It’s interesting to look at karma with this lens: an explanatory framework for progress.
I was listening to this recent In Our Time episode about…
the doctrine of Karma as developed initially among Hindus, Jains and Buddhists in India from the first millennium BCE. Common to each is an idea, broadly, that you reap what you sow: how you act in this world has consequences either for your later life or your future lives, depending on your view of rebirth and transmigration.
So the idea of reincarnation is widespread - “karma” is first mentioned in 1500 BCE, the Ancient Greeks have “metempsychosis” - but around 800 BCE the idea of karma develops in India in this direction:
the specifics of this moral mechanism
You can be re-born as a plant, animal, human (in one joke “even as a cooking pot”) – depending on how you behave.
It’s to do with your actions. It’s a physics of ethics.
In India it’s more systematic. It’s seen as an automatic mechanism, almost like a science, a physics of reality, and it has this moral characteristic.
But I hadn’t really thought about what re-birth means. This transmigration.
Like, is there a continuation of identity? Nooooo… it’s fuzzier than that. There are metaphors…
the self is like a caterpillar that crawls up a blade of grass and reaches over to another blade, and crawls down it to the ground again. The soul is a creature that can travel through this life, reach to another life, and come back to a new life again.
Which gives me a glimpse.
Though what is the exact nature of this? It’s hugely debated…
Like is it just a connection: when you’re teaching a student, what is passed on? - there’s nothing physical - it’s a causal relation
Or is there an ongoing self: The soul changing its clothes
(It feels like the opposite of the Star Trek transporter: in the transporter you are broken into data about atoms, faxed down to the planet’s surface, and reconstructed – and let’s be clear here, it’s not you, right? You’re dead, it’s someone who looks like you, with your memories, and they believe they’re you, but it’s not you, Star Trek proposes a material universe with the transporter but then logically is full of dead people who die over and over again, and deny it. Contrariwise karma says that you die but something persists.)
Whichever it is, karma includes this longitudinal focus on life after life which I will say as a claim is weaker than immortality, and stronger than ancestors/descendants.
Ultimately, I was utterly taken with this statement from the episode:
the morality of this means that we have the possibility of progress. It’s not one life and you’re done, it’s like being a goldsmith. As a goldsmith crafts a beautiful statue, and if he doesn’t like it, can melt it back down again, and try to make something more perfect, so that’s what our lives are. They’re attempts, and they can get better.
The possibility of progress!
Ah-ha!
I know this quote is about individual progress, let’s call it progress-1. But some branches of karma get into cohort transmigration, and that takes us closer to the sense in which I’m taking it, progress-2, today’s conception of progress: something singular that pervades all, a new nature, borderline Whig history or manifest destiny in a way, that we all contribute to but has its own identity and history and direction. The two senses overlap in some mysterious fashion.
Now this is where that thought took me, the idea that karma allows for the possibility of progress, ambiguously progress-1 and progress-2:
I always wonder about the function of systems.
Well not the function, systems are multivariate, but a function certainly.
Then I think about systems and frameworks we have today with overlapping roles. That helps me see the ancient way, not monumentalising it, and that gives me new perspectives on today. Look, it’s a method.
And karma, yes it’s a moral framework now, but what’s the mega trend of 1500 BCE, what created the conditions such that it emerged in the first place, what was it there to do?
Was that when progress first became noticeable?
This is where my imagination takes me, let’s be clear, I’m speculating.
But listen… there’s always been the idea of change, right, and even history (which, in the west, only emerged as a concept a little later, in Classical Greece) is just one thing after another.
I mean there was progress - stone to bronze to iron - but I get the impression that it wasn’t obvious.
Now suddenly you have kingdoms and cities, I mean Ur was 3800 BCE, but you have a flourishing in India in this period, so there’s a density of population, an urban way of life, and clearly this is part of the exponential acceleration of human civilisation and technology that we are still part of, and:
Maybe this is when the progress exponential became rapid enough, became noticeable for the first time? Maybe that’s the context we’re talking about.
Like: how do you explain progress?
That’s what you’d be asking, when progress itself was new.
(Meanwhile the Mycenaean Greeks in the ancient world were developing a cosmology of descent, from the gods, to the age of heroes, to today (and tomorrow, which will be worse). Still we see the arrow of time.)
I’ll come back to karma in a sec.
Progress Studies was invented as a discipline in 2019:
Progress itself is understudied. By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of “Progress Studies.”
The authors agree that “progress” is a loaded term: We know that, to some readers, the word progress may sound too normative.
(Normative in its “what ought to be” sense, i.e. perhaps fairness, as in normative economics, not in its sense meaning “standard”.)
And to me, that overloading of “progress” is really the point: this is not just a study of how and why change happens, but also why it tends in a particular direction (“progress”), and also the new discipline includes this huge moral SHOULD - that is, normative - because it’s not just a study of “history seems to have directionality and it can go slower or faster” but it is called PROGRESS.
So it’s an opinionated discipline, and they make that axiomatic: we must affirmatively make the case for the study of how to improve human well-being.
And I see progress studies as a positive activity: let’s not just work on being better, but work on being better at being better.
Well, but how?
So progress studies rhymes with karma, for me.
Both are concerned in explaining why the world improves.
(Again, I am not speaking about karma itself here, but the associations it sets up in my head.)
Imagine spotting progress for the very first time! So karma, to me, also brings in the mechanism:
if you look at nature, even though you can’t see the seed below the ground, it gives rise to plants again and again, and that gives us a clue as to how humans work.
(Quote from the In Our Time episode.)
Some new entity is being proposed, something that we can neither see nor touch but has a reality that strongly affects our own. Like gravity, as an analogy, but not just a force, which is a symptom, the Higgs field itself maybe.
What is it?
What is this fabric of souls, how do we think of it?
I see it as something between “culture,” which is the sum of our values and norms and material artefacts, and Kevin Kelly’s concept of the technium – our system of tools and machines that has biases and tendencies … agency.
Society is not something that we’re in, it’s something that we do. As I said million years ago(100 Hours, TedXAthens, YouTube).
The picture for me is this:
Re-birth in karma is the interplay between the individual and the abstracted culture (of ideas, tools, etc) that we create which has - it turns out, this is the best way to conceive of it - its own existence, and looking at it in this way, we create culture, and also we precipitate out of culture.
Culture or whatever, really. The land at the top of the blades of grass.
We live on through our acts!
So it helps make sense of all of that.
Then karma differs from progress studies, aside from scale of course, in these two ways:
first by proposing the mechanism of progress, being re-birth according to some arithmetic,
and secondly by asking, well, if we have this progress concept, we’re not just observers here, what direction do we want, what should we want?
Now suddenly we have this rich terrain of moral argument and learning.
For me, this is now where I want to pay closer attention, to take lessons from karma - a vast and ancient and filigreed tradition - its morality in particular, the debates on intention and trade-offs, in order to think about the politics of progress.
FOOTNOTE.
From the tech startup world, here is an example of karma and re-birth in microcosm, well nanocosm:
The biggest thing for me is that I never want to have to solve the same problem twice, ever.
… Defaulting to putting them in public, partly it’s sort of an insurance scheme.
I’ve worked for companies where I did everything in private. And then I left those companies and I’ve lost all of that work!
Everything that I do in public that has an open source license attached to it is just out there … That’s a problem that I’ve solved once and will never have to go back and revisit.
I love Willison’s framing right there – as he’s re-born company through company, there is some essence that continues, and by his acts he wants that new instantiation of self to start from a better place.
He doesn’t know who he’ll be next, so he benefits everyone. Open source. The concept of progress!
He calls it “selfish,” Larry Wall would call it laziness – as a virtue!
And I can’t helping thinking we can simply call it good karma.
It’s interesting to look at karma with this lens: an explanatory framework for progress.
I was listening to this recent In Our Time episode about…
So the idea of reincarnation is widespread - “karma” is first mentioned in 1500 BCE, the Ancient Greeks have “metempsychosis” - but around 800 BCE the idea of karma develops in India in this direction:
You can be re-born as a plant, animal, human (in one joke “even as a cooking pot”) – depending on how you behave.
It’s to do with your actions. It’s a physics of ethics.
But I hadn’t really thought about what re-birth means. This transmigration.
Like, is there a continuation of identity? Nooooo… it’s fuzzier than that. There are metaphors…
Which gives me a glimpse.
Though what is the exact nature of this? It’s hugely debated…
(It feels like the opposite of the Star Trek transporter: in the transporter you are broken into data about atoms, faxed down to the planet’s surface, and reconstructed – and let’s be clear here, it’s not you, right? You’re dead, it’s someone who looks like you, with your memories, and they believe they’re you, but it’s not you, Star Trek proposes a material universe with the transporter but then logically is full of dead people who die over and over again, and deny it. Contrariwise karma says that you die but something persists.)
Whichever it is, karma includes this longitudinal focus on life after life which I will say as a claim is weaker than immortality, and stronger than ancestors/descendants.
Ultimately, I was utterly taken with this statement from the episode:
The possibility of progress!
Ah-ha!
I know this quote is about individual progress, let’s call it progress-1. But some branches of karma get into cohort transmigration, and that takes us closer to the sense in which I’m taking it, progress-2, today’s conception of progress: something singular that pervades all, a new nature, borderline Whig history or manifest destiny in a way, that we all contribute to but has its own identity and history and direction. The two senses overlap in some mysterious fashion.
Now this is where that thought took me, the idea that karma allows for the possibility of progress, ambiguously progress-1 and progress-2:
I always wonder about the function of systems.
Well not the function, systems are multivariate, but a function certainly.
Then I think about systems and frameworks we have today with overlapping roles. That helps me see the ancient way, not monumentalising it, and that gives me new perspectives on today. Look, it’s a method.
And karma, yes it’s a moral framework now, but what’s the mega trend of 1500 BCE, what created the conditions such that it emerged in the first place, what was it there to do?
Was that when progress first became noticeable?
This is where my imagination takes me, let’s be clear, I’m speculating.
But listen… there’s always been the idea of change, right, and even history (which, in the west, only emerged as a concept a little later, in Classical Greece) is just one thing after another.
I mean there was progress - stone to bronze to iron - but I get the impression that it wasn’t obvious.
Now suddenly you have kingdoms and cities, I mean Ur was 3800 BCE, but you have a flourishing in India in this period, so there’s a density of population, an urban way of life, and clearly this is part of the exponential acceleration of human civilisation and technology that we are still part of, and:
Maybe this is when the progress exponential became rapid enough, became noticeable for the first time? Maybe that’s the context we’re talking about.
Like: how do you explain progress?
That’s what you’d be asking, when progress itself was new.
(Meanwhile the Mycenaean Greeks in the ancient world were developing a cosmology of descent, from the gods, to the age of heroes, to today (and tomorrow, which will be worse). Still we see the arrow of time.)
I’ll come back to karma in a sec.
Progress Studies was invented as a discipline in 2019:
The authors agree that “progress” is a loaded term:
(Normative in its “what ought to be” sense, i.e. perhaps fairness, as in normative economics, not in its sense meaning “standard”.)
And to me, that overloading of “progress” is really the point: this is not just a study of how and why change happens, but also why it tends in a particular direction (“progress”), and also the new discipline includes this huge moral SHOULD - that is, - because it’s not just a study of “history seems to have directionality and it can go slower or faster” but it is called PROGRESS.
So it’s an opinionated discipline, and they make that axiomatic:
And I see progress studies as a positive activity: let’s not just work on being better, but work on being better at being better.
Well, but how?
So progress studies rhymes with karma, for me.
Both are concerned in explaining why the world improves.
(Again, I am not speaking about karma itself here, but the associations it sets up in my head.)
Imagine spotting progress for the very first time! So karma, to me, also brings in the mechanism:
(Quote from the In Our Time episode.)
Some new entity is being proposed, something that we can neither see nor touch but has a reality that strongly affects our own. Like gravity, as an analogy, but not just a force, which is a symptom, the Higgs field itself maybe.
What is it?
What is this fabric of souls, how do we think of it?
I see it as something between “culture,” which is the sum of our values and norms and material artefacts, and Kevin Kelly’s concept of the technium – that has .
I think of that idea (that karmically haha comes round and comes round again): We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.
Society is not something that we’re in, it’s something that we do. As I said million years ago (100 Hours, TedXAthens, YouTube).
The picture for me is this:
Re-birth in karma is the interplay between the individual and the abstracted culture (of ideas, tools, etc) that we create which has - it turns out, this is the best way to conceive of it - its own existence, and looking at it in this way, we create culture, and also we precipitate out of culture.
Culture or whatever, really. The land at the top of the blades of grass.
We live on through our acts!
So it helps make sense of all of that.
Then karma differs from progress studies, aside from scale of course, in these two ways:
Now suddenly we have this rich terrain of moral argument and learning.
For me, this is now where I want to pay closer attention, to take lessons from karma - a vast and ancient and filigreed tradition - its morality in particular, the debates on intention and trade-offs, in order to think about the politics of progress.
FOOTNOTE.
From the tech startup world, here is an example of karma and re-birth in microcosm, well nanocosm:
I love Willison’s framing right there – as he’s re-born company through company, there is some essence that continues, and by his acts he wants that new instantiation of self to start from a better place.
He doesn’t know who he’ll be next, so he benefits everyone. Open source. The concept of progress!
He calls it “selfish,” Larry Wall would call it laziness – as a virtue!
And I can’t helping thinking we can simply call it good karma.