Oblomovka

I’m very disloyal. As soon as I start attaching my flag to some particular standard, I start trying to fault it. My hope would be that libertarianism is full of equally disloyal types, but actually there’s quite a lot of dedication to the cause.

And yet, a couple of weeks in, I do keep on having blasphemous thoughts. That’s not to say that I don’t enter any belief-space with as much gumption as I can muster. I try to approach any new idea with a respectful degree of naive enthusiasm.

I’ve been reading The Probability Broach, which is about as gung-ho a depiction of anarchocapitalism as you could imagine. It’s a fun read, very much of it’s time: full of Heinleinian gee-whiz dialog and Eighties fandom wish fulfillment. The alternate universe anarcho-capitalist America is full of people wearing SCA outfits and curing injuries with nutritional supplements.

But that’s by-the-by: what I want from reading political utopias (or dystopias) is to feel when the rings of falsehood peel out. It lets me suss out what my own beliefs about the invariants of the world are. I can buy a world where everyone wears funny kilts and monkeys can talk; but if one of the tenets of your story is that having everybody armed to the teeth makes for a polite and civil society, I’m going to have to be taken by the hand and talked-very-slowly-to until I get it. Or left for a very long time until I invent some crazy reasoning myself.

I don’t know whether this is a good procedure for a belief system or not. One always puts oneself through the Godwin time-vortex into Nazi Germany. What would you think of a German that sat in the back of Nazi party lesson going, “Okay, the uniforms I admit are kind of cool. But run me through how the Jews ruined everything one more time?”. I’m not exactly Schindler, am I? Or to spin it the other way: I’m in 17th Century Britain, and someone is telling me that universal suffrage is a good idea. Should I dump the whole crazy idealistic movement, just because I can’t seriously imagine near-universal literacy?

I don’t think opting out of idealism is a solution either. I see every political position overtly adopted as an act of idealism, because most of the time, we don’t act consistently with even our most pragmatic political stances. We don’t act with any conscious consideration at all. We talk of sharing, and save the best chocolates. We talk of communal standards, and litter when no-one is looking. We rail against the awful sweatshop standards of Nike, and then buy illegal drugs purchased through a network of intimidation and poverty.We’re irrational beasts in everyday life. Every statement of coherent political attachment is an act of hope that we’ll somehow lower our hypocrisy ratio by coming clean about what we want to believe; a battle against our own innate disloyalty to any simple set of rules.

Having said all that, I haven’t really mustered what my problems with libertarianism are yet. So, instead, here as your Sunday text, is a transcript of a playful discussion of the problem by Robert Anton Wilson:

Namu Amida Butsu

My favourite religion is actually Shinran Buddhism. I was married in a
Shinran Buddhist church thirty-five years ago. The great thing about Shinran
is that it’s an off-shoot of Amida Buddhism. Amida was the Buddha who refused
to enter Nirvana until all sentient beings could enter Nirvana with him. He
reincarnates perpetually to bring everybody to supreme enlightenment. A lot of
the teachings of Amida Buddhism is if you call on Amida Buddha once with true
faith, that’ll be enough. Even if you screw up this life entirely, in your next
life you’ll do better and in the life after that you’ll do better until
eventually you do achieve total detachment and nirvana. All you’ve got to do is
say, in Japanese, “namu amida butsu”: “In the name of Amida Buddha”. If you say
it with true faith, you will eventually be saved.

And in the 12th Century a monk named Shinran meditated on this until his heart
broke. He thought that this was just not fair to those people who can’t muster
a true faith. There are some people who are always asking questions, never
satisfied, always asking the next question, always a little bit sceptical. I’m
one of them. We just can’t manage true faith; we’re always wondering — maybe
there’s an alternative, maybes there’s another way of looking at it.

Amida, the Buddha of boundless compassion – can he possibly leave us out of it
if he intends to bring all beings to perfect bliss and enlightenment? Shinran
decided that was impossible. So shinran Buddhism is based on the teaching that
if you say “namu amida butsu” once, whether you have faith or not, it’s enough.
You’ll be saved eventually.

I think that is the most merciful, the most commonsensical, the most generous,
the most noble religion ever invented — or at least it seems that way to those
of us who are incapable of true faith in the traditional sense.

I have said “namu amida butsu” with some degree of faith, and a great deal of
scepticism on numerous occasions. I’ve never managed total faith, but I like to
say it, because Shin Ran says whether I believe it or not, it will work.

So I’d like to leave everybody with those words: “namu amida buttsu”. Say them
once, and whether you believe it or not, it will work, and all your problems
will be solved. It may take a thousand incarnations, but eventually you’ll get
there. And, hey, we’ve got lots of time!
— Robert Anton Wilson

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 at 11:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS/Atom feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.