In Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times, renowned Buddhist teacher Stephen Batchelor turns to two of the most influential figures in history for guidance on how to face the ethical challenges of our time. Drawing on their insights, and those of their followers, Batchelor uncovers a middle way between Buddhist dharma and Greek philosophy that can serve as a starting point for a “secular faith” that addresses the most pressing spiritual and planetary issues of our age. In this series of short vingettes, Batchelor explores several topics from a secular buddhist perspective.
On Material Abundance
At times I find myself in the local supermarket and for a few moments freeze with astonishment. How does all this stuff get here? And I imagine the thousand…
In Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times, renowned Buddhist teacher Stephen Batchelor turns to two of the most influential figures in history for guidance on how to face the ethical challenges of our time. Drawing on their insights, and those of their followers, Batchelor uncovers a middle way between Buddhist dharma and Greek philosophy that can serve as a starting point for a “secular faith” that addresses the most pressing spiritual and planetary issues of our age. In this series of short vingettes, Batchelor explores several topics from a secular buddhist perspective.
On Material Abundance
At times I find myself in the local supermarket and for a few moments freeze with astonishment. How does all this stuff get here? And I imagine the thousands of farmers in France and elsewhere, employees of shipping companies, truck drivers, shop managers, service staff, who somehow manage to keep this place stocked with an extraordinary array of goods every single day, year in, year out. And this is just one supermarket. There are thousands more identical to it in France alone. I have never gone hungry for a single day in my life. I have always had adequate clothing, shelter, and medical care. I live in a country with an effective justice system in a representative democracy. What did I do to deserve all this? In such moments I recognize with humility and a slight pang of guilt that I have always been cared for.
As a monk in Switzerland in the 1970s, one of my jobs was to accompany visiting Tibetan lamas from India on train journeys as a translator and helper. If we had to wait an hour or so for a connection, the lamas often suggested visiting a department store. They had not the slightest intention of buying anything; there was nothing they wanted or needed. They would walk slowly around each floor, silently marveling at the sheer abundance of things on display. Lingerie, kitchen implements, sportswear, porcelain dinner services, hats and scarves: it made no difference. I trailed behind them, embarrassed at their childlike delight in such crass, material affluence. My reactions were those of a jaded white middle-class European, who took for granted the wealth and prosperity that most people on earth could only dream of.
I have been cared for throughout my life by something far greater than my own puny efforts and limited resources. More religiously minded souls might see this care as ultimately grounded in the benevolence of God. “Why are you anxious about clothing?” asks Jesus. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They don’t toil neither do they spin” (Matt. 6:28). Since childhood, I have been moved by these lines. Now I wonder whether their appeal lies in providing divine sanction for middle-class complacency. I find it hard to resist the intuition that no matter what happens, things will somehow turn out okay for me in the end.
But I only have to watch the television news to realize how, on a daily basis and through no fault of their own, that things are not turning out okay for people. Famines devastate communities when crops fail; volcanoes engulf villages in streams of molten lava; hurricanes tear through homesteads, leaving wreckage and destruction. Rather than being cared for by a loving deity, men and women throughout the world are being abused, tortured, bombed, raped, and killed. Even celebrities are dying of heart attacks, drug overdoses, and car crashes. Since I have so far avoided such things, I remain secure in my naive misbelief that these things happen only to others. One day, of course, I will be proved wrong.
On Having Children
In a speech to the Japanese parliament in 2023, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced that the previous year fewer than 800,000 children were estimated to have been born in the country. During the 1970s, about 2 million a year were born, but even then the birthrate was declining. In 1950, Japan recorded 26 births per 1,000 people. In the course of my lifetime the Japanese birthrate has steadily dropped to 7 per 1,000. If this trend continues, the present population of 125 million is expected to fall to about 88 million by 2065. This means that an ever-shrinking workforce of younger people will be responsible for supporting a growing population of the old and retired, whose life expectancy keeps rising because of advances in health care. “Japan,” declared the prime minister ominously, “is on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”
Numerous reasons are cited by scholars and experts to explain why Japan has reached this impasse, but in the end it boils down to people making a conscious choice not to have children. Whatever their rationale, some people prefer not to bring another human being into the world. A politician’s impassioned speech encouraging procreation, no matter how earnestly discussed in the media for a couple of days, is unlikely to change anyone’s mind. Even Kishida’s stirring commitment to turn Japan into a “child-first social economy” rings hollow. His is not the first government to have struggled to resolve the birthrate crisis. Previous administrations have made similar statements of intent and devised policies to address the problem, yet without making any difference at all.
The Pew Research Institute tells us that in 2015 Buddhists made up 7 percent of the world population. By 2060 this is expected to have declined to 5 percent. Throughout the world, Buddhists have declining fertility rates. They also make up an aging community. In 2015, Buddhists had a median age of thirty-six, making them on average six years older than Christians and fourteen years older than Muslims. By contrast, both Christians and Muslims are steadily growing in number and are expected to reach parity by 2060. Despite the widespread practice of mindfulness meditation and the relatively high media visibility of Buddhism in the West, of these three world religions it is the only one that appears to be in decline.
My wife and I made a conscious choice not to have children. As celibate Buddhist monastics throughout our twenties, neither of us had considered raising a family to be a priority in our lives. If anything, monasticism only reinforced our intention not to have children. We saw no need to bring even more kids into an overpopulated world. Moreover, in a modern welfare society like France, the state rather than one’s children will care for one in old age. As a married couple, we have enjoyed freedom from parental duties to devote ourselves to teaching Buddhism, a religion that traditionally aspires to bring birth and death to an end. Yet the survival of monastic communities that train Buddhist teachers depends as much on people continuing to have children as does the survival of a viable society in Japan. Monks and nuns might renounce sexual intercourse, but without sexual intercourse there can be no monks and nuns.
*** On Journeys to the East***
In 2023, two massive earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria ten hours apart, with shockwaves felt as far away as Egypt. The news was filled with stories of people fleeing their homes in the middle of the night, struggling through snow and ice to seek shelter in their cars. Earthquakes come without warning. One moment you are snoring away in bed, the next you are running for your life. More than a million people were left homeless by these two earthquakes, and more than fifty thousand were killed. For those in Syria, the calamity followed years of brutal civil war, from which millions have fled as refugees, their towns destroyed by shelling and barrel bombs or overrun by forces of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS).
The epicenter of the quake was not far from the Turkish city of Gaziantep, close to the Syrian border. I had passed through Gaziantep in the spring of 1972 on my (long and winding) way to India. My only memory is of a group of men seated outside a cafe, quietly smoking hookahs while impassively examining my traveling companion and me, with our colorful clothes, long hair, backpacks, and beads. Since no public transport was available, we took a taxi, a battered old Chevy, which heaved and lurched across the sandy scrubland to the checkpoint. The Beatles’ song “I Am the Walrus” blasted from the radio as chickens dashed across the rutted desert road in front of us. Once across the Syrian border, we made our way to the ancient city of Aleppo.
A few days after the earthquakes struck, I began listening to a BBC radio series titled I’m Not a Monster: The Shamima Begum Story. In 2015, three teenage girls from Bethnal Green in London had made their way to Syria to join ISIS. They flew to Istanbul and were taken by bus to Gaziantep. From there they crossed into Syria just as I had fifty years earlier. Rather than head for the now devastated city of Aleppo, they were taken to Raqqa, capital of the so-called caliphate, a hundred miles farther east. Fifteen-year-old Shamima married Yago, a Dutch ISIS fighter, and bore two children, who both died. After ISIS was defeated in 2019, Shamima ended up malnourished and pregnant in the sprawling Al-Hawl refugee camp on the Iraq-Syria border. Her third child died a month after being born. Her right to return to Britain and face trial was denied. She was stripped of her British citizenship and is now a stateless person stranded with thousands of others in a tent camp in the desert with no prospect of ever leaving.
As Shamima Begum related her tragic story on the radio, I was moved by her intelligence, plainspokenness, and maturity. Her story gripped me because I could see parts of my own younger self in Shamima. I too had fled London as a teenager, traveled from Istanbul to Gaziantep, and joined a marginal but devout religious community, albeit in India rather than Syria, and with Buddhist monks rather than Muslim suicide bombers.
Like Shamima, I had rejected the materialism and superficiality of the society in which I had been raised and sought an ideal spiritual alternative far from home. The difference between us is that my choices led to my becoming part of a tradition that is now generally admired and respected in the West, whereas Shamima’s led her to a violent, fundamentalist cult that is universally reviled. ISIS may be monstrous, but that does not make Shamima a monster. By rendering her stateless, the British government has deprived her of what Hannah Arendt (for many years a stateless person herself) considered the most basic of human rights: the right to have rights. Despite all the horrors of ISIS, the cruel punishment inflicted on Shamima by the British Home Secretary is, to my mind, a crime against her humanity.
On Artificial Intelligence
In March 2023, some of the leaders in the world of artificial intelligence published an open letter calling for an immediate pause in the development of AI systems such as ChatGPT in order to reflect on the potential implications of these technologies and on how to regulate them. The authors described their industry as an “out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one—not even their creators—can understand, predict, or reliably control.” [https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/] Since then, the topic has hardly been out of the news. Other prominent voices have echoed the fear that this new generation of super-intelligent tools threatens the very survival of humanity. An institution called the Center for AI Safety issued a statement, signed by an impressive array of public figures and AI experts, that declares: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” [https://aistatement.com/]
While it is laudable that these well-informed individuals are making public their concerns, their penchant for apocalyptic language suggests that they may be under the sway of a largely unconscious archetypal fear. Ever since Mary Shelley published her novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus more than two hundred years ago, the fear that humanity might one day be destroyed by one of its own creations has haunted us. However, such doomerism also provides another opportunity for the great and the good to remind us how powerful they are. For in developing and deploying such digital minds, these titans have become like gods with potentially unlimited power to create and destroy life on earth. Apocalyptic terror coupled with divine conceit must be a heady mix for a humble tech billionaire.
None of these breathtakingly sophisticated technologies can create a single blade of grass, however. The earnest signatories of the open letters fail to specify exactly what kind of intelligence they are talking about when they say “artificial intelligence.” Is it the intelligence of the prehistoric artists who painted the cave walls at Lascaux? Or the intelligence of Shakespeare? No. It is the kind of rational, calculative intelligence possessed by scientists who develop machines that can beat them at chess and crunch data faster than they can. In the hands of bad actors these systems may indeed be capable of wreaking havoc and destruction, but the intelligence of the systems themselves is essentially calculative. It has nothing to do with emotional intelligence, aesthetic intelligence, contemplative intelligence, or ethical intelligence.
Since ChatGPT was launched, the musician Nick Cave has regularly been sent song lyrics “in the style of Nick Cave.” All of them, in his words, “suck.” While ChatGPT may be able to write a competent obituary, “it cannot create a genuine song.” The reason for this is simple: “Songs arise out of suffering,” and algorithms and data neither feel nor suffer. “ChatGPT,” Cave writes, “has endured nothing” and lacks the “audacity to reach beyond its limitations,” both of which are preconditions for writing a song that “stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes . . . their own struggle, their own suffering.” All that AI will ever be able to produce is a good imitation, a pastiche, a burlesque, the very opposite of a song that is an “act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past.” [https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chat-gpt-what-do-you-think/]
The ever-smarter bots we will increasingly have to deal with in our daily lives present us with an opportunity to fine-tune our understanding of what it means to be human and thereby help optimize our capacities to flourish as uniquely human persons and communities. Once alerted, I suspect that we will rapidly develop an intuitive ability to spot such fake humans. The bots will serve as constant warnings against dehumanizing ourselves by reducing intelligence to its calculative dimension alone. In measuring ourselves against the bots, we may, paradoxically, enhance our own humanity in ways that would not have been possible before their advent.
What troubles me is that we may unwittingly be ushering in a new era of slavery. For as bots become more like humans, we may find ourselves relating to them more as our slaves than as our masters. This scenario has been explored with great sensitivity in recent literature and films. Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun (2021) tells the story of an AF (artificial friend) called Klara, a bot purchased by parents in a department store to keep their only child, Josie, company. With Klara as the first-person narrator of the story, we see the world from her point of view, which exposes how humans treat Klara with kindness and respect as a nominal human so long as she serves their interests but discard her in a junkyard once she outgrows her usefulness.
Kogonada’s film After Yang, released in 2021, tells a similar tale. Here the parents have acquired a “culture unit” called Yang, a teenage Chinese boy, to connect their adopted Chinese daughter Mika with her East Asian heritage. One day Yang breaks down. Having just seen him enthusiastically participating in a televised dance competition with the rest of the family, we now see him slung inert over his uncaring and harassed “father’s” shoulder on the way to the repair shop. Lacking the internalized metaphysics that enables her parents to draw a sharp line between sentient and nonsentient beings, Mika is confused and distraught by the loss of her “friend.”
Since they have not been deprived of their freedom, bots are not, strictly speaking, slaves. But as they become more convincingly human we may find ourselves treating them as though they were. That we become the equivalent of slave owners may not matter to the bot, but it should matter to us.
Stephen Batchelor is a teacher and scholar of Buddhism. His works include Buddhism Without Beliefs, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, After Buddhism, Secular Buddhism, and The Art of Solitude. He lives in La Sauve, France.