Completely agree with your analysis of the failings of secularized meditation! However, I think it is important to share the full context of Klein's response to what Coates has just said about violence (and I am not even an Ezra Klein supporter / don't listen to his podcast unless someone shares a particular episode, like this one).
Klein: “But so then what does that, there's a Buddhist meditation I like. This is a weird, weird place to go. But it goes like this. I'm of the nature to grow sick. I'm of the nature to grow old. I'm of the nature to lose the people I love. I'm of the nature to die. How then shall I live? And-
Coates: "Love that."
Klein: "Yeah, and I do it because sometimes you need the reminder. What I hear you saying, in a way, is we are of the nature too. And I think the place I'm trying to push is then how then shall we live? Because in this distinction you're making between like you would have been there correctly yelling at FDR, and I'm not like asking you, but like me, right? Like my work, my role."
Coates: "Can you answer that? Can you say what you, I think it's a good point. Like would you define for me how you see like what your role is?"
Klein: "I don't know what my role is anymore. I'll be totally honest with you, man. I feel very conflicted about that question. The role I want to have is a person curiously exploring his political and intellectual interests in political peacetime. The role I somehow have is sometimes that, but I am in the business, I'm a political opinion writer and podcaster and so on, and I'm in the business of political persuasion. And I feel like me and the people believe what I believe, not narrowly speaking, but, you know, like the whole broad coalition, have failed in a really consequential way. And I think it is-"
Coates: "You feel like you failed in your work."
Klein: "I think there are places I failed. I mean, I think there are things I got right too. Like I think we shouldn't have run Joe Biden again. I think I was right about that. I think I've gotten a lot right, but I think I've gotten definitely things wrong. But I think we are here now, right? That's what I would really say. And it is forcing me to rethink things I would prefer not to rethink.”
I hate to give wiggle room to a white man but as I listen, it doesn't seem that he is using the five remembrances here to spiritual bypass or as a tool to manage his internal state. In the context of the conversation, he says "we are of the nature to" in response to what Coates has shared about the nature of political violence, how even when you preach love, you can get shot. And he then goes on to add to the context to sharing the five remembrances by contemplating the question of "how then shall I live?" After saying that he doesn't know what his role is in the moment, he goes on to say that he knows that he has failed and that he is being forced to rethink things.
As I listen, I don't hear him using the five remembrances as a form of stress management or performance optimization. In the context of the conversation, he actually is using it to do an ethical investigation and to contemplate the social and ethical dimensions of the five remembrances. Maybe not perfectly, I don't know anything about him or his meditation practice!
Thoughts? Again, I completely agree with your take on secularized meditation, I'm just not sure that is what is happening in this conversation.
Hi Jesssica! Thanks for this juicy comment (and putting pasting more of the transcript here). I think your point is well taken---in this moment Ezra might not be using the 5 remembrances to spiritually by-pass (I'll have to write another explainer post about spiritual by-passing for folks unfamiliar). But Ezra Klein is on record (for example his July podcast episode I link to in this post) as saying this is what his mediation practice is for...to calm himself down. And to bring it up at that moment....it just didn't seem the right response to Coates' point about his community's experience with political, systemic violence.
BUT, you include another thing above that Ezra said that drove me crazy "The role I want to have is a person curiously exploring his political and intellectual interests in political peacetime." Sounds like he wants to be a professional navel gazer.....again, I'm not sure exploring HIS intellectual interests is what needed right by this particular moment.
Thanks for engaging, Liz! I hear you, and it sounds like you have more context to Klein's meditation practice than I do - I'll have to give the episode you linked to a listen!
Perhaps we'll have to agree to disagree. :) I see Klein bringing up his meditation practice as a way to engage with what Coates has just said about political violence in the Black experience. He's using the Five Remembrances as a framing of something he understands to try to engage with what Coates has just said. How can we get toward greater understanding of each other's perspectives if we don't offer them the framing of how we understand or think through an issue?
Regarding what he says about the role he wants to have, Klein then goes on to say that the role he actually has is one of political persuasion, and that he has failed in really consequential ways, and that he needs to rethink things. I don't see that as navel-gazing. If anything, isn't this what we want thinkers, theorists, public leaders to be able to do? To consider that they've been wrong?
As I read your essay, I found myself nodding and agreeing, but I try to make a point of reading or listening to what has been referenced in a critique like this before resharing. When I did listen and heard this moment in the full context of the conversation, I was left with the feeling that you had isolated two quotes to fit your argument for the essay. I'm hesitant about the prevalence of this sort of critique, as people are less inclined these days to go to the source and discern for themselves, and are very ready to take a "gotcha" as fact.
That said, while I don't think Klein was spiritually bypassing in this conversation, what is striking is his naivete of the Black American experience. I found it confusing that he didn't understand Coates' fatalism, that he seems to have zero references to Afro-pessimism, and that such a revered public intellectual has made it this far without examining the parallel histories that Black and Non-Black Americans hold. Especially considering that they open the conversation by sharing with the listener that Coates and Klein text each other often about "the state of things."! Regardless, I am grateful that they decided to have this particular conversation in public.
Lastly, would love to read your essay on spiritual bypassing! I was introduced to this term early in my dharma study and am still flummoxed at how prevalent it is.
Jessica, I really appreciate your forensic thoughtfulness here. It’s a model for how constructive disagreement can take shape. I particularly love and will take with me your question, ‘how can we get towards greater understanding of each other’s perspectives if we don’t offer them the framing of how we understand or think through an issue?’.
Given that, one thing I want add is how oddly the phrase “I hate to give wriggle room to a white man…” landed with me. It presumes a lot to frame people via such collapsed 2D identity brackets. I know you’ll have plenty of reasons to be scornful of that identity tier and yet it cuts against the care you’ve shown Coates, Klein and Bucar and the diligence you’ve shown their worldviews. When standpoint epistemology militates against other and equally valid ways of knowing I fear that there’s a capitulation to hierarchies of knowing. Coates’ lived experience trumps Klein’s but I see that Bucar and yourself, albeit coming from slightly differing points of view, are trying in good faith to open up knowing.
Hey Ananth, thanks for sharing this thought! I can definitely understand how that phrasing lands if you don’t know me / don’t know my humor. That was meant to be a little tongue in cheek. It is true that I don’t look toward whiteness for my framing of the world (Black feminism is my compass) but I can assure you there are plenty of White Men whose opinions I take into account (honestly, probably too many)(again, tongue in cheek 😉).
Thank you so much for articulating so much of what I was thinking. I also didn't see Klein as navel-gazing, I saw a thoughtful willingness to engage and locate himself in a very serious issue. Did he have a perfect response to Coates? No. Is there such a thing as a perfect response to any serious issue where people disagree on the best ways to save lives and help all people to thrive? No.
Too bad his ethical investigation includes lionizing Charlie Kirk and throwing women's healthcare rights totally under the bus. If that's what he's using his meditation practice for I think it was 15 years wasted.
Hi Galen, can you share more about Klein “lionizing” Charlie Kirk? I never got that from him, but I am only distantly familiar with Klein. Curious to know more. Thanks!
I'm talking about Klein effusing in his most recent columns and on podcasts about how Kirk "did politics right." Klein believes that Charlie Kirk was so effective at peeling off young male voters because he was engaging them directly and because he was not afraid to "debate those who disagreed with him." Nevermind that Kirk debated in bad faith, spouted vast streams of misinformation to proselytize his incredibly racist, homophobic, and misogynist ideas. Not to mention Kirk's political organization Turning Point USA being funded with dark money and breaking campaign finance law. Do you think that is "doing politics right?"
No I don't, but what Klein seems to have meant (based on his own words) about Kirk "doing politics right" was simply that Kirk met people where they were at and persuaded them to his side. I agree with you that the specific ways Kirk persuaded people (lying, debating in bad faith, "othering" those he disagreed with) were not good, and they do not sit well with me and are not aligned with my values as a Buddhist (or how the Buddha described Right Speech.)
This is exactly what I was going to say. You offer such good thoughts on secularized meditation, but I don’t think this analysis is totally fair to Klein. He seemed to me to be wrestling with that question of “where to go from here” in a really sincere way.
Both things can be true ;-) He can be sincerely wrestling with where to go from here, and totally missing the points Coates is brining up. I do think he is struggling. I don't think he is particularly self-aware of his own short-comings. But he is a GREAT thought partner....I really enjoy his podcasts, and I find him an incredibly generous interviewer.
I think Klein has offered some clarity on political topics that seemed to have pretty clear ethical grounds. However, I recently became aware of his friendship with Ben Shapiro and I just can’t take his ethical struggles or voice of moral authority seriously given that. I think being really clear about the reality of a situation outside of your experience of it, your feelings about it or your relationship to it is critical, especially for people with dominant identities. As a white person, Klein’s response to Coates talking about political violence that affects Black people should not be about Klein’s feelings or experiences. That continues to center whiteness.
Took the words right out of my mouth! The authors point stands, but people of all religions with varying levels of piety invoke all sorts of verses, proverbs, etc. And many of those people interpret the texts, verses, or teachings differently anyhow.
That might be true, be its also true that playing "the Buddhist card" is a particular power/rhetorical move in this moment...and Ezra Klein knows that I think.
Agree with you Liz. My view is that someone with a 15-year practice connected to a True Source would never say it's ok to compromise on someone else's right-to-life just for political expediency. The privilege and violence of his whiteness was definitely on full display.
I totally agree. When I listened to that part, I was reminded of Hamlet, who is sent into distress about his father's murder (an "unnatural death") only to give a famous monologue on death and human frailty ("The readiness is all"). For Shakespeare, as for Klein, injustice is linked to mortality, though this could have been better articulated by Klein.
What a rich piece, Liz, and what a rich conversation in the comments. Prior to the election, when Klein was the only person talking in depth about getting Biden out of the race, I listened to him regularly, as I did post-October 7 when he did a remarkable job of bringing on Israelis and Palestinians to provide historical context to the massacre and subsequent genocide.
However, he has consistently revealed himself as more than a little smug in questioning what are basic issues of moral decency to people less privileged than himself. He's dangerously relativistic ("passive aggressive" as one of your commenters said) at a historic moment that demands backbone. I think what he may be perceiving in the conversation with Coates is that he --- as he is right now -- is not up to the task of the moment. And, worse, he may not have the capacity to transform his perspective especially if he wants to keep his job at The New York Times (don't get me started).
As my eldest child remarked about this conversation, while Ezra Klein is very good at listening to very smart people, he is also "not open to having his mind changed." In that, he's a sterling example of a nice white guy who just can't get that he just doesn't get it.
I think that is spot on: he is a good interviewer…I find he pulls interesting things out of guests even (especially) when he doesn’t agree, but…he never changes his mind. It is the lack of intellectual humility that I think is actually what bothers me (just like you oldest!)
This is one of the reasons Coates is as splendid as he is - he is open to change. When he discovers he was wrong or uninformed, he goes away and learns and then comes back changed by that learning. That is the mark of a brilliant scholar, activist, and human.
This!!!! I have been trying to figure out what bothered me about this conversation. It was his lack of intellectual humility. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard Klein say some version of, “Hmm. I hadn’t thought about it like that,” or “That’s a fair point I hadn’t considered.” He’s never rude but he never seems to edge - even a little - from where he starts.
This interview did not sit well with me. As you say, everything wrong with the establishment. But Coates’ invocation of his ancestors and how he sees his work in that lineage was deeply moving.
One thing Klein is really good at is letting his guest’s thoughts and ideas come through….I appreciate that at least about him. Coates’ words and framing were moving to me as well.
This was so interesting to hear about the secularization of meditation from a Buddhist perspective, because I often think along the same lines from a Christian lens. I think modern evangelicalism (and especially the prosperity gospel movement) has encouraged a very insular, personal exercise of faith that has made prayer and other practices largely in service of individualism (which is very American) and neglected the ways religious practices are actually meant to connect us to community and the world around us. Generally there seems to be a popularization of spiritual practices attached to a wellness movement rather than a faith-rooted one, and it feels inevitable that those practices will flail without a larger context and some self-sacrifice.
I definitely think the influence of the prosperity gospel has seriously hampered or erased modern evangelicalism’s theology of suffering. Practices like lament are virtually non-existent, as is the core tenant of family-like community. These have been replaced with the elevation of the nuclear family. The more inconvenient or emotionally difficult elements of faith have been dulled in favor of self-improvement gospels, which places self at the focus rather than God.
Basically I think this is such great work to explore!
While there's so much that has been erased (more later), maybe even more problematic is what has been over-emphasized and de-historicized. Early Christians in fact were oppressed, and struggled against moneyed and powerful rulers and interests. The simple act of gathering as community invited a kind of social isolation and potentially even violence. Even the methodology of interpretation of text and act was radically different from societal norms at the time. (Interestingly, it is this history that most closely mirrors the history of the Black Church and ideology of faith based anti-oppression struggles around the world.) The current evangelical movement is purposefully insular, stridently insistent on a comparative analysis that misrepresents their own community/ies as oppressed and downtrodden, therefore ossifying quite old, outdated and decontextualized interpretations of biblical texts and current events.
I think also what's been erased is a revolutionary openness to the world outside one's own Christian community, a deep desire to hear others, to heal others, to put others first and to work tirelessly to understand others. An erasure of community over a primacy of individual experience and in that an erasure of how the text directs communities to behave towards the outside world -- to be IN the world DOING theology instead of outside the world, preaching theology. An erasure of the world flipping, hierarchy shuffling, recognition of power as a danger when directed at improving the lot of a sunset of people rather than looking to the world to make a difference. An erasure of both lament (as someone else mentioned above) and gratitude and grace.... there's so much...
I'm curious about your work and really have to say thank you for the piece. It crystalized many thoughts I have had over the years w the picking and choosing of religious practices or ideas, and the personalized "spirituality" rather than open-hearted engagement w a religious community, even when some ideas chafe and cause moral discomfort. I am also inclined to note that Klein in his interview w Judith Shulevitz (re-aired December 27th), exposes a strong desire to have the benefits of a religious practices (rest/Sabbath) while shying away from the being in community, rooting that practice w/in a group of others who would hold him accountable and also, though, give him much of what it is clear he yearns for. This made me both sad for him and a little more understanding of how he just doesn't get it right now--clearly this isn't clicking for him. I'd love to hear him interview you!
Hey Liz! I also thought this was a fascinating exchange when I heard it, and glad to see others thought similarly. I absolutely agree that the depoliticizing impulse of neoliberal self-optimization risks flattening the tradition to the point that it is no longer recognizable as Buddhism. Your point about meditation being one aspect of a larger social and ethical system is well-put (subscribed!).
I would also say we should exercise historical caution when positioning "engaged" Buddhism as a more authentic form of Buddhism, even as it's clearly more aligned with genuine social and ethical engagement. All religious traditions are living traditions, adapting to contemporary contexts as communities seek to live out their traditions authentically. I'm concerned that we risk romanticizing Buddhism as though in an earlier form it was untouched by social ills, when (like every other major religious tradition) it has a complex history that includes, at times, allying itself with unjust systems (e.g. ethnonationalist movements).
Engaged Buddhism represents something valuable and important, but it's also a modern development. The question for me is whether we can advocate for it on its own merits rather than through implying direct lineage. This is coming from someone who is not a Buddhist, but who is deeply grateful for the wisdom and work of my engaged Buddhist neighbors.
Thanks for creating the opportunity to engage with this exchange again!
Totally. I'm not someone who believes there is an "authentic" form of any religious tradition or practice. I like David McMahan on this issue (his historical analysis is both accessible and well grounded in scholarship). Thanks for your comment!!
Well said. I've been practicing as a Western lay Theravada Buddhist for 25 years. I use the Pali Canon, and I use AI trained on the Pali Canon. My Substack is called Resisting the Drift. The West has colonized Buddhism profoundly, to my view.
Just did a quick scroll through your archive and I sense that I'm going to get distracted from writing my own articles even more. I'm reading through all the comments (like the Sociologist I'm trained to behave as) before replying through my own perspective, but my very new Substack "Intersectional Stoicism" seems like it'll be one that both of you (Liz and Sarah) might want to have some dialogues around. I'm the founder of that school of Stoicism, which is weaving together the ancient wisdom handed down from dudes who lived in the Medeterrainian 2000 years ago with modern neuroscience and intersectionality - I particularly like that if I put the words in order as Stoic Intersectional Neuroscience it's S.I.N. -- particularly since that "sin of empathy" concept started spreading.
I've been a practicing Stoic for more than 30 years; those were the tools that aided my surviving an adolescence full of chronic pain. I have hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome to a pretty significant degree and my ribs shift out of place in my sleep (less so if I've got the firmness dialed in where I need it on my Sleep Number bed *and* have all 6 of the pillows needed to keep my spine and pelvis lined up, but if I sneeze or cough at least one rib will need to be popped back into it's proper spot, hence the assortment of balls at my bedside).
No amount of mindful introspection gets ramps where I need them to go about my adult responsibilities in the cosmopolis.
I'm an American-born Euromutt; ever since my 2nd Great Grandmother came to the U.S. from Prussia, every female in my maternal line has married someone whose first language wasn't English, and I continued that tradition. My husband is Chinese (born in Toronto), and both of his grandmothers back in China were Buddhists, but his mother was converted to Evangelical Christian by missionaries before he was born. We've been exploring what aspects we can integrate their paternal heritage into our children's lives, while also honoring our shared values as Unitarian Universalists (which my husband and I became as newlyweds after my learning about the denomination in Sociology of Religion class and deciding that was a good place to seek a modern village to establish my new family in; we were UUs for 4 years before our first child was born).
Liz, here you haven't critiqued meditation or secularism but moral detachment. It's true that some secularism exhibits that detachment, and that meditation won't necessarily remedy it.
But people of doctrinal religion and active worship also exhibit moral detachment at times. Indeed, history has documented repeated abuses of compassion, dignity and human rights simply because people of faith in power appealed to antiquated and ignorant canon over diligent and well-informed moral judgement.
What you're advocating for then isn't really religious, but civic. You want a more morally thoughtful, civically engaged population. If so, then some secularists like myself would agree with you.
It's true that some faiths have that as a tradition, but it's also true that they adopt it and dispense with it for largely political and cultural reasons. In the US, the swing from Conservative Protestantism to fundamentalism and evangelicalism over the last 150 years is a well-documented example.
In the early 19th century, Conservative Protestantism was civically active and morally engaged. But past the rupture of the Civil War and into the inconvenient scientific revelations of the late 19th century and beyond, it had fractured, involuted and produced forms of Christianity that are muscular, yet both morally and civically detached.
Why? Because its doctrine had granted it a promise of destiny, while the facts turned against its doctrine. Rather than deal with the conflict, it became psychotic, eventually producing Machiavellian travesties like Creation Science and most recently rallying behind a corrupt, malignant narcissist as secular leader, branding itself for generations as an ends-over-means social movement.
If you want to make religion more relevant to the shifting moral pressures that we have, then you need to work out how to deal with its psychosis of entitlement, rather than preaching more collective psychosis as the solution.
You would also be well-served not to treat secularism as a single, homogeneous and amoral force. It's worth remembering that human compassion and protocols of respect, reciprocity and mutuality predate modern faiths by hundreds of thousands of years.
Hi Ruv--thanks for the juicy comment. My interest in this Substack, Religion, Reimagined, is thinking through forms of religious engagement that are ethical (frankly I'm uninterested in the others...like what is the point?). And I think we might disagree about how to make religion more relevant....one of the BIG things I find in religious traditions are resources to help shift our focus away from the individual to someone else (the collective, god, nature, etc) and I do think that is relevant (and sorely needed) today.
Thank you for responding. I was glad to hear from you.
Rather than just react to your article I first took a look at your profile and past post titles. My first impressions registered as something that I had seen somewhat of before.
In my head I put you on the Inglehart-Welzel World Values Survey map, and figured that you'd like to pull the top-right quadrant down a bit and more to the left, and wanted to use the forms of religion if not a specific doctrine. [https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/images/Map2023NEW.png]
As I say, I have seen this discussed before (I'm not young, and have hung with a lot of humanists, both secular and sectarian.) I'm in agreement with some of the ends and recognise some of the expected benefits, if also skeptical about the means.
Where we agree: Morality can't be individual -- it has to be cultural (we could discuss why separately.) More community in our atomised society would hurt nobody, and would help in many areas.
Where we might disagree: You've also said that religion must be ethical but I suspect that you don't know what that means except as an aspiration, since almost no religions do. (I'd love you to prove me wrong there.)
Where we have already disagreed: I said in my comment that you'd be well served not to treat secularism as one undifferentiated blob. You didn't acknowledge or respond to that point, so I understand you think that it -is- one hedonistic, individualistic, quasi-nihilistic blob (it's not.)
Where you might be conflicted: Your end is largely humanistic, but you're academically invested in your own training and might be attached to it being the sole means to this end. To that extent, it serves you to conflate religion with collectivism (it isn't); and secularism with individualism (it's not.) That conflation gives your education and training instant moral weight, but I think you'll have a harder row to hoe than that.
Regardless, I'm not opposed to your venture, Liz. I'd like to see what comes of it and hope to read more. You'd already be aware that it's a narrow niche of potential readers. There'll be some ex-congregants who miss their congregations but not their faith, and a smattering of religious nones like myself who take an interest for various reasons, not all hostile.
My current and main interest is: how well do you know your own guard-rails? Based on the post I read and your response I think you were glad to tell me what you intended, but didn't seem so comfortable discussing framework and method.
So do you only want readers who agree with ends *and* means? If so, then how can that ever be ethical? If you want readers who agree with your ends then I'm potentially at least a casual reader, but then how will you be accountable for means?
Ruv, you sound like SO MANY Unitarian Universalists I've known and loved in my 25+ years of spending as many hours per week as I can spare in those contexts (mostly just as a Sociologist "participant observer" opting for that socialization processes context for my children as well as my extroverted human needs).
In addition to being a UU, I've been a practicing Stoic for over 30 years. I would LOVE a conversation like this in the comments on my new Substack "Intersectional Stoicism!" I have comments set to require paid subscription to proctect my mental bandwidth from needing to practice the Virtue of Moderation there ;) If you're not inclined to financially support a stranger in order to comment, drop me a DM and I'll gift you a subscription. Helping me develop my own thinking via being challenged like you're doing here is exactly the kind of gift I want to receive toward the work I feel an irresistable impulse to do in the world.
[Liz, apologies for the private communications appearing in your newsletter comments. I'll keep it brief.]
Ahmie, you're seeking to do a lot in your newsletter and I can see why it might interest you to talk to some readers of Liz's newsletter on topics not directly related to her posts.
But Liz is our host, her labour has made this space available for discussion on matters related to her choice of topics and it is not respectful that you promote your own interests here without her explicit consent. It cannot do other than disrupt the conversations that she seeks to have.
I think it's especially ironic that you have locked your own comments against casual disrespect while casually disrespecting another author in comments here.
Because of your own overlaps of interest, what you could consider doing instead is approaching Liz directly and offering to do guest-post cross collaborations.
Meanwhile, your insouciant lack of awareness and entitled lack of restraint suggests to me that you're not a stoic so much as left-wing American elite -- entitled, identitarian, virtue-performative and self-satisfied -- cherrypicking the language of stoicism without clearly understanding that the world the stoics lived in was actually far harder even for its privileged, than the world that you inhabit, even with your self-absorbed intersectional grievances.
I have read what you're doing. I respect the challenges that you face and what they can grow, and acknowledge that you sincerely intend to grow it. But I also think that you're presently too self-satisfied, privileged and entitled for any comment that I might offer to help.
From my perspective, the next work you have to do is your own, and it's not about you so much as how the rest of the world might be improved if you were not at its centre, blithely assuming that God put you there.
I’ll add, I felt at first like Klein’s use of this meditation was a bit…condescending toward Coates, almost a “holier-than-thou” moment, but when he asked Coates how do we live, it struck me how much he simply doesn’t understand about the Black experience in America. Coates’s entire point rests on the idea that suffering will continue, and yet, we continue to live—and live within our values.
When Coates says, “love that,” in response to Klein’s reciting of the meditation, to me it was as if he was affirming, “yes, that’s what I’m saying.” Because it is what he’s saying.
For Klein to then entertain the prospect of shifting our lines in order to “win” shows even more clearly how he can recite the meditation, but isn’t embodying it. Klein seems to see staying the course of our convictions even in regressive political eras as “losing” whereas, Coates sees it as a form of integrity within activism and revolution.
Coates views fatalism as acceptance, not defeat. If he did, he wouldn’t keep writing. But he does.
Overall, my takeaway was that Coates understands and embodies the meditation in his outward life, whereas, Klein can only recite and deploy it for his own internal life.
I remember when mindfulness meditation began being marketed to the corporate world as a way to get employees to de-stress, calm down, and, of course, optimize performance. Spiritual and moral underpinnings and responsibility to community and world were lost. Capitalism doesn't care. In general, any papering over the difficult, challenging truths about a society will ultimately fail, and we see that disastrous failure unfolding in the US right now under fascism. Until this nation faces up to the oppressive and violent aspects of its history--instead of trying to flee from that truth--it will never work fairly for all and we will never bear the responsibility that we have not only to one another but to the rest of the world.
Calming down really does help the market and status quo, right? I agree with all of this and explored these ideas in a follow up post that went live today about spiritual by-passing.
I'll check it out, Liz. Yes, from the corporate point of view, "calming down" improves functionality. They paid good money to get experts in there to help their employees. Not sure how well that worked, but maybe some people learned something genuine they could use--and might be using now, since so many of us are traumatized. From my view, spirituality and spiritual practice open us to deeper realization of the connection we already have with everything surrounding us and the responsibility that implies. We calm ourselves to be better able to be present, clear-minded witnesses and active participants, knowing we all make this world.
I mean those practices CAN do that….but I think when they are white-washed/medicalized/secularized and frankly made “easy” they have less ability to work in that careful way. I’m not about folks given up their spiritual practices….I just want them to work BETTER. ;-)
Yes there's a book called McMindfulness about this. Watered down Stoic philosophy is used in a similar way, particularly by entrepreneurial business guru types. Christianity & Judaism both have forms of meditation and contemplation that can be just as effective, and can be used by someone who doesn't necessarily believe in their God (especially with Judaism) but once again they need to be understood in the context of their traditions and history.
In case you're interested in encountering distilled instead of watered down Stoic philosophy, I'd love to have your energies on my Intersectional Stoicism publication. Drop me a DM mentioning that you found me through Liz's post if you don't have the inclination or capacity to support me with a paid subscription to comment (I have comments paywalled to keep the Broicism trolls out), and I'll gift you a subscription so you can comment.
Fun little intersection between the two of us -- my nickname has been Squirrel since high school (which is also when I started practicing Stoicism as a way to survive an adolescence infused with chronic debilitating pain from undiagnosed, untreated joint subluxations - the hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome wasn't recognized until almost 20 years after symptoms first manifested with puberty onset so I spent my adolescent and emerging adult years getting medically gaslit pretty much any time I saught medical care... my Medical Sociology professors were also saviors of my sanity).
That sounds really intriguing, it's great to see more perspectives in philosophy & alternative spirituality that are outside of able-bodied, white/economic privileged etc assumptions. That was a concern of mine with Stoicism. I know several people who have EDS, it's very difficult to get diagnosed & for people to be understanding & empathetic. In fact, I've been out of touch with her for a long time, but I know someone who was working on a Religious Studies MA (maybe it was sociology of religion?) focused on the intersection of religion & disability. She's one of the first people I encountered who had that diagnosis.
Perhaps this is the nudge needed to reach out to the scholar with EDS? If you find anything she’s publishing online, I’d appreciate a DM with links. That intersection sounds like something I’d enjoy deep-diving into.
As for other publishing scholars with EDS, Dr. Tasha Eurich was diagnosed during the course of writing her most recent book, Shatterproof. I’ve been recommending that book at every opportunity since I read it in April. I really enjoyed her prior book, Insight. I’m still trying to figure out how to get my recommended publications to show up in a sidebar on my publication, I think I have hers in that list already.
James Doty, MD, wrote about this in his memoir, "Into The Magic Shop." Big time financiers on Wall Street have adopted meditation to become more callous and indifferent in their day-to-day.
LOVE your username & Substack publication name. I'm a disabled Sociologist practicing Stoic momming 5 sons with my ethnically Chinese husband. Always looking for other parents to chat with about philosophy.
This is so fascinating to me as someone who is a religious person (practising but imperfect Muslim) who finds that religion is often stripped for parts in our society. Thank you!
I was raised as a Soto Zen Buddhist here in Hawaii, and I share your wariness of people removing Buddhist meditation from it's religious context. Or even misunderstands it, as it seems Ezra Klein has
If folks find secular meditation and 'mindfulness' to be helpful to them, that's cool. But too often I've met folks who pick and choose parts without understanding the whole. I don't demand that they convert or attend a Buddhist monastery. But part of me bristles at folks treating our religion like a costume, fad, or lifestyle to sold
Thankfully, the folks I've met IRL have had open hearts and minds. And I wish all folks well on their journey to find Enlightenment
I really appreciate this piece. I was at a retreat last fall and really struggled with the general sentiment that we were there to distance ourselves from the political and to focus on our own internal peace and equinimity at all times. As several participants rightly pushed back on, the notion of solely personal meditation as the response to genocide, or the loss of women's rights, was a hard pill to swallow. The framing seemed to be that our personal liberation (via a personal meditation practice) would implicitly lead to collective liberation, instead of grappling with the ways in which our personal liberation is inherently tied to the work of collective liberation.
As an ordained clergy person with nearly 40 years of ministry, I think the same things written here about Buddhism also apply to a radically personalized Christianity.
I totally agree, and also....guess where this impulse to interiorize and personalize Buddhism came from? Protestant interpreters (and then Buddhist reactions to them)! But this personalized spirituality is a pattern I'm seeing everywhere....and one I'll be writing a lot more about in different contexts!
Great analysis, Liz. From the philosophical side, this is why I could never quite get into the Stoic revival of the last decade plus. It too often lacks a justice focused core that would keep it from being hollow retreat.
The stuff derived from Ryan Holiday definitely comes across as smug. Massimo Pigliucci and Donald Robertson a bit less so, but they're both very high-minded academic in their writing styles which can come across as elitist. William B. Irvine and Ward Farnsworth are my favorite traditionally published modern Stoics, and Grey Freeman's "Practical Stoicism" (which was released into the public domain as a PDF then narrated by Robin Homer of Vox Stoica) are worth engaging with in my opinion. I always send curious new people to Irvine's "A Guide to the Good Life: the Art of Stoic Joy" as the first recommended reading. Erick Cloward of the Stoic Coffee Break podcast (and now Stoicism 101) is also doing good work.
Please check out and give me feedback on what I'm trying to do in Intersectional Stoicism. I agree, the modern forms of Stoicism hyperfixate on self-control/moderation/temperance while trying to appear wise and completely ignoring the virtues of courage and justice. This is harmful to people existing in marginalized bodies. I also am taking care to remind people that the only ancient Stoic NOT born to privilege whose words we have to reflect on is also the only one who did not write those words down himself; it was handed down to us through the privileged lens of a student who may well have filtered out some of the emancipated slave's teachings when they discomforted him too much.
This is a great reminder about social location that gets at my uneasiness with the Stoic revival so well. It is less the "what" of Stoicism that bothers me than the "who" in the Stoic revival, and the "who" reveals so much about the powers it serves. As a white, cis, hetero, middle-aged male, I'm already inclined toward cool reflection at a distance because the world has been designed to allow me that space and encourage that stance for me. What I should be doing, thinking, and reading, are things that CHALLENGE that stance--e.g., theologies of liberation or critical race theory.
If I were to decide that postmodern life is too hectic and retreat into Stoicism, it would mark a failure to use my standing and privilege to improve the conditions that make that retreat easy for me and well nigh impossible for others.
To return to Liz's original reflections on Klein and Coates, when Klein admits that he doesn't know what his role or job is, the humility--though I'm sure it felt genuine to Klein--reads as grotesque. Sitting with a platform like that and not knowing how to use it to make people's lives better and having spent way too much time allowing them to get worse probably does require one to use meditation to overcome the doublethink.
Nevermind me over here platonically swooning a little about a self-identified white, cis, hetero, middle-aged male using the term “social location” unprompted ;)
Part of what I’m attempting to do with Intersectional Stoicism is make sure that people like you feel included as well. Stoicism was built for people like you, it needs a bit of refinement to include people like me.
For reference, I’m white but deeply multicultural due to having a lot of 20th century immigrants in my family of origin and being married to a childhood immigrant. Cis-ish meaning I’m fine with other people identifying me as female but I don’t really have a solid “gender identity” within my own mind beyond the considerable chunk of my life I’ve spent menstruating/gestating/birthing/lactating (and getting frequently gaslit about how derailing those activities are). Hetero-ish in that I’ve been in an exclusive couplehood relationship with my husband for nearly 30 years so my “queerness” really doesn’t matter (I’m attracted — platonically first, then sometimes romantically, to personalities, not bodies, and I’m demisexual to the point that sexual activities do not cross my mind if I’m not in an emotionally secure situation with my potential sexual activity partner; I’m functionally asexual when my psycho-emotional needs aren’t being met in a relationship but will swing to enthusiastically sexual when we’re in a good psycho-emotional rhythm… this may well be the most “feminine” aspect of my way of being, from conversations I’ve had with other women). I am also middle-aged (turning 49 in December) so most of the distractibility of youthful identity development is behind me — though by that definition I was mentally middle-aged in my teen years in many aspects… chronic pain gets the credit for that developmental milestone getting reached early, it was very effective at filtering out “not worth the energy” nonsense.
Total tangent, but Substack is weird about the formatting it allows when replying from the notifications compared to in the webpage of the original article. It wasn’t letting me do the double-dash-for-emdash keyboard shortcut in the threaded comments but it’s letting me here, and I think that I couldn’t do other text formatting in there, either. Hmmm.
Anyway, I’d really enjoy ongoing conversation around this where it doesn’t tangent the OP. I have a couple draft versions of articles in the queue for Intersectional Stoicism that I haven’t had the attention-focus time to edit before posting (my teacher-husband and our kids had Friday off school, and I was a little unwell in the middle of last week, so I got behind). Replying to comments is taking my attention away from that task, and I also need to rethink/maybe tweak settings on my publication so I can allow for comments that develop thoughts like this without risking getting inundated by defensive overpampered Broic trolls who are triggered by the idea that what works for them doesn’t generalize broadly. That’s why the comments are paywalled — they can have their opinions, but they can’t express them in my creative sharing space without paying for my time to moderate them instead of allowing them to further dysregulate the people who are coming to my work for support in their healthy development. Drop me a DM if you subscribe for free and I’ll see if I can figure out how to gift you a subscription so you can comment. That’s the work-around I’ve come up with so far.
Completely agree with your analysis of the failings of secularized meditation! However, I think it is important to share the full context of Klein's response to what Coates has just said about violence (and I am not even an Ezra Klein supporter / don't listen to his podcast unless someone shares a particular episode, like this one).
Klein: “But so then what does that, there's a Buddhist meditation I like. This is a weird, weird place to go. But it goes like this. I'm of the nature to grow sick. I'm of the nature to grow old. I'm of the nature to lose the people I love. I'm of the nature to die. How then shall I live? And-
Coates: "Love that."
Klein: "Yeah, and I do it because sometimes you need the reminder. What I hear you saying, in a way, is we are of the nature too. And I think the place I'm trying to push is then how then shall we live? Because in this distinction you're making between like you would have been there correctly yelling at FDR, and I'm not like asking you, but like me, right? Like my work, my role."
Coates: "Can you answer that? Can you say what you, I think it's a good point. Like would you define for me how you see like what your role is?"
Klein: "I don't know what my role is anymore. I'll be totally honest with you, man. I feel very conflicted about that question. The role I want to have is a person curiously exploring his political and intellectual interests in political peacetime. The role I somehow have is sometimes that, but I am in the business, I'm a political opinion writer and podcaster and so on, and I'm in the business of political persuasion. And I feel like me and the people believe what I believe, not narrowly speaking, but, you know, like the whole broad coalition, have failed in a really consequential way. And I think it is-"
Coates: "You feel like you failed in your work."
Klein: "I think there are places I failed. I mean, I think there are things I got right too. Like I think we shouldn't have run Joe Biden again. I think I was right about that. I think I've gotten a lot right, but I think I've gotten definitely things wrong. But I think we are here now, right? That's what I would really say. And it is forcing me to rethink things I would prefer not to rethink.”
I hate to give wiggle room to a white man but as I listen, it doesn't seem that he is using the five remembrances here to spiritual bypass or as a tool to manage his internal state. In the context of the conversation, he says "we are of the nature to" in response to what Coates has shared about the nature of political violence, how even when you preach love, you can get shot. And he then goes on to add to the context to sharing the five remembrances by contemplating the question of "how then shall I live?" After saying that he doesn't know what his role is in the moment, he goes on to say that he knows that he has failed and that he is being forced to rethink things.
As I listen, I don't hear him using the five remembrances as a form of stress management or performance optimization. In the context of the conversation, he actually is using it to do an ethical investigation and to contemplate the social and ethical dimensions of the five remembrances. Maybe not perfectly, I don't know anything about him or his meditation practice!
Thoughts? Again, I completely agree with your take on secularized meditation, I'm just not sure that is what is happening in this conversation.
Hi Jesssica! Thanks for this juicy comment (and putting pasting more of the transcript here). I think your point is well taken---in this moment Ezra might not be using the 5 remembrances to spiritually by-pass (I'll have to write another explainer post about spiritual by-passing for folks unfamiliar). But Ezra Klein is on record (for example his July podcast episode I link to in this post) as saying this is what his mediation practice is for...to calm himself down. And to bring it up at that moment....it just didn't seem the right response to Coates' point about his community's experience with political, systemic violence.
BUT, you include another thing above that Ezra said that drove me crazy "The role I want to have is a person curiously exploring his political and intellectual interests in political peacetime." Sounds like he wants to be a professional navel gazer.....again, I'm not sure exploring HIS intellectual interests is what needed right by this particular moment.
But push back on me if we disagree!
Thanks for engaging, Liz! I hear you, and it sounds like you have more context to Klein's meditation practice than I do - I'll have to give the episode you linked to a listen!
Perhaps we'll have to agree to disagree. :) I see Klein bringing up his meditation practice as a way to engage with what Coates has just said about political violence in the Black experience. He's using the Five Remembrances as a framing of something he understands to try to engage with what Coates has just said. How can we get toward greater understanding of each other's perspectives if we don't offer them the framing of how we understand or think through an issue?
Regarding what he says about the role he wants to have, Klein then goes on to say that the role he actually has is one of political persuasion, and that he has failed in really consequential ways, and that he needs to rethink things. I don't see that as navel-gazing. If anything, isn't this what we want thinkers, theorists, public leaders to be able to do? To consider that they've been wrong?
As I read your essay, I found myself nodding and agreeing, but I try to make a point of reading or listening to what has been referenced in a critique like this before resharing. When I did listen and heard this moment in the full context of the conversation, I was left with the feeling that you had isolated two quotes to fit your argument for the essay. I'm hesitant about the prevalence of this sort of critique, as people are less inclined these days to go to the source and discern for themselves, and are very ready to take a "gotcha" as fact.
That said, while I don't think Klein was spiritually bypassing in this conversation, what is striking is his naivete of the Black American experience. I found it confusing that he didn't understand Coates' fatalism, that he seems to have zero references to Afro-pessimism, and that such a revered public intellectual has made it this far without examining the parallel histories that Black and Non-Black Americans hold. Especially considering that they open the conversation by sharing with the listener that Coates and Klein text each other often about "the state of things."! Regardless, I am grateful that they decided to have this particular conversation in public.
Lastly, would love to read your essay on spiritual bypassing! I was introduced to this term early in my dharma study and am still flummoxed at how prevalent it is.
Love this back and forth. Thank you both.
Magic is always in the conversation that follows!
Jessica, I really appreciate your forensic thoughtfulness here. It’s a model for how constructive disagreement can take shape. I particularly love and will take with me your question, ‘how can we get towards greater understanding of each other’s perspectives if we don’t offer them the framing of how we understand or think through an issue?’.
Given that, one thing I want add is how oddly the phrase “I hate to give wriggle room to a white man…” landed with me. It presumes a lot to frame people via such collapsed 2D identity brackets. I know you’ll have plenty of reasons to be scornful of that identity tier and yet it cuts against the care you’ve shown Coates, Klein and Bucar and the diligence you’ve shown their worldviews. When standpoint epistemology militates against other and equally valid ways of knowing I fear that there’s a capitulation to hierarchies of knowing. Coates’ lived experience trumps Klein’s but I see that Bucar and yourself, albeit coming from slightly differing points of view, are trying in good faith to open up knowing.
Thank you.
Hey Ananth, thanks for sharing this thought! I can definitely understand how that phrasing lands if you don’t know me / don’t know my humor. That was meant to be a little tongue in cheek. It is true that I don’t look toward whiteness for my framing of the world (Black feminism is my compass) but I can assure you there are plenty of White Men whose opinions I take into account (honestly, probably too many)(again, tongue in cheek 😉).
Thank you so much for articulating so much of what I was thinking. I also didn't see Klein as navel-gazing, I saw a thoughtful willingness to engage and locate himself in a very serious issue. Did he have a perfect response to Coates? No. Is there such a thing as a perfect response to any serious issue where people disagree on the best ways to save lives and help all people to thrive? No.
Thank you.
Too bad his ethical investigation includes lionizing Charlie Kirk and throwing women's healthcare rights totally under the bus. If that's what he's using his meditation practice for I think it was 15 years wasted.
Yeah, I was surprised by the pivot on abortion rights...I'm a practical gal so I get the impulse, but what and WHO are we fighting for?
Wow, a lot of judgement.
Hi Galen, can you share more about Klein “lionizing” Charlie Kirk? I never got that from him, but I am only distantly familiar with Klein. Curious to know more. Thanks!
I'm talking about Klein effusing in his most recent columns and on podcasts about how Kirk "did politics right." Klein believes that Charlie Kirk was so effective at peeling off young male voters because he was engaging them directly and because he was not afraid to "debate those who disagreed with him." Nevermind that Kirk debated in bad faith, spouted vast streams of misinformation to proselytize his incredibly racist, homophobic, and misogynist ideas. Not to mention Kirk's political organization Turning Point USA being funded with dark money and breaking campaign finance law. Do you think that is "doing politics right?"
No I don't, but what Klein seems to have meant (based on his own words) about Kirk "doing politics right" was simply that Kirk met people where they were at and persuaded them to his side. I agree with you that the specific ways Kirk persuaded people (lying, debating in bad faith, "othering" those he disagreed with) were not good, and they do not sit well with me and are not aligned with my values as a Buddhist (or how the Buddha described Right Speech.)
(Edited for clarity)
This is exactly what I was going to say. You offer such good thoughts on secularized meditation, but I don’t think this analysis is totally fair to Klein. He seemed to me to be wrestling with that question of “where to go from here” in a really sincere way.
Both things can be true ;-) He can be sincerely wrestling with where to go from here, and totally missing the points Coates is brining up. I do think he is struggling. I don't think he is particularly self-aware of his own short-comings. But he is a GREAT thought partner....I really enjoy his podcasts, and I find him an incredibly generous interviewer.
Both things can be true! It’s funny because I felt like Coates was missing Klein’s points the whole time. Maybe that was on purpose.
But yes, I thought it was generous of both of them to even do the show.
I think Klein has offered some clarity on political topics that seemed to have pretty clear ethical grounds. However, I recently became aware of his friendship with Ben Shapiro and I just can’t take his ethical struggles or voice of moral authority seriously given that. I think being really clear about the reality of a situation outside of your experience of it, your feelings about it or your relationship to it is critical, especially for people with dominant identities. As a white person, Klein’s response to Coates talking about political violence that affects Black people should not be about Klein’s feelings or experiences. That continues to center whiteness.
Took the words right out of my mouth! The authors point stands, but people of all religions with varying levels of piety invoke all sorts of verses, proverbs, etc. And many of those people interpret the texts, verses, or teachings differently anyhow.
That might be true, be its also true that playing "the Buddhist card" is a particular power/rhetorical move in this moment...and Ezra Klein knows that I think.
Agree with you Liz. My view is that someone with a 15-year practice connected to a True Source would never say it's ok to compromise on someone else's right-to-life just for political expediency. The privilege and violence of his whiteness was definitely on full display.
I totally agree. When I listened to that part, I was reminded of Hamlet, who is sent into distress about his father's murder (an "unnatural death") only to give a famous monologue on death and human frailty ("The readiness is all"). For Shakespeare, as for Klein, injustice is linked to mortality, though this could have been better articulated by Klein.
Anyone on the receiving end of injustice knows freedom, like mortality, isn't theoretical.
He sounds earnest, even self-reflective, perhaps mildly aware of how little he understands about dharma.
What a rich piece, Liz, and what a rich conversation in the comments. Prior to the election, when Klein was the only person talking in depth about getting Biden out of the race, I listened to him regularly, as I did post-October 7 when he did a remarkable job of bringing on Israelis and Palestinians to provide historical context to the massacre and subsequent genocide.
However, he has consistently revealed himself as more than a little smug in questioning what are basic issues of moral decency to people less privileged than himself. He's dangerously relativistic ("passive aggressive" as one of your commenters said) at a historic moment that demands backbone. I think what he may be perceiving in the conversation with Coates is that he --- as he is right now -- is not up to the task of the moment. And, worse, he may not have the capacity to transform his perspective especially if he wants to keep his job at The New York Times (don't get me started).
As my eldest child remarked about this conversation, while Ezra Klein is very good at listening to very smart people, he is also "not open to having his mind changed." In that, he's a sterling example of a nice white guy who just can't get that he just doesn't get it.
I think that is spot on: he is a good interviewer…I find he pulls interesting things out of guests even (especially) when he doesn’t agree, but…he never changes his mind. It is the lack of intellectual humility that I think is actually what bothers me (just like you oldest!)
This is one of the reasons Coates is as splendid as he is - he is open to change. When he discovers he was wrong or uninformed, he goes away and learns and then comes back changed by that learning. That is the mark of a brilliant scholar, activist, and human.
This!!!! I have been trying to figure out what bothered me about this conversation. It was his lack of intellectual humility. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard Klein say some version of, “Hmm. I hadn’t thought about it like that,” or “That’s a fair point I hadn’t considered.” He’s never rude but he never seems to edge - even a little - from where he starts.
This interview did not sit well with me. As you say, everything wrong with the establishment. But Coates’ invocation of his ancestors and how he sees his work in that lineage was deeply moving.
One thing Klein is really good at is letting his guest’s thoughts and ideas come through….I appreciate that at least about him. Coates’ words and framing were moving to me as well.
This was so interesting to hear about the secularization of meditation from a Buddhist perspective, because I often think along the same lines from a Christian lens. I think modern evangelicalism (and especially the prosperity gospel movement) has encouraged a very insular, personal exercise of faith that has made prayer and other practices largely in service of individualism (which is very American) and neglected the ways religious practices are actually meant to connect us to community and the world around us. Generally there seems to be a popularization of spiritual practices attached to a wellness movement rather than a faith-rooted one, and it feels inevitable that those practices will flail without a larger context and some self-sacrifice.
Yes! These popularized spiritual practices are exactly the focus of my work right now....what got erased?
I definitely think the influence of the prosperity gospel has seriously hampered or erased modern evangelicalism’s theology of suffering. Practices like lament are virtually non-existent, as is the core tenant of family-like community. These have been replaced with the elevation of the nuclear family. The more inconvenient or emotionally difficult elements of faith have been dulled in favor of self-improvement gospels, which places self at the focus rather than God.
Basically I think this is such great work to explore!
While there's so much that has been erased (more later), maybe even more problematic is what has been over-emphasized and de-historicized. Early Christians in fact were oppressed, and struggled against moneyed and powerful rulers and interests. The simple act of gathering as community invited a kind of social isolation and potentially even violence. Even the methodology of interpretation of text and act was radically different from societal norms at the time. (Interestingly, it is this history that most closely mirrors the history of the Black Church and ideology of faith based anti-oppression struggles around the world.) The current evangelical movement is purposefully insular, stridently insistent on a comparative analysis that misrepresents their own community/ies as oppressed and downtrodden, therefore ossifying quite old, outdated and decontextualized interpretations of biblical texts and current events.
I think also what's been erased is a revolutionary openness to the world outside one's own Christian community, a deep desire to hear others, to heal others, to put others first and to work tirelessly to understand others. An erasure of community over a primacy of individual experience and in that an erasure of how the text directs communities to behave towards the outside world -- to be IN the world DOING theology instead of outside the world, preaching theology. An erasure of the world flipping, hierarchy shuffling, recognition of power as a danger when directed at improving the lot of a sunset of people rather than looking to the world to make a difference. An erasure of both lament (as someone else mentioned above) and gratitude and grace.... there's so much...
I'm curious about your work and really have to say thank you for the piece. It crystalized many thoughts I have had over the years w the picking and choosing of religious practices or ideas, and the personalized "spirituality" rather than open-hearted engagement w a religious community, even when some ideas chafe and cause moral discomfort. I am also inclined to note that Klein in his interview w Judith Shulevitz (re-aired December 27th), exposes a strong desire to have the benefits of a religious practices (rest/Sabbath) while shying away from the being in community, rooting that practice w/in a group of others who would hold him accountable and also, though, give him much of what it is clear he yearns for. This made me both sad for him and a little more understanding of how he just doesn't get it right now--clearly this isn't clicking for him. I'd love to hear him interview you!
Hey Liz! I also thought this was a fascinating exchange when I heard it, and glad to see others thought similarly. I absolutely agree that the depoliticizing impulse of neoliberal self-optimization risks flattening the tradition to the point that it is no longer recognizable as Buddhism. Your point about meditation being one aspect of a larger social and ethical system is well-put (subscribed!).
I would also say we should exercise historical caution when positioning "engaged" Buddhism as a more authentic form of Buddhism, even as it's clearly more aligned with genuine social and ethical engagement. All religious traditions are living traditions, adapting to contemporary contexts as communities seek to live out their traditions authentically. I'm concerned that we risk romanticizing Buddhism as though in an earlier form it was untouched by social ills, when (like every other major religious tradition) it has a complex history that includes, at times, allying itself with unjust systems (e.g. ethnonationalist movements).
Engaged Buddhism represents something valuable and important, but it's also a modern development. The question for me is whether we can advocate for it on its own merits rather than through implying direct lineage. This is coming from someone who is not a Buddhist, but who is deeply grateful for the wisdom and work of my engaged Buddhist neighbors.
Thanks for creating the opportunity to engage with this exchange again!
Totally. I'm not someone who believes there is an "authentic" form of any religious tradition or practice. I like David McMahan on this issue (his historical analysis is both accessible and well grounded in scholarship). Thanks for your comment!!
Well said. I've been practicing as a Western lay Theravada Buddhist for 25 years. I use the Pali Canon, and I use AI trained on the Pali Canon. My Substack is called Resisting the Drift. The West has colonized Buddhism profoundly, to my view.
folks in these commments…check our Sarah’s substack!
Thanks for the shoutout! Much obliged!
Just did a quick scroll through your archive and I sense that I'm going to get distracted from writing my own articles even more. I'm reading through all the comments (like the Sociologist I'm trained to behave as) before replying through my own perspective, but my very new Substack "Intersectional Stoicism" seems like it'll be one that both of you (Liz and Sarah) might want to have some dialogues around. I'm the founder of that school of Stoicism, which is weaving together the ancient wisdom handed down from dudes who lived in the Medeterrainian 2000 years ago with modern neuroscience and intersectionality - I particularly like that if I put the words in order as Stoic Intersectional Neuroscience it's S.I.N. -- particularly since that "sin of empathy" concept started spreading.
I've been a practicing Stoic for more than 30 years; those were the tools that aided my surviving an adolescence full of chronic pain. I have hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome to a pretty significant degree and my ribs shift out of place in my sleep (less so if I've got the firmness dialed in where I need it on my Sleep Number bed *and* have all 6 of the pillows needed to keep my spine and pelvis lined up, but if I sneeze or cough at least one rib will need to be popped back into it's proper spot, hence the assortment of balls at my bedside).
No amount of mindful introspection gets ramps where I need them to go about my adult responsibilities in the cosmopolis.
I'm an American-born Euromutt; ever since my 2nd Great Grandmother came to the U.S. from Prussia, every female in my maternal line has married someone whose first language wasn't English, and I continued that tradition. My husband is Chinese (born in Toronto), and both of his grandmothers back in China were Buddhists, but his mother was converted to Evangelical Christian by missionaries before he was born. We've been exploring what aspects we can integrate their paternal heritage into our children's lives, while also honoring our shared values as Unitarian Universalists (which my husband and I became as newlyweds after my learning about the denomination in Sociology of Religion class and deciding that was a good place to seek a modern village to establish my new family in; we were UUs for 4 years before our first child was born).
Liz, here you haven't critiqued meditation or secularism but moral detachment. It's true that some secularism exhibits that detachment, and that meditation won't necessarily remedy it.
But people of doctrinal religion and active worship also exhibit moral detachment at times. Indeed, history has documented repeated abuses of compassion, dignity and human rights simply because people of faith in power appealed to antiquated and ignorant canon over diligent and well-informed moral judgement.
What you're advocating for then isn't really religious, but civic. You want a more morally thoughtful, civically engaged population. If so, then some secularists like myself would agree with you.
It's true that some faiths have that as a tradition, but it's also true that they adopt it and dispense with it for largely political and cultural reasons. In the US, the swing from Conservative Protestantism to fundamentalism and evangelicalism over the last 150 years is a well-documented example.
In the early 19th century, Conservative Protestantism was civically active and morally engaged. But past the rupture of the Civil War and into the inconvenient scientific revelations of the late 19th century and beyond, it had fractured, involuted and produced forms of Christianity that are muscular, yet both morally and civically detached.
Why? Because its doctrine had granted it a promise of destiny, while the facts turned against its doctrine. Rather than deal with the conflict, it became psychotic, eventually producing Machiavellian travesties like Creation Science and most recently rallying behind a corrupt, malignant narcissist as secular leader, branding itself for generations as an ends-over-means social movement.
If you want to make religion more relevant to the shifting moral pressures that we have, then you need to work out how to deal with its psychosis of entitlement, rather than preaching more collective psychosis as the solution.
You would also be well-served not to treat secularism as a single, homogeneous and amoral force. It's worth remembering that human compassion and protocols of respect, reciprocity and mutuality predate modern faiths by hundreds of thousands of years.
I hope that may be useful.
Hi Ruv--thanks for the juicy comment. My interest in this Substack, Religion, Reimagined, is thinking through forms of religious engagement that are ethical (frankly I'm uninterested in the others...like what is the point?). And I think we might disagree about how to make religion more relevant....one of the BIG things I find in religious traditions are resources to help shift our focus away from the individual to someone else (the collective, god, nature, etc) and I do think that is relevant (and sorely needed) today.
Hi Liz,
Thank you for responding. I was glad to hear from you.
Rather than just react to your article I first took a look at your profile and past post titles. My first impressions registered as something that I had seen somewhat of before.
In my head I put you on the Inglehart-Welzel World Values Survey map, and figured that you'd like to pull the top-right quadrant down a bit and more to the left, and wanted to use the forms of religion if not a specific doctrine. [https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/images/Map2023NEW.png]
As I say, I have seen this discussed before (I'm not young, and have hung with a lot of humanists, both secular and sectarian.) I'm in agreement with some of the ends and recognise some of the expected benefits, if also skeptical about the means.
Where we agree: Morality can't be individual -- it has to be cultural (we could discuss why separately.) More community in our atomised society would hurt nobody, and would help in many areas.
Where we might disagree: You've also said that religion must be ethical but I suspect that you don't know what that means except as an aspiration, since almost no religions do. (I'd love you to prove me wrong there.)
Where we have already disagreed: I said in my comment that you'd be well served not to treat secularism as one undifferentiated blob. You didn't acknowledge or respond to that point, so I understand you think that it -is- one hedonistic, individualistic, quasi-nihilistic blob (it's not.)
Where you might be conflicted: Your end is largely humanistic, but you're academically invested in your own training and might be attached to it being the sole means to this end. To that extent, it serves you to conflate religion with collectivism (it isn't); and secularism with individualism (it's not.) That conflation gives your education and training instant moral weight, but I think you'll have a harder row to hoe than that.
Regardless, I'm not opposed to your venture, Liz. I'd like to see what comes of it and hope to read more. You'd already be aware that it's a narrow niche of potential readers. There'll be some ex-congregants who miss their congregations but not their faith, and a smattering of religious nones like myself who take an interest for various reasons, not all hostile.
My current and main interest is: how well do you know your own guard-rails? Based on the post I read and your response I think you were glad to tell me what you intended, but didn't seem so comfortable discussing framework and method.
So do you only want readers who agree with ends *and* means? If so, then how can that ever be ethical? If you want readers who agree with your ends then I'm potentially at least a casual reader, but then how will you be accountable for means?
Ruv, you sound like SO MANY Unitarian Universalists I've known and loved in my 25+ years of spending as many hours per week as I can spare in those contexts (mostly just as a Sociologist "participant observer" opting for that socialization processes context for my children as well as my extroverted human needs).
In addition to being a UU, I've been a practicing Stoic for over 30 years. I would LOVE a conversation like this in the comments on my new Substack "Intersectional Stoicism!" I have comments set to require paid subscription to proctect my mental bandwidth from needing to practice the Virtue of Moderation there ;) If you're not inclined to financially support a stranger in order to comment, drop me a DM and I'll gift you a subscription. Helping me develop my own thinking via being challenged like you're doing here is exactly the kind of gift I want to receive toward the work I feel an irresistable impulse to do in the world.
[Liz, apologies for the private communications appearing in your newsletter comments. I'll keep it brief.]
Ahmie, you're seeking to do a lot in your newsletter and I can see why it might interest you to talk to some readers of Liz's newsletter on topics not directly related to her posts.
But Liz is our host, her labour has made this space available for discussion on matters related to her choice of topics and it is not respectful that you promote your own interests here without her explicit consent. It cannot do other than disrupt the conversations that she seeks to have.
I think it's especially ironic that you have locked your own comments against casual disrespect while casually disrespecting another author in comments here.
Because of your own overlaps of interest, what you could consider doing instead is approaching Liz directly and offering to do guest-post cross collaborations.
Meanwhile, your insouciant lack of awareness and entitled lack of restraint suggests to me that you're not a stoic so much as left-wing American elite -- entitled, identitarian, virtue-performative and self-satisfied -- cherrypicking the language of stoicism without clearly understanding that the world the stoics lived in was actually far harder even for its privileged, than the world that you inhabit, even with your self-absorbed intersectional grievances.
I have read what you're doing. I respect the challenges that you face and what they can grow, and acknowledge that you sincerely intend to grow it. But I also think that you're presently too self-satisfied, privileged and entitled for any comment that I might offer to help.
From my perspective, the next work you have to do is your own, and it's not about you so much as how the rest of the world might be improved if you were not at its centre, blithely assuming that God put you there.
Spot on. Thank you for this piece.
I’ll add, I felt at first like Klein’s use of this meditation was a bit…condescending toward Coates, almost a “holier-than-thou” moment, but when he asked Coates how do we live, it struck me how much he simply doesn’t understand about the Black experience in America. Coates’s entire point rests on the idea that suffering will continue, and yet, we continue to live—and live within our values.
When Coates says, “love that,” in response to Klein’s reciting of the meditation, to me it was as if he was affirming, “yes, that’s what I’m saying.” Because it is what he’s saying.
For Klein to then entertain the prospect of shifting our lines in order to “win” shows even more clearly how he can recite the meditation, but isn’t embodying it. Klein seems to see staying the course of our convictions even in regressive political eras as “losing” whereas, Coates sees it as a form of integrity within activism and revolution.
Coates views fatalism as acceptance, not defeat. If he did, he wouldn’t keep writing. But he does.
Overall, my takeaway was that Coates understands and embodies the meditation in his outward life, whereas, Klein can only recite and deploy it for his own internal life.
Yes, this ALL resonates with me as well. Thanks for commenting so others can read your thoughts as well.
I remember when mindfulness meditation began being marketed to the corporate world as a way to get employees to de-stress, calm down, and, of course, optimize performance. Spiritual and moral underpinnings and responsibility to community and world were lost. Capitalism doesn't care. In general, any papering over the difficult, challenging truths about a society will ultimately fail, and we see that disastrous failure unfolding in the US right now under fascism. Until this nation faces up to the oppressive and violent aspects of its history--instead of trying to flee from that truth--it will never work fairly for all and we will never bear the responsibility that we have not only to one another but to the rest of the world.
Calming down really does help the market and status quo, right? I agree with all of this and explored these ideas in a follow up post that went live today about spiritual by-passing.
I'll check it out, Liz. Yes, from the corporate point of view, "calming down" improves functionality. They paid good money to get experts in there to help their employees. Not sure how well that worked, but maybe some people learned something genuine they could use--and might be using now, since so many of us are traumatized. From my view, spirituality and spiritual practice open us to deeper realization of the connection we already have with everything surrounding us and the responsibility that implies. We calm ourselves to be better able to be present, clear-minded witnesses and active participants, knowing we all make this world.
I mean those practices CAN do that….but I think when they are white-washed/medicalized/secularized and frankly made “easy” they have less ability to work in that careful way. I’m not about folks given up their spiritual practices….I just want them to work BETTER. ;-)
And it's not just meditation they've co-opted. This society can and will twist anything.
Yes there's a book called McMindfulness about this. Watered down Stoic philosophy is used in a similar way, particularly by entrepreneurial business guru types. Christianity & Judaism both have forms of meditation and contemplation that can be just as effective, and can be used by someone who doesn't necessarily believe in their God (especially with Judaism) but once again they need to be understood in the context of their traditions and history.
Yes, although I think the term McMindfulness pre-dates Purser's book (I'd have to dig up that reference).
In case you're interested in encountering distilled instead of watered down Stoic philosophy, I'd love to have your energies on my Intersectional Stoicism publication. Drop me a DM mentioning that you found me through Liz's post if you don't have the inclination or capacity to support me with a paid subscription to comment (I have comments paywalled to keep the Broicism trolls out), and I'll gift you a subscription so you can comment.
Fun little intersection between the two of us -- my nickname has been Squirrel since high school (which is also when I started practicing Stoicism as a way to survive an adolescence infused with chronic debilitating pain from undiagnosed, untreated joint subluxations - the hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome wasn't recognized until almost 20 years after symptoms first manifested with puberty onset so I spent my adolescent and emerging adult years getting medically gaslit pretty much any time I saught medical care... my Medical Sociology professors were also saviors of my sanity).
That sounds really intriguing, it's great to see more perspectives in philosophy & alternative spirituality that are outside of able-bodied, white/economic privileged etc assumptions. That was a concern of mine with Stoicism. I know several people who have EDS, it's very difficult to get diagnosed & for people to be understanding & empathetic. In fact, I've been out of touch with her for a long time, but I know someone who was working on a Religious Studies MA (maybe it was sociology of religion?) focused on the intersection of religion & disability. She's one of the first people I encountered who had that diagnosis.
Perhaps this is the nudge needed to reach out to the scholar with EDS? If you find anything she’s publishing online, I’d appreciate a DM with links. That intersection sounds like something I’d enjoy deep-diving into.
As for other publishing scholars with EDS, Dr. Tasha Eurich was diagnosed during the course of writing her most recent book, Shatterproof. I’ve been recommending that book at every opportunity since I read it in April. I really enjoyed her prior book, Insight. I’m still trying to figure out how to get my recommended publications to show up in a sidebar on my publication, I think I have hers in that list already.
James Doty, MD, wrote about this in his memoir, "Into The Magic Shop." Big time financiers on Wall Street have adopted meditation to become more callous and indifferent in their day-to-day.
LOVE your username & Substack publication name. I'm a disabled Sociologist practicing Stoic momming 5 sons with my ethnically Chinese husband. Always looking for other parents to chat with about philosophy.
This misunderstanding of mindfulness and meditative practices is one of my biggest pet peeves. Thank you for putting words to this.
A fellow mindfulness killjoy! We need a club.
Sign me up! 😄
This is so fascinating to me as someone who is a religious person (practising but imperfect Muslim) who finds that religion is often stripped for parts in our society. Thank you!
Mahalo for your insightful article!
I was raised as a Soto Zen Buddhist here in Hawaii, and I share your wariness of people removing Buddhist meditation from it's religious context. Or even misunderstands it, as it seems Ezra Klein has
If folks find secular meditation and 'mindfulness' to be helpful to them, that's cool. But too often I've met folks who pick and choose parts without understanding the whole. I don't demand that they convert or attend a Buddhist monastery. But part of me bristles at folks treating our religion like a costume, fad, or lifestyle to sold
Thankfully, the folks I've met IRL have had open hearts and minds. And I wish all folks well on their journey to find Enlightenment
I really appreciate this piece. I was at a retreat last fall and really struggled with the general sentiment that we were there to distance ourselves from the political and to focus on our own internal peace and equinimity at all times. As several participants rightly pushed back on, the notion of solely personal meditation as the response to genocide, or the loss of women's rights, was a hard pill to swallow. The framing seemed to be that our personal liberation (via a personal meditation practice) would implicitly lead to collective liberation, instead of grappling with the ways in which our personal liberation is inherently tied to the work of collective liberation.
Thanks for sharing your experience! I think you would like Awakening Together by Larry Yang.
Thank you! I've added it to my library list.
As an ordained clergy person with nearly 40 years of ministry, I think the same things written here about Buddhism also apply to a radically personalized Christianity.
I totally agree, and also....guess where this impulse to interiorize and personalize Buddhism came from? Protestant interpreters (and then Buddhist reactions to them)! But this personalized spirituality is a pattern I'm seeing everywhere....and one I'll be writing a lot more about in different contexts!
Great analysis, Liz. From the philosophical side, this is why I could never quite get into the Stoic revival of the last decade plus. It too often lacks a justice focused core that would keep it from being hollow retreat.
oh thank you can naming this! That revival always felt a bit smug...and this is why!
The stuff derived from Ryan Holiday definitely comes across as smug. Massimo Pigliucci and Donald Robertson a bit less so, but they're both very high-minded academic in their writing styles which can come across as elitist. William B. Irvine and Ward Farnsworth are my favorite traditionally published modern Stoics, and Grey Freeman's "Practical Stoicism" (which was released into the public domain as a PDF then narrated by Robin Homer of Vox Stoica) are worth engaging with in my opinion. I always send curious new people to Irvine's "A Guide to the Good Life: the Art of Stoic Joy" as the first recommended reading. Erick Cloward of the Stoic Coffee Break podcast (and now Stoicism 101) is also doing good work.
Please check out and give me feedback on what I'm trying to do in Intersectional Stoicism. I agree, the modern forms of Stoicism hyperfixate on self-control/moderation/temperance while trying to appear wise and completely ignoring the virtues of courage and justice. This is harmful to people existing in marginalized bodies. I also am taking care to remind people that the only ancient Stoic NOT born to privilege whose words we have to reflect on is also the only one who did not write those words down himself; it was handed down to us through the privileged lens of a student who may well have filtered out some of the emancipated slave's teachings when they discomforted him too much.
This is a great reminder about social location that gets at my uneasiness with the Stoic revival so well. It is less the "what" of Stoicism that bothers me than the "who" in the Stoic revival, and the "who" reveals so much about the powers it serves. As a white, cis, hetero, middle-aged male, I'm already inclined toward cool reflection at a distance because the world has been designed to allow me that space and encourage that stance for me. What I should be doing, thinking, and reading, are things that CHALLENGE that stance--e.g., theologies of liberation or critical race theory.
If I were to decide that postmodern life is too hectic and retreat into Stoicism, it would mark a failure to use my standing and privilege to improve the conditions that make that retreat easy for me and well nigh impossible for others.
To return to Liz's original reflections on Klein and Coates, when Klein admits that he doesn't know what his role or job is, the humility--though I'm sure it felt genuine to Klein--reads as grotesque. Sitting with a platform like that and not knowing how to use it to make people's lives better and having spent way too much time allowing them to get worse probably does require one to use meditation to overcome the doublethink.
Nevermind me over here platonically swooning a little about a self-identified white, cis, hetero, middle-aged male using the term “social location” unprompted ;)
Part of what I’m attempting to do with Intersectional Stoicism is make sure that people like you feel included as well. Stoicism was built for people like you, it needs a bit of refinement to include people like me.
For reference, I’m white but deeply multicultural due to having a lot of 20th century immigrants in my family of origin and being married to a childhood immigrant. Cis-ish meaning I’m fine with other people identifying me as female but I don’t really have a solid “gender identity” within my own mind beyond the considerable chunk of my life I’ve spent menstruating/gestating/birthing/lactating (and getting frequently gaslit about how derailing those activities are). Hetero-ish in that I’ve been in an exclusive couplehood relationship with my husband for nearly 30 years so my “queerness” really doesn’t matter (I’m attracted — platonically first, then sometimes romantically, to personalities, not bodies, and I’m demisexual to the point that sexual activities do not cross my mind if I’m not in an emotionally secure situation with my potential sexual activity partner; I’m functionally asexual when my psycho-emotional needs aren’t being met in a relationship but will swing to enthusiastically sexual when we’re in a good psycho-emotional rhythm… this may well be the most “feminine” aspect of my way of being, from conversations I’ve had with other women). I am also middle-aged (turning 49 in December) so most of the distractibility of youthful identity development is behind me — though by that definition I was mentally middle-aged in my teen years in many aspects… chronic pain gets the credit for that developmental milestone getting reached early, it was very effective at filtering out “not worth the energy” nonsense.
Total tangent, but Substack is weird about the formatting it allows when replying from the notifications compared to in the webpage of the original article. It wasn’t letting me do the double-dash-for-emdash keyboard shortcut in the threaded comments but it’s letting me here, and I think that I couldn’t do other text formatting in there, either. Hmmm.
Anyway, I’d really enjoy ongoing conversation around this where it doesn’t tangent the OP. I have a couple draft versions of articles in the queue for Intersectional Stoicism that I haven’t had the attention-focus time to edit before posting (my teacher-husband and our kids had Friday off school, and I was a little unwell in the middle of last week, so I got behind). Replying to comments is taking my attention away from that task, and I also need to rethink/maybe tweak settings on my publication so I can allow for comments that develop thoughts like this without risking getting inundated by defensive overpampered Broic trolls who are triggered by the idea that what works for them doesn’t generalize broadly. That’s why the comments are paywalled — they can have their opinions, but they can’t express them in my creative sharing space without paying for my time to moderate them instead of allowing them to further dysregulate the people who are coming to my work for support in their healthy development. Drop me a DM if you subscribe for free and I’ll see if I can figure out how to gift you a subscription so you can comment. That’s the work-around I’ve come up with so far.