Thought for the Day

18 FEB 26

Good morning.
The worse the news gets, the closer we come to some underlying questions. Epstein, Ukraine, climate change, geopolitics – you name it. What should we do? How can we not feel powerless in the face of so many problems? One answer, which people often associate with Buddhists, is to withdraw. The world just keeps spinning – Buddhists call it samsara. So, perhaps the best we can do is to cultivate an alternative, at least within ourselves, and hope it has some kind of effect.

If that seems weak, think how people across the US responded to Buddhist monks walking for peace across the country. Twenty-four monks set out from their meditation centre in Texas last October and walked over two thousand miles to Washington DC. Crowds gathered along the way, millions followed their progress on Facebook and Instagram, and thousands greeted them at the Lincoln Memorial when they arrived in Washington last week.

Why did the monks stir such a powerful reaction? For one thing, they were walking through a divided country. Up north in Minnesota, violence was spiralling, the outward sign of much deeper divisions. The monks were different. They exuded peace. That’s powerful in itself, but they also had a message.

The particular tradition these monks follow emphasises mindfulness, which these days is often regarded as an innocuous soothing exercise, especially helpful for getting to sleep at night. For serious practitioners, like these monks with their steady gait and bloodied feet, it means being present and giving things one’s full attention. In that way, you experience your mind’s tendency to busyness and agitation. You see the reactive patterns of your thoughts and that lets you recognise the sources of suffering right there in the mind, and maybe break the circuit.

The Buddha long ago taught that we’re driven by forces we barely recognise. He named them as craving, aversion and delusion. The world – samsara - he said, is simply those forces writ large; and the news, which we can find so overwhelming, reflects them.
The monks’ simple message was that it’s possible to be different, and their choice to step out of their monastic retreat into the world was just as significant. By embodying mindfulness and peace so publicly, without being overtly political, they symbolised an alternative to the challenges facing American society. I think the response showed how deeply people yearn for that alternative, and that’s another source of hope in these difficult times.

Good morning. How do you feel about mind control? New research from a laboratory in Zurich suggests it may be possible to make people less selfish – by sending electrical currents through their brains. Forty-four volunteers were asked to divide money between themselves and an anonymous partner. Remarkably, when certain neural pathways at the front and back of the head were stimulated, participants gave more away.
It sounds like science fiction. But other forms of bio-hacking are, of course, already common: weight-loss drugs, metabolic trackers, sleep technology. Medicines are routinely used to lift mood, sharpen attention, steady anxiety. So why not use science to make us kinder as well? That way, we might all become more beautiful people inside, as well as out.
Just imagine it. Wellness centres offering holistic packages, body and soul: Botox top-ups in the morning, altruistic boosting in the afternoon. More seriously, researchers claim this new technology could be used for the treatment of certain brain disorders and prove invaluable for people who struggle with social behaviour. It could be just the nudge they need to become better citizens.
It’s a wholesome idea. Yet as I read the academic article on this impressive experiment in brain-hacking – forecasting gains in “cooperation, productivity, and cohesion” – I became increasingly uneasy. I was put in mind of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, published almost a century ago, which describes a civilisation held together not by conscience but by chemistry and conditioning. A terrifying vision. Once virtue is treated as something that can be engineered, the line between encouragement and enforcement grows thin. A society might become more efficient, more compliant, even more outwardly generous, and still lose its soul. Huxley warns that people who allow themselves to be controlled may eventually come to “love their servitude”.
Even if such dystopian fears never come to pass, the ambition to control our moral impulses through technology raises questions about the nature of morality. Christian thought has long distinguished between shaping behaviour from the outside and forming the person from within. Charity — what theologians call caritas — is not simply a matter of generous action. Intention matters too: affection that is freely given is what lends acts of generosity their meaning; without it, they risk becoming little more than reflexes.
It’s fascinating to learn that science can influence our moral behaviour, but it is fatal to confuse this fact with morality itself. The Christian vision insists that a person is more than a set of automatic responses. Morality only makes sense if it is chosen. As a society, we have already surrendered ourselves to our smartphones, our computers, and our digital habits; let’s at least fight, while we can, to love one another freely.

14 FEB 26

13 FEB 26