I was reflecting today on the life of Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha.
According to Buddhist myth, Siddhartha was born under a prophecy that he would either become a great military ruler or a supremely enlightened holy man. His father wanted the former, so he raised Siddhartha in a bubble of sorts, filling his life with nothing but pleasure and keeping from his eyes all instances of pain and suffering.
Eventually, though, Siddhartha came to see the world of suffering. More than that, he wanted to see it. And, in seeing it, he renounced his life of bountiful pleasure in favor of extreme asceticism—almost to the point of death (which of course later developed into his middle path of moderation). Siddhartha saw the world and responded to it by forsaking the pleasures of his life.
In modern “developed” countries, we tend to pride ourselves upon our ability to see the world. We live in a scientific age. On the macroscopic level, we’ve peered deeper into space than anyone before us. This year, Hubble spotted a galaxy 13.4 billion light years away (just a few hundred million years after our universe rolled out). On the microscopic level, we’ve seen (or at least detected) photons, neutrinos, bosons, etc. Additionally, we’ve mapped the human genome and classified many life forms and identified the ecosystems of which they are a part.
But for all our seeing, it seems to me that in some ways we’re trained not to see. This point is especially true for us as consumers, I think. Try an experiment: Go into a grocery store and count all the faces you see in the snack aisle. You’ll find faces on cookies, candies, crackers, etc. Next, go to the meat aisle and count the number of faces you see there. My guess is that you won’t see too many faces. That’s odd, though, isn’t it? We put faces on foods that never had faces and remove faces from foods that did. In a similar fashion, few clothing companies are exceedingly transparent about how they provide the clothes they do at the prices they do. Tags don’t clearly divulge labor practices.
In short, we don’t see the true cost behind our products. But it’s more than that. I think we’re trained not to see it—the suffering, whether human or nonhuman. Much like Siddhartha’s father, there are forces—in these cases, market forces—that don’t want us to see. They benefit from our not seeing.
And maybe we (and I include myself here) are quite happy not to see. Ignorance is bliss, after all. We can gorge ourselves on meat because we don’t have to see the conditions (for both humans and nonhumans) that make our levels of consumption possible. We can live happily with great wealth because we don’t see the conditions of poverty around the world—in some cases upon which our wealth is built. For all the greatness of our scientific advances predicated upon our empirical senses, we are often so happy not to see. Indeed, many of those advances come at a cost we don’t want to see—medicines tested on animals is just one example among many.
As I reflected on the Buddha, I thought how his life is a great lesson for people like me. He teaches that the cost of happiness in extravagant living is too high. To attain it, we must pay with our sight. The cost of truth, as it were, is seeing, which robs us of our happiness in extravagance and mandates moderation. Seeing beckons us to take a different path, a path that would spell disadvantage for those invested in our not seeing.
I’m not a Buddhist, but I find Siddhartha’s life an extremely powerful and convicting one.
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Ryan Patrick McLaughlin, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Siena College.
1 Comment
Mark B
September 28, 2023, 5:26 pmInteresting meditation upon the similarities between the Buddha's early experience and market forces. I don't think it really hit the mark, though. There are simply too many assumptions baked in that are, well, assumed and not shown.
The biggest being when you say, "We can live happily with great wealth because we don’t see the conditions of poverty around the world—in some cases upon which our wealth is built."
First, having seen a fair amount of third world (and even U.S.) poverty in my travels, I appreciate what I have all the more. Not because I have it and they don't, but because I appreciate the cultural, material, and legal infrastructure that make it all possible.
But the real tell is the provably false idea that wealth creation may, at least in some instances, be an inherently zero-sum game. This isn't market fundamentalism: it is a simple observation that you cannot create something from nothing.
Okay, so let's consider what you may consider an obvious exception to my statement: extracting rare earths in third-world countries to power the post-carbon economy. To build the batteries on which Tesla's wealth is based, for example, it would be ideal if the U.S. extracted cobalt, lithium, etc. here in the U.S. with U.S. level wages and safety standards. Agreed?
When we source it overseas, we should at least look, as Prof. McLaughlin encourages us to do, at the misery and poverty of those doing the mining. But, Tesla's wealth here isn't due to the poverty there. The people in the open pit mines aren't giving up a six-figure salary at Goldman Sachs to do that work. Whatever else their situation in life, they've decided (sadly enough) that doing that is better. That is, they are *already* impoverished and they are *already* politically oppressed – so much so that working in a mine appears to them an opportunity. Yes, THAT is an agony of the human condition.
Now, agreed, if you were to require U.S. sourcing, Tesla's margins would be lower, the infrastructure would be more expensive, or both. But, without the core creative efforts of tens of thousands of engineers, builders, scientists and managers, those rare earths have no value at all. So, our wealth isn't due to their poverty, and you do nothing to pull them out of that poverty by assuming it is. In other words, it makes obvious sense to call for reform in those nations, it makes no sense to throw shade on the creation of wealth in this nation.
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