The Death of Ideals

THE BUDDHA, FAMOUSLY, told his monks: “Cetanaa’ham bhikkhave kammam vadaami.” “Monks: intention, I say, is karma.” What is meant by ‘kamma’ (or karma) is more complex: a theory amenable to modifications, a law of the physical universe or a particular way of thinking that solves some problems and no more. What is more important to recognise is that the Buddha’s view was a radical break from the earlier Vedic and Upanisadic literature, where karma was linked to actions performed or merits earned, and not necessarily the intentionality informing actions themselves. For all means and purposes, karma, like certain modeling assumptions in macroeconomics, had become the staple of Buddhist, Jain or Vedic religions. It was during one of those days, that a wanderer named Moliyasivaka called upon the Buddha, who was then living in the Bamboo Grove in the city of Rajagriha. He asked the Buddha to confirm if it was true, as other monks had told Moliyasivaka that, ‘whatever a person experiences, whether it be pleasant or painful or neutral feelings, all that is caused by what was done in the past’. In other words, he wanted the Buddha to confirm that ‘karma’ causally influenced and affected all that we experience.

This is the kind of question that the Buddha ought to have hit out of the park, by confirming the doctrine of karma and reasserting its immutable hold on all life. But the Buddha did something else. He advised the wandering ascetic that some experiences or feelings in the body arise from disorders of bile, some from disorders of phlegm, some others from disorders of humoural winds inside a body, some from disorders born from changes in climate, some from careless behaviour, some from assaults. Hearing this, Moliyasivaka summarised the Buddha’s words and then told himself that karma then was merely one-eighth of the factors that can produce illness and discomfort. By some scholarly accounts, this dialogue is among the earliest explication of causes and diseases in Indian history—an eightfold division of factors that cause bodily harm which was subsequently internalised by more classical treatises of Ayurveda. What is often lost when reading this little excerpt that comes down to us in the Samyutta Nikaya (The Connected Discourses) is that in the face of bodily harm and disease, even the Buddha put aside his usual models of what made the world go around according to him—namely, karma—and instead adopted a different way of conceptualising human frailty.

Setting aside our favourite way of thinking about the world—a mental model, if you will, that maximally confirms or addresses the empirical experiences we call reality—is difficult. Rarely has this been seen more vividly, with extraordinary consequences, than during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, as we see revelations and evidence pour in that major governmental bureaucracies and financial markets were entirely blindsided because such an eventuality was never paid enough attention in their calculus. Cognitive blindness was then preceded by policy paralysis—as if the world had suddenly revealed, like some alternative reality in a Haruki Murakami novel, two moons dangling on the horizon. This simply was not supposed to happen. Countries don’t shut down; large financial firms with billions of dollars in assets aren’t supposed to be scrambling to meet margin calls on their leveraged portfolios. The irony, of course, is none of this is all too unexpected. At least since early 2000s, the Center for Disease Control has been warning about flu-like pandemics; in the late 2000s, researchers at the University of Hong Kong warned about a ‘ticking time bomb’ because of Chinese wet markets, presence of SARS-CoV-2 virus among bats in the Wuhan area and the rise of international travel. Some others, like the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, have written about the increasing presence of ‘white swans’—transmission of predictable shocks with outsize consequences—due to the changing nature of our social arrangements where interconnectivity bears gifts, but also viruses.

Despite these assorted warnings and signals, much of our intellectual discourse continued to rely on models where previous iterations of reality are often deemed as the best predictors of what was to come. It is as if a creed of eternal growth and optimism about the future were the bedrock assumptions upon which this worldview was built. From the mainstreaming of laissez-faire economics to the evangelical zeal to bring Democracy to foreign states—the presumption that nature, climate and pathogenic fellow travellers would play along was a convenient and useful fiction. The rise of world-altering technologies like the internet, the human genome projects and the decisive victories of free-trade economics only burnished the sense that the future is golden, if we engineer it right.

Interestingly, this moment we are now living through resonates the intellectual climates of 18th century Europe. As important theoretical discoveries by Newton, Galileo, Huygens and Snell began to roll in alongside inventions like Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes and powerful telescopes, savants like Leibniz and poets like Alexander Pope began to recast traditional theologies about the Biblical God’s perfection discernible by reason and science. Even the distress and chaos following the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius in 1714 was for Leibniz an opportunity to extol it as a window to study nature more. The emerging fields of new sciences were merely means to directly discover the underlying rationality and order that was assumed to be the omnipresent characteristic of God’s creation. This view, of a munificent god being slowly uncovered by science and reason, became the standard model for European intellectuals. Even the word ‘optimism’ arrived into the world in February 1737, in the Memoires de Trévoux, an influential journal on science. In 1753, the Berlin Academy insisted that entrants to one of its popular public competitions answer with an essay on the topic of ‘All Is Best’. The entries were expected to burnish their answers with the ‘system of optimism’ that was widely known. But this emergent wave of progress, optimism and discovery found itself undermined dramatically by an ‘act of God’!

Like the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, the 1755 earthquake of Lisbon struck and destroyed almost the entirety of that most Christian of cities, full of cathedrals and solemn devotees, killing anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 people. Add to it riots and mass deprivation that arose in a short order that shook the intellectual worldviews of European intellectuals. The emptiness of that rhetoric of optimism was there for all to see. They realised that all the clever preening about a compassionate god and ennobling scientific discoveries didn’t change the fundamental fact that there is great suffering in this world. The rabble-rousing but influential French philosopher, Voltaire, caricatured Leibniz devastatingly as Dr Pangloss, the ‘greatest philosopher of the Holy Roman Empire’ in his satire, Candide ou l’Optimisme—for his seemingly intractable faith in the perfectibility of human history. Within three decades, before the 18th century ended, the old world order of Leibniz and Voltaire had been entirely decimated following the French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon that burnt European countryside and cities alike. The biggest casualty was however the models of the world that men like Leibniz and the British poet Alexander Pope held as true representations of the world.

We too similarly now face a world where crises of unknown size and uncertain consequences sweep the world, potentially washing away with them all the cows that we were told are sacred: balanced budgets, small governments, economic forecasting, privacy of individuals, technical transnational bureaucracies like the World Health Organization, open border advocates. The political-economy models of the world, which came of age with the Reagan-Thatcher revolution in the early 1980s, are now in their middle ages; their intellectual arteries are clogged with interest-group politics; their body politic is no longer as nimble as their ideological rivals on the extremes of the left and the right; and their abilities to arouse the masses are non-existent. To this end, there is a certain irony that among the various fatalities of the coronavirus pandemic will be this model of the world which advocated free trade, free markets and free movement of capital in the name of human welfare. What set of models of political economy will come to dominate our collective consciousness in its stead, after this pandemic, is anybody’s guess. But if those new set of ideas insist on storming the Bastille and sharpening the guillotines, we ought to be not surprised.

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