Alexander Weinstein is the Director of The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the author of the short story collection Children of the New World (Picador 2016). His short stories and translations have appeared in Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades, PRISM International, World Literature Today, and other journals. He is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and his fiction has been awarded the Lamar York, Gail Crump, Hamlin Garland, and New Millennium Prizes. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Siena Heights University and leads fiction workshops in the United States and Europe. Photo courtesy of Alexander Weinstein.
Author Alexander Weinstein writes about Vajrayana sleeper cells, virtual-reality children, and commodified digital enlightenment. Here he talks with Myles McDonough about the Buddhist themes in his debut short story collection, Children of the New World.
Myles McDonough: You received your B.A. from Naropa University, an institution founded by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa. How did your time at Naropa influence your writing? What did you learn about art or the human condition that has found its way into your fiction?
Weinstein: Naropa was a wild and wonderful school, and The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was a place to experiment with the boundaries of poetry and fiction. I learned to take risks with form, structure, and style—all of which influenced my long-term work. I’d grown up reading classic authors such as Chekhov, Somerset Maugham, and Tolstoy—all amazing writers—but much more tonally “serious.” At Naropa I was introduced to the literary outlaws and this was deeply inspiring.
One of things I came to realize about the human condition is how little space we allow for play. By the age of eighteen, many of us have abandoned the childhood joys which made us happy—and this reflects the predicament of adulthood. Somehow we become afraid of our voices and so we no longer sing, we think we’re awful artists and so we don’t draw, we move in socially accepted ways rather than exploring dance. This is a great loss, one which echoes the demands of a society which values efficiency over creativity.
Several of the stories in your collection involve conflicts between contemplative practice and authoritarianism. Both “Moksha” and “The Pyramid and the Ass”, for instance, take place in a near-future United States where the federal government has outlawed Buddhism. Why does the government described in these stories consider meditation a threat? What makes contemplative practice a danger to oppressive regimes?
I’m interested in critiquing anti-contemplative regimes (such as the United States) because throughout Western history there’s been a kind of spiritual war going on. Mystical spirituality and contemplative arts were persecuted by governments, orthodox religions, and, by extension, Western colonialism. Presently we’re witnessing the same American-Indian War happening to the Native Americans at Standing Rock as we read about in history books. And it’s occurring across the world to indigenous tribes—they’re fighting to protect their homelands, their cultures, and their sacred practices against a corporate/government takeover.
Contemplation, especially when done within a community, can encourage a more communal life with greater empathy, greater connection to nature and the arts, and greater peace.
Contemplation invites a transcending of the very boundaries which the established power profits from. Deep contemplation can lead to questioning the status-quo. As one grows more introspective, there’s less interest in supporting warfare, totalitarian authority, gender divisions, race divisions, sexual orientation divisions—all of which are elements of social control. So mysticism threatens the machinery of the empire. Contemplation, especially when done within a community, can encourage a more communal life with greater empathy, greater connection to nature and the arts, and greater peace.
The exploitation of spirituality for profit is a running theme in these stories. Again, in “Moksha”, the enlightenment on offer isn’t an experience obtained through meditation and discipline, but a product to be haggled over. Likewise, in “The Pyramid and the Ass”, the federal government has paired with independent contractors to control the very process of reincarnation. In what ways can the pursuit of profit interfere with spiritual development? What is the antidote?
Over the past decade I’ve become increasingly troubled by the ways in which spirituality has been monetized. I’m thinking here of the yoga classes with pop/dance mixes and hundred dollar yoga mats, the DJ ayahuasca ceremonies, the shamanic/electronica festivals. There’s a growing interest for these more “consciousness-based” gatherings, and in one way this is good, because folks are looking for a deeper connection. But, on the other hand, there are often uncontrolled egos running these ceremonies who are as interested in profit, power, and sex as your stereotypical CEO. There’s an exploitation of people’s spirituality for personal gain, and a lot of westerners are ransacking world wisdom traditions in order to convert them into profitable enterprises.
While I don’t know the antidote, I think one step towards deepening the spiritual path requires detaching from the external glitz and glamor of the capital-based model of spirituality and working to create a more authentic and communal interaction with one another, one which prizes human connection over material or spiritual gain.
In both “Saying Goodbye to Yang” and “Children of the New World”, you write about artificial intelligences that look and act like real human children. The parents in these stories raise these robots and programs as members of their families, and love them deeply. How does artificial intelligence complicate the notion of sentience, in a Buddhist sense? How do machines such as Yang fit into the Buddhist definition of “sentient beings”?
It’s interesting, because I think of Yang, the robot child in “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” or the electronic children in “Children of the New World” as just robots/programs. I mean, I have an emotional connection to them—I think of Yang as a sweet boy, and of the children as real—but whenever I discuss these stories, I point out that I’m just as duped by the machines as my characters are. These are robots and AIs! They aren’t the same as humans, they’re not sentient, and they don’t have consciousness.
What if there was a bodhisattva AI? After all, one of the things which attaches us to the cycle of rebirth is our attachment to ego, and what better un-attached being could there be than an AI?
However, your question about sentient beings and Buddhism raises an interesting question—because Buddhism does acknowledge that even inanimate objects can still have sentience. So what if we take the question a speculative-step further?
What if there was a bodhisattva AI? After all, one of the things which attaches us to the cycle of rebirth is our attachment to ego, and what better un-attached being could there be than an AI?
So we create this robot which looks like a human, talks like a human, has warm skin, a beating heart, kind eyes, a melodic voice, and also has access to every world wisdom tradition ever uploaded to the internet—the saints, gurus, and shamans of the world—anything that was recorded or uploaded to YouTube is now assimilated by the AI. It can deliver dharma talks, and proves to be more enlightened than any of the masters. And let’s say you have hundreds of thousands of these robotic bodhisattvas, delivering enlightenment to the masses—liberating us from our desires, guiding us towards freeing other beings from the cycle of death and rebirth.
Could this AI achieve the idealized state of total liberation which our clunky human birth/death/rebirth model has been taking so long to reach? Might we speed the process up even a step further by downloading the bodhisattvic program into our own brains? A simple mouse click and we suddenly see the world as pure light?
I explore these realms in my short stories, but there’s no reason to think this isn’t in our future—right now we have AI’s winning at Chess and Go against masters, and there’s a burgeoning market of sexbots, so why couldn’t we have a spiritual robot? And why should we get goosebumps and an icky feeling about imbuing technology with this attribute?
For me, the answer has to do with corporate avarice. The internet is a staggeringly brilliant piece of technology, and yet it’s constantly being put to uses which both lull us into deeper sleep (i.e. Clash of Clans, Candy Crush, Tinder/Grindr) or is data-mining our lives so to better sell us things. So the danger of the hypothetical Buddha AI is that it may quickly become the overlord of our algorithm—its access to our inner spiritual lives allowing it to better sell us things (similar to the previous critique of the phony-holy gurus out there), ultimately directing our consciousness toward the demands of the market. For the Buddha AI to be trustworthy, its programmers and funders would need to have no interest in material gain, and the cyberworld has yet to prove it’s willing to forgo such things.
The First Noble Truth states that there is suffering in life. In “Children of the New World,” attempts to eliminate suffering with ever more sophisticated technology have ultimately failed: the commodified enlightenment of “Moksha” fades after a few days; the romantic partnership in “Openness” is enhanced by social media, but burdened by the gaps it reveals between the characters’ desires and the reality of their relationship. How does human suffering change in a near-future setting, and how does it stay the same?
Part of the humor I aim for is based on the human struggles of my characters. Even though the technology allows them near-psychic abilities, virtual children, and wilder sex lives, underneath it all they still struggle with the basic questions of how to love well, how to deepen their compassion, and how to care for their families. So many of my stories examine how technology inhibits these fundamental human attributes and increases our opportunities for suffering.
The characters have given up their personal lives for online lives, but the technology can’t teach them what it means to love well or develop compassion—only the real world and human interaction can provide this.
Underneath much of our tapping, clicking, scrolling, and swiping is a great deal of loneliness, and I think we turn to our devices in order to hide from our fear of being alone. Even in groups nowadays we can watch as each person disappears into their cell phones (over dinner, during car rides, while hanging out together). So there’s this way that we’re actually increasing our loneliness (even though we’re communicating with thousands of people while we add filters to our images, comment on posted articles, or like our friends’ photos). This is what the characters in my stories are battling: they’ve given up their personal lives for online lives, but the technology can’t teach them what it means to love well or develop compassion—only the real world and human interaction can provide this.
“Children of the New World” offers a humorous and dystopian look at what the world might soon be like if humans continue to neglect their relationships to each other and to their environment. In the past, you have spoken about a desire to write utopian fiction, grounded in awe or joy rather than in conflict. What might such fiction look like? What role will it play in your next book?
I’m very interested in exploring different approaches to fiction than the classic Freytag-pyramid model. The basic premise of the Freytag pyramid is that for fiction to work there must be conflict. I learned this early on and took it as gospel truth, but recently I’ve been wondering if this isn’t simply a hang-over from a cynical era: we’ve been taught that conflict is entertainment, and so we exploit it.
So, I’m exploring awe as a functional model to replace conflict. The model of a story built upon awe seems to require a constant unfolding of surprise and pleasure within the text. It’s kind of like a Russian-doll in reverse: one starts with a smaller version of joy/awe, and as the story progresses, the surprises come with ever-larger, expanding circles of joy/awe/surprise. In this way we, as readers, find ourselves enraptured, even intoxicated.
Examples of stories which function in this way can be found in Italo Calvino, Tom Robbins, Grace Paley, and Steven Millhauser, just to name a few. And, of course, poetry has a much richer history of awe—Ross Gay’s poem “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude” is a beautiful contemporary example of this ode-like exuberance.
I’m presently working with this in my new book, The Lost Traveler’s Tour Guide. There are sections which have love and kindness as their central premises: cities of joy, bakeries of hope, cafés of solace. As for the utopian story, it’s still a work-in-progress. For me, the genre of joy remains one of the mountains to climb, a reason to keep writing, and to continue trying to develop my own ability to love more deeply.
