‘Why Buddhism is True’ by Robert Wright wins this month’s Prestigious Ashurbanipal Book Award
And why social media as a meditative practice (maybe?) isn’t as dumb as it sounds
The “Pure Informational Theory” of freedom of speech: The arduous project of human knowledge is knowing the world as it is, and we cannot begin to know the world as it is without knowing what people think, believe, or are willing to espouse. As a result, all speech conveys some amount of information and is all therefore of some value. And because it is hard to judge in advance what information is particularly useful to know, the broadest possible protection of expression of opinion is necessary.
Joining the ranks of Abigail Shrier and Martin Gurri, the winner of this month’s Prestigious Ashurbanipal Award is “Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment” by
.I have been a huge fan of Wright since reading his book, “The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology,” in the 1990s. It was the clearest and most thoughtful explanation of evolutionary psychology and how it applies to the actual life and decisions of Charles Darwin that I have ever read. His follow-up book, “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny,” is among the rare books that I have read more than four times. It is so filled with fresh thinking and insight, expressed in a clear and simple style, that it is a genuine pleasure to read.
I had — foolishly, it turns out — assumed that writing a book about Buddhism would lead Wright to reconsider or even disavow his previous work on evolutionary psychology. While I don’t think the subjects are at all contradictory, I have previously seen people who become more spiritual likewise become more skeptical of such hard-nosed topics. On the contrary, a lot of the book is dedicated to reconciling evolutionary psychology and Buddhism — which Wright does brilliantly and, in my opinion, accurately.
The book is profound in its conclusions, masterful in its harmonizing of scientific thought and wisdom traditions (something that my “Coddling of the American Mind” co-author Jonathan Haidt and I have great affection for), while also managing to be funny, honest, and practical.
It’s the kind of book I’ll be thinking about for the rest of my life.
Why ‘social media as meditative practice’ may not be the absolute dumbest thing you’ve ever heard in your life
I had the great pleasure of joining Robert Wright on his podcast back in 2020, and I talked about how I’d been thinking of Twitter (now X) as a form of “meditative practice.”
I know how odd this sounds. Social media — with all its hot takes, oversimplifications, pile-ons, dunking, confirmation bias, Cancel Culture, and general nastiness — seems like the exact opposite of meditative practice.
But I think that comes from a misunderstanding of what meditative practice is actually like.
In order to explain, I am going to break all sorts of Buddhist rules on how to talk about meditation, for the sake of both simplicity and clarity. Like Wright, I do not think of myself as a Buddhist — just someone who, after spending a lot of time meditating and studying the Western brand of Buddhism, has been greatly impressed by the tradition’s inherent wisdom about human nature and our minds.
So what kind of rules am I referring to? Well, for example, in meditation circles it’s discouraged to think of yourself as “trying to do something” when you’re meditating. “There is no wrong way to meditate” is something I heard when I first started poking my nose into the practice. While I understand what they’re getting at — namely, that you can bring meditation to any state of mind — if you, for example, decide to spend your meditation retreat carefully going over your “to-do” list in your head and trying to memorize what you need to add to it later, you aren’t doing it right.
I studied a Western-oriented school of Buddhism that is focused on taking Buddhist practices out of the monastery and into the “real world.” Like many others in meditation, we were taught to focus on our own breathing, and when a thought inevitably arises, we were meant to lightly label it as “thinking,” then return to following the breath.
When people are new to meditation they can often be blown away by how “loud” their minds are. It is often likened to a wild horse, but I think that image is not wild enough. To me it’s more like watching a hundred wild horses on amphetamines run around the inside of your skull with very loud music blaring and endless strobe light flashes of things your brain is worried about forgetting and embarrassing moments you have had in your life combined with a hyper-awareness that your shoulder really hurts and your calves really itch while wondering, “Am I just bad at this?”
After a lot of practice, you get a little bit more distance between you and the thoughts. Buddhists call this nonattachment, but I’m okay with simply calling it detachment. Detachment, like objectivity, is not a state you can ever fully get to, but you can get closer to it through meditation. Over time you can see your thoughts as having something like agendas of their own. They are trying to get you to do something — usually even when that task is as amorphous as “WORRY!” or as specific as “you really need to tell your coworker that you feel bad about the way you put that one thing in that meeting three months ago and if I had the Infinity Gauntlet the first thing I’d do is fix that … by which, of course, I mean the awesome one from the comic book not the lame one that burns you all up from the movies.”
After a while you start to understand the old Buddhist mantra, “You are not your thoughts.” Your thoughts come to seem a little bit more like weather and, with a bit more detachment, you can decide more carefully which ones to follow and which ones to let fizzle.
So how does this apply to social media?
I wrote a long time ago on HuffPost that Twitter (yes, yes, now X) is like the collective unconscious of the entire species. What I mean is that prior to the last two decades there has never been anything like a real-time way to check in on the largely unmediated reactions of hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people around the planet. This is an extraordinary shift, and it's one of the reasons why Paul Krugman’s 1998 prediction that the internet would only have as much impact as a fax machine was such a colossally stupid idea. Martin Gurri is correct that social media is part of what he calls a “Fifth Wave,” creating a tremendously disruptive influence on every aspect of modern life from government to science to even how we think about thinking.
And here’s one of the really weird things about meditating, which Sam Harris really likes to emphasize: After doing it for a while, you start to realize that it seems like your thoughts don’t really come from anywhere, or at least not anywhere that’s easy to track down. They just kind of pop into existence, like a virtual particle in a vacuum. By refocusing on your breath, this can be easier to see — and what you are trying to do is learn how to not necessarily follow the individual thought that arrives down the rabbit hole and through the labyrinth of other thoughts, emotional reactions, worries, and instincts it triggers.
Over time, I was taught to try to identify with whatever it is that exists that can actually view these thoughts from the outside — looking for what’s looking. In other words, trying to cultivate a little bit of detachment, where you watch your thoughts arise and choose not to get carried away by them.
I hope by now you see how this plays out on X or Notes or — for about 19 of you — on Threads. When you’re online, you are playing the role of the “you” that exists with the ability to observe your own thoughts, and you can treat posts the same way you do your thoughts while meditating. If you want to have a long and happy life in an environment where you can be “canceled” for reacting the wrong way (hey, Rikki Schlott and I wrote a book about that!), learning not to get carried away by those provocations is useful — the same way not getting carried away by our own thoughts is useful.
But I want people to understand that this is more than mere self-preservation. The collective brain we’ve created in social media works in ways surprisingly similar to our actual brains, and if we can cultivate some amount of detachment — some greater willingness to simply observe what a given post is saying in a broader sense, where it is trying to take you, what the person on the other side may be trying to tell you or, quite often, trying to tell themselves — we can get a lot more out of it.
How social media works with the ‘Pure Informational Theory’ of free speech
X, and social media in general, is an experiment unlike any that existed in human history prior to the “information age.” Its primary historical parallel is the printing press — which was colossally disruptive but on a much smaller scale and at a lower level of immediacy than social media.
What if we didn’t feel the need to crush the wrongthink on X and instead approached social media with a deep curiosity — not only about what we are thinking and why, but also what everyone else is thinking and why (keeping in mind the sometimes massive gulf between what people are thinking and what they’re willing, able, and incentivized to say)?
This is an unparalleled opportunity to learn profound and perhaps uncomfortable truths about human nature and to examine the emerging phenomenon of what human nature looks like when connected to billions of other unmediated minds.
This way of looking at speech and ideas led me to my “Pure Informational Theory” of Free Speech, which I defined above. (It’s also a reminder to tell everyone to pick up
’s book about free speech and how we know things, “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth,” which is indispensable on this topic).One especially useful meditation technique for X is to be aware of “feeling tones”: noticing how a pervasive body-wide sensation can seem to emanate out of certain kinds of thoughts. Reminding yourself purposefully of a loved one while meditating, for example, can quite literally feel like a ripple of warmth spreading across your chest. Likewise, remembering an embarrassment or humiliation — even from decades ago — can create a nearly instantaneous body-wide (and highly unpleasant) reaction. Even thinking about thinking about it for the purposes of writing it here, my hands are tensing up and my neck is getting hot.
The thing is, once you approach those feelings with curiosity rather than a desire to drive them away, they lose some of their viscerality. And once you recognize this and begin to harness it, you become less fearful of them arising again.
What happens when you bring this way of looking at the world to social media? There are some things that people can post online that make us furious, sad, hopeless, or panicked. But rather than answering right away, sit with that feeling for a moment and try to figure out what it tells us about ourselves, about the other person, about the dynamics and incentives of this peculiar medium, and what it is you or the other person may not be saying. It’s a rich and complicated world, and you can learn a lot more with that approach than simply trying to shut down whatever sparked a reaction.
Unfortunately, given how fast everything is moving, I fear that we will fail to realize that we can learn far more about human nature — what’s really going on in people’s heads, underlying currents, and things that people are and are not willing to say — than ever before. The instinct against learning this is deep: As with an unwanted thought, the compulsion to make the bad social media post go away is likely to win. We are naturally more inclined to try to make our environment more comfortable and “safe” than to seize an opportunity to learn something much more strange, intricate, and profound about the way the world really is. But if we can learn to live with the discomfort, and if we can train ourselves not to get carried away — either by our own thoughts or by social media rage-bait — we will be much better off.
And the good news is that you’re not on your own! Meditation can be tricky to get into if you’ve never done it before, but there are a number of apps that provide great tools, resources, education, and guidance to help you along. I’ve tried Calm, Headspace, and Sam Harris’ Waking Up, and while I like them all my favorite is Headspace.
Headspace gently and carefully teaches you some things that I wish I knew about meditation going in. Even in its first 10 “lessons,” it shows you things that took me years to figure out on my own. But I’ll just say: Don't expect to get anything out of it for at least the first couple of weeks. As Tim Ferriss likes to say, the minimum effective dose of meditation is probably at least two weeks.
And if you can go to a meditation retreat, give it a shot. My first experience of a full weekend gave me a kind of pleasant hangover that made even the rougher parts of Philadelphia look dazzling and new.
SHOT FOR THE ROAD
A recurrent problem in meditation is that you’ll get a song stuck in your head for hours, if not days. Robert Wright confesses that the song for him was “Feels Like the First Time” by Foreigner. Mine is often “Fresh Feeling” by Eels or, lately, “Double Rum Cola” by Fata Boom.
But my all-purpose song for getting other songs I don’t like out of my head is “The Girl From Ipanema” — specifically the version on this classic album by Stan Getz and João Gilberto. Pretty much every cool cat above a certain age owns this record, which popularized the genre of “bossa nova” all over the world.
It’s a gorgeous and soothing window into a different time, and it even has a little bit of the flavor of one of my favorite countries in the world, Brazil.
Here’s a great live version of the tune from 1968, beautifully sung — as on the original record — by João Gilberto’s wife Astrud, who sadly left us last year.
Although this is a broken record response to writing you've previously shared, I'll continue. My deep dive into the human condition began with harari's sapiens but gained direction after reading Wright's moral animal soon after. I then moved into Stoic philosophy and world religion self-teaching and realized Stoicism and Buddhism had much in common. During this learning I attempted to understand the 2016 presidential campaign and its outcome by picking up a book you may have heard of, The Righteous Mind by some moral philosophy professor who collaborates with generally awesome people. With lessons from Righteous mind along with Gurri's book, I entered 2017 with an informed worldview that provided relative clarity about how the election went as it did and why people became unhinged in both directions. Later that year Why buddhism is true confirmed my priors. Not long after, I was sufficiently prepared for a particularly unfun episode of major depression since my depressive realism enhanced cognition while undergoing CBT provided obvious context for the direct line through Buddhist, Stoic, and CBT teachings.
An interesting take, that social media can be part of a meditation practice ... I think there is truth there. I did do a very intensive vipassana meditation course in a forest monastery outside of Chang Mai a long long time ago where indeed one learned to not get caught up with anything that wasn't permanent - which is nothing according to Buddhism - like thoughts and physical feelings and instead just simply observe so as to know. Went in maybe aware of 5% of what was going on in my mind, coming out now maybe 85% aware of the actual world in and out of my head. I still remember my first sight coming out of the monastery: seeing a car. It was like seeing one for the first time but this time REALLY seeing it: they are a trip!
I don't know if that is where I gained my ability to not get ruffled by most things - my wife and kid get frustrated when I never take offense at anything! - but I'm sure it up'd my game tremendously.
There are so many ways to go down THIS rabbit hole of thinking such as entertaining Apollo's no. 1 maxim, Know Thyself, or Jesus's, "And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free," or focusing on the need for epistemology humility for being able to make it by the intimidation and possible humiliations involved with weathering, nee embracing, nee calling out for, elenchus, that is refutation, which is necessary to pursue truth via socratic dialectic...
I also think of how 'detachment' (if really done correctly I think it can actually enable one to 'attach' to what is actually real; as CS Lewis believed, instead of conquering our desires they can be blessed by that which is actual Truth, capital T) can help achieve the observatory state whereby one can avoid getting infected with rudeness and therefore not pass it on. I've never agreed with the author of the article linked to below that, "Unfortunately, unlike the flu, there currently is no known inoculation for this contagion," the contagion that enables the spreading of rudeness, for there is indeed one and that is consciousness, actually knowing what is going on in front of and in you as you encounter the world and the world encounters you. Knowing you are getting, 'infected,' is the first step in not letting it happen.
I myself call this ability, in this context, Love, for that is what loves does, it observes, notes, listens and tries to understand what others are saying, doing etc. but here, again ala CS Lewis, it does it out of a desire, a blessed desire, to not take the offenses thrown at one by supposed enemies, but instead to, 'turn the cheek,' let the offenses fly on by and not infect you and instead, with your attention, love the infected so as to heal them.
Lots of material to ponder when one observes, particularly when one correctly, actually, observes.
"Rude Behavior Spreads Like a Disease - Scientists study the contagion of obnoxiousness"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rude-behavior-spreads-like-a-disease/
... okay, now I'm ready to wade back into the world of social media, the storm that challenges our consciousness; the world that offers so much samsara to get caught up in. Unless! ....