Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 420: The Elephant in the Meditation Room | Christopher Ford

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

Today’s episode is the culmination of a long search to find a countervailing force: a Buddhist Trump supporter. This search was born out of the Buddhist impulse to find the other side. What is talked about as cultivating non-attachment to views and also called “beginner’s mind.” As you will hear, after a lot of searching, we finally found our person. Christopher Ford is a longtime Republican who worked for Trump (albeit indirectly) at the State Department. Ford wrote a pair of fascinating and provocative articles for the Buddhist magazine Lion’s Roar. One was entitled, Zen and the Moral Courage of Moderation. The other was called, The Elephant in the Meditation Room. Christopher Ford is a lay chaplain in the Soto tradition of Zen Buddhism. His teacher is Roshi Joan Halifax, who has been on this show a couple of times and is herself a longtime progressive. From January 2018 until January 2021,he served at the state dept as Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation. He’s also worked at the National Security Council, and as a congressional staffer. This episode explores:Ford’s argument for a Buddhist conservatismFord’s experience in the Trump administration and his assessment of our current political stateThe personal tools Ford recommends using in day-to-day life, some of which go right to the issue of not being attached to our views Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/christopher-ford-420See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, today's episode is the culmination of a long search throughout the Trump years when pretty much every Buddhist I know was bemoaning either publicly or privately the general state of affairs. We decided we wanted to find a countervailing force, a Buddhist Trump supporter. As a journalist, I've been trained to always find the other side. I believe this is a Buddhist impulse as well.

In Buddhism, they talk a lot about cultivating non-attachment to views and also what's called beginner's mind. I don't want to claim that I'm perfect at actually taking in opposing views in either my professional or personal life, but I definitely aspire. Anyway, as you're going to hear, after a lot of searching, we finally found our person. To be clear, my guest today won't actually say whether he voted for Trump, but he is a long-time Republican who did work for Trump, albeit indirectly, at the State Department. Although as you'll hear, he quit after the events of January 6th. We found this guest because he wrote a pair of fascinating and provocative articles for the Buddhist magazine Lions Roar. One was entitled, Does Buddhism Mean You Have to Be a Liberal?

The other was called, and I love this, The Elephant in the Meditation Room. to be a liberal. The other was called, and I love this, the elephant in the meditation room. Christopher Ford is a lay chaplain in the Soto tradition of Zen Buddhism. His teacher is Rochie Joan Halifax, who's been on this show a couple of times and is herself a long-time progressive, so that must be an interesting relationship. Ford is also a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He's a graduate of Harvard Yale at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar from January 2018 until January 2021. He served at the State Department as Assistant Secretary of State

for International Security and Non-Proliferation. He's also worked at the National Security Council and as a Congressional Stafford. In this conversation, we talk about his argument for a Buddhist conservatism, his experience in the Trump administration, and his assessment of our current political state, and the personal tools Ford recommends using in day-to-day life, some of which go right to the issue of not being attached to your views. We'll get started with Christopher Ford right after this.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm all

One word spelled out Okay on with the show Hey y'all is your girl Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress singer and entrepreneur on my new podcast baby this is Kiki Palmer I'm asking friends family and experts the questions that are in my head like it's only fans only bad Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast.

What's up, kids? What's up, kids? Christopher Ford, welcome to the show. Pleasure, thanks for having me. So I read a quote from you recently where you said that you've sometimes felt like a bit of a zoo animal being a conservative in Buddhist and meditation circles. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? I would add to that and a Buddhist in conservative hawkish foreign policy and

national security circles. And neither of those things things is quite, I think, what people necessarily expect. So I hope it's a good zoo animal. You know, there are different things. You don't want to be sort of the one that they all stand around and go, oh my god, look at that. I hope it's an interesting, like, you know, sort of maybe point of interest in fascination. But, you know, it's not for me to say, it could be either one, I suppose. But you know, it's not for me to say it could be either one I suppose. You're rather be like a beautiful snow leopard than some animal, you know, hurling feces at the wall. I was going to say mommy, mommy, he's throwing poop, right? I mean, you don't really want to be that one, although, you know, nature is as nature is, I suppose. I really want to hear, I want to let the audience hear you describe sort of how you

to hear, I want to let the audience hear you describe sort of how you envision conservatism through a Buddhist lens and just to set the table a little bit. You wrote an article before the 2016 election with the amazing headline, The Elephant in the Meditation Room, and the sub headline was, does Buddhism mean you have to be a liberal? And your answer is no. So can you just lay out your basic thesis about how Buddhism informs your conservatism? Sure. One of the three tenants of the particular lineage that I've been studying in revolves around the idea of what they describe is not knowing, which is I think a way for Buddhists as a practice to accustomed themselves to standing a little bit clear from fiery enthusiasm in the sense that, you know, I think meditation encourages

us to have at least a little bit of distance and detachment, even from the things that get our own blood boiling. And that's a really healthy instinct when it comes to meditation practice and engaging with humans and finding ways to be compassionately engaged with the world. That's something that I see Buddhism as one of the many things that Buddhism teaches, whether it's Buddhist or not, I suppose, really any good meditation practice encourages a little bit of that, you know, stop for a moment, take a breath, recenter yourself, and use that as sort of the foundation for engaging with everything else that one has to engage with. And I think at least traditional conservatism can offer some of that sensibility in the policy

arena as well. I mean, I think those of us who are considered to be really traditional conservatives often bring a, almost a, a burky and kind of sensibility to, to policy questions to be. A little suspicious of those who have their fiery enthusiasm for policy outcomes. So, you know, I was like, well, be careful. The road to hell is paid with good intentions. We should be thoughtful and prudent about moving forward and not sort of rush headlong over the precipice because you don't know whether there is a happy green field of good policy outcomes waiting there or a giant crevasse that you didn't bother to look for before plunging forward. And I think some of that skepticism of easy answers and a commitment to continued,

you know, if necessary, just plotting forward on hard paths that practice can teach. I think that's an important thing that conservatives can bring to the policy environment and being a little bit of a break to the the fevers of others. And that's that's probably a good thing. And I see a lot of I see there there's some some synergies there perhaps or or parallelisms if nothing else. Can you define Birkian? Birk, an English parliament who is best remembered sort of an icon in conservative circles for his speaking out against the French Revolution and being worried about how the noble principles that

it began with worrying that what might happen and predicting the danger that as many revolutions do, that they will sort of turn upon themselves. And in effect, he sort of understood the incipients of the terror, as it were. The Berkian sensibilities, I sort of think of as being kind of that little voice of, okay, that makes sense, but don't get carried away. Take it easy, cool down, take a breath, don't go crazy here, don't become so entranced or bewitched by your good idea or your right answer that you discover yourself thinking that that right answer is so right that it is an alter upon which everything else should be sacrificed in its pursuit. And I think

Burkian conservatives bring to the table that sensibility. And it means that we sometimes have to spar against people on our side of the aisle too. I think bringing that kind of a Burkian mode, if you will, to the policy arena is often really helpful. And with a bit of luck and prevent enthusiasm from tipping over into, there's a fine line between passion, which we need, right? I mean, we need to care about the world. Passion helps fuel that. It's the energy for doing good things and accomplishing hopefully things that are they trying to make the world a better place. But passion, you have to be careful not to slip over that sort of quiet line into fanatical zeal because that ends up being more destructive than constructive. And I think a Berkian side of spectacles can help guard

against that to some degree. But I could see how there would be another fine line between passion and passivity that if you take not knowing too far this intellectual humility that is certainly a part of, as I understand it, the Buddhist tradition, if you take that too far, you could end up, you know, sitting in the lotus position and doing absolutely nothing. Quite right. And it's when I think a good Buddhist practice looks for an Aristotelian mean between disengagement and engagement. Compassion requires, and service of compassion requires caring about things. You can't just reach that. I don't give a damn conclusion. That's fair. And having that care drives what you're trying to do. But I think if you grab onto things too much, maybe it's like running a steeple chase carrying an egg.

If you hold it too loosely, you're going to drop the darn thing and the whole thing. You won't get the egg to the destination. But if you grip it fanatically tight, you're going to break it. So you have to find that I'm shifting terms again. The gold is bad. It's not too hot and not too cold. And we don't get an easy formulaic bright line answer to that. We have to just sort of live that that tap dance, if you will, on an ongoing basis. And I see that's what practice is. And I think having something of that sensibility in the policy world is, I hope at least very useful. But I would imagine that your conservatism, and I don't know this for sure, so you'll tell me, I would imagine that your conservatism, and I don't know this for sure, so you'll tell me that your conservatism goes beyond just a burky and slash Buddhist intellectual humility

to an actual embrace of some policies. So off the top of my head, when I think of conservative, the big conservative pushes of the last couple of decades, I think of the Iraq war, I think of tax cuts, I think of trying to limit access to abortion, I think of trying to reimagine immigration and social security. So there are lots of big bold conservative efforts that I'm just rattling off the top of my head that I'm wondering where you must have to take a stand and some way on some of these. Oh, certainly. I was just simply trying to identify the ways in which what I think I was a conservative

sensibility overlaps with Buddhism, at least most obviously to me. As a conservative, I have had all sorts of policy positions over time. I've been working professionally in Washington since the mid 1990s. I may come at them from more traditional policy reasons of thinking rightly or wrongly that X is the right way to approach a particular type of problem. I think the Buddhism may be sort of leavens that, and it's so almost a check on myself to some degree as well. I mean, I tend to come at things from a policy perspective, from a more, you know, a more or less hawkish perspective, more of a free market perspective. And although in social issues, I tend to be more in the more in the libertarian side of things. But usually people have employed

me in Washington to work on the foreign policy and national security. So my domestic views are not super relevant from a professional perspective. So staying on your hawkishness, I'm curious, how do you understand that within the framework of Buddhism? I think there's a common conception, and it may be a misconception that that any force is out of bounds if you're a real Buddhist. That is a very common perception. I think myself, it is a misperception. It certainly hasn't been the position of Buddhist societies historically. I think some of this may be an artifact of the fact that in the West, in particular, we, you know, at least amongst the Conver community and certainly myself as an example, I think the stereotype

is probably strongest there. That, you know, Buddhism entails necessarily a kind of rigid pacifism, and I don't think historically that's been the case where societies have been Buddhists, there have been Buddhist leaders for a long long long time of some of the very iconic ones, Ashoka from the, I think the Mauryan dynasty, if I recall correctly, in India, who is, I believe, the first actual ruler of a state around Pyrrto, you actually converted to Buddhism and is remembered in the Buddhist community for the last, you know, couple of thousand years as a sort of a paragon of Buddhist virtue as a king. And his successor's understood statecraft and not to know that it has its needs. And to some degree, you betray something and your stewardship of the interests and welfare

of the people that, in his case, he ruled if you are utterly ignorant or refuse to engage in any way with the politics of force and statecraft, it's a challenging world. And the challenge for a ruler is to have to be compassionate and forceful in the right degree. It's that Aristotelian mean again. So the challenge is how to live out compassion in a way that is appropriately strong in order to preserve interests that are important to preserve the well-being and the safety and indeed the lives of people who, if you know,

for one is at least temporarily a steward of the public interest. That's, there's no easy bright-line way to do that, but I think it's that toggling back and forth along the continuum that is the fundamental challenge of statecraft. And as I say, at Buddhist societies, historically, have never pretended away that that is a challenge that needs to be grappled with. And even to this day, I mean, you point out in some of your writings that the Dalai Lama explained that in his words, wrathful, forceful action, as long as it has a compassionate motivation can be appropriate. And then after the death of Osama bin Laden, apparently the Dalama justified that as an appropriate countermeasure.

And here too, I think sensibility makes a difference. It doesn't make all the difference. And having your heart in the right place doesn't necessarily, I'm not suggesting that excuses doing any damn thing. But I think what he has been able to point to and and it goes back in his career I think quite a long way I recall reading a story of him writing a letter to Tibetan government officials as the Chinese communists were closing in in 1959 and he had just the Dalai Lama had just escaped to exile and wrote a letter back to them. They'd asked for advice, and his advice was to, he told them to take up position, positions as generals in what remained in the Tibetan government, and to try to negotiate with the Chinese Communist forces to preserve Tibet's

freedom, but that if that were not possible to meditate on it wholeheartedly, and he left it to that to struggle with, as a practice, in a sense, to struggle with the call of whether to be peaceful or raffle in that case. And he clearly did not rule out raffle. And that's what it doesn't mean that any raffle answer is the right one, right? I mean, we have, we face ethical challenges of toggling back and forth between extremes like that in our daily lives, in a much smaller way, all the time. And we struggle our way forward trying to find the humane and decent thing to do. But that doesn't always mean letting everything go and not taking a stand. Sometimes, sometimes one must, but I think it also matters where one's heart is when one does. Coming up, Christopher talks about his experience in the Trump administration, his decision to resign

after January 6th, and his view that moderation can be strategically advantageous. That is after this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting.

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So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts, you can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Let's go back to your article free 2016 election, your op-ed and in lion's war magazine laying out to your vision of a Buddhist inflected conservatism. I'm curious, after having written that, did you go on to vote for Donald Trump?

I keep my voting decisions to myself. I did work for him. And tried to bring a little bit of what I hoped. I imagined that a thoughtful Birken would bring to the policy, I mean, I hope that was useful in some respect. I know I occasionally made some animations amongst folks on my side. As I think I mentioned a few minutes ago, I think having that kind of sensibility,

it's not always appreciated because, especially in this day and age, on both the right and the left, I think our political system is not knowing it's not its problem. It's not paralyzed by self-doubt. No one in the political arena right now has the slightest doubt that where they are coming from it apparently is absolutely the right thing to do. It is so transcendently right that the other side shouldn't just lose the policy debate.

The other side should be driven from the field and their villages burned down, and the earth salted behind them. That seems to be the modern political psychology. And that seems to be, to be, really toxic and problematic one from the respective of not knowing. And let me put it this way. On both sides of the aisle, there's no shortage of folks who never came across a good idea that they didn't conclude had to be done stupidly or recklessly.

There's a lot to be said for taking the good idea that's wrapped in, I don't know, wrapped in a shroud of nuttiness with sharp spikes of insanity poking out of it. There's a lot to be said for like chipping off the sharp spikes of insanity so that you can actually move the good idea forward. That's not being disloyal.

That's actually being true to the agenda in a sense, but it's not always appreciated as such. Donald Trump is a lot of things. I don't think intellectually humble is one of them. So he does not, as far as I can tell, embody the kind of conservatism that I'm hearing you describe. Did you have any qualms about going to work for him? And just to be clear, it's not like you were interacting with Donald Trump on the daily you were working in a pretty specific foreign policy realm, but nonetheless, you were, quote unquote, working for him.

Was that an issue for you in any way given how you envisage conservatism? Yes, I know. I mean, I think it was a more extreme version of what I think any political appointee policy, person, faces to some extent, and always has in the sense that I mean, I've never, I used to have, I don't say a lot now because you might offend someone because it might be taken as a finger point, but I used to always say that I'd never met anybody in all my years in Washington who, you know, 100% agreed fully with absolutely everything the boss did. You know, it's a complicated world that's not true in any context and, you know, everyone's got to

have an idea in their head of when they walk and when they don't. I didn't myself get sucked in to anything that forced me to jump across that line until the very end. I did speed up my resignation. We were all leaving anyway, of course, in early January, but I had submitted my letter resignation on the 4th of January and gave it a couple of weeks to spool things down, make sure my staff is taken care of, make sure transition is going as well as I could and get out of there. But after the 6th of January and a day of soul searching,

I resubmitted my letter and walked off the door immediately that same afternoon. So I mean, I guess I did come across online at the very end, but it was the very end. So I don't want to take too much credit for that. There was a fairly costless decision to leave two weeks early, but after the 6 sixth in the capital, I couldn't stay. After resigning, you wrote another op-ed

in the Lions' Roar magazine, Zen, and the moral courage of moderation. And you laid out a lot of the things you've said thus far in this discussion, you're kind a lot of the things you've said thus far in this discussion, you're kind of diagnosis of where we are as a culture with this lack of not knowing on both sides. And I think I believe you called this extremity bias. And I'm curious, well, A, if you've got, if you want to say more about that, the floor

is yours. And perhaps more importantly, be where do we go from here? How can we, as people listening to you, be better citizens to have more intellectual humility? I don't profess to have any kind of a magical answer. I mean, part of me wants to say that it's nice to advocate. It's harder to model. And I think that may be one of the things that practice as a Buddhist could help encourage us to learn. I would like to envision a future in which after a few years or less, hopefully, it's not

just that people have been preached to about, hey, hold on, this isn't the way that we should be going. We need to learn a bit more sort of, youawareness and humility and prudence in policy. But I think also to reinforce, even for those who have an agenda, that sometimes that actually is the best way to pursue your agenda. There's a friend of mine who likes to say, well, if you want it bad, you get it bad. And I think to some degree, there is a practical lesson as well as just a moral one.

And it may be that the practical lesson is one that is perhaps more appealing to the entrenched political camps. If you really want to move whatever your particular agenda is forward, it's very possible, and I think likely, that doing it with a sort of fever pitch intensity and devil take the hindmost blindly charging forward without fear of consequences kind of approach, that may be very satisfying for a kind of virtue signaling perspective because you're doing

God's work or whatever it may be. But even from a pragmatic policy perspective, it doesn't always actually get you where you need to go. I think what the Trump administration will probably find, it doesn't always actually get you where you need to go. I think what the Trump administration will probably find that isn't a number of areas where they might have been able to have more staying power in the policy arena. There may be things where by virtue of plowing forward in a really unreflective way, they may have squandered the chance to come up with Answers that have more staying power rather than ones that are you know, if someone comes in and a Couple of years later flips the lights which and turns it all off or goes a hundred and eight degrees in a different direction One of the things that I'm proudest of in the administration was the degree to which a whole bunch of folks and I was only one of many many people working on this we're able to

bring about a very significant shift in U.S on this, we're able to bring about a very significant shift in US strategy with respect to sort of great power competitive dynamics, particularly with respect to China. And the Biden administration has been very consistent with that approach. I mean, yes, differences in tone and tenure and all the usual flavor distinctions that one expects from policy changes in Washington, that's fine. But the United States has done what I'm frankly with a rapidity that I find really surprising, has made a very real change in how it approaches sort of strategic competitive posture, these of each China in the world, that the kind of thing that traditionally takes a long time for the

ship of state, the big bureaucracy, the big super tanker to change its course bearing. And it's done in a way that has, we've ended up with a policy consensus across the board. And it has staying power by virtue of that very bipartisanship. And there are, you know, I'm sure there were things that the Trump administration could have done more of to make stick better. Had it been had a little bit more, a little bit more not knowing in the leavening, if you will. And I think that's a lesson that I think a lot of policymakers can probably learn if you want your policy to stick just, you know, four years. There is value in engaging with, you know, building buy-in, at least to some degree,

with those who don't see things exactly as you do. But there's a lot about policy that is messy and contingent and morally unsatisfying because it involves compromise. But to some degree, it's that degree of contingency and compromise, which can, it does not always, but which can ensure that it actually works and is adopted and stays in place. So if you care about long-term agenda, rather than just virtue signaling in the short-term, you have to be thinking, I think, a little bit more prudential, burky and kind of mode. Coming up, Christopher talks about practical tools for bringing Buddhist practice into everyday life, even in the midst of extremely stressful days.

That's after this. Let's talk about you do have some interesting tools for individuals, all of us who are sort of operating in this political environment, whether in the United States or anywhere else, because it seems like many, many developed countries are dealing with and developing countries are dealing with political polarization. So you've got really interesting ideas for how we can approach current events. One of them is you call it stop check. Can you describe what that is?

Sure. My meditation practice largely fell apart when I was in government. With some helpful nudging from Rochie Jones, I've actually restarted again recently, but it went down the tubes pretty early on. But I don't feel like I entirely abandoned practice in the sense that I found myself therapeutically engaging in what I described as stop check to myself. Just every once in a while in the

middle of some kind of a crazy frenetic course of events, just a quick stop and, you know, a couple of breaths, a couple of, I just kind of recentering. Usually people weren't around when I do this. It would be between meetings or whatever else it would be, but it kind of recentering loosely analogous to what one would do in Zazan and sitting meditation where, you know, the monkey mind gets going and you start thinking about whether you've responded to that guy's email or what you got to do tomorrow morning or whether you left the refrigerator door open or whatever it might be. And you need to stop that, go back to your breath just for a second.

But the ability to take even just a quick moment and back out and re-center and breathe. I found useful to some degree at least, and keeping me from going completely nuts in the course of a stressful government day. Not a dramatic solution, it's not a miracle answer, but even taking a little bit of an edge off over time, I think helps keep you more in the place that you need to be in order to wisely navigate know, sort of wisely navigate back and forth between two ends of the Aristotelian spectrum and find that mean, which is the right answer for whatever

you happen to be, what you're happy to be knitting. Yeah, that sounds absolutely right to me, and I don't believe in miracle answers. Another tactic that you recommend is something called structured doubt. There's the old saying from Helmut von Mokey, the elder, from the Prussian General Staff, and the Franco-Prussian War back in 1870 that no plan survives first contact. In other words, you can have a great plan, but the world is complicated. In the moment, your brilliant plan hits the reality of the first engagement. It's going to go out the window. But that doesn't mean that and hits the reality of the first engagement is gonna go out the window. But that doesn't mean that planning is useless.

Planning is useful in the sense that it gets you thinking about alternatives and to help you acculture yourself to the conceptual agility of responding to something new. And structured doubt is maybe sort of a way to just institutionalize that a little bit. It's like, okay, what are the assumptions behind, I clearly think that whatever I'm trying to do is the right answer, but what lies behind that and what if I'm wrong? Can I build,

is there an answer from a policy choice from the perspective of how does my preferred outcome stand up? I mean, I hope that it stands up well against your optimal fact pattern on the ground, right? If all of my assumptions are correct, I do really hope that what I'm saying is the right answer, because if not, I'm not very clever. But you should also be thinking about what if my assumptions aren't correct and how well does this particular choice stand up against them? And it may be worthwhile, especially because we really don't know what the future is going to bring. The world is a very stubborn thing. It loves to surprise our assumptions. I guess what I try to think I was like,

can you do that in your own day-to-day encounter with people or with whatever your daily stressors are and reel that aperture in just down to, how do I deal with this person in this meeting? And if you still got to make decisions, not making decision-hairs to decisions, so this is not a license to fail to make decisions, but it's an encouragement to self-awareness and humility

and agility because you may need to redirect. It's a way of trying to think about these things through the prism of just how your frontal cortex bumps up against the rest of the world in a really immediate sense. Nothing grand or high-falutin. Yeah, but I think this makes this potentially really useful, especially as you in those moments when you say, you know, you're sort of reeling, reeling in the aperture, just getting down to something very specific, humdrum mundane,

and you're thinking about, okay, how am I going to deal with this person? on mundane and you're thinking about, okay, how am I going to deal with this person? You do want to imagine, and I think this is the appropriate application of structured doubt, you do want to imagine that how you think it's going to go, and then you want to imagine, perhaps my imagining is wrong and how else could it go? Or else you're likely to be surprised in a bad way. Yeah, and if you're very lucky, things will work out exactly as you want and you're going to be the hero. But, you know, it's not the usual outcome.

There's always some wrinkle, right? And the more fixated we are upon the knowings of assuming that we've got this on control, the less ready we'll be for some of the crap that we've got this on control. The less ready will be for some of the crap that's going to for sure happen. I have the, I've mentioned this before in the show that I have these sort of Buddhist inflected communications coaches I've been working with for three years who really helped me sort of change my interpersonal communication style, and they have a concept called provisional language, which means that when you're making statements, you want to include lots of provisional language indicating that you really don't know how things are going to turn out, or you don't know

what the causes and conditions are in the mind of another person behind their behavior. So perhaps you did this because you felt X, Y, and Z instead of, oh, you did this because you assumed X, Y, and Z really having baking into your language, a, I need to lecture humility and understanding of impermanence and entropy. And the concept there is that actually just by learning to talk that way, it changes the way you think. I think that's a really wise point. And I think it changes the way you think the other direction too. Speaking in certainties, I think conduces to felt certainty, and especially to the decrease of that unjustified, that's a serious liability. To state the blazingly obvious and other gigantic concept and practice in the Buddhist world is compassion.

I think back to George W. Bush running in 2000 as a compassionate conservative. I think the critique from folks on the left is that conservatism lacks compassion because you guys aren't willing to spend money on social programs or you don't want to take away people's guns or whatever. How is conservatism compassionate in your conception of conservatism? Well, I would say that it's compassionate in this or can be. I certainly wouldn't want to sit to characterize it as always being anything, but I think it is capable of being compassionate to some degree in the sense that it is compassionate to be stern sometimes. It is compassionate to take a stand and to say no or to be forceful sometimes. I mean, those who are, you know, parents, I think, recognize this perhaps more immediately,

than at least I used to before being a parent. But, you know, it's not truly compassionate to be utterly indulgent of someone who you care about and who is in your care. It's not truly compassionate, even just as a friend. What Plutarch said that a true friend is not a flatterer. If I'm truly your friend, I don't just, yes, man, every damn thing you say and agree with you unquestionally and feed you whatever BS line, you know, massages you can go at the moment. If I truly care about you, I sometimes need to tell you some hard truths. And I see that sternness is actually being compassionate. Now, not that you can't, you know, all of these things

can easily, anything can slide over into, you know, across some line into pathology. But I think there's a, you know, a, a compassion without some degree of willing to be stern in appropriate circumstances isn't really, I mean, that's a good betrayal of ones. It's a betrayal of the purpose of compassion to be to help to be a maleerative. And I think compassionate conservatism, these aspires to be appropriately stern, where that needs to be done. done, being uninterested in helping others is a failing here. But being interested, it is sometimes necessary to be what could be perceived to be harsh. And parenting, maybe the clearest example of this kind of thing. But sometimes you guys say, no, sometimes that's ridiculous. Sometimes, sometimes some degree of punishment is in order to be compassionate.

And it's a failure of one's compassionate duty not to act sternly in those circumstances. The hard part, of course, is knowing when the circumstances are truly upon you and how far to go. And the hard part is figuring out where to be in the middle and I think in that respect both the stereotyped political camps bring important qualities to the table. And so policy making isn't about either one of them running the board. You know that's where our modern psychology of having to solve the earth behind the other guy because you've destroyed him. That's where we do ourselves a terrible disservice,

because policy making through this person, if you're toggling back and forth on trying to find some Goldilocks point, policy making necessarily means having to keep the other guy in the game, because that other guy's gonna have skills or instincts or something to bring to the table. In some ad mixture, you don't know what,

that will be useful to some degree. And if your political culture involves exterminating those who don't think what that will be useful to some degree. And if your political culture involves exterminating those who don't think like you do, you won't be able to draw upon whatever strengths they can bring. That had a mixture won't be possible, as it would otherwise have been, because you've shrunk the bench of talent that is available to help him make the world a better place. And that's just stupid. Final question, just going back to something you said earlier about how there's a sort of insufficient amount of not knowing on both ends of the political spectrum, sort of a lack

of intellectual humility on the left and on the right. You know, I could hear folks on the left saying, well, is that a false equivalency? Because, I mean, if you look at the right right now, you got a whole, you got tens of millions of people arguing that the election was stolen with zero evidence. You've got some of the vaccine stuff going on on the right as well, where arguments are being made without evidence,

are there truly as robust analogs on the left, or do you really feel that it's really, truly going on in the same way on both sides? I was trying to be very careful and diplomatic, I think, but I think there is a problem of a, so a not knowing deficit on both sides. I didn't warrant that at this moment in time, each suffers from this problem to the same degree.

And maybe I'll try to still remain diplomatic and leave that question of degree unanswered, but I think there is no law of nature that these things are entirely parallel and in the same degree, right? I mean, we're having some problems on my side of the L right now. It's been the other direction before that's not really the important point.

The important point is both sides can and should do a lot better. More structured doubt. In closing, if people want to get more information about you, the read your writings, et cetera, et cetera, where can they go? Well, there isn't a lot of Buddhist stuff, only a few of the essays, but if you want to walk out on my policy writings, I do have a personal website. It's the new paradigms forum and said www.newparadigmsform.com. Christopher Ford, thank you very much for coming on. Appreciate it.

It's such a pleasure talking to you so much, Dan. Likewise. Thanks again to Christopher. Also big thanks to the people who work incredibly hard to make this show a reality two and a half times a week. Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Kashmir, Justin Davie, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartelle, and Jen Poyant, and the good folks over at Ultraviolet Audio,

who do our audio engineering. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode with my man, Jeff Warren. We're gonna talk about his expensive view of what practice means. And there'll be a lot of hilarious banter. So that's Wednesday with Jeff Warren. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-replus

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