A lawyer friend explained it to me this way: Since the 1980s, lawyers with specialized expertise and exclusive relationships—especially those involved in high-stakes deals like mergers and acquisitions—have been generating irresistibly large profits for their firms. In response, firms have abandoned their old merit- and seniority-based systems and instead promote and empower the most financially productive lawyers. But because these lucrative deals require government approval, the firms’ leadership is now willing to submit to the Trump administration’s humiliating demands in order to keep the cash flowing.
Let’s call that karma. Abandoning your principles out of greed makes you more vulnerable, even if you do manage to acquire more stuff. At least, sometimes it does, from a certain perspective, right? But when, and why? And what is that perspective, exactly?
Take another example. After the 2024 US presidential election, it seemed clear to me that most voters for Trump adhered to two pieces of professionally manufactured misinformation: (1) The 2020 election was stolen (the “Big Lie”) and (2) the Democratic Party leadership was corrupt and untrustworthy. So-called “swing voters” mostly believed that, even if Trump was not perfect, the Democrats offered no credible alternative. More recent revelations about Biden’s mental decline make it clear that (2) was true all along! Granted, Fox News was attributing different lies to the Democrats than they were really telling. But Democrats’ failure to gain the people’s trust—even trust in evident facts—is somehow less surprising if they are lying. It helps to explain the manipulators’ success.
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson named their book about the cover-up of Biden’s mental decline Original Sin, but here, too, the metaphor of karma is at least as illuminating as the reference to the Garden of Eden. Lies make you less credible, even when you try to speak the truth. At least, sometimes that’s the case. But when, and why?
These are real questions that warrant investigation and analysis. The Buddhist concept of karma is about actions and their results; principally, it is about how people’s morally significant intentions can bring long-term, generally unintended, effects. To notice institutional consequences from lawyers abandoning their principles for money, or to notice historical consequences from Democrats’ lying to cover up Biden’s mental decline, is to acknowledge the possible utility of this framework for understanding the present world.
Call it karmic historiography, then, when we interrogate history for where it is, potentially, the outcome of accumulated moral acts—whether positive or negative. This TIF forum uses the notion of karma and related Buddhist ideas to bring new and surprising light to contemporary society and politics. The Buddhist conceptual toolset provides new analytical methods and prompts reconsiderations of prior historical and sociological approaches.
How can Buddhist ethical analysis—deploying not just karma, but also concepts such as dependent origination, defilements, suffering, and no-self—serve to illuminate moral and psychological dimensions in historical and social phenomena? Karma emphasizes the cyclic and cumulative effects of repeated actions; dependent origination emphasizes the way seemingly independent events and individuals emerge out of complex webs of causes and conditions; attention to defilements illuminates the deeply conditioned, psychological motives for negative intentions; consideration of suffering recasts historically dominant desires for wealth and power as having unreliable motivations and lasting negative psychological and social effects; no-self draws attention to how social settings and roles are always in flux, and social ills result from attachments to narrow identities. The present series is a test of these and related principles. It is not a claim that Buddhists have historically thought this way, but an offering for readers of TIF to sample and see if it is useful to think this way today. You do not need to be a Buddhist to see the benefit of putting these concepts to work.
Through this series, we find karma offering fresh perspectives on the opening of traumatic wounds in psychoanalysis and in sex; on the recursive, delusive self-making involved in mindless scrolling; on how large language models evince the intertwining of the material and the mental; on how spaces and places carry the “karmic” imprint of past injustices; on how agency is both dispersed and channeled by sociopolitical roles; on how the socioculturally transformative potentials of such interdependent agency are communicated through the Buddhist cosmological “multiverse”; and on a Buddhist model for deliberative democracy that remains instructive today. Essays also explore challenges to, and potential shortcomings of, this Buddhist-inspired approach, especially when it is pursued in a shallow manner. Karma, we will see, is too often interpreted as punishment or destiny, rather than a method of moral scrutiny that motivates active engagement. It can be dangerous, as well, if it is taken as justification for discounting the claims of one’s (ostensibly deluded) opponents.
These essays open a more extended conversation and point toward new practical disciplines that would seek to apply the fruits of the humanities and social sciences to issues of broadly accepted significance and obvious moral weight. Is Donald Trump a producer or a product of our media environment? How is bias-based violence related to the public rhetoric of politicians? Why do attempts to intervene in poverty, violence and so much else (everything else?) repeatedly, if often unintentionally, renew and reinforce power differentials? What dynamics explain the social phenomena of backlash, or the entrenchment of views in polarization and ethnonationalism, or active ignorance (as José Medina puts it), or repeating cycles of trauma? Many fields and approaches shed light on these topics; this forum makes clear that what we call karmic historiography ought to be one of them.
Buddhist approaches to causality, intention, and ethics can deepen our understanding of historical and social processes, while providing practical insights into contemporary critical concerns—but they are nothing more or less than practical tools. They are, as Buddhists say, “conditioned” or even “empty.” They may be useful, but only sometimes, not always and only so. Yet that’s the best we can hope for, as long as we’re stuck cycling in samsara—that is, before we reach enlightenment. Consequently, while it may seem naïve to tell politicians not to lie, or to tell lawyers that they should not sacrifice their integrity for money, it just might turn out to prove compelling, once such moral advice is grounded in evidence-based, karmic reasoning. In the meantime, then, we may as well take these ideas out for a spin.