It should be obvious that the Buddha would have been a socialist. He would likely have strongly resisted the suffering-stoking psychology of capitalism (and its literature). Ironically, while his aims align exquisitely with the best of the left, his name is bandied in certain trendy capitalist circles by meditators who seem blissfully ignorant of the Buddha’s basic goals. Noticing this suggests one way in which the Buddhist and Western senses of “enlightenment” are diametrically opposed. As we’ll see the latter has led to a kind of incoherent individualism which can steer systematically towards greater suffering (institutionally and culturally).
Consider this mind-shifting definition: the very goal of Buddhism, nirvana is “the ending of greed.” Since capitalism is organized greed incarnate, any properly nirvanic practice necessarily implies curbing it. In this the Buddha is a hardcore lefty. That definition of nirvana is from Stephen Bachelor, a monk who in After Buddhism rethinks these ideas to fit our times by plumbing the oldest available Pali texts. The Buddha left no writings and he died (~480BC) three centuries before those texts were written (he didn’t even speak Pali). Bachelor dislikes even the term “Buddhism” which was coined by 19th-century Westerners, he prefers “dharma practice.” But like much of the relevant vocabulary, “dharma” invokes a dense web of ideas and emotions that aren’t easy to squeeze into the terms of alien tongues.
One translator resorted to 20 renderings of “dharma” in German, writes scholar Keerthik Sasidharan. In “The Way of Dharma” he describes its “unique moral force” in Indian classics. These civilization-shaping stories feature characters who exemplify dharma — “devotion, truth, sacrifice, love and other ennobling ideas.” Suckled on these stories the inner world of typical Indians is still today shaped “in the service of dharma.” But despite its complexity, dharma can usually be distilled into the easy to state, but hard to answer, question: What is the most compassionate thing to do here? So, the Buddha was all about practical compassion. As the best of the left should be.
Buddha held that “greed corrupts the mind.” It’s central to the unholy trinity—greed, hatred, and delusion—that spawn human suffering. Bachelor says the Buddha was primarily an ethicist and a psychologist. His followers later took a metaphysical turn, but “nirvana” didn’t originally mean some transcendent state. It first meant living here and now, liberated from greed, hatred, and delusion while acting on the practical compassion dharma demands. This earthly nirvana could be directly experienced whenever the unholy trinity was inactive. That’s true not only for spiritual athletes or saintly ascetics but for ordinary folk in the bustle of everyday life.
The Buddha’s savvy psychology saw that life necessarily involves dukkha, typically translated as “suffering” (and as we’ll see science is now catching up to the Buddha on this). But presenting dukkha as just “suffering” it loses nuances, like the bittersweet pleasures of ill-chosen joys that we chase. This recurring reality of suffering means the psychological and emotional tools to cope are vital. Thus, the Buddha offered training in practical mental skills (not speculations about cosmic creation or postmortem salves). Crucially, Bachelor writes the proper practice of dharma is as much about how “one speaks, acts and works in the public realm” as with “spiritual exercises in private.” Sadly, that outward other-orientation is too often twisted into self-help to live more calmly within capitalism’s machineries of greed (e.g., as a “self-help hack” for greater rapacious productivity in Silicon Valley). In Bachelor’s view this sort of mindfulness meditation too often cements “solipsistic isolation.” And building “firmer barriers around the alienated self” betrays the basics of dharma and goes against the very social grain of human nature. Focusing inwardly, privileging your own suffering, instead of outwardly, on a compassionate civic life, is immensely misguided. It corrupts the dharma’s core mission of collectively organized compassion. An aim the left surely shares.
We live in “a society aching for the Buddha’s balm” says an apt review of An End to Suffering by Pankaj Mishra. Mishra, too, deems the Buddha more a rational thinker and skillful psychologist than a religious figure. His whole stress is on earthly ethics and practical salves for life’s woes (therapy, not theology). The aim is liberation from ordinary human suffering so as to lead an ethical civic life (steering between sensual excess and self-denial).
Mishra fruitfully distinguishes greed/craving (trishan) from proper wanting. He finds no disapproval of moderated wants when they’re ethical and chosen with the right intention (and not under greedy compulsion). Mishra’s multicultural fluency enables fertile contrasts. He finds the Buddha’s views on the nature of a human mind differ radically from key Western thinkers. For instance Buddhist thinking can “refute intellectually” the very idea of the Cartesian “I,” that speculatively conjured autonomous spirit that still sits unrealistically at the heart of modern individualistic theorizing.
In founding modern western philosophy, Descartes’s solitary soul-searching seems to have taken its theory of mind on a 300-year asocial tangent. Feminist philosopher of science Mary Midgley blames the resulting unrealistic individualism on the fact that like Descartes “practically all the great European philosophers have been bachelors” who led weird lives (she lists Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Kant, among others). Had Descartes had a more ordinary life, his “I think, therefore I am” might have begun, “We think, therefore…” Theorizing us to be independent individuals makes whatever little sense it could only if you ignore childhood’s long and expensive maturation. “You could read 2,500 years of philosophy and find almost nothing about children,” laments scientist Alison Gopnik. But even once mature we never escape our need for others—that isn’t childish, it’s human. Inalienably human.
To flesh out the case against Cartesian individualism, notice that our minds have fundamental relay-race-like qualities. Others pass on to you much that becomes integral to “your” consciousness, like “your” mother tongue(s), “your” culture’s conceptual tools, its emotional palette, and storied behaviors (and moral norms). We each can’t help but think with a mind built and shaped by many others. By social tools, like these words, which are necessarily collective. Each human mind is an utterly social phenomenon. Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise since all key human traits evolved utterly socially. Many errors arising from misconceiving us in abstracted and starkly individual terms still bedevil “the Enlightenment’s” projects. Much of individualism is a diabolically bad empirical description of humans. Influential weirdos aside, we are inalienably social and deeply enduringly other-dependent. Thus it seems that some of the founding certainties of liberal modernity simply don’t fit the basic, and evident, biological or psychological facts— surely a rickety basis for a way of life. Despite elaborate denials humanity remains stubbornly sociocentric.
Mishra recounts that 19th-century thinkers “looked towards India for spiritual relief from a Europe that by adopting the bourgeois religion of progress was losing its soul.” This new ruthless religion deified the organized delusions and greed of capitalism. According to Mishra, Nietzsche admired facets of a newly imported but distorted Buddhism—finding to be a “hundred times more realistic than Christianity.” Since it struggled not against sin but against suffering. Nietzsche (mis)took that to mean the Buddha had jettisoned moral concepts (to go “Beyond Good and Evil”). But his self-aggrandizing high-and-mighty Übermensch mindset seems to have utterly overlooked the dharma’s obligatory otherward core of compassion.
Tensions in these dueling “enlightenments” surface in differing cross-cultural views on the novel. An art that is psychology and morality incarnate. Though it’s fashionable to deny it, novelists can’t avoid moral judgements, they’re central to the craft. A novelists’ “moral judgement is the air which the reader breathes” as philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch wrote. In Ian Watt’s history of the Rise of the Novel he describes how European literature was instrumental in shaping and preaching the idea of individualism itself, and its self-focused moral priorities. The British in colonial India used novels in schools to try to convert selected Indians into “proper” modern individuals. So writes novelist and critic Vikram Chadra, who calls those novels a “sophisticated technology of [liberal] selfhood,“ and finds “inescapable complicity of the novel with the depredations of colonialism.”
Stories, and life, cast as adventures in individualism may now seem “natural,” but that’s a modern novelty. In 1830 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote “Our ancestors lacked the word ‘individualism’… in their era there were, in fact, no individuals who did not belong to a group” (hence related loyalties and duties were always central concerns). As Mishra notes, liberal individualism’s novelty and alienness proved tricky to translate. For instance, Japanese translators struggled to find terms for self-interest not tainted by morally-disapproved-of selfishness and failure of duty. Likewise, Indian culture countered self-centeredness, encouraging sharing, generosity, and compassion—that is, dharma (though it should be noted that being dharma-centered hasn’t prevented many severe social problems, like caste or gender discrimination). Being raised in another story tradition may make it easier to see that “English literature has long been a leading disseminator of the ideology of morbid individualism,” as novelist and critic Amitav Ghosh puts it in The Great Derangement, his 2016 book on the collective failure of the literati to address the climate crisis. He fears we’re “in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike.” Ghosh pins this on a recent mutation in “the contemporary novel [which] has become ever more radically centered on the individual psyche while the collective… has receded both in the cultural and fictional imagination.” He writes that novelist John Updike “put his finger on a very important aspect of contemporary culture” when he asserted that a proper novel must be “an individual moral adventure.” That isn’t a good description of the novels of Zola, Tolstoy, Dickens or Upton Sinclair and countless others, but it fits the focus of today’s literary elite. This cultural selfward shift matters since precisely this sort of “morbid individualism” and “crisis of the imagination” now obstruct our ability to respond rationally to our most pressing collective predicaments. For instance, far too much climate crisis discourse has focused on tone policing and personal feelings, like optimism. But as Ghosh in the Q&A after his 2024 Tanner Lecture (Intimations of Apocalypse: Catastrophist and Gradualist Imaginings of the Planetary Future, available here) said “I don’t think we should think about [the climate crisis] in terms of pessimism or optimism. I think we should think of it as a duty… it is our duty to do what we can… the idea of Dharma.” In the moral climate of Indian literature, you do your duty (to whoever or whatever you love) however you’re feeling.
Mishra has said that “literature has always been Buddhistic,” in painting “tormented and confused inner lives.” I’d suggest that he’s half right, since the typical moral of western liberation-celebrating fiction passionately opposes the Buddha’s teachings not to greedily multiply desires. Like capitalism, much of liberal literature tends to promote psychologically unskilled forms of freedom and passion chasing (if not financial, then experiential and emotional greeds). In that sense, both laissez-faire economics and liberal literature systematically increase suffering. Both feed a worldview where private happiness is the highest aim and greedy desires are admired. In an essay called “Modernity’s Undoing,” Mishra rails at the literary “cult of private experience” in the “narcissistic heart of the West” (a finely fitting Don DeLillo phrase). The passion and powers of great writers that once weighed “the fate of their societies” is now too often expended on what it feels like to be “some adulterer in suburban Massachusetts.” Mishra’s own novels mull the psychic costs of modernity. The seismic social and political shocks that roiled 19th-century Europe swept India in Mishra’s generation, clashing with indigenous dharmic norms.
This stream of Western narcissism has achieved heroic and mythic proportions, and its influence has spread far beyond the fraction of people who read novels. For instance, the supposedly universal mythic pattern of Joseph Campbell’s “heroes’ journey” has shaped pop culture. His highly influential take on mythologies, The Hero with a Thousand Faces “sold the public on a vision of the individual hero, unfettered from community or history” as Sarah E. Bond and Joel Christensen write in an LA Review of Books essay. This casting of American “rugged individualism” as a “seemingly timeless archetype” relied on cherry-picked takes on mythic tales from other cultures. Campbell’s “sins of contextual omission” includes his bumper sticker philosophizing to “follow your bliss,” which uses a simplified (and contested) slant on the Indian concept of ānanda (or in Bond and Christensen’s view “a fundamental misunderstanding of its meaning in Hindu philosophy”). These misunderstandings have been widely preached, for instance in the moral climate of “hero’s journey” movies like the Star Wars franchise (its creator George Lucas says it was explicitly inspired by Campbell’s mythologizing).
Science is beginning to side with the Buddha in seeing the limits of focusing on your feelings or of self-centered hedonism. In Good Reasons for Bad Feelings physician and founder of evolutionary medicine Randolph Nesse, explains “why life is so full of suffering.” Fundamentally, “natural selection does not give a fig about our happiness,” and feeling bad often serves evolutionarily adaptive aims. We evolved to unavoidably experience recurring stresses, anxieties, and dissatisfactions. As the Buddha taught, only well-honed mental and emotional skills can mitigate these inbuilt neurobiological patterns. Patterns that ensure our severest stressors include social isolation (which today’s hyper-individualism can lead to). But using skillful socio-centric dharma practice, we can face life’s bouts of suffering alongside cheerfulness, serenity, compassionate joy, and bliss—terms Bachelor and Mishra use for mental and emotional states that diligent dharma practice can enable.
To summarize how the Buddhist and Western senses of “enlightenment” diverge. One seeks liberation from greed; the other often tends to worship greed of many kinds (which structure its political, economic, aesthetic, and emotional life). Nietzsche in 1890 called the modern state “organized immorality.” That phrase fits today’s capitalist greedocracy to a T. (For instance, some of the world’s richest individuals and institutions host glitzy “humanitarian” galas while also gambling in global food markets to profit by taking calories out of the mouths of the planet’s poorest babies).
Mishra has said that the antidote to capitalism’s “culture of cruelty” is a socialist “culture of compassion and solidarity” (the Dalai Lama has said that he is “as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist”). But to my mind the left’s tribes remain confused about what that really means. In Mishra’s view, Marx “offered no morality beyond that of the self-serving … class.” I’d suggest that sowed a deep and constantly creaking contradiction at the birth of left politics. It remains caught between being mainly motivated by material self-interest or a compassion-first politics. I argue we need a less selfish, more otherish left politics built on outward compassion and organized kindness, focusing on the needs of those that have the least. Or in the words of perhaps the world’s most famous proto-socialist “as ye do unto the least of these, ye do unto me.” Heeding dharma (or Jesus) in our personal and political lives we must regularly ask what is the compassionate thing to do? In a world where 84% of humanity (6.7 billion people) live in poverty, 2.4 billion lack food security, and 150 million kids are permanently stunted by malnutrition (where the well-established logic of the climate crisis requires rapidly restraining elite greeds). Let’s work to end systemic greed and enact global political compassion, using the Buddha’s sounder sociocentric psychology and ethics.