Yes, well, for the centenary celebration of this paper, please allow me to say...
(1) when I wrote it, I was aware that I was supplying something that had been lacking in the already available ("respectable") literature.
In this one aspect, it may be compared to my (much later) book, Future of an Illusion. The latter was directly and openly saying (i) what the respectable vegan literature left unsaid and (ii) what my own YouTube channel had (up to that point) left unsaid. And of course it was shocking and horrifying for "the vegan establishment" to behold.
Unlike Future of an Illusion in its milieu, and unlike The Opposite of Buddhism, an essay that similarly supplied something left unsaid by all the university textbooks, this one paper that has had some success, "Canon" and "Reason", was not shocking and horrifying for the PhD-wielding audience to behold. What I had to say about meditation, European imperialism in Theravada Asia, and many other things was (and still is) shocking and horrifying to these people —in much the same way that Future of an Illusion is shocking and horrifying for most of the people to whom it pertains.
Everyone wants to be a Golden Axe person until there's an actual axe in the room, and blood on the floor: they're willing to play at being an intellectual only when the stakes are low —when the rules make everyone feel safe. Discovering that everything you've been taught about meditation is a lie, for example, makes everyone feel unsafe. I tell you the French would not publish my work (on Buddhism) because it was insulting to the memory of the French Empire in Laos and Cambodia, and the British couldn't deal with the insult to the memory of their "great men" like Rhys-Davids. Blood on the axe, blood on the floor. What now, what next.
Meditation is one of innumerable examples I could offer from my own "oeuvre" —an oeuvre we now must describe in two categories, extant and non-extant, as my YouTube channel was censored and disappeared from public view. Even the storybooks I wrote for children are currently non-extant. My point here, not to digress too much, is merely that I've dealt with innumerable "bloodshed" issues like this, in many provinces of history, politics, philosophy, etc., and some of those conflicts have now disappeared from the record.
Communism is not a religion, and yet the Communists make themselves despicable in the same way that religious people do: thinking that their purity (and intellectual superiority) arises from ignorance. Pointed, intentional, self-selected ignorance. They pretend that anything challenging their ignorance is baffling to them: this is worse than regarding something sinful as merely forbidden, it is the pretense that the particular sin is incomprehensible and so, while known, remains unknown.
The old religions knew sin and openly understood what was forbidden as desirable: the new religions of our times pretend that sin does not exist, and that the forbidden things they're opposed to cannot even be thought through hypothetically by the believer. Like hot ice or a squared circle, the Communist regards theories and facts incompatible with his or her own philosophy as nonsensical, never tempting. They paint the real world in unthinkability, to then live within a narrow category of familiar things that seem real —and yet are unreal to everyone who does not make the effort to imagine them. The religious mentality has expanded, in our times, as religious institutions and obligations have withered away.
It is intellectual intransigence rather than religious belief that I am satirizing here: the refusal to learn, the refusal to discard old beliefs, the refusal to change, because of the delusion that one's own virtue is demonstrated by defending the presuppositions adopted in the past —even if these presuppositions serve no purpose whatsoever. The Pali canon says the Buddha was black: deal with it. The Pali canon says that bad people go to hell after they die: deal with it. I cannot express to you how childish and insane the responses of scholars with PhDs have been to even such simple points as this. But look now at how childish vegans are when dealing with similarly elementary and obvious "problems" —by which I mean problems that are only problems because the believers have a fixed notion of their own spiritual purity that makes them unwilling to deal with mere facts.
Some sins are less disgusting to me because they reach out for things human nature may inevitably yearn for, even when they are difficult or impossible to grasp, but this defect of character (this state of self-selected, self-re-enforcing delusion) I cannot sympathize with at all. It is contrary to human nature, and offers the believers something so easily grasped. They nevertheless take pride in it as if it were accomplished against all odds: they're like the conspiracy theorists who refuse to use soap and toothpaste, boasting of precisely the intransigence they should be ashamed of.
Unnatural Vegan ("Swayze") couldn't simply admit she was wrong about the side effects of taking antidepressants during pregnancy —as if the admission were worse than the thing itself —even after the evidence had become undeniable to her (and she saw the effects with her newborn baby in her arms, etc.).
On a physical and emotional level, what could be more horrifying than admitting to yourself (as a "science educator" preaching skepticism) that you've inflicted brain damage on your own baby because of your dogmatic attitude toward science, even after Eisel Mazard had pointed out the problem to you, with innumerable peer reviewed sources to back him up? My horror is this: the example isn't extreme, and isn't exceptional. The vast majority of people alive and speaking English in this century seem to have the same attitude toward everything, all the time, in even the most "dry" of academic controversies: they would rather believe that they never were wrong than admit it, learn, give credit where it's due, and move on.
And, of course, in areas as esoteric as Buddhist philosophy and vegan politics many such stumbling experiences are inevitable. Dogmatism in automobile repair may be another thing entirely. Changing one transmission may be very much like another, without any crucial role for skepticism at each stage of the operation.
Yesterday, Melissa showed me a sickening video from an ex-vegan who is still disputing whether or not insects are sentient, and whether or not we are willing to believe the evidence that they feel pain. "Skepticism" indeed. There is equal "skepticism" about the scientific evidence that recreational drugs (including marijuana and alcohol) cause brain damage amongst the very same people addicted to these recreational drugs. The meaning of skepticism in our times is merely a commitment to justify a life of self-destruction and self-indulgence with an ersatz faith —as the Catholics of the dark ages had warned it would be so many centuries ago. We have lost our faith in asceticism only. We have lost our faith in sacrifice, not yet pleasure, happiness, utility.
(2) This particular lecture ("Canon" and "Reason") was intended for an audience in Cambodia that did not even have a high school education.
So, yes, you can see "the secret of its success" in appealing to people with PhDs, when you combine point (1) and point (2).
The Opposite of Buddhism was written in the same era with the same purpose, but it is utterly horrifying to the same people. It forces them to see things they would prefer remain unseen.
I am not willing to write for an audience of idiots: I genuinely sympathized with people I met in Cambodia and Laos who had been denied "access to education" as a consequence of Cold War Communism and who were —at that time— struggling with a sudden abundance of "raw" information available on the internet and (then, still) on CD ROM. I genuinely wanted to help these people who had made a sudden transition from the world as it was explained to them by their grandparents (in their first language) to the world as described by starkly biased European "experts" in English and in French.
I did not understand human stupidity until Season Three because I did not study it.
I didn't read books for idiots, and I didn't read books by idiots, and I didn't read books about idiots. This entailed a great weakness of mine throughout Season One and Season Two.
The problem is, of course, what I write (and record, etc.) can only be appreciated (effortlessly) by a small number of brilliant people —or else with great effort by people of average intelligence. And given that I am not promising my readers nirvana, why should anyone of average intelligence make the effort? I do not mean this sarcastically: I understand that the vast majority of people have no motivation to make the level of effort required to understand my books, articles and audio/video recordings —whereas other authors may be promising the cure for your health problems, a more beautiful body, transcendental salvation, an economic basis for utopia, or at least a life of smug superiority resulting from the delusion that you've discovered these "things". The authors I compete with incentivize the reader with intangible outcomes that would be tragic if they were tangible, as the communion wafer would be horrifying if it were actually transformed into the body of Christ while you chewed it up in your mouth, and licked the blood from your teeth afterward. Idealism is the enjoyment of the intangible as tangible; nihilism is the understanding of distinction between the two.
The text that a brilliant person may find delightful in the blink of an eye entails hours of hard work for an imbecile to understand. This is a problem of both style and substance for the even the shallowest of writing.
You can produce a shallow text that requires a brilliant reader. Even my satirical rap lyrics demonstrate the problem —and that is not a boast, it's an admission of failure. Even the lyrics I wrote for Melissa to sing in Antinatalist Woman, that I saw again yesterday. It's all Nagarjuna, it's all Lao Zi: dense and cryptic and recondite for those who aren't intelligent enough to fill in the blanks "in the blink of an eye". Nagarjuna wasn't writing riddles: he thought he was writing simply and clearly. So did I.
The decline of our intellectual standards, in the English speaking world, is demonstrated more by the history of comedy than the history of "required readings" in universities. People are more sophisticated than whatever they laugh at; they're less sophisticated than whatever they worship —and are far less sophisticated than what they're compelled to read (or are compelled to believe) and find themselves unwilling to rebel against.
Voltaire wrote comedy. Machiavelli wrote comedy. Plato wrote comedy. Perhaps in future nobody will believe that the comedian had been one and the same person as the serious intellectual in any of these three cases —in parallel to the refusal to believe that Seneca was one and the same author in all of his works (his tragedies, etc.).
I really did make an effort to produce comedy that was comprehensible to idiots: in this I failed. I never could be stupid enough.
And I never could be stupid enough to be a scholar of Buddhism. Looking back at "Canon" and "Reason", that is the moral of the story: as with success on YouTube, Twitch and TikTok, we all must appreciate that the stars are successful because of —not in spite of— their stupidity.
Stupidity is the necessary bridge between artist and audience: ignorance and evil bind people together in ways that wisdom and good intentions never can. Stupidity is a shared identity; intelligence is isolated and isolating —and people in the middle are often aware of this, and discuss the temptations of stupidity in choosing between the two.
Some have no choice. The internet has made it impossible to ignore the extent to which the desire for learning is only the desire for the audience to be told that there is nothing more for them to learn: that they are already members of some ineffable elite —even if that is just because they refuse to use soap and toothpaste.
I never would have written these essays without the delusion that they could help people. I never would have lectured Unnatural Vegan about brain damage if I didn't believe that I was helping her, and helping some unspecified number of others in the audience.
I cannot be a scholar of any kind in the absence of this optimism that other people are willing to learn and change, i.e., precisely as Unnatural Vegan was not.
By nature, I was always delighted to discover that I had been wrong, to learn something from having the error pointed out to me, to then give credit where it's due, and move on. The joy of learning, for me, was greater than the sorrow of discovering that I had been a fool —and I laughed at my prior ignorance more often than I was saddened by it, in retrospect. I thought this was psychologically normal: I was wrong.
The whole enterprise of season two (and my earlier career as a scholar of Buddhism) is thus destroyed by the intransigence I've been trying to describe to you (half satirically, half seriously) in this essay about an essay. Absolutely nobody could ever have been helped by my research and published work about Buddhism: it is teaching wood carving to trees, my philosophy.
I used to say that I was in the position of an Elvis impersonator living in a cultural context where incredibly few people knew who Elvis was, and so very few in the audience could evaluate or appreciate the performance, not knowing what I was aiming for. I now regard myself, instead, as the last heterosexual on earth, producing pornography that nobody else finds erotic. I have no objection to living on a planet entirely populated by the gay, but the incomprehension of my audience, thus, is not a problem research or public education could ever solve. And this is the spirit of Season Three, wandering in search of Season Four.
