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labingi(Reposted from my Substack)
I recently attended a Trinity Lecture Series lecture, "Knowing What We Don’t Know: Cultivating Intellectual Humility Through Imaginative Literature" with Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson. It was a very good lecture by a Catholic for an audience assumed to be entirely Catholic. As an agnostic Buddhist, I was a cultural guest, and it was the first time in a long time I have been a guest in discourse community that assumes everyone is an insider. Such an experience is a gift, even—perhaps especially—when it causes discomfort. Moreover, it was an apt gift to receive in a lecture about cultivating humility and knowing what we don’t know. I tried to follow Professor Hooten Wilson’s (hereafter JHW) advice to listen openly and think deeply. Here are some of my impressions.
I am fully onboard with her advice to read a wide range of fiction with openness and, if those works don’t initially connect with us, to start with the thought, “Maybe I missed something.” I’m not great at that. I’m a judgmental reader of fiction, especially if it’s recent. So this is something I can and should strive to improve on.
A key aspect of her advice was to read texts widely known to be great works of high morality in order to cultivate “taste.” By developing a taste for such works, we can gravitate to them and increase our exposure to good role models and lessons, while decreasing the amount of time we spend engaging with harmful inputs. I agree with a lot of this. “Taste” is not the word I would personally use because, to me, “taste” is a relatively amoral word; it refers to entertainment (or food, etc.) that one enjoys regardless of one’s underlying morals. For example, one may have a “taste” for horror movies without thinking people should terrorize each other in real life. JHW, however, ties “taste” strongly to moral rectitude, which is lexically alien to me.
I agree, however, that morality is deeply entangled with fiction. I agree that what we like generally says something about our values—or at least this is true for me. I agree that this is important and deserves consideration. I might call it something different: discernment, judgment? I personally would leave a greater philosophical space for enjoying works without morally agreeing with them.
But I agree that surrounding oneself with beneficial inputs is beneficial. Reading great works helps the heart and mind in ways that reading trash doesn’t. I have certainly absorbed ill effects from works with some kind of “harmful” message. The most harmful to me personally has been the message that women have to have a romantic partner to be anything other than a failure. This was culturally louder in my formative years than it is now, and it followed me from Disney to Jane Austen to every pop fantasy novel to every Shakespearean comedy, and so on.
But this is tricky because harmful messages can be in great works that also have good messages. Pride and Prejudice is a good novel; Much Ado about Nothing is a good play. I’m glad I’ve read both. On balance, I agree with my parents (and I think JHW agrees too) that reading broadly is a decent way to sort through different kinds of messaging. I doubt that it’s possible not to get psychologically hurt (at least for someone, like myself, who absorbs a lot of life through literature), but it certainly is possible to cultivate a practice of reading works that are thoughtful, well crafted, and conscientious in their various ways.
Where JHW’s discourse threw me was not in its basic points about reading but in its (Catholic) stance on humanity. She opened by asserting that we (humans) tend to think only about our successes and see our lives as a continuous rise through accomplishments. I thought, what universe does she inhabit? I thought, my default perspective is better summed up by an interchange in the Monk movie, where Monk says something offensive, and a bystander says, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” And Monk says, “Yes, every day. All the time.” (Quote may not be exact.)
I don’t literally feel that way all the time, but I’ve spent a lot of my life wracked by guilt. I usually feel like a failure (in terms of our society’s markers of success), and I very often feel ashamed of my many, many failings. Nor do I think this unusual.
I suspect it is even less unusual in a predominantly Christian culture because Christianity teaches us to feel guilty. I once attended a sermon at a the First Congregational Church of Eugene, Oregon, a progressive church, where the pastor said that each of the world’s major religions had signal strength and a signal weakness. He said, “The great strength of Christianity is love, and its great weakness is guilt.” That was over fifteen years ago, but it stuck with me because I felt its truth. We’re all born with original sin. Jesus died for our sins. We’re supposed to live like Jesus, but we never can because he’s literally God and perfect, and we’re not. Or as Tori Amos puts it, “Nothing I do is good enough for you.”
So it struck me as particularly ironic to hear an assertion that we only think about our successes coming from the religion of “Why do we crucify ourselves every day?” But maybe that illustrates the point. We need to acknowledge our failures, says JHW. We need to humble ourselves, in sense of recognizing that we are gluttonous, slothful, etc. so that we can accept the gift of being elevated through Christ in a way we can never achieve for ourselves. In other words, you must feel the guilt, Christian. QED?
She meant this well, of course. And she was saying it to an audience that, by and large, already believed it and finds comfort in that teaching. There’s nothing wrong with that. If that’s the path that leads you to being a good person in the world and rejoicing in the promise of salvation, that’s a beautiful thing.
For me, however, as a lifelong agnostic in a Christian dominant society, from a Protestant ethnic background, who went to Catholic high school, and has been a practicing Buddhist for about six years, Buddhism has exposed for me the profound depths of my tendency toward self-flagellation and how destructive that tendency is. Part of this tendency, for me, is innate personality. I saw a video about the INFJ personality type once (I’ve lost track of it, but will cite if someone can point me to it), in which the presenter said something to the effect of, “The one thing you should never say to an INFJ is ‘you should be ashamed,’ because they’ll say, ‘You know, you’re right,’ and proceed to feel miserable about themselves.” That said, the Christian acculturation to guilt does not help.
Since I started practicing Buddhism, I’ve seen a shift in my responses. Say I get distracted by some bitter, angry course of thought when I’m trying to meditate. I have a strong predisposition to say to myself, “There you go again, wallowing in anger and self-pity and projecting your own shortcomings onto others,” and so on. But Buddhism teaches me to see this without judgment: “Let’s observe that you’ve gone to that angry place again. That’s clearly still strongly with you. Okay, let’s go somewhere else now.” The latter approach (for me) is far more conducive to a less stressful, less angry, more positive, more compassionate life.
A key difference I see is dualism vs. non-dualism. The idea that we must humble ourselves (I kind of want to say “debase” ourselves, though JHW did not use that word) so that Christ can uplift us is a dualist idea: we are categorically separate from God. We are flawed; he is perfect. We are sinners; he is sinless. We cannot save ourselves; he can save us.
Buddhism is a non-dualist tradition, and the Mahayana school that I belong to holds that we all already have Buddha nature—we actually can “save ourselves” in the sense of ending our suffering and having boundless joy and compassion. We simply have a phenomenally large amount of work to do to uncover that Buddhist nature, to see through the illusions and distortions. And we do, absolutely, need help to do that, help from the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha specifically, but ultimately, it’s our own mental work.
One of the greatest revelations that has come to me through this practice is a non-dualist perspective on compassion. I was raised under model of selfish vs. selfless. Jesus sacrificed; so should we. We should have compassion for others but be quite strict with ourselves: don’t let ourselves get away with any nonsense. Buddhism has helped me internalize that it’s all the same; we’re all the same. When I dedicate the merit of my practice to the benefit of all sentient beings, that includes myself. When I notice my own distraction, I should notice it with the same compassion I’d feel when seeing it in someone else whom I genuinely want to help. This teaching is “humble” too, in the sense that it’s not self-aggrandizing, not selfish, deeply concerned with benefiting others, deeply aware of how much there is still to learn. But it doesn’t require self-debasement, nor does it require external grace.
This is the great difference I felt in that lecture between my own belief system and the system advocated by JHW and the Catholic Church. Again, I have no problem with people choosing the Catholic path; it serves many well. But there are reasons I do not choose the Catholic path, and one of them is that the Buddhist path is healthier for me. That said, I will strive to be more curious and open before the books I read and cultivate my discernment by reading a wider array of “good” literature. These are good lessons, and I take them to heart.
I recently attended a Trinity Lecture Series lecture, "Knowing What We Don’t Know: Cultivating Intellectual Humility Through Imaginative Literature" with Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson. It was a very good lecture by a Catholic for an audience assumed to be entirely Catholic. As an agnostic Buddhist, I was a cultural guest, and it was the first time in a long time I have been a guest in discourse community that assumes everyone is an insider. Such an experience is a gift, even—perhaps especially—when it causes discomfort. Moreover, it was an apt gift to receive in a lecture about cultivating humility and knowing what we don’t know. I tried to follow Professor Hooten Wilson’s (hereafter JHW) advice to listen openly and think deeply. Here are some of my impressions.
I am fully onboard with her advice to read a wide range of fiction with openness and, if those works don’t initially connect with us, to start with the thought, “Maybe I missed something.” I’m not great at that. I’m a judgmental reader of fiction, especially if it’s recent. So this is something I can and should strive to improve on.
A key aspect of her advice was to read texts widely known to be great works of high morality in order to cultivate “taste.” By developing a taste for such works, we can gravitate to them and increase our exposure to good role models and lessons, while decreasing the amount of time we spend engaging with harmful inputs. I agree with a lot of this. “Taste” is not the word I would personally use because, to me, “taste” is a relatively amoral word; it refers to entertainment (or food, etc.) that one enjoys regardless of one’s underlying morals. For example, one may have a “taste” for horror movies without thinking people should terrorize each other in real life. JHW, however, ties “taste” strongly to moral rectitude, which is lexically alien to me.
I agree, however, that morality is deeply entangled with fiction. I agree that what we like generally says something about our values—or at least this is true for me. I agree that this is important and deserves consideration. I might call it something different: discernment, judgment? I personally would leave a greater philosophical space for enjoying works without morally agreeing with them.
But I agree that surrounding oneself with beneficial inputs is beneficial. Reading great works helps the heart and mind in ways that reading trash doesn’t. I have certainly absorbed ill effects from works with some kind of “harmful” message. The most harmful to me personally has been the message that women have to have a romantic partner to be anything other than a failure. This was culturally louder in my formative years than it is now, and it followed me from Disney to Jane Austen to every pop fantasy novel to every Shakespearean comedy, and so on.
But this is tricky because harmful messages can be in great works that also have good messages. Pride and Prejudice is a good novel; Much Ado about Nothing is a good play. I’m glad I’ve read both. On balance, I agree with my parents (and I think JHW agrees too) that reading broadly is a decent way to sort through different kinds of messaging. I doubt that it’s possible not to get psychologically hurt (at least for someone, like myself, who absorbs a lot of life through literature), but it certainly is possible to cultivate a practice of reading works that are thoughtful, well crafted, and conscientious in their various ways.
Where JHW’s discourse threw me was not in its basic points about reading but in its (Catholic) stance on humanity. She opened by asserting that we (humans) tend to think only about our successes and see our lives as a continuous rise through accomplishments. I thought, what universe does she inhabit? I thought, my default perspective is better summed up by an interchange in the Monk movie, where Monk says something offensive, and a bystander says, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” And Monk says, “Yes, every day. All the time.” (Quote may not be exact.)
I don’t literally feel that way all the time, but I’ve spent a lot of my life wracked by guilt. I usually feel like a failure (in terms of our society’s markers of success), and I very often feel ashamed of my many, many failings. Nor do I think this unusual.
I suspect it is even less unusual in a predominantly Christian culture because Christianity teaches us to feel guilty. I once attended a sermon at a the First Congregational Church of Eugene, Oregon, a progressive church, where the pastor said that each of the world’s major religions had signal strength and a signal weakness. He said, “The great strength of Christianity is love, and its great weakness is guilt.” That was over fifteen years ago, but it stuck with me because I felt its truth. We’re all born with original sin. Jesus died for our sins. We’re supposed to live like Jesus, but we never can because he’s literally God and perfect, and we’re not. Or as Tori Amos puts it, “Nothing I do is good enough for you.”
So it struck me as particularly ironic to hear an assertion that we only think about our successes coming from the religion of “Why do we crucify ourselves every day?” But maybe that illustrates the point. We need to acknowledge our failures, says JHW. We need to humble ourselves, in sense of recognizing that we are gluttonous, slothful, etc. so that we can accept the gift of being elevated through Christ in a way we can never achieve for ourselves. In other words, you must feel the guilt, Christian. QED?
She meant this well, of course. And she was saying it to an audience that, by and large, already believed it and finds comfort in that teaching. There’s nothing wrong with that. If that’s the path that leads you to being a good person in the world and rejoicing in the promise of salvation, that’s a beautiful thing.
For me, however, as a lifelong agnostic in a Christian dominant society, from a Protestant ethnic background, who went to Catholic high school, and has been a practicing Buddhist for about six years, Buddhism has exposed for me the profound depths of my tendency toward self-flagellation and how destructive that tendency is. Part of this tendency, for me, is innate personality. I saw a video about the INFJ personality type once (I’ve lost track of it, but will cite if someone can point me to it), in which the presenter said something to the effect of, “The one thing you should never say to an INFJ is ‘you should be ashamed,’ because they’ll say, ‘You know, you’re right,’ and proceed to feel miserable about themselves.” That said, the Christian acculturation to guilt does not help.
Since I started practicing Buddhism, I’ve seen a shift in my responses. Say I get distracted by some bitter, angry course of thought when I’m trying to meditate. I have a strong predisposition to say to myself, “There you go again, wallowing in anger and self-pity and projecting your own shortcomings onto others,” and so on. But Buddhism teaches me to see this without judgment: “Let’s observe that you’ve gone to that angry place again. That’s clearly still strongly with you. Okay, let’s go somewhere else now.” The latter approach (for me) is far more conducive to a less stressful, less angry, more positive, more compassionate life.
A key difference I see is dualism vs. non-dualism. The idea that we must humble ourselves (I kind of want to say “debase” ourselves, though JHW did not use that word) so that Christ can uplift us is a dualist idea: we are categorically separate from God. We are flawed; he is perfect. We are sinners; he is sinless. We cannot save ourselves; he can save us.
Buddhism is a non-dualist tradition, and the Mahayana school that I belong to holds that we all already have Buddha nature—we actually can “save ourselves” in the sense of ending our suffering and having boundless joy and compassion. We simply have a phenomenally large amount of work to do to uncover that Buddhist nature, to see through the illusions and distortions. And we do, absolutely, need help to do that, help from the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha specifically, but ultimately, it’s our own mental work.
One of the greatest revelations that has come to me through this practice is a non-dualist perspective on compassion. I was raised under model of selfish vs. selfless. Jesus sacrificed; so should we. We should have compassion for others but be quite strict with ourselves: don’t let ourselves get away with any nonsense. Buddhism has helped me internalize that it’s all the same; we’re all the same. When I dedicate the merit of my practice to the benefit of all sentient beings, that includes myself. When I notice my own distraction, I should notice it with the same compassion I’d feel when seeing it in someone else whom I genuinely want to help. This teaching is “humble” too, in the sense that it’s not self-aggrandizing, not selfish, deeply concerned with benefiting others, deeply aware of how much there is still to learn. But it doesn’t require self-debasement, nor does it require external grace.
This is the great difference I felt in that lecture between my own belief system and the system advocated by JHW and the Catholic Church. Again, I have no problem with people choosing the Catholic path; it serves many well. But there are reasons I do not choose the Catholic path, and one of them is that the Buddhist path is healthier for me. That said, I will strive to be more curious and open before the books I read and cultivate my discernment by reading a wider array of “good” literature. These are good lessons, and I take them to heart.
