Print

Print


Dear Friends,
Thank you for all your responses, both on and off list. There have been too many for me to answer individually as you deserve, and more than enough to encourage me to continue with the discussion. Having skimmed through one or two pieces that were sent to me and dipped into Copeland Macdonald's excellent website, I return armed with or burdened with, the title question.
My first instinct is that there is no such thing. An institution is a more or less codified and explict collection of communal habits. Now I have many habits, some 'good', most 'bad'; I won't bore you with them. But even a good habit, say cleaning your teeth before going to bed, is not the action of wisdom; it does not involve attention, mindfulness, responsiveness, creativity. It may be possible to clean one's teeth with these things, but then it is not a habit. A habit is by nature automatic, more or less unconscious, reactive. I suggest that this is a serious danger in the 'practice' of meditation; practice makes habit, and habit makes for mindlessness, not mindfulness. This is why Krishnamurti says when asked how to be attentive, 'Just do it.' If there is a 'how', there is a method, and method is habit, and habit is not attention. Therefore there can be no 'how'.

Nevertheless, one needs to clean one's teeth, and one needs to have organisations and institutions to get things done. So perhaps the question should rather be, 'if an institution is required, what sort of institution would it be wise to set up.' In other words, what is a good institution, or a good communal habit?

Given that this is what is being done here, right now, this seems to me to be the most urgent question to discuss. If I am right that an institution is incapable of manifesting wisdom in itself, it seems natural to suggest that a good institution is the minimal one that will do the job, and minimally constrain its members to collective habits or forms which inevitably prevent wisdom, while taking full account also of our propensities for irrationality, greed, power-seeking and other stupidities. Indeed, but for such stupidities, I suspect that we wouldn't need institutions, just as if we had full attention, we wouldn't need habit to keep our teeth clean.
 I wonder if it is possible for us to reach a consensus on the form of the institution we need here? Perhaps the discussion might lead us towards a notion of what it might be useful to seek to change in academia. I don't have the answers, but I hope I have something close to the right question... over to you!
Best wishes, bob Macintosh.