Stephen Batchelor, a teacher and former Buddhist monk who rose to prominence after the publication of 1997’s Buddhism without Beliefs, offers a philosophical exploration of secular Buddhism in his newest book, Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times (Yale, Aug. 26). By examining the teachings of two unexpected contemporaries, Batchelor argues that the lives and beliefs of the Buddha and Socrates largely coincide with one another, and that their common stances on ethics can answer some of today’s most pressing questions and point readers toward a life grounded in compassion.
What parallels between these two struck you the most during your research?
Both were primarily concerned with how to live a good life, or what I call ethics. It’s about how we become the sort of people we deeply and intuitively aspire to be through our choices, our actions, and our work. Ethics is not about following moral rules. Ethics is really a practice of becoming fully human, and what the Greeks called eudaimonia, which means human flourishing. And so both put metaphysics to one side—they had no interest in the ultimate nature of reality. They focused increasingly and exclusively on the question of how you can become a more fully realized version of yourself.
Can you explain what you talk about in the book as a middle way, or a nonbinary approach to living ethically?
Human language tends to make us think in binary categories—right and wrong, something being real and not real—all these opposites. And religion often tends to be the champion of the good side of the binary. But the Buddha was very clear, and many of his followers likewise, in recognizing that these binaries are not actually real. Socrates’s approach is to endlessly cleave to a middle position, neither affirming nor denying, as it were, but pursuing a life of ongoing curiosity, questioning, being allowed to be surprised, astonished by life, rather than endlessly trying to pin it down in a box.
Why are we so drawn to black-and-white thinking, especially today?
I don’t think it’s a modern problem. It’s difficult to be neutral. We tend to always want to be on the side of people we feel are most justified in a conflict. We have a strong urge to be right rather than wrong. Binary thinking is not just a mental habit but seems to be deeply rooted in our emotions and biology.
What are some of the ethical challenges your book addresses?
I take on the big questions of our time, including climate change, pandemics, artificial intelligence, and how the evolution of that technology could have unforeseen consequences that might be disastrous. There could be another Covid that is 10 times worse. What’s common to all these global crises is that they’re beyond the scope of any one nation to deal with. These are issues that confront all beings on this earth.
What do you want readers take away from Buddha, Socrates, and Us?
I would hope that by finding a common ground between a major thinker in the West and a major thinker and spiritual leader in the East, we can touch something more fundamental about the humanity we all share. We can break down the binary of East and West, for example. It’s about trying to break divisions between people and open a greater sense of how we share far more than what differentiates us.
