of the commandment – and its consistency not only with achieving our own happiness but securing the happiness of those around us, Miller opens the Epilogue of his book by restating it in more general terms. Human life has a goal ‘beyond survival’, he concludes, and it is that of ‘attaining fulfilment’. Reinforcing the broader, potentially altruistic, implications of this, he further specifies the goal of the individual and society as ‘encouraging the growth of the sum fulfilment of all sentient beings’.
The meaning of self-fulfilment is obvious, he claims.
Now I have to admit that it is not obvious to me. Or not except in the sense that it is so familiar from contemporary discourse, that I rather take for granted the value it has for other people. In fact, to me, it is one of those overly self-evident things that becomes the stranger the more one thinks about it. I am quite sure that it would have meant nothing whatsoever to a human being living before, let us say, the year 1800. So let me try to set out how I would explain self-fulfilment to an ancient Roman.
Imagine an oak-tree, or a Norwegian maple, or an ash. Not just any old tree, but the perfect specimens of those trees that we find exhibited at Kew Gardens. Now the implicit philosophical message that seems to be conveyed by what we see there is the following. That the better the oak-tree, the more fully it constitutes whatever it is to be an oak-tree – the closer it comes, in other words, to a certain ideal of itself. Now apply this idea to a human being. Not just to the human being in general, but – more strangely – to the individual human being that is yourself: the closer you come to the authentic you, the more you become that ideal of yourself that only you can realize, the better you will be. This, as I see it, is the goal of self-fulfilment. Now one important difference between human beings and oak-trees that we human beings need to be our own gardeners. What, in the case of tree, may involve considerable effort on the part of a human cultivator – feeding, pruning, etc. – we humans have to undertake for ourselves. This explains Cdt. 8: CHOOSE GROWTH. Just because self-fulfilment brings us and others the ultimate happiness does not mean it will not require moral effort on our part.
The travails of human self-fulfilment
But there is a particular kind of obstacle to self-fulfilment that seems to relate not just to outward circumstance but to the psychic constitution of the human being. And it is this which is dealt with by what I take to be the second most important commandment of Miller’s ten. Cdt. 10: KNOW IT’S ALWAYS NOW. There are a string of further commandments which depend on this one, for which Cdt. 10 gives a kind of theological rationale.
Now Miller would probably want to deny this. He evidently sees himself as drilling below the melange of ethical and cultural considerations characteristic of religions, to a vein of culturally neutral ethics that would be applicable under all cultural conditions. Yet the fact remains that Cdt. 10 turns out to have a metaphysical basis. This is not obvious at first sight. KNOW IT’S ALWAYS NOW could boil down to the straightforward injunction to live, in the words of Jesus, ‘sufficient unto the day’. But this is not what Miller means, as is evident from his reflections on the reality of death in this context, and the non-existence of a hereafter. No, what he is really propounding, in this commandment, is the non-actuality of past and future – a philosophical position that has been termed presentism. Such a doctrine is not particularly conducive to a Christian ethics; but it is not universally shared even by atheists. Its chief importance for Miller, I suspect, concerns his definition of that ‘self’ whose fulfilment constitutes, in his view, the goal of existence. The ‘real’ self, according to the Miller’s presentist doctrine, is limited to our stream of consciousness. This is what we really are; the past and the future belong only to the structure of our subjectivity.
I shall return presently to some of the difficulties this poses for the consistency of Miller’s ethical vision. But first let us note how this presentist view of the self relates to various other commandments.
We have already noted how self-fulfilment will tend to be effortful for conscious beings like ourselves, in the way that it is not, for example, for oak-trees: we must be our own gardeners, as it were. But there is a very specific kind of obstacle to self-fulfilment that is posed for creatures whose reality – and whose possibility of happiness and self-fulfilment – is entirely restricted to the present, but whose form of existence requires them to live suspended between the twin unrealities of past and future. Up to a point, of course, our capacity to live ‘in our heads’ is highly advantageous for our survival. (And, of course, survival is the unspoken first goal of our existence.) But when it comes to self-fulfilment, the possibilities it creates for wholly unproductive anxieties, fears, frustrations, resentments, and delusions set a trap into which we are repeatably liable to fall. A whole string of Miller’s commandments are aimed at promoting our happiness by raising our awareness of this danger to our psychic equilibrium: Cdt. 2: FIND SERENITY; Cdt. 5: FIND PERSPECTIVE; Cdt. 6: BE GRATEFUL; Cdt. 9: BALANCE.
Are we just ourselves or outside ourselves?
This leaves us with a further three commandments that address our relationship with what is outside our conscious selves. And it is here that the problems really start to emerge. The more interesting of these are: Cdt. 3: LOVE SELFLESSLY, which we have already touched on, and Cdt. 7: CULTIVATE A RATIONAL COMPASSION. (Cdt. 4, incidentally, about which I shall have nothing further to say, is: PRACTISE POSITIVE RECIPROCITY.) Miller frequently states that the self-fulfilment of others may be part of our own, and that the goal of self-fulfilment is not necessarily a selfish one. The problem is that Cdt. 1 (BE THE BEST VERSION OF THYSELF), understood in this way, may involve (and, taken along with Cdts. 3, 4 & 7, will involve) identifying the self with what, according to Cdt. 10 (KNOW IT’S ALWAYS NOW), is not the self. In other words, ‘loving selflessly’ may be fully consistent with ‘seeking self-fulfilment’, but it is hard to see how it can be consistent with ‘seeking self-fulfilment’, if what is meant by ‘self’ is restricted (as per Cdt. 10) to our stream of consciousness.
Imagine those trees again – a whole clump of them. I read recently in a popular book that trees have psychic states that put them in harmony with each other. So when we cosset the tree on the edge of the clump (maybe digging in compost, or maximizing its exposure to light), the whole row starts to perk up. What this means, is that, for the purposes of self-fulfilment, the tree isn’t just the individual tree, it is also, in some measure, the whole copse. This is, of course, also the case for human beings. Think of the boxer or the warrior so intent on winning that they hardly notice the pain of the blows.
Even more disruptive to the notion of the self as limited to the individual stream of consciousness is the reverse scenario – where our own conscious self is blighted by a suffering that is entirely extrinsic to it. As in the case of the Buddha’s ‘Going forth’. Siddhartha (the Buddha to be) had been a prince accustomed to luxury who had hitherto lived a life entirely sheltered from the suffering. He walks out of the palace grounds one day, and beholds what he has never seen before: first, someone weighed down by age, next a sick man, and then a corpse being carried in a funeral procession. So shaken is he to the core of his being that he no longer has the slightest interest in continuing his privileged existence, but walks out on his title, his beautiful wife and their son, taking up the life of a wanderer.
Personally, I don’t find this story in any way implausible. It reflects how we can identify ourselves with what is extrinsic to us: how the boundaries of the self are extensible – an idea expressed in Buddhism (as in our own culture) by the notion of ‘compassion’ (karuna). Our ‘self’ can be blighted by a suffering that afflicts someone else’s stream of consciousness – as Siddhartha’s delight in existence somehow vanishes at the sight of the aged man, the sick man and the corpse.
But this compassion is not just extensible to our contemporaries. In one of the more reflective passages of his book, Miller examines what he means by ‘compassion’. He distinguishes it from empathy on the grounds that something more than feelings and motivations is at issue when we endeavour to practice compassion ‘rationally’. Ultimately, he claims, compassion is a matter of wanting to ‘make a difference’ – not just here and now, but to life in the future. We all want, as he puts it, to leave a legacy. This kind of compassion which extends to those separated from ourselves not only space but in time can also assume a negative form. The knowledge that the human race faced certain extinction in forty years would do much to extinguish our present zest for life. I suspect that even now the lives of compassionate and intelligent individuals are darkened by the prospect of environmental catastrophe.
So what is the self? Is it just the individual stream of consciousness? Or does it include what we identify with? Is it really limited to the present? Or does it also appropriate the past and future?
If the ‘self’ to be fulfilled is the individual stream of consciousness (as per Cdt. 10), then it is hard to see what sense we can make of the broader notion of self-fulfilment as involving the fulfilment of others. We can’t say we practise selfless love and compassion just for our individual happiness. Partly because being selfless involves just that – transcending the self. Partly because extending one’s boundaries in this way is absolutely not compatible with maintaining the kind psychic equilibrium conducive to individual well-being. The first casualty of selfless love and compassion will be balance, proportion, serenity et al..
How the Buddha did it
Which raises the question: How did the Buddha manage it? And it’s here that we reach the nub of Miller’s difficulties.
Actually, the Buddha did manage something impressive; but it wasn’t self-fulfilment. His compassion goes so far beyond his own psychic state that, having achieved the ultimate enlightenment himself, he goes forth to help others attain the same goal. There is a story that he was visited by the Brahma Sahampati who urged him to this course. But whatever his motivation it was certainly not that of his personal well-being. Yet, the Buddhist scriptures represent the Buddha as, I suppose you could say, ‘serene’. And no one would have accused him of ingratitude, or lack of a sense of balance or proportion. How did he bring it off?
The answer is that his goal was not ‘self-fulfilment and freedom from suffering’. It was ‘freedom from suffering’, period. So distant is Buddhism from all notions of self-realization that it proposes the ideal of ‘no self’ (anatta). The ‘self’ for Buddhism is a construct; and the task of anyone seeking Enlightenment either for themselves or for other people is to see it for the social construct that it is. It is not difficult to see how the attainment of ‘no-self’ might both be compatible with compassion, even universal compassion, and at the same time with a kind of ‘serenity’. On the other hand, the affirmation of self – and self-fulfilment involves such affirmation – places us, so far as Buddhism is concerned, on the very opposite course
I suspect Miller would see the doctrine of ‘no self’ as just another piece of ancient doctrinal ideology which we need to jettison of if we want to appropriate what is good in the ancient wisdom. Part of what he calls the ‘winnowing process’. But why would he see the goal of self-fulfilment as any less culturally specific than, say, the Buddhist doctrine of ‘no self’? Probably, because it seems to him self-evident on account of its familiarity. Whereas, ‘no self’ is unfamiliar, bizarre-seeming, and would, on that account, no doubt be assumed by him to be culturally relative.
Personally, I believe it necessary to have attempted to enter the worldview of other cultures if we want to be able to see ourselves sufficiently from the outside to be able to distinguish what is or is not likely to be specific to our own worldview – and ultimately have any chance of isolating universal moral principles underlying the diverse forms of culture (assuming there are any). Miller, for some reason, thinks such things will be transparent to everyday common sense.
JORDAN PETERSON: 12 RULES OF LIFE
DAVID GRAEBER: THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING
TERRY EAGLETON: RADICAL SACRIFICE
JOHN GRAY: SEVEN TYPES OF ATHEISM
REZA ASLAN: GOD, A HUMAN HISTORY
JONATHAN HAIDT: THE REVENGE OF THE RIGHTEOUS MIND