Three Ways to Become a Deeper Thinker

by | Nov 23, 2024 | The Atlantic

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What is the sound of one hand clapping?

You may have encountered this cryptic question at some point. It is a koan, or riddle, devised by the 18th-century Zen Buddhist master Hakuin Ekaku. Such paradoxical questions have been used for centuries to train young monks, who were instructed to meditate on and debate them. This was intended to be taxing work that could induce maddening frustration—but there was a method to it too. The novitiates were not meant to articulate tidy answers; they were supposed to acquire, through mental struggle, a deeper understanding of the question itself—for this was the path to enlightenment.

You don’t have to be training to become a Buddhist monk to realize the value of hard questions without clear answers. Wrestling with a koan of your own—such as Why am I alive? or For what would I give my life?—can be a way to improve your emotional health and grow as a person. You might resist doing so because life’s fundamental riddles are uncomfortable to contemplate, and the world gives you every opportunity to avoid them. But when you enter the mysterious world of unanswerable questions, you will surely grow as a person and change for the better.

[Read: Why so many Americans are turning to Buddhism]

The questions that matter most to us are typically those least likely to have clear answers. If you ask me, “Why do you love your wife?” I will struggle to answer convincingly. I know I do, but the reasons seem impossible to articulate. Anything I say (“Because she is good to me”) will utterly miss the point and trivialize the relationship. Indeed, the fact that fairly trivial questions are easy to answer with clarity is no coincidence. (“How do I get to the supermarket?” Two right turns, then a left.) The celebrated psychotherapist Carl Jung considered this ease-of-answering test a way of understanding what matters most. “The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble,” he wrote in 1931.

We might call life’s unanswerable riddles “right-brain questions.” Neuroscientists interested in the hemispheric lateralization of the brain—how each side undertakes different functions—have shown that when people use deep understanding and intuition, as opposed to analytical method, to gain insight into problems, a burst of high-frequency, or gamma-band, activity appears in the right temporal lobe, corresponding with a change of blood flow in the right anterior superior temporal gyrus. This observation is consistent with the hypothesis of the British neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, who has argued that people primarily use the right side of the brain when they ponder questions about life’s meaning.

We generally resist the work involved with this kind of right-brain insight because confronting big problems that are difficult to resolve is uncomfortable. As some research shows, knotty life questions without clear answers can evoke a dark mood without any clear biological explanation. This can be particularly difficult for adolescents, pondering for the first time big questions about fate and death, emptiness and meaninglessness, guilt and condemnation.

You might conclude that, for the sake of your well-being, you should steer clear of such contemplation. But you’d be mistaken, in much the same way as you’d be mistaken in avoiding exercise because working out involves bodily discomfort. To begin with, sitting with issues of life, death, and love requires us to admit the limits of our understanding—to say “I don’t know.” Researchers have demonstrated in experiments that people are highly averse to giving this response, but doing so is a sign of cognitive health. It seems reasonable to extrapolate that learning to make this admission more easily could be a good way to improve your cognitive health.

Even an “I don’t know” response can lead to a deeper, if unstated, understanding—with important benefits. In 2012, for example, two psychologists asked a sample of young adults how often they considered questions such as “Do you ever reflect on your purpose in life?” and “Do you ever think about the human spirit or what happens to life after death?” They found that the people who spent more time on these questions tended to score higher than their peers on a variety of measures defined as spiritual intelligence, critical existential thinking, sense of life’s meaning, curiosity, and well-being. That certainly sounds like cognitive health to me.

[From the June 1963 issue: “The Riddle,” by Albert Camus]

Taking the evidence all together, I’d propose a hypothesis that, as a society, we have become spiritually flabby and psychically out of shape because we haven’t been getting in the reps on challenging existential questions. As much research has documented, anxiety and depression have been exploding in the United States, especially among young adults. I believe that this is not because we’re thinking too much about the hard questions of life, but too little. As I’ve discussed previously, we pass our hours and days hypnotized by the trivia injected into our lives via our tech devices, and are less willing to delve into deeper matters. The elevated levels of sadness and fear are, I believe, at least in part the result of our philosophically sedentary lifestyle. Like the benefits of hard exercise, the short-term discomfort of big questions is necessary to avoid the long-term ill-health that comes from avoiding these questions.

To address this problem, I’d like to see a revolution in existential thinking, a craze for pondering life’s mysteries. Social entrepreneurs could establish reading rooms and debating clubs in every city. Philosophers could become as popular as the hottest fitness influencers. That’s my fantasy, anyway. But short of its becoming a reality, I can suggest a routine you can follow.

1. Schedule your mental workout.
If you go to the gym, you probably do so at a planned time, involving particular exercises. And there are certain things you don’t do while working out—eating pizza, taking a nap. You can use similar principles for your mental fitness. Choose a period of time each day—say, 30 minutes—that you can dedicate to weighing tough questions of real importance. First, ban all devices and allow no distractions; then figure out in advance what existential or spiritual challenges you plan to consider. You can use a paragraph or two of philosophy or scripture to focus your mind on a specific question, break it down, and improve your understanding.

In Tibetan Buddhism, this method is called analytical meditation, and similar practices exist in other traditions. As you may find in your initial weeks at the gym, the exercise is hard at first and tempting to abandon. But with discipline, the habit becomes easier, then pleasant, then indispensable. For many years, I have actually combined the two practices: Right after my morning hour in the gym, I’ll spend the next half-hour (usually 6:30–7 a.m.) in meditation. At this point, I can’t imagine starting my day any other way.

2. Go for a long walk.
For some people, a good alternative is a long walk alone, without devices, as a way to give room to your right-brain questions. Philosophers have long advocated this technique—Immanuel Kant was reputedly such a regular walker, to aid his deep thinking, that neighbors set their watches by his passing. Research has shown that walking naturally stimulates creative thinking and facilitates the ability to focus without being distracted. I like to prescribe this practice—again, ideally in the early morning—to my students, especially if they have been feeling a sense of meaninglessness.

3. Invite boredom.
One effect of our screen-centered culture is that we’re never truly bored. This might sound great, like a quality-of-life enhancement. But it isn’t. Experiencing boredom is crucial for abstract reasoning and insight, because it helps stimulate the brain’s default-mode network, the set of brain regions that becomes active when the outside world does not impinge on our mind’s attention. Neuroscientists have shown that such activity is vital for accessing high-level meaning. For this reason, building periods of boredom into our life really matters, because they no longer occur spontaneously. A good way to do this is to run errands and make short trips without taking your phone. At first, you will still feel the reflex to reach for it every few seconds. But fairly quickly, you will start to experience your default-mode network sparking up again, perhaps for the first time in a long time. In a deep cognitive sense, boredom is productive.

[Arthur C. Brooks: To get out of your head, get out of your house]

A decade ago, after a lengthy trip to India, I took a series of long walks to ponder unanswerable questions. Among other ones, I considered the question posed by the koan that opened this essay: What is the sound of one hand clapping? I aimed not to find an answer, but to gain a greater understanding of the question—which I hoped might help explain other mysteries of my life.

Over a few weeks, I came to comprehend that the sound of one hand clapping is an illusion. The hand’s movement mimics clapping, but the only way to make the illusion a reality is to add a second hand. The sound of one hand clapping can be imagined, but the clap doesn’t exist until another hand is present. With that realization, I recognized the koan’s question as a way to understand the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness (śūnyavāda in Sanskrit), which says that no individual thing or person has any intrinsic existence, but exists only relationally, dependent on everything else. The concept of an individual nature is, like one hand clapping, an illusion.

On further reflection, this illuminated for me another ineffable mystery, one that I mentioned earlier: why I love my wife. By myself, I am the one hand clapping, an illusion of a human. I come fully into personhood only when I am completed by the presence of my mate. She is, for me, the other hand, creating the sound that is our life.

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Trump Is Building the Most Anti-Semitic Cabinet in Decades

by | Nov 23, 2024 | The Atlantic

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Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 21, 2024

Of all the promises, from quixotic to horrifying, that Donald Trump has made about the next four years, the one that seems least likely to be fulfilled is his vow to “defeat anti-Semitism.” He has nominated a slew of cranks who have dabbled in the oldest conspiracy theory of them all, a belief that Jews control the world.

Over the past decade or so, pernicious lies about Jewish villainy have drifted into the mainstream of American life. That’s a fact Trump acknowledges when he talks about his plans to “defend Jewish citizens in America.” But he tends to focus on the problem at college campuses, which constitutes an incomplete diagnosis. It allows Trump to ignore his own complicity in unleashing the worst wave of anti-Jewish sentiment in generations.

In his first administration, Trump provided rhetorical cover for supporters who blared hateful sentiments—those “very fine people,” Kanye West, and others. This time, he’s placing them in the line of presidential succession. If confirmed, this crew would comprise the highest-ranking collection of White House anti-Semites in generations.

Take Matt Gaetz, Trump’s former nominee for attorney general. (Gaetz withdrew himself from consideration shortly after this article was published.) He is a fierce opponent of the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would curtail federal funding for institutions of higher education that fail to address the hatred of Jews when it flourishes on their campuses. There are principled reasons for rejecting the bill. But in the course of arguing against it, Gaetz revealed himself. He asserted that the legislation’s definition of anti-Semitism would penalize the belief that the Jews killed Jesus. This wasn’t a point Gaetz made in the spirit of protecting free speech. He fervently believes it himself. “The Bible is clear. There is no myth or controversy on this,” he posted on X. This is the canard from which the whole Western tradition of anti-Semitism flows, a belief officially repudiated by the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council nearly 60 years ago.

And it wasn’t a stray expression. In 2018, Gaetz invited Charles Johnson, a notorious figure on the alt-right, to attend the State of the Union address as his guest. Johnson is a textbook example of a Holocaust denier. He insists that only 250,000 Jews died—and only of typhus—during World War II. In a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session, he wrote that he agreed with a commenter “about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real.” When confronted with Johnson’s record, Gaetz admitted that he hadn’t properly vetted Johnson before extending him an invitation. Even so, he told Fox Business that Johnson is “not a holocaust denier.” That defense, given all the evidence about Johnson presented to him, is tantamount to an endorsement.

The essence of conspiracism is the description of the hidden hand, the ubiquity of all-powerful evildoers. That is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s overriding intellectual habit. He believes that the CIA killed his uncle, and he attributes autism to vaccines. In 2023, he was caught on video suggesting that COVID-19 might be a bioweapon. Espousing such a theory should be disqualifying for the job of running America’s public-health system. But he went further. He said that the disease was designed to attack Caucasians and Black people. “The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” (In case it needs saying, this is false.) As a well-practiced conspiracist, he knew to append his theory with a disclaimer, adding, “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not,” as if he were merely asking an innocent question. And when confronted with his own words, he denied any ill intent: “I haven’t said an anti-Semitic word in my life.”

[Read: The sanewashing of RFK Jr.]

But his insinuation echoed the medieval Christian libel that Jews had poisoned the wells of Europe, unleashing the Black Death. Kennedy’s winking accusation also mimics a strain of white-supremacist pseudoscience, which asserts that Ashkenazi Jews are a distinct race from Caucasians. According to this bizarre, and bizarrely prevalent, theory, that’s what makes Jews so pernicious: They can pass for white people while conspiring to undermine them.

Not so long ago, these sorts of comments would have rendered a nominee unconfirmable—or at least would have necessitated an excruciating apology tour. But anti-Semitism is no longer taboo. And it’s telling that Trump has adopted Elon Musk as a primary adviser, because Musk is a chief culprit in the lifting of that taboo.

When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he reversed a ban imposed by the company’s previous regime that kept anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers off the platform. Under his ownership, anti-Jewish voices became unavoidable fixtures on the site, broadcasting their bigoted theories without any fear of consequences.

One reason they have little to fear is that Musk has displayed sympathy for their worldview. Like them, he harps on the wickedness of George Soros, whom he once likened to the comic supervillain Magneto, a mutant who plots to wipe out humanity. (Like Soros, Magneto is a Holocaust survivor.) This comparison almost explicitly admits its exaggeration of Jewish nefariousness. And if the thrust of his sentiments wasn’t clear enough, he emphatically endorsed a tweet claiming that “Jewish communities have been pushing … dialectal hatred against whites.”

For a time, Musk refuted his critics by smearing them. He accused the Anti-Defamation League, the nation’s leading Jewish civil-rights group, of orchestrating a campaign to destroy him. Eventually, to fend off an advertiser boycott, he apologized, visited Auschwitz, and called himself “aspirationally Jewish.”

The presence of these conspiracists doesn’t suggest that Trump will pursue policies that provoke Jewish suffering. His support for Israel might even win him the approval of a growing segment of organized Jewry. Instead, the danger posed by his appointees is that their mere presence in high office will make American anti-Semitism even more permissible; they will make conspiracies about Jews socially acceptable. Indeed, that might already have happened. Trump just proposed the most anti-Semitic Cabinet in recent history, and that fact has barely elicited a peep.

This article has been updated following Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration for the position of attorney general.

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