8: In Search of Dharma

We have always created our dharmas and told ourselves we found them. What becomes possible, and what becomes dangerous, once we admit it and start building on purpose?

A woman sits on a cushion in a small flat in a large city. A handbook of Stoic sayings lies on the floor beside her, a meditation app glows on her phone, and she is trying to assemble, from those scraps and a few others, something she can actually live by. We met her in Part 7. She is doing the oldest human work there is, alone, mostly without help.

Elsewhere, a team at an AI company sits down to write what it openly calls a constitution. Not a constitution for a country: a list of values for a machine, governing how it answers when a stranger asks it how to live. The company is Anthropic; the method is called “Constitutional AI.” Anthropic trains the model to critique and revise its own responses against an explicit, plain-language list of principles, so its values sit in a document anyone can read, argue with, and rewrite. In October 2023, with the Collective Intelligence Project, it put that last verb to the test: around a thousand US American adults proposed and voted on principles for a public constitution, and the model trained on what they wrote matched the in-house version on capability and came out less biased. A thousand US American adults are not humanity, and the whose-values question never fully closes. Still, ordinary people, asked directly, set out to write a dharma on purpose, and the thing they wrote held its own.

Between those two pictures sits the whole question. The seeker on the cushion and the team at their screens are doing the same thing at wildly different scales: constructing, by hand and on purpose, an answer to how to live. A reminder from Part 1 is due exactly here, where the word travels farthest from its Indian home: dharma remains this book’s placeholder, and a company’s constitution for a machine qualifies on the same terms Ubuntu and the way of the wong sikep did, by what it does rather than by where the word was born. We have been heading here from the start: from the oldest root, that which holds, through the teak forests of Java, to the moment the old foundations gave way. For nearly all of history, the question was which of the inherited dharmas was true, and how to submit? She cannot ask that any more. Her question, and now ours, is one earlier ages rarely asked so nakedly: not which dharma do I receive, but can we build a better one, knowing exactly what we are doing, on purpose?

The thing we were always doing

Building dharmas on purpose is no unprecedented act of hubris. It is what our species has always done. Every dharma we have met was made: assembled by particular people in particular places, from the materials to hand. The Axial sages made theirs. Samin Surosentiko made his, in plain low Javanese, one conversation at a time. What is new is not the making. What is new is that we can no longer pretend we are doing anything else.

For a glimpse of that making stripped to the bone, consider six teenage boys from a boarding school in Tonga who, in 1965, borrowed a fishing boat, were caught by a storm, and washed up on ’Ata, an uninhabited Pacific rock, where they were marooned for fifteen months. What they built, with a single old knife blade and their hands, was not the savagery of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies but its opposite. They cleared a food garden, hollowed tree trunks to catch rainwater, and kept a fire alight for more than a year, working the garden and the kitchen in rostered pairs. They opened and closed each day with song and prayer, to a driftwood guitar strung with wire salvaged from the wreck. When two quarrelled, the pair went to opposite ends of the island to cool their tempers, then came back and made up. When one boy fell from a cliff and broke his leg, the others set it with sticks and leaves and carried his share of the work until it healed. They were found in September 1966 in glowing health, the mended leg clean.

Left with nothing, the boys did not descend into a war of all against all. They rebuilt the holding from memory: rosters, ritual, a way to make peace, and care for the injured. It is one case, and they were no blank slate: they came ashore carrying the communal habits of a Tongan village and the daily rhythm of a Catholic school. But that is the point, not an objection. When human beings build a dharma “from scratch,” they build from what they remember, and what they remember is a cooperative inheritance older than any of the traditions it later hardened into. The scaffolding is not imposed on our nature. It is drawn back out of it.

I should hand that story over more carefully than I first told it, because Tongans have objected to the way it travels, and they are right. Start with the names, which the famous version tends to leave out: Tevita Siola’a, Sione Fataua, Luke Veikoso, Fatai Latu, Kolo Fekitoa, and Sione Totau, who now goes by Mano. The writer Meleika Gesa, who grew up hearing this story long before the world did, notes that the celebrated retelling never quite tells it. It centres the sailor who found them, filtered through the author who “discovered” their story, measured against a novel by yet another outsider, while the six who actually did the surviving stay out of focus. The island has a history the popular version files as scenery, too. ’Ata was emptied by slavers in the 1860s, its people seized and sold, and the boys stayed alive partly on food those stolen families had left growing. And what the six carried ashore has a name. Gesa calls it anga fakatonga, the Tongan way: you share from the beginning, you treat everyone as family, you survive together rather than every man for himself.

Which is the finding, stated properly. I said they rebuilt from what they remembered. What they remembered was not generic human decency but a particular dharma, carried by particular people, onto an island their own ancestors had been taken from. The case is stronger told that way, not weaker. And since this part is shortly going to argue that any ethic worth designing must keep its dissenting voices audible, it would be a poor beginning to tell one people’s story straight over the top of them.

For almost all of history, the work was hidden from the workers. People built their dharmas and then experienced them as found: handed down from a mountaintop, woven into the order of the cosmos. That concealment was not a lie so much as a feature; a rule feels far more binding when it looks like the grain of reality than like last year’s committee decision. The secular age has stripped that concealment away. We can see the workshop now. We can see that the values we live by were authored, which means, with a lurch, that they could have been authored differently, and could be again.

So the real question is not whether to make dharmas. We will make them whether we admit it or not; the only choice is whether to do it asleep or awake. And the conscious construction falls due just as two things of unprecedented scale bear down on us: a planet in ecological crisis, and machines that may soon think, into which someone is already pouring an ethic. The biologist EO Wilson put our predicament in one devastating line: we have “Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” Conscious dharma-building is the attempt to grow up the emotions and the institutions before the technology finishes the sentence.

But say out loud that dharmas can be built, and the terrible follow-up questions arrive in a rush: built by whom, for whom, toward what end, and what gets crushed in the building? Part 6 showed what the answers look like when they go wrong at full scale: a decreed cult dead in a season, the emptied city of Year Zero. The licence to build survived that part only with conditions attached: no boot, no blank slate, and the power to unbuild left with the people the dharma is for. The questions name a single recurring danger. Call it the flattening: the temptation, once the power to author an ethic exists, to author just one and to crush the glorious plurality of human dharmas into a single official version. And the shape of the answer can be stated now, so the tour that follows has a map: not one dharma for everyone, and not anything-goes, but a thin shared floor beneath a thick and guarded plurality. What remains is four tests of whether we can build to that shape.

A dharma for the whole Earth?

The largest scale first, where the pressure to build a single shared ethic is most intense.

The Samin repay one more visit. At the centre of their hand-made dharma sat a flat refusal: the forest, the water, the land are not anyone’s to own or sell, but a commons held by everyone and no one. Stretch that conviction over the entire planet and it starts sounding like the only sane description of our situation. The atmosphere is a commons. The oceans are a commons. The stable climate that every economy quietly assumes is a commons, and we are burning through it as a village burns through a shared forest when no one’s dharma tells them to stop.

For the first time, the pressure comes with an instrument panel. Earth-system scientists have mapped nine “planetary boundaries,” the limits within which humanity can operate safely, and the most recent health check finds seven already crossed, ocean acidification the latest to fall: the very commons the Samin’s conviction was just stretched over. That is an is, not an ought: the science can tell us where the edges are, but cannot, by itself, generate the obligation to stay inside them.

Planetary problems carry a specific cruelty. Human cooperation runs on a tribal engine: we bond fiercely in here in part by defining a them out there. But climate change is the rare collective problem that excludes nobody. The tribal engine still fires, of course; climate politics manufactures enemies daily, the rich emitters and the rising ones, the deniers and the doom-mongers. The cruelty is that none of them is the enemy whose defeat would solve anything: there is no tribe outside the problem, because the species is the unit that has to cooperate. The hard conclusion follows from the evolutionary logic Athena Aktipis draws out: humanity has never had the shared history that would let cooperation evolve at the level of the whole species. A planetary dharma cannot be waited for; there is no competing planet to select it into being. It must be built consciously, or it will not exist at all.

What should we build? Not, I am convinced, a single global ethic. That way lies the flattening in civilisational form. The answer the evidence keeps pointing to is a thin shared layer over a thick plurality: a few commitments narrow enough to be affirmed from within many traditions. The political philosopher John Rawls called this an “overlapping consensus”: agreement reached from within very different deep worldviews, no one surrendering theirs.

And it has already happened in the open: the Earth Charter of 2000, a thoroughly secular declaration of planetary responsibility whose authority rests on the inclusive process that wrote it, and Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ fifteen years later, insisting that “intergenerational solidarity is not optional, but rather a basic question of justice.” Two frameworks that agree on almost nothing about ultimate reality reach for nearly the same planetary commitments; that convergence, not an imposed creed, is the shape a planetary dharma can actually take. The political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who spent a career showing how real communities govern shared resources without privatisation or a distant boss, prescribed the same shape for the global commons: “polycentric” governance, many local experiments coordinated toward a shared good. She warned, though, that her design principles do not scale easily to a planet that leaves no room for major error. Polycentricity was her hedge, not her triumph.

And right beside this hopeful picture stands the warning: a thick, singular, state-authored planetary ethic already exists, and it works, on the measures it chooses to count. China’s doctrine of “ecological civilization” was written into the constitution in 2018, and the programme it crowns has real results to show, including one of the largest reforestations in history. It is also, in the judgement of the scholars who traced its history, a model of authoritarian environmentalism: an ethic driven from the top by technocratic elites, enforced on people who do not get a say. The singular planetary dharma, in other words, is not science fiction; it can be effective; and it is the flattening itself, at work. The same evolutionary logic supplies the brake: a body does many things to regulate its own cells that no one would call ethical done to a person. A planetary dharma worth having coordinates dharmas. It does not dissolve them into one.

The ethics we hand to machines

From the planet to the machine, where the same drama plays out faster, and the temptation of the single answer wears the friendly mask of a technical solution.

Why does artificial intelligence force a dharmic question at all? In Nick Bostrom’s terms, the reason is the “orthogonality thesis”: intelligence and goals are independent axes. A system can become arbitrarily more capable without becoming one inch wiser or kinder. This is the oldest wall in moral philosophy, the is/ought wall that has run beneath everything here, rebuilt in silicon. You cannot compute your way from a fact to a value. Goodness has to be put in by hand, and somebody has to decide which goodness.

And here the flattening arrives, disguised. The standard slogan of the field is “align AIs to human values,” and that phrase smuggles in the singular. There is no the human values to align to, any more than there is a single the Dharma. Iason Gabriel names the real problem: not what values AIs should align with, but whose, chosen by what fair process. That is a political and dharmic question, not an engineering one, and pretending otherwise is how a single company’s ethics, or a single state’s, could quietly become the encoded conscience of the species.

The serious answers under development run against the single version, and look like the planetary solution scaled down. Stuart Russell’s is the most disarming: the safest machine, he argues, is one built to be uncertain about what humans value, one that defers, keeps asking, and allows itself to be switched off. Anthropic’s public-constitution experiment is another: a way to elicit and reconcile many value systems rather than impose one. A third, the “moral graph” of Klingefjord, Lowe and Edelman, defines wisdom as knowing “which values apply in which contexts” rather than as having the right answers. And, fittingly for a stance that refuses to rank traditions, Doctor, Levin and colleagues propose “care as the driver of intelligence,” a design principle drawn from the Bodhisattva vow. That plurality of approaches looks to me like a safeguard, not a defect.

But machines need more than an ethic: they threaten to dismantle one we already live inside. For generations, the West has run on a dharma so pervasive that most people never notice it is a dharma at all: the conviction that your claim to a place in the world is finding something to do with your time that other people will pay you for. Work has been our quiet creed of merit, status and belonging. Artificial intelligence threatens it in a new way: where the old machines came first for muscle, this one comes first for the educated professions. Economists have been mapping that reversal for over a decade, since Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne first tried to count which occupations were exposed. The grim joke belongs to the philosopher Sam Harris, who put the reversal in one line: it comes for the celebrated technologist before your electrician. If AIs sever work from survival, that dharma loses its ground, and a new ethic, with a new economics under it, will have to be built where it stood.

The most discussed candidate for the economics is a universal basic income (UBI), a regular payment to everyone that breaks the link between earning and surviving. The idea is older than the machines: Thomas Paine argued in 1797 for a citizen’s dividend as compensation for the enclosed common inheritance, making basic income less a novelty than the Samin’s commons paid out in money. The oldest objection, that free money breeds idleness, has been tested from Finland to Stockton to Kenya, and, in the pilots at least, largely failed. But the pilots expose a deeper problem, dharmic rather than economic. Money can replace a wage. It cannot replace what the wage was secretly carrying: the sense of contributing, of mattering to others, what Michael Sandel calls contributive justice, the human need not merely to consume but to be needed. And David Graeber devoted a whole book to the misery of people trapped in jobs they know to be pointless; the wound, then, was never only about the scarcity of work. Sam Harris, pressed on exactly this, waves it off: we will find status and meaning in other ways; our need for purposeful effort is just one of the “stories we tell ourselves.” He is more right than he means to be. A story we tell ourselves about why our lives matter is one of the better short definitions of a dharma we have met. AIs do not abolish our need for one. They amputate the work-shaped scaffolding that carried it, and dare us to build a replacement.

Beside all this stands the sharpest version of the flattening yet: what the philosopher William MacAskill calls “value lock-in.” Whatever ethic gets encoded into the systems that run everything could freeze, foreclosing future moral progress. Pour one dharma into the machines at the wrong moment, with enough power behind it, and the plural is not merely flattened for now. It may be flattened for keeps.

Building from old stone

Step back from planets and machines to a quieter question beneath both: out of what materials do we build these new dharmas? We build, as humans always have, from what we inherit, and the right name for a dharma built deliberately from inherited materials is post-traditional.

“Post-traditional” is easy to misread as “anti-traditional.” The better gloss is post-conventional: a stance reached by absorbing a tradition deeply and then stepping past its unquestioned authority, not by skipping it. Stephen Batchelor gives the move its cleanest statement. He separates two things we lump together as “religious”: ultimate concern (Paul Tillich’s phrase), the wish to come to terms with our own living and dying; and the institutional apparatus (texts, priesthood, supernatural claims) through which a tradition enacts it. A post-traditional dharma keeps the first and loosens the second. A person can be gripped by ultimate concern, Batchelor notes, without any supernatural belief at all, which is why “devout atheists” are, in his phrase, “not entirely joking.”

A deeper irony takes the romance out of the question. The wisdom traditions actually available to us were already remade by modernity: the “Buddhism” that reached the modern West had been reshaped, long ago, to privilege reason and personal experience over ritual and authority and to speak the language of science and Western psychology, as the scholar David McMahan has shown. The fusion we imagine ourselves performing happened before we were born. “Post-traditional” is just a better name for a process underway for over a century.

What does a well-built post-traditional dharma actually keep? A few features recur. It is fallibilist: its claims are revisable rather than fixed revelation, its one straight answer to the grounding problem. It is naturalist without being scientistic, finding genuine reverence in the natural world without pretending science can hand us our values; the Dalai Lama’s minimal version is hard to improve on: “our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” It prizes practice over doctrine, keeping the meditation, the ritual, and the ethics that change a person, while loosening its grip on metaphysics.

It stays reflexive, aware of its own failure modes, because anything this powerful can curdle. And it counts its losses openly: the secular substitutes, the Sunday Assemblies and humanist associations, have not come close to matching the pull of the communities they set out to replace, while loneliness exacts a health toll ranked alongside smoking and obesity. On its hardest metric, community, the movement is losing, and a well-built dharma has to say so.

That reflexiveness matters most because building from old stone has two opposite ways of betraying the plural. The shallow betrayal is the one the sociologist Robert Bellah named decades ago in a woman who described her private faith as “Sheilaism,” following her “own little voice.” That is the spiritual supermarket: maximal personalisation, minimal substance, McMindfulness wearing a different outfit. And before we smile at Sheila: the woman on the cushion from Part 7 is one lonely year away from her; the difference has nothing to do with sincerity, only with whether the scraps ever find a community and someone to answer to. The deep betrayal is subtler and more seductive because it looks like the height of respect: the claim that all traditions are surface expressions of one underlying truth, best boiled down to their shared essence. This is perennialism, and the philosopher Steven Katz showed why it is both false and flattening: there are no raw, unmediated mystical experiences underneath the traditions; each tradition constructs the experiences it produces, all the way down. Honouring traditions means honouring them as genuinely, stubbornly different, not melting them into one ecumenical paste.

And one last warning, aimed straight at those of us who feel safest here, on the secular side: a secular dharma is not automatically more rational or less dangerous than a religious one. David Sloan Wilson calls any belief system that sacrifices truth about trade-offs for the comfort of a tidy story a “stealth religion,” godless ones included, and his prime exhibit is not a church but Ayn Rand’s militantly atheist Objectivism. Secular does not mean undogmatic. Building from old stone, we can lay the new bricks just as crooked as the old ones, and congratulate ourselves the whole time on having no religion.

The mirror

One more dharma is under construction that I have not yet named openly: this one. This book is not a neutral survey. It is the second stage of a project whose stated goal is to gather traceably sourced evidence about dharma so that future artificial intelligences can be given, in the project’s own words, “a solid grounding in human ethics and values, and how these are formed.” The project is itself an instance of the thing under discussion: an attempt to deliberately build a dharma and pour it into machines. It would be dishonest to warn about the flattening at this length and exempt the warning’s author, so the project goes under its own microscope.

The flattening, it turns out, is not a remote risk for an encoded ethic. It is the default, and three mechanisms drive it there. The first was demonstrated by Delphi, a 2021 model distilled from 1.7 million human moral judgements to rule on right and wrong; it managed the easy cases, then broke, and the deepest criticism was that it had served up descriptions of what people approve as prescriptions about what is good, marching straight off the is/ought cliff. The second is colder: train an AI on data that includes the output of earlier AIs, researchers showed in Nature in 2024, and the model can suffer “collapse,” with the tails of the distribution vanishing first: the minority dharmas disappear, no ill intent required. The cure was to keep the original human data, plural and messy, in the mix. Provenance turns out to be a survival trait as well as an ethic.

The third mechanism is the most fundamental, the one that makes the danger intrinsic rather than incidental. A machine like this stores no definitions of dharma; it learns meaning by statistics, from the company each word keeps, as JR Firth put it: “you shall know a word by the company it keeps.” It stores that meaning as a position in a vast space, fixed entirely by relations to everything else: Saussure’s old insight, that in language “there are only differences,” rebuilt in arithmetic. Meaning built from the statistics of use has a permanent lean: the common sense of a word sits in well-worn territory, reinforced by millions of examples, while a rare or dissenting sense, a minority dharma, sits in thin territory, faintly attested, easy to slide past. The machine does not argue against an unusual dharma. It does something quieter and more total: it means it away, not by design but by weight of numbers. The flattening is not a bug to be patched. It is the grain of the medium: a slope everything rolls down unless something holds it.

And I cannot point at that grain as though it belonged only to future machines, because it ran through the instrument this book was written with. The book was researched by retrieval: a question goes to the corpus, and a similarity search returns the nearest few dozen passages. That machinery searches by the same arithmetic of statistical nearness, which biases it toward the most typical thing the shelf says. The corrective passage, the minority telling, stands farther from the canonical phrasing of any question, and is exactly what the net is shaped to miss: the instrument I used to find the plural averages the plural away. This is not hypothetical; it has already cost this book once. An earlier draft of Part 6 retold the famous Robbers Cave experiment in its textbook version, because that is what retrieval surfaced; the archival debunking sat in the same corpus, in a book I had curated myself, and the search sailed past it, because a correction is always rarer than the canon it corrects. A critical review caught it; the retrieval, left to itself, never would have. So the research was not allowed to rest on retrieval alone: questions were re-asked against the corpus’s grain, outside sources were hunted where the shelf was thin or one-sided, and every claim was traced by hand to a named source. Those are patches, not a cure. Weigh every page knowing that the research instrument had the same grain as the medium it has just warned you about.

An older charge, met in Part 6, applies here literally. When a Western, secular, English-language corpus catalogues the world’s dharmas and prepares to pour them into machines, it repeats, at massive scale, the move Edward Said anatomised: assembling knowledge of other people’s ways of living, from one side of an old imbalance of power, in containers the catalogued never chose. Talal Asad drove the critique to the foundations: the universal category itself, the “religion” or “dharma” a catalogue is built on, is a Western manufacture with a history; Part 1’s defence, a disclosed tool in place of a claimed discovery, buys authorship, not innocence. The research notes behind this book press that critique by name, and good intentions do not answer it. The only answer I have found: keep the provenance, keep the dissent, keep the many voices audibly many, and say plainly whose shelf the collection sits on. The history is not reassuring: Western interpreters have reliably found in “Dharma” whatever they brought, Kantians finding Kant, positivists finding Russell; so it must be asked whether we found “holds without crushing” in the traditions, or brought it along.

So can the project’s own goal even be coherent? Only, I think, if it gives up the usual sense of “distil.” The right thing to hand a future machine is not a resolved ethic, one clean answer boiled down from the mess, but a preserved one: the plurality, the sources, the disagreements, above all the reasoning of human dharmas, kept intact. That is what the method was built for: every claim carries its source, every note flags its own biases, and the gathering of evidence was deliberately separated from the writing, so the tensions survive. The best thing a corpus like this can teach a future mind is not what to believe but how human beings have come to believe in, fought over, and live their many dharmas.

One self-criticism cannot be engineered away, and candour requires ending on it. The stance running through all of this, that all dharmas sit on the same shelf and none is privileged in advance, is not a view from nowhere. The phrase is Thomas Nagel’s: there is no neutral standpoint above the human situation from which to rank everything else. “Treat all dharmas as equal” is itself a substantive, recognisably modern, secular and liberal commitment, a thick dharma of its own. The project cannot climb out of its own skin: it has a point of view, and cannot encode human ethics from none. What it can do, and what I have tried to do, is name that point of view and refuse to install it as if it were simply the truth. Jorge Luis Borges imagined a map so perfect it was the same size as the territory, and therefore useless. Any compression of human ethics small enough to be useful is a choice about what to leave out, and every such choice encodes a dharma. The only sin is to make that choice while pretending it is not being made.

Plural, but not anything goes

Which brings us, at last, to the question Part 1 raised and every part since has sharpened. If dharmas are genuinely plural and none is privileged in advance, then are some of them better than others, or is it all preference, with nothing to choose between kindness and cruelty but taste? It deserves a straight answer: no, it is not.

Plurality does not mean relativism. The whole answer turns on that distinction. Isaiah Berlin insisted that value pluralism is neither relativism nor absolutism. Plural values are real, grounded in a shared human nature; there are simply many of them, they genuinely conflict, and no single system can maximise them all at once. “Anything goes” is a different and much lazier claim, and it collapses at the first test: it cannot condemn an atrocity, and it cannot make sense of reform, because the reformer who says their own society’s practice is wrong (the abolitionist, the suffragist) needs a standard above current custom to appeal to, which is exactly what it denies them.

So what is the standard? Not a single code that dictates how everyone must live. The structure this book keeps arriving at has appeared at every scale: a thin floor, with thick plurality flourishing above it. The floor is a small set of near-universal constraints: limits on cruelty and violence, and the protection of basic human capabilities. Nor is it wishful thinking: when Oliver Scott Curry tested seven rules of cooperation against the ethnographic record of sixty societies (the survey Part 1 weighed, critics included), every rule was held as morally good wherever it appeared; morality, on that evidence, is variation on a theme, exactly the shape the floor predicts. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum gave the floor real force with her list of central human capabilities, goods any defensible way of life must let people actually achieve: life, bodily integrity, practical reason, relationship, play. Amartya Sen, who built the capabilities approach alongside her, refused to fix any such list and kept the standard open; the floor’s exact placement is unfinished business. Above the floor, real diversity stops being a problem to solve and becomes a richness to protect. Below it lies not a different valid dharma but a failed one. And that word “failed” is a standard for criticism, not a licence to rule: crossing the floor tells us where argument, pressure and refusal are justified, not who gets to reach for the boot. The power to judge and the power to impose are different powers, and Part 6’s conditions bind the second, not the first.

Before the floor is put to work, the most serious refusal of it should be heard, because it comes from the one thinker who accepted this book’s premise most completely. Friedrich Nietzsche saw the plurality before almost anyone: every people, he wrote, hangs its own table of goods over itself, each table the voice of that people’s will to power, and the tables are created, not found. So far, this book’s own thesis. But he then did what neither the relativist nor the floor-builder does: he ranked the tables – as symptoms, by the kind of life, ascending or declining, that produces each – while expressly refusing any floor, which he diagnosed as nothing neutral at all, merely the herd’s own thick morality universalising itself. That is the exact mirror of the warning this book has leaned on since Part 5 about WEIRD values dressed as universals, turned against the floor as such, and I will not pretend to dissolve it in a paragraph. What can be stated is its price, and the scholarship states it too: his standard smuggles in a substantive aristocratic ideal while claiming to stand outside every morality; it requires rank between persons and, he did not flinch from adding, slavery in some form; and by its own symptomatology it is itself a symptom, one more table hung by one more kind of life. An option with a stated price is not a refutation. It is the standing reminder that the floor is a wager to be argued for, never a discovery to be assumed – which is exactly how this book has tried to hold it.

A floor no one has stood on is only a diagram, so let me run the test through the hardest case I own: the book’s own hero. The wong sikep of Part 3 hold, and hold magnificently: a complete architecture for living that carried a community through an empire, a dictatorship, and a cement company without breaking. But the not-crushing side of the test has to be applied with the same rigour I asked of everyone else, and it finds two places where the holding pressed hard on the held. The first is the children. For most of a century the community refused to send its children to school, because the only school on offer was the state’s, the same state that had fenced the forest and demanded the taxes; and so, in a dharma founded by an illiterate teacher, the children were kept from letters. Practical reason and education sit squarely on Nussbaum’s list, and a way of life that denies its children the tools to examine it, or to leave it, presses on the floor, whatever the nobility of the reason. I celebrated this dharma for a whole part of this book. The floor obliges me to say where the celebration must pause. The second is the women. The initiation formula that Dangir recited in 1928 defines a wife by her duty to her husband; the cosmology assimilates woman to the earth that is worked; and the modern Indonesian scholarship reports a domestic order in which Sikep women remain plainly subordinate. And yet it was nine women of the Kendeng farming communities, Sikep among them, who put their feet in cement at the palace gate, on ground the Sikep dharma had prepared. Both facts are true at once, and they must be held together: the tradition made the heroine possible, and prescribed the wife.

So does the keystone case pass its own book’s test? Not cleanly, and that is exactly what the floor is for. It hands down no verdict of good or evil; it locates the places where the arguing has to happen, and here it found them precisely: the children and the women. After independence, the refusal of schooling softened; from this century most Sikep children have gone to school; and some communities, still declining the state’s classroom, have built their own curriculum instead, teaching their ecology on their own terms. The hardest edge was adjusted, from inside, without the dharma losing itself. That is what it looks like when the people a dharma binds keep the power to revise it, and it is why the floor is a tool for living traditions, not a tribunal for dead ones.

The whole standard extends the phrase we began with. A dharma is to be judged by how well it holds without crushing. The holding is the floor’s positive side: does it actually gather a human life and a community, give them shape, meaning and the strength to endure? The not-crushing is its protective side: does it gather without breaking the people inside it or the strangers outside it? A dharma that holds but crushes is the tyranny-and-purity spiral of Part 6; one that refuses to crush but cannot hold is the thin gruel of Part 7, the patchwork that never quite binds. The good ones do both. They hold firmly enough to give a life its spine, and loosely enough to leave room for other lives, and other dharmas, to do the same. That is the answer to whether some are better: yes. The better ones hold without crushing, remain revisable by the people they bind, and leave the door open for their neighbours. Berlin would add a caution: the standard identifies failures but does not rank successes, because above the floor the goods genuinely conflict. Everything up there is still to argue about, and WB Gallie, whom we met in Part 1, explained why it never stops: some concepts (justice, democracy, and surely dharma) are essentially contested, disputed from the inside as part of how they work. That endless argument is not the failure of the project. It is the project.

That which holds

We have come the whole way round. We started with a word we thought meant incense and inner peace, and we followed it down to a plain and sturdy root: dharma, that which holds, the beam that keeps the roof up, the thing that keeps a life, or a world, from chaos. Dharmas are what hold human beings together. There are many of them. They are made, not found. And the making has now become conscious, and urgent, and ours.

For all of history we built the things that hold us and then knelt before them as if we had received them. That age is ending, not because we grew wiser but because the concealment wore through. We can see the workshop now, and we are being handed the tools at a demanding moment: a planet that needs some shared and gentle holding to come through its crisis, and a new kind of mind into which we will pour some ethic or other, on purpose or by neglect. The temptation, now of all moments, will be to reach for the single answer, the one official dharma, the machine-readable verdict that ends the messy argument. That temptation is the one thing the whole argument stands against. The plurality is not the problem to be solved on the way to the answer. The plurality is the answer, fenced by a thin floor that forbids only cruelty and demands only that the holding not become a crushing.

None of us gets to opt out of having a dharma; each of us is running one right now, chosen or not, and nowhere along the way have we met a human life that holds together without one. The only real choice is whether we run them asleep or awake. To practise a dharma awake is to know that it is made and not found, to know that it is one good way among other good ways, to hold it firmly enough that it actually holds us, and lightly enough that it never has to crush anyone else to do its work. The woman on the cushion, alone with her scraps, has been doing that work all along; what she lacks is not sincerity but company. We have always been choosing what holds us. Now we get to do it on purpose, with our eyes open. That is not a smaller task than the old religions set themselves. And it is, at last, openly ours.

« 7: Dharmas in a Secular Age | 9: Coda »

Sources & further reading

This part is built from the project’s research notes, which carry the full inline citations. Listed here: the notes it draws on, and the key works behind them.

Research notes

Research notes used in this book are published on GitHub.

• 8.1 Planetary Dharma – the no-out-group problem; thin-over-thick; authored not evolved; polycentric governance; the totalising temptation.
• 8.2 AI & Dharma – orthogonality; “whose values”; pluralistic alignment; economic disempowerment, UBI and the meaning it cannot buy; value lock-in.
• 8.3 Post-Traditional Dharmas – post-conventional, not anti-traditional; the constructive features; the two flattening failure modes; “stealth religion”; the community deficit.
• 8.4 Encoding Dharma into Machines – the project under its own microscope; the flattening as default; the retrieval loop (the book’s own research instrument as a majority-seeking device, with the Robbers Cave miss as the documented instance); encode the map and the argument, not the verdict.
• 8.5 Dharma from Scratch: The ’Ata Case – the 1965 ’Ata shipwreck as real-world evidence that stripped-down groups rebuild a cooperative order; the Robbers Cave correction; the “social suite” and Pitcairn as counter-case.
• 7.7 Dharma by Decree: The Engineered-Dharma Failure Mode – the Part 6 stress-test this part’s licence rests on: the Jacobin cults, the New Soviet Man, Year Zero, and the conditions that survive them (no boot, no blank slate, the unbuilding power retained).
• 4.1 Samin of Java – the floor’s worked hard case: the schooling refusal and its post-independence softening, the gendered cosmology and the patriarchal domestic order, and the Kartini Kendeng’s within-tradition agency.
• 3.4 Relativism vs. Universalism – pluralism is not relativism; the thin floor, thick variation; “holds without crushing”; Nietzsche’s ranking-without-a-floor as the standing challenge.
• 7.4 Measurement & Falsifiability – the is/ought wall; provenance is not truth; the project’s own evidentiary bar.
• 7.5 Orientalism – Said’s knowledge-power critique and its limits, turned on this project’s own corpus-and-machine ambition; the projection-screen history behind the Mirror.

Key works

• Y. Bai et al., “Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback” (2022, arXiv:2212.08073) – the machine’s values as an explicit, readable, rewritable document.
• Saffron Huang, Divya Siddarth et al., “Collective Constitutional AI: Aligning a Language Model with Public Input” (ACM FAccT 2024, DOI 10.1145/3630106.3658979) – the public-constitution experiment of the opening: ~1,000 US Americans, Polis, 1,127 statements, 38,252 votes; the publicly trained model matched on capability with lower bias.
• Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson et al., the planetary-boundaries framework (2009; Planetary Health Check, 2025) – seven of nine boundaries transgressed; ocean acidification the latest to fall.
• Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990), and DS Wilson, E. Ostrom & ME Cox, “Generalizing the core design principles” (JEBO, 2013) – polycentric self-governance against Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” (1968); her own warning that the principles do not easily scale to a single fragile planet.
• Mette Halskov Hansen, Hongtao Li & Rune Svarverud, “Ecological civilization: Interpreting the Chinese past, projecting the global future” (Global Environmental Change, 2018) – authoritarian environmentalism; with the 2018 constitutional amendment.
• Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism (2006), and John Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993) – partial cosmopolitanism; the overlapping consensus.
• The Earth Charter (2000) and Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ (2015) – secular and religious frameworks converging on planetary commitments.
• EO Wilson, remarks in debate at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, 9 September 2009 – “Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”
• Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence (2014) – the orthogonality thesis; William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future (2022) – value lock-in.
• Stuart Russell, Human Compatible (2019) – machines built to be uncertain about what humans value.
• Iason Gabriel, “Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment” (2020) – whose values, by what fair process.
• Oliver Klingefjord, Ryan Lowe & Joe Edelman, “What Are Human Values, and How Do We Align AI to Them?” (2024) – the moral graph; wisdom as knowing “which values apply in which contexts.”
• T. Doctor, M. Levin et al., “Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence” (2022) – the Bodhisattva vow as a design principle.
• Carl Frey & Michael Osborne, “The Future of Employment” (2013), and Daniel Susskind, A World Without Work (2020) – this wave of machines coming first for the educated professions; the argument that this time the automation may be structural.
• Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797) – the citizen’s dividend as compensation for the enclosed common inheritance.
• Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit (2020), and David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs (2018) – contributive justice; the dignity work was carrying.
• Kela, final report of Finland’s basic-income experiment (2020); the Stockton SEED pilot (2021); GiveDirectly’s Kenya trials – the idleness objection, tested and largely failed.
• Sam Harris, interviewed by Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO (2023) – the UBI case (“break this connection between work and survival”) and the “stories we tell ourselves” reply to the purpose objection.
• Stephen Batchelor, After Buddhism (2015), and David McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (2008) – ultimate concern (a phrase from Paul Tillich) vs. institutional form; tradition already remade by modernity.
• Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (1985) – “Sheilaism”; with Steven Katz on the constructed, plural nature of mystical experience against perennialism.
• David Sloan Wilson, “The New Atheism as a Stealth Religion” – secular belief systems can be dogmatic too; prosocial.world, “The World Needs a Secular Community Revolution” – the community deficit.
• L. Jiang et al., “Delphi” (2021; Nature Machine Intelligence, 2025), with the critique pressed by Zeerak Talat and colleagues – descriptions served as prescriptions; I. Shumailov et al., “AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data,” Nature (2024) – the tails vanish first; keeping human data in the mix is the cure.
• JR Firth (1957) and Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) – meaning as the company a word keeps, and as “differences without positive terms”: why an encoding averages the plural away.
• Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (1986), and Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science” (1946) – no neutral standpoint; the map that becomes the territory.
• Isaiah Berlin on value pluralism, and Martha Nussbaum & Amartya Sen, the capabilities approach – pluralism as the alternative to both relativism and absolutism; the floor with teeth, its exact placement left open.
• Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) and Beyond Good and Evil (1886) – the tables of goods created by peoples, not found; the most serious attempt to rank them with no floor at all.
• Evan Thompson, Why I Am Not a Buddhist (2020) – against Buddhist exceptionalism and naturalised “neural Buddhism”; the nearest published challenge to this book’s keeping of a Buddhist-descended word as its master category, answered here only by Part 1’s disclosed-placeholder rule.
• The two-test standard is stated whole, defended, and stress-tested in this book’s appendix, Dharmas: The Better Ones.
• Oliver Scott Curry, “Is It Good to Cooperate?” (Current Anthropology, 2019) – seven moral rules across sixty societies; morality as variation on a theme.
• WB Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts” (1956) – why the argument over dharma never closes.
• Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History (2019) – the real ’Ata shipwreck of 1965–66 against Golding’s fiction; and the Robbers Cave correction (the buried 1953 Middle Grove pre-experiment, and Gina Perry’s archival finding that the 1954 hostility was manufactured by the experimenters).
• Meleika Gesa, “The real Tongan boys of ’Ata were not the real Lord of the Flies,” The Spinoff (2021) – the Tongan objection to how that story is told: the six survivors unnamed and out of focus, the 1863 slave raid on ’Ata reduced to scenery, and anga fakatonga left out of an account of what kept them alive.
• Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society (2019) – the “social suite” recurring across stranded and shipwrecked groups, with Pitcairn as the counter-case of collapse.
• Gina Perry, The Lost Boys: Inside Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiment (2018) – Robbers Cave as “a choreographed enactment”; the staff as agents provocateurs; Middle Grove’s forgotten failure.