(NB: As a part of this post, you must also read the comments by Hennie below. 
)
In a conversation a couple of weeks ago with someone that has spent some time living in Indonesia, I learned that Bali has a much lower crime rate than the rest of Indonesia. The explanation* she offered for this was that Bali was predominately Hindu, and Hinduism includes a belief in karma. The rest of Indonesia is largely Islamic.
What is karma? I would suggest reading the Wikipedia page on karma for a primer. Or if that is too long, you could read just the three paragraphs extracted by Lisa (of South African adventure racing fame). For now, I’m going to be a bit ugly, and use a reductionistic/modernistic sound-byte definition:
The Law of Karma: Basically, what one does in the past affects one’s future: performing good deeds will result in good effects and performing bad deeds will result in bad effects.
Regular readers of this blog should hopefully immediately recognise this as an incarnation of “conventional wisdom”.
Is it a superstition?
If I wore my scientific reductionist hat, the same hat that encourages horrid sound-byte definitions of such concepts, I might argue there is no enforcer for karmic balance, no balancing force. The belief in karma, the belief that if I do terrible things something terrible will happen to me, is but humans assigning meaning to events and performing observational selection to the extent that it can help them believe there is some form of justice in life. It certainly sounds like superstition.
But I don’t like that hat. It is an ugly hat. I like my “memetic engineering” hat much more. I like working with an awareness of the meaning and the feeling, and the purpose of a meme, of an idea. Let karma be something less harshly defined, approach it with a mindset more aware of pre-modern culture, let the definition be a little more mystical. Distilling an idea like that into a reductionistic definition is already doing it an injustice.
Unreductionism
(Yea, I’m coining new words. So sue me.)
What does the idea of karma capture, in essence? Do good, then good will happen to you. It encourages the same actions that a rationality-based ethics built on the Golden Rule encourages. Both result in the same practices, even if they’re not build on the exact same beliefs.
The reductionistic approach takes the belief to a logical and harsh definition, to be empirically tested and scrutinised. The result is then typically “this cannot be tested” (if karma balance is believed to be achieved in another life, perhaps), or “there is no evidence to suggest this is true”. To get to that kind of conclusion, you’re embracing individualism. Look at the bigger picture…
Much of religious tradition is about enabling cooperation between individuals for the benefit of the collective, providing a survival benefit to the tribe. (Including superstition: some anthropological theories on the origins of certain superstitions suggest they are a solution to the trust problem: when humans developed language, for the first time in their history they had the ability to lie, an ability that could be used for personal gain. What ideas might have to develop in order to foster cooperation?) The greater truth, for the collective as a whole, is that karma most certainly does work. It just doesn’t necessarily come back to you, the individual — it’s positive benefits are for the community. And a well-functioning community should then have knock-on benefits for you, the individual.
Traditions that recognise karma balance isn’t necessarily found in this life, and solve the problem by postulating reincarnation, finding balance in “another life perhaps”, are much more correct than you might imagine. Doing a good deed can have a good benefit for those around you: those around you are the people living those “other lives”. The reincarnation belief is an instantiation of empathy: the other might as well be you, so treat them well! Consider us all connected, then a good deed certainly benefits us, connected. Besides that, people also do reciprocate, so there is sufficient “selfish” reasons enabling individualists to recognise the benefit.
Karma is then a tool enabling each individual to evaluate a “best” course of action for themselves, without needing to wonder about the other‘s choices and actions (much like free-market capitalism might dream of successfully reducing decisions with complex society-wide implications to an individual’s personal economic concerns). Karma could thus be considered a factorisation of collective best-behaviour.
There is another aspect to karma, and that’s the positive use of confirmation bias: do well, then expect to reap rewards, and you might be prone to recognise and emphasize all the good things that happen to you rather than the bad. (And if bad things happen, you might go dig through your past, looking for bad actions, and blame those for your current predicament. Thus, self-reinforcing good behaviour.)
I have no trouble appreciating the correlation between a belief in karma, and a low crime rate…
When it doesn’t work…
And I could have just ended the post. But you know me. I need to take this further, I need to think too much. Let’s revisit the suggestion that belief in karma explains why Bali has a lower crime rate than the rest of Indonesia:
If we wanted to find some degree of certainty about this particular explanation, we would have to consider alternative hypotheses and find a way to test which is more likely. Ideally, we would want many examples of this kind of correlation, to see if this holds for other groups and in other contexts as well. Already pretty much impossible to find enough data, but suppose we had many examples. That could establish whether a low crime rate and Hinduism can be associated. That does not guarantee causality though — it does not guarantee that it is Hinduism that causes the low crime rate. It might even be the other way round: a society with a low crime rate might provide an environment suitable to support beliefs in Hindu memes — i.e. the low crime rate might cause (or at least support) the beliefs.
In particular: in a well functioning society without a problem with crime, the traditional wisdom that is encapsulated in the concept of karma seems valid, whereas having a “Job experience”, where everything goes wrong despite impeccable behaviour serves as a dramatic counter-example to undermine such a belief. Translating the story of Job into a Hindu context (for now: minus belief reincarnation to redress imbalance in “this life”): Job’s friends could arguably be more prone to karma-belief, whereas Job discovered that it just doesn’t work that way. Might a tribe in the middle-east endure many more hardships, despite doing everything “right”, and therefore find it much harder to believe in a concept such as karma?
What about the “conventional wisdom” found in the prosperity gospel then?
Prosperity theology is the teaching that an authentic religious belief and behaviour in a person will result in their material prosperity.
It is in many ways similar to the conventional wisdom expressed by the karma idea, but “authentic religious belief and behaviour” can be much more demanding and all-encompassing than the general “good behaviour” required by karma. This ensures that prosperity gospel ideas can survive hardships better than the karma idea, as hardships that cannot be blamed on insufficient good deeds and attitude can still be blamed on insufficient religiosity by simply extending and exaggerating the religion’s demands. (For example, as explanation for why they were stuck under Roman oppression, ruled by the empire, the Pharisees suggested it was because of insufficient purity. If we could all live to the highest standards of purity… God will free us from Roman rule, his kingdom will come. And Jesus didn’t agree with the Pharisees, God’s kingdom is already at hand! But I digress. As always.)
This is pure speculation though. Combined with a belief in reincarnation and “wrongs committed in my previous life might explain suffering in my current one”, the whole meme complex can become much more tenacious and pernicious. For that reason, I really shouldn’t speculate as to whether the South African economic context has any effect on how sustainable belief in karma might be. So… the little table below is in a separate section that really has nothing to do with this post.
Rough economic comparison between Indonesia and South Africa
(If you’re a South African:) Did this post make you wonder about how the economic situation of Indonesia compares with our own? I did, so I took a look at the CIA World Factbook. South Africa seems much, much worse:
| Indonesia | South Africa | |
| Unemployment rate (2007 est.): | 9.1% | 24.3% |
| Population below poverty line (2006, 2000 est. respectively): | 17.8% | 50% |
| Household income or consumption by percentage share (2000): | lowest 10%: 3.6% highest 10%: 28.5% |
lowest 10%: 1.4% highest 10%: 44.7% |
(NB warnings such as: “The quality of surveys is improving with time, yet caution is still necessary in making inter-country comparisons.”)
While I can think of two different ways to interpret that last statistic, I think it means the top 10% of our population gets 44.7% of the country’s income, and the bottom 10% of our population gets only 1.4%: we have a much bigger gap between rich and poor.
Um, anyway, enough randomness. I hope some of this was interesting or thought provoking to you. Oh, and do point out any errors, I’m not giving this post a final proofread.
8 responses so far ↓
1 Hennie // Oct 30, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Hey Hugo, thought I’d have a go at this.
I agree with you that, defined and accepted literally, the concept of karma may be seen as an example of conventional wisdom. I’d like to write a bit from my own experience and understanding, albeit from a Buddhist perspective. Perhaps I can add to what you’ve written. First, my disclaimer, this is a bit long, so bare with me. Also, sorry if this sounds a bit too preachy!
As I understand it, the concept of karma is more of a statement of “widely” held belief, a relative truth as opposed to an absolute truth. By widely, I mean you find it in various forms in various cultures (eg., as you pointed out, Prosperity theology is closely tied to this).
At a deeper level, karma is a statement about our daily lives as we normally perceive them, not what happens “after we die”. The literal interpretation is a handy way to get people to start thinking about this problem. It’s like a riddle. Birth and death is what happens in any given moment. We are born into the present moment and “instantly” it/we pass away. Afterwards, we feel a nostalgic longing for good times, and relief at the passing of bad times (only, inevitably, for them to return later!).
So we start to wonder, what do I do to make the good times stay or to return? (Good times can also include the good of the community.) What can I do to make things even better? Sometimes, just deciding which actions are good and which actions are evil keeps us up at night. Many times, we find ourselves hopeless, thinking there’s nothing we can do to change things for the better.
What is moral action then? There’s an old Zen story: (I paraphrase from translation by K. Sekida)
Emperor Wu was a devout Buddhist. He built many temples, supported monks, and set monks to translate the sutras into Chinese. He himself was deeply versed in Buddhist scriptures and put on a sacred golden robe to give lectures on the sutras. It is said that on that occasion, flowers rained down from heaven and changed the earth to gold. Upon meeting the monk Bodhidharma, the emperor asked: “I have erected temples and supported monks; what virtue will come out of it?”, fully expecting to hear the reply “Great virtue!”. Instead, Bodhidharma replied simply: “No virtue”.
We don’t hold it against a lion for chasing down and brutally killing antelope. We might consider it a nasty state of affairs, but it is that creature’s nature. We wouldn’t even think about expecting a rock to move out of the way on its own accord for our convenience.
Humans tend to think about themselves as separate from their surroundings, which is true in some sense, yet looking closely we realise there is really no separation between us and reality. We have our own nature, part of the whole of reality, and we cannot help but to express our nature. That is, after all, what we mean by the concept! So, rather than expecting some return (the “good” or the “bad”), just _act_. How can we expect to act correctly if we’re so wrapped in our own agendas, “good” or “bad”, that we don’t see clearly what is happening right now?
You sit down with a friend in a coffee shop and the waiter arrives at your table, what do you do? (I order coffee). Someone in the queue in front of you forgets their wallet at the till in Pick ‘n Pay, what do you do? (I call after them). Someone tells you you’re being a silly Buddhist again, what do you do? (I laugh with them).
Where’s the control? Won’t we just end up acting impulsively, giving in to every base desire we have? I think that merely being worried about this already says a lot about your nature. Won’t we just end up ignoring the needs of others? Ditto. So, you’ve been spending too much time on the internet writing a reply to a blog post, what do you do?
2 Hugo // Oct 30, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Excellent!
I’m going to have to read that again and think more about it, it seems a bit Buddhisty.
I’m now wondering, “how do I turn my Buddhist friend into a blogger?” Care to make the occasional guest post? 
I mean, I could just duplicate your comment into a post, and say “voilá! Guest post!”
Which is the literal interpretation? The reductionistic one that I ran with in my post? The “hrmph, typical westerner, such lack of nuance” approach?
Did I build a straw-man? Or did I just run with a typical “literal interpretation”? (For a while I actually mentioned “straw-man” about my sound-byte definition, but I see that didn’t last.)
3 Hugo // Nov 2, 2008 at 11:01 am
Just a comment about Zen below Peter Rollins’ blog posts that I felt like sharing here:
http://peterrollins.net/blog/?p=82#comment-2126
4 Hennie // Nov 2, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Hey Hugo. Sorry for the late reply, I got sidetracked by French and hydroponics of all things.
Also, I was typing this when you posted you newest comment/link. Maybe that could be the standard disclaimer. I’d like to add a parable that stuck with me, it goes like this:
I couldn’t find my original source, so that was grabbed from here . So, with that as my disclaimer…
I can’t really comment on the way lay people in Hindu and Buddhist traditions perceive their religion, but with this being the first paragraph of my reply you can already see I’m going to try anyway
This is going to follow a bit of a convoluted path, but I’ll get there eventually, promise!
I read a book by Karen Armstrong called “The Great Transformation” a few months ago (highly recommended!) and remembered about something I read there. The idea of karma was very revolutionary when first conceived. At the time, religious practice in the region (which I think included at least the Indian subcontinent) focussed on the fashioning of an immortal self by means of making the appropriate sacrifices and performing the correct rituals. As I recall, there were even “mending” rituals that were meant to repair a ritual once someone had made a mistake. In summary, religious life was focussed almost solely on the external world.
The idea of karma changed all that. The idea was that your immortal self was built, not through ritual, but striving to do good, striving to act without selfish desire. Performing bad deeds, motivated by your desire, doomed you to live another life on earth, never to achieve real contentment. This is because the self you constructed was tied to the earth by desiring earthly things. As for one who is liberated from desire: “Brahman he is and to Brahman he goes”.
There was a clear shift from the external to the internal. The idea of karma caused (some) people to really examine themselves. They went from “have I obeyed the rules and made the sacrifices as perscribed” to “wasn’t I being selfish just then?”.
I like a phrase that Armstrong uses: “spiritual technology”. Perhaps you may call this a part of the memetic engineering toolbox? Concepts, even soundbites, like these allows one to nudge people along, to examine their approach to the life more deeply (Fowler’s stages of faith development are a useful model). This might seem cynical, but in my mind it seems to be an honest attempt to describe to others what is invariably a more nuanced worldview.
It’s no surprise that we find teachers making use of paradoxes to express complex ideas in small packages. They usually indicate an attempt to make you re-evaluate your attitudes and conceptions (of course, sometimes people really are just full of s**t
). Call it a reality check, like looking carefully at a digital watch in a dream and noticing that the display doesn’t make any sense at all. The point is that people don’t really learn anything by being told the answer directly, they have to learn to apply their own minds. After all, it can be a fatal mistake to keep looking at the answers at the back of your maths textbook while studying and working towards those because, come the exams, there are no final answers given. The mental tension followed by the moment of realisation, the “A-ha!” moment, is a powerful vehicle for change. I was very pleased to hear “enlightenment” being rendered in Afrikaans as “verligting” (literally “relief”, but also “Renaissance” (rebirth) or (at least in the Dutch sense?) “lighting”)
(warning, now I _really_ start speculating!) Fast forward a few centuries and we find that the idea of karma became almost universally accepted. Accepted to such an extent that little critical reflection was invested in its analysis by some. So this “spiritual technology” became an end in itself. We find very shallow interpretations flourishing, even amongst those of religious bent in the population. Basically, conventional wisdom finds expression again, just in an entirely different form. You might hear a straw man muttering: “So you’re from that caste are you? Surely you’ve done something to deserve it, either in this life or the last.” That sort of thinking is really no better than blaming someone’s lacking sacrifices for their sickness. Unfortunately, each generation must go, unavoidably, through the same stages of development that their parents did, and taking ideas for granted is so much easier if few people handle them with sufficient introspection.
So, finally, this is what I think I meant by the “literal” interpretation. Ironically, the quick off the mark rationalist judgement is somewhat similar to that of a segment of unreflecting believers (probably still involves straw men though). It’s a whole lot more difficult to dismiss such interpretations offhand when your social network seems to be gunning for that very same absurdity. This seems to happen when people never come into contact with good teachers who actually monitor their progress and know just how to poke at them as individuals to get them moving in the right direction. Or worse, their teachers are themselves clinging to unsound beliefs. Perhaps it is best to treat the teachings of a religion as invitations to introspection, rather than statements of belief. Maybe there’s meta-teaching to be had here?
PS: Hugo, thanks for the complement
Feel free to use the comments as you see fit.
PPS: Not too much proofing unfortunately.
5 Hugo // Nov 2, 2008 at 8:54 pm
Great! Nice links, nice thoughts, they connect quite well with the things I’ve been discovering in things I’ve been reading lately. And yes, both the literalists and the “rationalists” tend to interpret scripture in the same way.
6 Johan Swarts // Jun 1, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Not liking a hat doesn’t make it untrue.
7 Hugo // Jun 1, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Of course.
Some days you need a fully functional hat, when the most important thing is to survive the sun, or the cold… other times you’re going out to a party, a masked ball, to have a good time, then you pick flair. Without that, you don’t enjoy yourself as much, you don’t get to mix with the rest of the masked crowd.
Analogies. When I’ve never even been to a masked ball. I’m asking for trouble.
8 Hugo // Jun 1, 2009 at 3:29 pm
(For others reading, and Afrikaans-capable, some context – Johan’s blog: http://gormendizer.co.za/2009/02/09/reinkarnasie-n-stomende-pot-k4ksic/
)
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