Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

by Robert Wright

For starters, natural selection is so wildly inventive that the advent of a species smart enough to launch cultural evolution was probably pretty likely all along.

Not at all: the dinosaurs were a lifeform sufficiently complex to evolve sentience, but didn't despite hundreds of millions of years. Sentience was an unlikely accident.

And maybe, once social organization approaches the global level, the only way for complex consciousness to flourish on this planet—or even to survive—is for it to now be unwarped, or at least partly unwarped.

Yeah: we need to eliminate a fundamental element of human nature. Perhaps Buddhism can do that, but that is an individualistic pursuit, subject to coordination problems.

Here’s an embarrassing irony: nothing so arouses tribalistic animosities in me as people who support policies that, in my view, tend to arouse tribalistic animosities.

Interesting. They tend to push me further into anti-tribal irritation.

If full-on enlightenment means you quit making value judgments of any kind and quit pushing for change, then count me out.

The footnote associated with this sentence addresses the issue of nihilism, but doesn't resolve it.