The House We Live In
Virtue, Wisdom and Pluralism
Seth Zuihō Segall [+–]
Independent Scholar
Seth Zuihō Segall completed a PhD in clinical psychology from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale in 1977 and was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest in 2016. He served on the faculties of Southeast Missouri State University (1978), Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (1979-1980), the Yale University School of Medicine (1981-2009), and SUNY Purchase (2012-2017) and is a former Director of Psychology at Waterbury Hospital (1998-2004) and a former President of the New England Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (1998-2000). He is currently a contributing editor for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, a review editor for The Humanistic Psychologist, the science writer for the Mindfulness Research Monthly, and a teacher at the New York Insight Meditation Society.
His publications include Encountering Buddhism: Western Psychology and Buddhist Teachings (2003, SUNY Press), Buddhism and Human Flourishing: A Modern Western Perspective (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), and Living Zen: A Practical Guide to Balanced Existence (Rockridge, 2020) as well as articles for the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, The Humanistic Psychologist, H-Net, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and other periodicals.
Author’s page: www.sethzuihosegall.com. His blog, The Existential Buddhist (www.existentialbuddhist.com), publishes essays on Buddhist philosophy, meditation, art, politics, and literature.
The classical Greek, Buddhist, and Confucian philosophers laid the foundations for our present-day understandings of virtue, wisdom, and flourishing. Aristotle thought wise and virtuous people did more than live and endure; they thrived and flourished. And they didn’t just flourish alone; they flourished as members of families and communities.
To what degree are we, as a culture, successfully cultivating the conditions that foster individual and collective flourishing? How well are we transmitting the wisdom, values, and virtues that are the necessary perquisites for developing meaningful and satisfying lives—lives that harmonize personal fulfillment with concern for the welfare of others? There are important reasons to think we are falling far short of what is possible. First, many of the values reflected in television, film, magazines, social media, advertising and popular music—radical individualism, limitless self-expression, the pursuit of status, wealth, and celebrity, and the unbridled acquisition and consumption of material goods—are more conducive to lives of self-indulgence and self-absorption than lives that genuinely flourish. The triad of institutions that might conceivably push back against these values—family, church, and school—have been significantly weakened by a multiplicity of social, economic, and cultural factors, and may themselves be sources of outdated or dysfunctional values. Our failure to transmit the wisdom, values, and virtues that support genuine flourishing is one major factor contributing to our current cultural malaise—a malaise characterized by economic inequality, a “culture of narcissism,” increases in “deaths of despair” among the middle-aged, increases in diagnoses of anxiety and depression among the young, a failure to effectively meet the challenge of climate change, and a declining capacity to distinguish fact from fiction in matters of politics, science, and public health.
Our contemporary “culture war” reflects another values-related problem: the clash of divergent understandings of virtue, wisdom, and flourishing held by people whose identities and values are at least partly determined by their regional, ethnic, racial, religious, educational, professional, age-cohort, and social class affiliations. The “tribalization” and “affective polarization” resulting from the politicization of these divergent values threatens to tear societies apart.
The most pressing question of our day is whether we can arrive at a new operating consensus on virtue and truth—one shared by enough of the citizenry to permit democracy to function. We are, by historical necessity, a multicultural, pluralistic society and a new consensus can’t be based on the tenets of a single religious tradition. We need a solution that is, to at least to some extent, transcultural. The House We Live In: Virtue, Wisdom, and Pluralism outlines one possible approach to a transcultural solution: a reconsideration of values, virtues, wisdom, and flourishing grounded in the commonalities between the classical Greek, Buddhist, and Confucian traditions.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
The House We Live In [+–]
America’s initial vision was not one of a pluralistic multicultural democracy. Pluralistic multiculturalism was an ideal that emerged slowly over time—through the vicissitudes of the civil war and successive waves of immigration—and in the face of considerable resistance. This is the vision of America that was on the ballot in the presidential elections of 2008-2020. The cultural divide between traditionalists who view America through the lens of white, Christian, patriarchal values, and those who view it through the lens of pluralistic, secular, and multicultural values is the defining conflict of our era. This chapter emphasizes that America is already a de facto pluralistic multicultural society marked by divergent values and visions of what the good life entails. While the hallmark of liberal societies is their ability to tolerate pluralism in values and visions, America is struggling to arrive at a consensus on values that can help solve the pressing issues of the day: economic inequality, climate change, ecological degradation, racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination, and epidemics of deaths of despair in the middle aged and anxiety and depression in the young. The increasingly multicultural, secular nature of American society means that any newly emerging value system cannot be grounded in the teachings of a single religious tradition but must be congruent with the moral intuitions of people from diverse ethnic, religious, and racial groups. The culture war and the urgent need for a new consensus on values serve as the backdrop for the project of this book: a transcultural ethics uniquely suited to the needs of secular, pluralistic, multicultural democracies.
Chapter 2
Values arise out of social conditions and change with social circumstances, but that does not mean they are entirely socially contingent. They are also grounded in relatively unchanging aspects of human nature and the universal existential circumstances all human societies must address. Values can have core aspects that are universal to all cultures, as well as phenotypical expressions particular to a time and place. The chapter begins by exploring how values are internalized, reflected on, and refined. Values can be judged as good or bad according to the degree to which they promote individual and collective flourishing. Virtues are constellations of habit and value that promote and partially define flourishing. There can be no definitive list of the virtues, since virtues are partially dependent on the whole-way-of-life that constitutes a culture, but there can nevertheless be a core set of virtues that are common to all cultures—a common thread running through the philosophies of antiquity and the world religions of today. The chapter closely examines three ethical philosophies of antiquity—Aristotelean, Buddhist, and Confucian—to discern their commonalities and differences. It then proposes and examines seven universal moral virtues—courage, benevolence, conscientiousness, temperance, equanimity, truthfulness, and justice—in terms of their relation to flourishing.
Chapter 3
In addition to the moral virtues, Aristotle, the Buddha, and Confucius stressed the role of wisdom in human flourishing. Wisdom has three aspects. First, wisdom is a cultures’ fund of advice about how to live. Every culture has its unique treasure house of ethical resources passed down through the generations in its religious and philosophical texts, poetry, literature, myths, legends, folk tales, fables, and adages. Second, wisdom is a faculty of mind—a set of intellectual abilities that enable one to make good ethical judgments. Aristotle thought phronesis, or practical wisdom, was the intellectual virtue that made all the moral virtues possible—the ability to “hit the mark” and discern the appropriate thing to do in any situation. Practical wisdom is a “knowing how to” rather than a “knowing that.” The chapter explores nine dimensions of practical wisdom: 1) self-and social-awareness, 2) practical relationship know-how, 3) rules of inquiry and inference, and the abilities to 4) weigh multiple factors simultaneously, 5) think abstractly, 6) see things from other perspectives, 6) attend to the wisdom of the body, 7) observe one’s own mental processes, and 8) maintain an attitude of open inquiry. All of these contribute to the ability to make proper ethical judgments. Beyond phronesis or practical wisdom, there is also what Aristotle called sophia, or philosophical wisdom. Even when the great philosophers disagree, studying their contributions widens our perspectives, deepens our sense of awe and mystery about life, and makes us humble about what we think we know. They help us to cultivate a “philosophical attitude” which allows us to step back from our immediate experience, investigate it with curiosity, and bear untoward events with equanimity.
Chapter 4
Flourishing means living lives that are decent, meaningful, fulfilling, and admirable. This chapter examines seven dimensions of flourishing: relationship, accomplishment, aesthetics, meaning, whole-heartedness, integration, and acceptance. Flourishing lives realize all or most of these dimensions. Flourishing lives realize and satisfy individually appropriate sets of values with the caveat that they must be lived not just for oneself, but also for the sake of others. Higher levels of flourishing call for lives of open-ended inquiry into values rather than lives lived in accordance with dogma.
Chapter 5
Only Connect [+–]
America is in need of a new Great Awakening—an ethical renewal based on human flourishing. Belongingness, relationship, caring, and connection are as crucial to flourishing as individuality and freedom, but our culture emphasizes individualism at their expense. This overemphasis on individualism lies at the root of our current discontents. It is the mindset that led the conquistadors to subdue indigenous peoples everywhere and that permits corporations to heat up the atmosphere; pollute the soil, water, and air; kill off pollinating insects, birds, and fish; and raise domestic animals in inhumane factory farms. It has led to senseless American military interventions around the world and is the root cause of extreme economic inequality. It is the reason why over 800,000 Americans lost their lives to COVID, and is the main impediment to overcoming our history of racism. This chapter shows the implications of restoring the balance between individualism and relationality for domestic policy, foreign affairs, the environment, education, and communicating across the cultural divide. It emphasizes that while there are many ways we can fix the house we share together, only a new moral vision can allow us to make the changes we need.
