Buddhism and the State: RΔjadhamma after the Sattelzeit (New Paper)
Published today in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics. abstract β RΔjadhamma is a list of ten royal virtues or duties that occurs in the jΔtaka tales and that has been influential in Southeast Asian Buddhist political thought. Like pre-modern political thought in Europe β that is, thought before the Sattelzeit β Buddhist political thought lacks a concept of the βstateβ and is concerned with kings and similar rulers. Here I propose a modernized interpretation of rΔjadhamma as virtues/duties of the state. The full text (in pdf format) can be downloaded here.
The Lesser Dystopia
(This is part 3 in the No Time for Utopia series.) In On the Fragility of Civilization, I argued that due to the slowly compounding effects of an increasing number of relatively localized βnaturalβ disasters caused (directly or indirectly) by climate change, a vicious circle of failing disaster management, economic decline, civil unrest, and hunger will trigger a cascade of collapsing societies, eventually leading to global societal collapse in roughly 25 to 30 years from now (give or take a half decade). The world during and after collapse will be very different from what most of us have ever experienced,...