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An institution is any structure or mechanism of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals within a given human community. Institutions are identified with a social purpose and permanence, transcending individual human lives and intention by enforcing rules that govern cooperative human behavior.^[1]

The term "institution" is commonly applied to customs and behavior patterns important to a society, as well as to particular formal organizations of government and public services. As structures and mechanisms of social order among humans, institutions are one of the principal objects of study in the social sciences, such as political science, anthropology, economics, and sociology (the latter being described by Durkheim as the "science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning").^[2] Institutions are also a central concern for law, the formal mechanism for political rule-making and enforcement.

Examples of institutions[link]

• Marriage and the family - sociology of the family
• Religion and religious institutions - see sociology of religion; civil religion
• Educational institutions - schools (preschool, primary/elementary, secondary, and post-secondary/higher - see Sociology of education)
• Research community - Academia and universities; research institutes - see sociology of science
• Medicine - hospitals and other health care institutions - see sociology of health and illness, medical sociology
  • Psychiatric hospitals (history)
• Law and legal system - courts; judges; the legal profession (bar) - see jurisprudence, philosophy of law, sociology of law
  • Criminal justice or penal systems - prisons - see sociology of punishment
• Military or paramilitary forces - see military sociology
• Police forces
• Mass media - including the news media (television, newspapers) and the popular media - see media studies
• Industry - businesses, including corporations - see financial institution, factory, capitalism, division of labour, social class, industrial sociology
• Civil society or NGOs - Charitable organizations; advocacy groups; political parties; think tanks; virtual communities

In an extended context:

• Art and culture (See also: Culture industry, Critical theory, Cultural studies, Cultural sociology)
• Language (See also: Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Sociology of language)
• The nation-state - Social and political scientists often speak of the state as embodying all institutions such as schools, prisons, and so on. However, these institutions may be considered private or autonomous, whilst organised religion and family life certainly pre-date the advent of the nation state. In the Neo-Marxist thought of Antonio Gramsci, for instance, a distinction may be felt between the institutions of political society (the police, the army, legal system, etc.) which dominates directly and coercively, and civil society (the family, the education system, etc.)

Aspects of institutions[link]

Although individual, formal organizations, commonly identified as "institutions," may be deliberately and intentionally created by people, the development and functioning of institutions in society in general may be regarded as an instance of emergence; that is, institutions arise, develop and function in a pattern of social self-organization, which goes beyond the conscious intentions of the individual humans involved.

As mechanisms of social interaction, institutions are manifest in both objectively real, formal organizations, such as the U.S. Congress, or the Roman Catholic Church, and, also, in informal social order and organization, reflecting human psychology, culture, habits and customs, and encompassing subjective experience of meaningful enactments. Most important institutions, considered abstractly, have both objective and subjective aspects: examples include money and marriage. The institution of money encompasses many formal organizations, including banks and government treasury departments and stock exchanges, which may be termed, "institutions," as well as subjective experiences, which guide people in their pursuit of personal well-being. Powerful institutions are able to imbue a paper currency with certain value, and to induce millions into cooperative production and trade in pursuit of economic ends abstractly denominated in that currency's units.^{[citation needed]} The subjective experience of money is so pervasive and persuasive that economists talk of the "money illusion" and try to disabuse their students of it, in preparation for learning economic analysis.^{[citation needed]}

Perspectives of the social sciences[link]

While institutions tend to appear to people in society as part of the natural, unchanging landscape of their lives, study of institutions by the social sciences tends to reveal the nature of institutions as social constructions, artifacts of a particular time, culture and society, produced by collective human choice, though not directly by individual intention. Sociology traditionally analyzed social institutions in terms of interlocking social roles and expectations. Social institutions created and were composed of groups of roles, or expected behaviors. The social function of the institution was executed by the fulfillment of roles. Basic biological requirements, for reproduction and care of the young, are served by the institutions of marriage and family, for example, by creating, elaborating and prescribing the behaviors expected for husband/father, wife/mother, child, etc.

The relationship of institutions to human nature is a foundational question for the social sciences. Institutions can be seen as "naturally" arising from, and conforming to, human nature—a fundamentally conservative view—or institutions can be seen as artificial, almost accidental, and in need of architectural redesign, informed by expert social analysis, to better serve human needs—a fundamentally progressive view. Adam Smith anchored his economics in the supposed human "propensity to truck, barter and exchange". Modern feminists have criticized traditional marriage and other institutions as element of an oppressive and obsolete patriarchy. The Marxist view which sees human nature as historically 'evolving' towards voluntary social cooperation, shared by some anarchists, is that supraindividual institutions such as the market and the state are incompatible with the individual liberty which would obtain in a truly free society.

Economics, in recent years, has used game theory to study institutions from two perspectives. Firstly, how do institutions survive and evolve? In this perspective, institutions arise from Nash equilibria of games. For example, whenever people pass each other in a corridor or thoroughfare, there is a need for customs, which avoid collisions. Such a custom might call for each party to keep to their own right (or left—such a choice is arbitrary, it is only necessary that the choice be uniform and consistent). Such customs may be supposed to be the origin of rules, such as the rule, adopted in many countries, which requires driving automobiles on the right side of the road.

Secondly, how do institutions affect behaviour? In this perspective, the focus is on behaviour arising from a given set of institutional rules. In these models, institutions determine the rules (i.e. strategy sets and utility functions) of games, rather than arise as equilibria out of games. For example, the Cournot duopoly model is based on an institution involving an auctioneer who sells all goods at the market-clearing price. While it is always possible to analyse behaviour with the institutions-as-equilibria approach instead, it is much more complicated.

In political science, the effect of institutions on behavior has also been considered from a meme perspective, like game theory borrowed from biology. A "memetic institutionalism" has been proposed, suggesting that institutions provide selection environments for political action, whereby differentiated retention arises and thereby a Darwinian evolution of institutions over time. Public choice theory, another branch of economics with a close relationship to political science, considers how government policy choices are made, and seeks to determine what the policy outcomes are likely to be, given a particular political decision-making process and context.

In history, a distinction between eras or periods, implies a major and fundamental change in the system of institutions governing a society. Political and military events are judged to be of historical significance to the extent that they are associated with changes in institutions. In European history, particular significance is attached to the long transition from the feudal institutions of the Middle Ages to the modern institutions, which govern contemporary life.

Institutionalization[link]

The term "institutionalization" is widely used in social theory to refer to the process of embedding something (for example a concept, a social role, a particular value or mode of behavior) within an organization, social system, or society as a whole. The term may also be used to refer to committing a particular individual to an institution, such as a mental institution. To this extent, "institutionalization" may carry negative connotations regarding the treatment of, and damage caused to, vulnerable human beings by the oppressive or corrupt application of inflexible systems of social, medical, or legal controls by publicly owned, private or not-for-profit organizations.

The term "institutionalization" may also be used in a political sense to apply to the creation or organization of governmental institutions or particular bodies responsible for overseeing or implementing policy, for example in welfare or development.

Institutionalization as a socio-political phenomenon in Europe[link]

During the period of the industrial revolution in Europe many countries went through a period of "institutionalization", which saw a large expansion and development of the role of government within society, particularly into areas seen previously as the private sphere. Institutionalization is also seen as being an important part of process of modernization in developing countries, involving again the expansion and improved organization of government structures.

Public and civic organizations acquired great authority and wealth during and in the century following the Industrial Revolution in the UK and other rapidly developing nation states. The growing demands of industry for high volume labor supplies in the 19th century also created an ethos in which the needs and rights of the unproductive or vulnerable individual were deemed less important than the needs of society as a whole. Large numbers of beggars and high rates of crime and disease were a consequence of the massive social and economic changes experienced in the period following the battle of Waterloo. Social unrest from the Peterloo riots onwards resulted in a significant Chartist challenge to established authority on the streets of major cities like Sheffield, Manchester, and Glasgow in the 1840s.

During the period from 1850-1930 many types of institutions were created by public subscription, parliament and local authorities to provide housing, healthcare, education, and financial support for individuals in need. At the upper end of the scale, public boarding schools such as Eton and Harrow were founded or greatly extended to meet the growing demand for the education of the children of those in colonial service overseas. These were seen as models of social improvement, and many inferior imitations followed for the lower social orders. Virtually every borough in the UK was required by legislation to make provision for paupers, homeless, released prisoners, convicted criminals, orphans, disabled war veterans, older people with no means of support, deaf and blind schools, schools and colonies for those with learning disabilities or mental health problems.

Distinguishing features of such institutions were frequently, but not exclusively:^{[citation needed]}

• communal dormitories
• communal kitchens and dining facilities
• rural, isolated locations
• restrictions on personal liberty and possessions
• uniforms
• oppressive, authoritarian regimes
• strict systems of rules and codes of conduct
• use of well-recognized propaganda techniques
• boards of visitors or trustees, usually drawn from the ranks of the upper middle classes, the so-called "great and good"
• hierarchical systems of management
• compulsory religious attendance
• involvement of inmates as unpaid or poorly rewarded labor in return for small privileges
• widespread abuse of human rights, dignity
• rigid separation of the sexes
• excessive reliance on medication and physical restraints

Many of these organizations, whilst originally expressing idealistic aspirations and aims, became "total" institutions within a generation or two of their foundation, providing in some cases cradle to grave housing, occupation and social control. Founding charters usually proclaimed beneficial outcomes of "reform" (or rehabilitation) of character through moral and occupation education and discipline, but in practice inmates were often trapped in a system that provided no obvious route of escape or promotion. As late as the 1950s, in Britain, several hundred thousand people lived in Victorian asylums and "colonies".

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his opus The Social Contract that "Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them: they love their servitude". Institutionalization is a similar process.^[3]

Deconstruction of major social institutions[link]

The dangers of institutions were chronicled and criticised by reformers almost since their foundation. Charles Dickens was an outspoken and high profile early critic, and several of his novels, in particular Oliver Twist and Hard Times demonstrate his insight into the damage that institutions can do to human beings.

Enoch Powell, when Minister for Health in the early 1960s, was a later opponent who was appalled by what he witnessed on his visits to the asylums, and his famous "water tower" speech in 1961 called for the closure of all NHS asylums and their replacement by wards in general hospitals:

"There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside - the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day. Do not for a moment underestimate their powers of resistance to our assault. Let me describe some of the defences which we have to storm."^[4]

Scandal after scandal followed, with many high profile public inquiries. These involved the exposure of abuses such as unscientific surgical techniques such as lobotomy and the widespread neglect and abuse of vulnerable patients in the USA and Europe. The growing anti-psychiatry movement in the 1960s and 1970s led in Italy to the first successful legislative challenge to the authority of the mental institutions, culminating in their closure.

During the 1980 s and 1990s the hospital population started to fall rapidly, mainly because of the deaths of long-term inmates. Significant efforts were made to re-house large numbers of former residents in a variety of suitable or otherwise alternative accommodation. The first 1,000+ bed hospital to close was Darenth Park in Kent, swiftly followed by many more across the UK. The haste of these closures, driven by the Conservative governments led by Margaret Thatcher and John Major, led to considerable criticism in the press, as some individuals slipped through the net into homelessness or were discharged to poor quality private sector mini-institutions. The resistance of many institutions to change, predicted by Enoch Powell, has continued into the 21st century, and there are still several thousand people permanently resident in the dwindling asylums and long stay hospital replacement campuses scattered across the UK.

Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt details how professional training programs and other induction procedures to institutions socialize new recruits to respect group norms whilst selecting those newcomers not only technically capable to function within the institution but also responsive to its socialization process.

See also[link]

Look up institution in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Actor analysis
• Deinstitutionalization
• state, Nation, country, Sovereign state
• for effect on individuals: institutionalization
• Erving Goffman
• Historical institutionalism
• Ideological state apparatus
• Institute
• Institutional abuse
• Institutional economics
• Institutional logic
• Institutional memory
• Linkage institution

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Berger, P. L. and T. Luckmann (1966), The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Anchor Books, Garden City, NY.
• Chang, Ha-Joon (ed.) (2007), Institutional Change and Economic Development, Anthem Press.
• Greif, Avner (2006), Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-67134-7
• North, D. C. (1990), Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Schotter, A. (1981), The Economic Theory of Social Institutions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Further reading[link]

• Report of the Committee of Inquiry into allegations of ill-treatment of patients and other irregularities at the Ely Hospital, Cardiff, HMSO 1969
• Extracts of the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Normansfield Hospital - British Medical Journal, 1978, 2, 1560–1563
• Whyte, William H., The Organization Man, Doubleday Publishing, 1956. (excerpts from Whyte's book)
• The Production and Reproduction of Scandals in Chronic Sector Hospitals Amy Munson- Barkshire 1981

• "Social Institutions," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky at the 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
Born	1964 (age 47–48) Columbia, Missouri
Occupation	Writer, consultant, lecturer[1]
Known for	Writing

Clay Shirky (born 1964^[2]) is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He has a joint appointment at New York University (NYU) as a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Assistant Arts Professor in the New Media focused graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).^[3] His courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technological networks, how our networks shape culture and vice-versa.^[4]

He has written and been interviewed extensively about the Internet since 1996. His columns and writings have appeared in Business 2.0, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired.

Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client–server infrastructure that characterizes the World Wide Web. He is a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Advisory Board.

In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson calls Shirky "a prominent thinker on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies."^[5]

Education and career[link]

Photograph of Shirky taken by Creative Commons chairman and MIT Media Laboratory director Joi Ito.

After graduating from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in fine art in 1986, he moved to New York.^[6] In the 1990s he founded the Hard Place Theater, a theatre company that produced non-fiction theater using only found materials such as government documents, transcripts and cultural records.^[6] and also worked as a lighting designer for other theater and dance companies, including the Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service and Dana Reitz.^[7] During this time, Shirky was vice-president of the New York chapter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and wrote technology guides for Ziff Davis. He appeared as an expert witness on cyberculture in Shea v. Reno, a case cited in the U. S. Supreme Court's decision to strike down the Communications Decency Act in 1996.

Shirky was the first Professor of New Media in the Media Studies department at Hunter College, where he was key in developing the MFA in Integrated Media Arts program.

In the fall of 2010, Shirky was as a visiting Morrow Lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government^[8] instructing a course titled: "New Media and Public Action".^[9]

Views[link]

In his book Here Comes Everybody Shirky explains how he has long spoken in favor of crowdsourcing and collaborative efforts online. He uses the phrase "the Internet runs on love" to describe the nature of such collaborations.^[10] In the book, he discusses the ways in which the action of a group adds up to something more than just aggregated individual action.

He points to four key steps. The first is sharing, a sort of “me-first collaboration” in which the social effects are aggregated after the fact; people share links, URLs, tags, and eventually come together around a type. This type of sharing is a reverse of the so-called old order of sharing, where participants congregate first and then share (examples include Flickr, and Delicious). The second is conversation, that is, the synchronization of people with each other and the coming together to learn more about something and to get better at it. The third is collaboration, in which a group forms under the purpose of some common effort. It requires a division of labor, and teamwork. It can often be characterized by people wanting to fix a market failure, and is motivated by increasing accessibility.

The fourth and final step is collective action, which Shirky says is “mainly still in the future.” The key point about collective action is that the fate of the group as a whole becomes important. In a presentation called "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus",^[11] Shirky popularized the concept of cognitive surplus, the time freed from watching television which can be enormously productive when applied to other social endeavors. He also notes that we are experiencing an era where people like to produce and share just as much, if not more than they like to consume. Since technology has made the producing and sharing possible, he argues that we will see a new era of participation that will lead to big change. In 2010 Shirky published Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

Shirky has also written about "algorithmic authority," which describes the process through which unverified information is vetted for its trustworthiness through multiple sources.^{[12] [13]}

The Shirky Principle[link]

In April 2010, Kevin Kelly cited the phrase "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution," and called it the "Shirky Principle", as the phrasing reminded him of the clarity of the Peter Principle.^[14][15][16]

Response to Evgeny Morozov[link]

In March 2011, Shirky responded to questions raised by Evgeny Morozov about consulting he had done for the Libyan government. Shirky explained that he had been invited in 2007 to speak in Boston to Libya's IT Minister.^[17] Shirky stated that the talk was "about using social software to improve citizen engagement in coastal towns. The idea was that those cities would be more economically successful if local policies related to the tourist trade were designed by the locals themselves." Shirky added that nothing came of the project beyond his initial talk. He defended his underlying desire to expand representative government in Libya and concluded that "the best reason to believe that social media can aid citizens in their struggle to make government more responsive is that both citizens and governments believe that."

Bibliography[link]

• The Internet by E-Mail (1994) - ISBN 1-56276-240-0
• Voices from the Net (1995) - ISBN 1-56276-303-2
• P2P Networking Overview (2001) - ISBN 0-596-00185-1
• Planning for Web Services: Obstacles and Opportunities (2003) - ISBN 0-596-00364-1
• Selected Articles in The Best Software Writing I, Joel Spolsky ed. (2005) - ISBN 1-59059-500-9
  • A Group is its Own Worst Enemy by Clay Shirky
  • Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software by Clay Shirky
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008) - ISBN 978-1-59420-153-0
• Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010) - ISBN 978-1-59420-253-7

See also[link]

• Collective action

Footnotes[link]

References[link]

• Shirky, Clay (2003). "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality". Writings About the Internet. http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html. Retrieved 2006-02-16. 
• MacLeod, Hugh (2006). "Shirky's Law: "Equality. Fairness. Opportunity. Pick Two."". gapingvoid. http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/002238.html. Retrieved 2006-02-16. 
• Clay Shirky's Bio
• Gillette, Felix (2010-06-08). "Feats of Clay". The New York Observer. http://www.observer.com/2010/media/feats-clay. Retrieved 2010-06-09. 

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Clay Shirky

• Clay Shirky's homepage
• Clay Shirky on Twitter
• Clay Shirky’s writings on the O'Reilly Network
• Profile and videos at TED.com
• Profile and talks at Fora.tv
• Socially Intelligent Computing A Dialogue with Daniel Goleman
• Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata - a presentation (mp3) from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference held in San Diego, California, March 14–17, 2005.
• Futures of the Internet (Flash,mp4,RealVideo,3gp,mp3). Internet Society - NY Chapter. 2008-04-16. http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=214. Retrieved 2008-04-27.  - Colloquium @ NYU.
• Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008
• "It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure." Video, Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo NY, Sept. 16-19, 2008.
• Video (and audio) of interview/discussion with Clay Shirky by Will Wilkinson on Bloggingheads.tv
• Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom A talk about journalism and pay walls.

Alan Wilson Watts

Born	(1915-01-06)6 January 1915 Chislehurst, Kent, England
Died	16 November 1973(1973-11-16) (aged 58) Mt. Tamalpais, California, USA
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Eastern Philosophy
School	Zen Buddhism · Hinduism · Pantheism · Religious naturalism · Taoism
Main interests	Personal identity · Higher consciousness · Aesthetics  · Public Ethics

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest but left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.

Living on the West Coast, Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not just a religion. Like Aldous Huxley before him, he explored human consciousness in the essay, "The New Alchemy" (1958), and in the book, The Joyous Cosmology (1962).

Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais. His legacy has been kept alive by his son, Mark Watts, and by many of his recorded talks and lectures that have found new life on the Internet. According to the critic Erik Davis, his "writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity."^[1]

Early years[link]

Watts was born to middle class parents in the village of Chislehurst, Kent, in 1915, living at 3 (now 5) Holbrook Lane. His father was a representative for the London office of the Michelin Tyre Company, his mother a housewife whose father had been a missionary. With modest financial means, they chose to live in pastoral surroundings and Alan, an only child, grew up playing at brookside, learning the names of wildflowers and butterflies.^[2] Probably because of the influence of his mother’s religious family^[3] the Buchans, an interest in "ultimate things" seeped in. But it mixed with Alan’s own interests in storybook fables and romantic tales of the mysterious Far East.^[4]

Watts also later wrote of a mystical vision he experienced while ill with a fever as a child. During this time he was influenced by Far Eastern landscape paintings and embroideries that had been given to his mother by missionaries returning from China. The few Chinese paintings Watts was able to see in England riveted him, and he wrote "I was aesthetically fascinated with a certain clarity, transparency, and spaciousness in Chinese and Japanese art. It seemed to float...".^[5] These works of art emphasized the participative relationship of man in nature, a theme that stood fast throughout his life.

Buddhism[link]

Seated Great Buddha (Daibutsu), Kamakura, Japan

By his own assessment, Watts was imaginative, headstrong, and talkative. He was sent to boarding schools (which included both academic and religious training of the Muscular Christianity sort) from early years. Of this religious training, he remarked “Throughout my schooling my religious indoctrination was grim and maudlin…”^[6] During holidays in his teen years, Francis Croshaw, a wealthy Epicurean with strong interests in both Buddhism and the exotic little-known aspects of European culture, took Watts on a trip through France. It was not long afterward that Watts felt forced to decide between the Anglican Christianity he had been exposed to and the Buddhism he had read about in various libraries, including Croshaw’s. He chose Buddhism, and sought membership in the London Buddhist Lodge, which had been established by Theosophists, and was now run by the barrister Christmas Humphreys. Watts became the organization’s secretary at 16 (1931). The young Watts explored several styles of meditation during these years.

Education[link]

Watts attended The King's School next door to Canterbury Cathedral. Though he was frequently at the top of his classes scholastically, and was given responsibilities at school, he botched an opportunity for a scholarship to Oxford by styling a crucial examination essay in a way that was read as presumptuous and capricious.^[7]

Hence, when he graduated from secondary school, Watts was thrust into the world of employment, working in a printing house and later a bank. He spent his spare time involved with the Buddhist Lodge and also under the tutelage of a "rascal guru" named Dimitrije Mitrinović. (Mitrinović was himself influenced by Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, G. I. Gurdjieff, and the varied psychoanalytical schools of Freud, Jung and Adler.) Watts also read widely in philosophy, history, psychology, psychiatry and Eastern wisdom. By his own reckoning, and also by that of his biographer Monica Furlong, Watts was primarily an autodidact. His involvement with the Buddhist Lodge in London afforded Watts a considerable number of opportunities for personal growth. Through Humphreys, he contacted eminent spiritual authors (e.g., Nicholas Roerich, Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan) and prominent theosophists like Alice Bailey. In 1936, aged 21, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, heard D. T. Suzuki read a paper, and afterwards was able to meet this esteemed scholar of Zen Buddhism. Beyond these discussions and personal encounters, Watts absorbed, by studying the available scholarly literature, the fundamental concepts and terminology of the main philosophies of India and East Asia.

Influences and first publication[link]

In 1936, Watts' first book was published, The Spirit of Zen, which he later acknowledged to be mainly digested from the writings of Suzuki.

In 1938 he and his bride left England to live in America. He had married Eleanor Everett, whose mother Ruth Fuller Everett was involved with a traditional Zen Buddhist circle in New York. A few years later, Ruth Fuller married the Zen master (or "roshi"), Sokei-an Sasaki, and this Japanese gentleman served as a sort of model and mentor to Watts, though he chose not to enter into a formal Zen training relationship with Sasaki. During these years, according to his later writings, Watts had another mystical experience while on a walk with his wife.

Watts' fascination with the Zen (or Chan) tradition—beginning during the 1930s—developed because that tradition embodied the spiritual, interwoven with the practical, as exemplified in the subtitle of his Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East. "Work," "life," and "art" were not demoted due to a spiritual focus.

Priesthood and after[link]

Watts left formal Zen training in New York because the method of the teacher didn't suit him. He was not ordained as a Zen monk, but he felt a need to find a professional outlet for his philosophical inclinations. He entered Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, an Anglican (Episcopalian) school in Evanston, Illinois, where he studied Christian scriptures, theology, and Church history. He attempted to work out a blend of contemporary Christian worship, mystical Christianity, and Asian philosophy. Watts was awarded a master's degree in theology in response to his thesis, which he published as a popular edition under the title Behold the Spirit. The pattern was set, in that Watts did not hide his dislike for religious outlooks that he decided were dour, guilt-ridden, or militantly proselytizing—no matter if they were found within Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism.

All seemed to go reasonably well in his next role, as Episcopalian priest (beginning in 1945, aged 30), until an extramarital affair resulted in his young wife having their marriage annulled. It also resulted in Watts leaving the ministry by 1950. He spent the New Year getting to know Joseph Campbell; his wife, Jean Erdman; and John Cage.

In early 1951, Watts moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Here he taught alongside Saburō Hasegawa, Frederic Spiegelberg, Haridas Chaudhuri, lama Tokwan Tada, and various visiting experts and professors. Hasegawa, in particular, served as a teacher to Watts in the areas of Japanese customs, arts, primitivism, and perceptions of nature. Besides teaching, Watts served for several years as the Academy's administrator. One notable student of his was Eugene Rose, who later went on to become a famous Hieromonk and theologian in the Eastern Orthodox Church of America.

Watts also studied written Chinese and practiced Chinese brush calligraphy with Hasegawa as well as with some of the Chinese students who enrolled at the Academy. While Watts was noted for an interest in Zen Buddhism, his reading and discussions delved into Vedanta, "the new physics", cybernetics, semantics, process philosophy, natural history, and the anthropology of sexuality.

Middle years[link]

After heading up the Academy for a few years, Watts left the faculty for a freelance career in the mid 1950s. In 1953, he began what became a long-running weekly radio program at Pacifica Radio station KPFA in Berkeley, which continued until his death in 1973. Like other volunteer programmers at the listener-sponsored station, Watts was not paid for his broadcasts; they did, however, gain him a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area. These programs were later carried by additional Pacifica stations, and were re-broadcast many times over in the decades following his death. The original tapes are currently held by the Pacifica Radio Archives, based at KPFK in Los Angeles, and at the Electronic University archive founded by his son, Mark Watts (alanwatts.org).

In 1957 when 42, Watts published one of his best known books, The Way of Zen, which focused on philosophical explication and history. Besides drawing on the lifestyle and philosophical background of Zen, in India and China, Watts introduced ideas drawn from general semantics (directly from the writings of Alfred Korzybski and also from Norbert Wiener's early work on cybernetics, which had recently been published). Watts offered analogies from cybernetic principles possibly applicable to the Zen life. The book sold well, eventually becoming a modern classic, and helped widen his lecture circuit.

Around this time, Watts toured parts of Europe with his father, meeting the renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung. In relation to modern psychology, Watts's instincts were closer to Jung's or Abraham Maslow's than to those of Freud.

Experimentation[link]

When he returned to the United States, he began to dabble in psychedelic drug experiences, initially with mescaline given to him by Dr. Oscar Janiger. He tried LSD several times with various research teams led by Drs. Keith Ditman, Sterling Bunnell, and Michael Agron. He also tried marijuana and concluded that it was a useful and interesting psychoactive drug that gave the impression of time slowing down. Watts’ books of the ’60s reveal the influence of these chemical adventures on his outlook. He would later comment about psychedelic drug use, "When you get the message, hang up the phone."^[8]

For a time, Watts came to prefer writing in the language of modern science and psychology (Psychotherapy East and West is a good example), finding a parallel between mystical experiences and the theories of the material universe proposed by 20th-century physicists. He later equated mystical experience with ecological awareness, and typically emphasized whichever approach seemed best suited to the audience he was addressing.

Supporters and critics[link]

Watts's explorations and teaching brought him into contact with many noted intellectuals, artists, and American teachers in the human potential movement. His friendship with poet Gary Snyder nurtured his sympathies with the budding environmental movement, to which Watts gave philosophical support. He also encountered Robert Anton Wilson, who credited Watts with being one of his "Light[s] along the Way" in the opening appreciation of Cosmic Trigger.

Though never affiliated for long with any one academic institution, he did have a fellowship for several years at Harvard University. He also lectured to many college and university students. His lectures and books gave him far-reaching influence on the American intelligentsia of the 1950s–1970s, but he was often seen as an outsider in academia. When questioned sharply by students during his talk at University of California Santa Cruz in 1970, Watts responded that he was not an academic philosopher but rather "a philosophical entertainer."

Watts has been criticized by Buddhists such as Roshi Philip Kapleau, John Daido Loori, and D. T. Suzuki for allegedly misinterpreting several key concepts of Zen Buddhism. Examples of the criticisms by those who believe that zazen can only be achieved by a strict and specific means of sitting as opposed to a cultivated state of mind available at any moment in any situation would be when Kapleau claimed that Watts dismissed zazen on the basis of only half a koan.^[9] In regard to the aforementioned koan, Robert Baker Aitken reports that Suzuki told him "I regret to say that Mr. Watts did not understand that story."^[10] In Loori's translation of Dogen's The True Dharma Eye, the author also mentions this and expands further to suggest that Zen in its essence is zazen, and cannot be grasped without the practice. This had been the predominant interpretation of Zen in the West before Alan Watts began to write. One major point raised today, however, is that the state of Zen is like that of a dog, always in the moment, regretting nothing. Although in one Koan Zhaozhou is said to have answered that a Dog does not have Buddha nature, in a different Koan from the same period Zhaozhou answered the same question in the positive, demonstrating the disagreements between the sects of 'walking monks' and 'sitting monks' that go back thousands of years. In his talks, Watts addressed the issue of defining zazen practice when he said, "A cat sits until it is tired of sitting, then gets up, stretches, and walks away."

He did, however, have his supporters in the Zen community, including Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center. As David Chadwick recounted in his biography of Suzuki, when a student of Suzuki's disparaged Watts by saying “we used to think he was profound until we found the real thing," Suzuki "fumed with a sudden intensity," saying, "You completely miss the point about Alan Watts! You should notice what he has done. He is a great bodhisattva."^[11]

Applied aesthetics[link]

Watts often wrote about, or sometimes alluded to, a group of neighbors in Druid Heights (near Mill Valley, California), who had endeavored to combine architecture, gardening, and carpentry skills to make a beautiful and comfortable life for themselves. These neighbors accomplished this by relying on their own talents and using their own hands, as they lived in what has been called "shared bohemian poverty."^[12] Druid Heights was founded by the writer Elsa Gidlow,^[13] and Watts dedicated his book The Joyous Cosmology to the people of this neighborhood.^[14]

Regarding his intentions, Watts attempted to lessen the alienation that accompanies the experience of being human that he felt plagued the modern Westerner, and (like his fellow British expatriate and friend, Aldous Huxley) to lessen the ill will that was an unintentional by-product of alienation from the natural world. He felt such teaching could improve the world, at least to a degree. He also articulated the possibilities for greater incorporation of aesthetics (for example: better architecture, more art, more fine cuisine) in American life. In his autobiography he wrote, "… cultural renewal comes about when highly differentiated cultures mix".^[15]

In his last novel Island (1962), Aldous Huxley mentions the religious practice of maithuna as being something like what Roman Catholics call "coitus reservatus". A few years before, Alan Watts had discussed the theme in his own book Nature, Man and Woman. There, he discusses the possibility of the practice being known to early Christians and of it being kept secretly by the Church.

Later years[link]

In his writings of the 1950s, he conveyed his admiration for the practicality in the historical achievements of Chán (Zen) in the Far East, for it had fostered farmers, architects, builders, folk physicians, artists, and administrators among the monks who had lived in the monasteries of its lineages.

In his mature work, he presents himself as "Zennist" in spirit as he wrote in his last book, Tao: The Watercourse Way. Child rearing, the arts, cuisine, education, law and freedom, architecture, sexuality, and the uses and abuses of technology were all of great interest to him.

Though known for his Zen teachings, he was equally if not more influenced by ancient Hindu scriptures, especially Vedanta, and spoke extensively about the nature of the divine Reality Man that Man misses, how the contradiction of opposites is the method of life and the means of cosmic and human evolution, how our fundamental Ignorance is rooted in the exclusive nature of mind and ego, how to come in touch with the Field of Consciousness and Light, and other cosmic principles. These are discussed in great detail in dozens of hours of audio that are in part captured in the ‘Out of Your Mind’ series.

On the personal level, Watts sought to resolve his feelings of alienation from the institutions of marriage and the values of American society, as revealed in his classic comments on love relationships in "Divine Madness" and on perception of the organism-environment in "The Philosophy of Nature".

In looking at social issues he was quite concerned with the necessity for international peace, for tolerance and understanding among disparate cultures. He also came to feel acutely conscious of a growing ecological predicament; as one instance, in the early 1960s he wrote: “Can any melting or burning imaginable get rid of these ever-rising mountains of ruin—especially when the things we make and build are beginning to look more and more like rubbish even before they are thrown away?"^[16] These concerns were later expressed in a television pilot made for NET filmed at his mountain retreat in 1971 in which he noted that the single track of conscious attention was wholly inadequate for interactions with a multi-tracked world.

Political stance[link]

Distrusting both the established political left and right, Watts found political inspiration in the Chinese sage Chuang-Tzu, an ancient Taoist thinker^{[citation needed]}. He disliked much in the conventional idea of "progress." He hoped for change, but personally he preferred amiable, semi-isolated rural social enclaves, and also believed in tolerance for urban tenderloins, social misfits, and eccentric artists. Watts decried the suburbanization of the countryside and the way of life that went with it.

In one campus lecture tour, which Watts titled "The End to the Put-Down of Man", Watts presented positive images for both nature and humanity, spoke in favor of the various stages of human growth (including the teenage years), reproached excessive cynicism and rivalry, and extolled intelligent creativity, good architecture and food^{[citation needed]}.

On spiritual and social identity[link]

Watts felt that absolute morality had nothing to do with the fundamental realization of one’s deep spiritual identity. He advocated social rather than personal ethics. In his writings, Watts was increasingly concerned with ethics applied to relations between humanity and the natural environment and between governments and citizens. He wrote out of an appreciation of a racially and culturally diverse social landscape.

He often said that he wished to act as a bridge between the ancient and the modern, between East and West, and between culture and nature.

Watts led some tours for Westerners to the Buddhist temples of Japan. He also studied some movements from the traditional Chinese martial art T'ai chi ch'uan, with an Asian colleague, Al Chung-liang Huang.

Worldview[link]

In several of his later publications, especially Beyond Theology and The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Watts put forward a worldview, drawing on Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, pantheism, and modern science, in which he maintains that the whole universe consists of a cosmic self playing hide-and-seek (Lila), hiding from itself (Maya) by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe, forgetting what it really is; the upshot being that we are all IT in disguise. In this worldview, Watts asserts that our conception of ourselves as an "ego in a bag of skin" is a myth; the entities we call the separate "things" are merely processes of the whole.

Internet phenomenon[link]

As part of his growing popularity, Matt Stone and Trey Parker—creators of the animated series South Park—have also contributed a video tribute by animating some of his lectures. This has spawned a culture of user-animated videos all around the net.^[17]

Personal life[link]

Watts married three times and had seven children, five daughters and two sons. His oldest son, Mark Watts, currently serves as curator of his father's work.

Watts met Eleanor Everett in 1936, when her mother, Ruth Fuller Everett, brought her to London to study piano. They met at the Buddhist Lodge, were engaged the following year and married in April 1938. A daughter, Joan, was born November 1938 and another, Anne, was born in 1943. Their marriage ended eleven years later, but Watts continued to correspond with his former mother-in-law.^[18]

After leaving Eleanor in 1950, Watts married Dorothy DeWitt and moved to San Francisco in early 1951 to teach. They began a family that grew to include five children: Tia, Mark, Richard, Lila, and Diane. However the couple separated in the early sixties after Watts met Mary Jane Yates King while lecturing in New York. After a difficult divorce he married Mary Jane in 1964.

Watts lived with Mary Jane in Sausalito, California, in the mid-60s.^[19] He lived his later years at times on a houseboat in Sausalito called the Vallejo,^[20] and at times in a secluded cabin on Mount Tamalpais.

In October 1973, Watts returned from an exhausting European lecture tour to his cabin in Mount Tamalpais. On November 16, 1973, he died in his sleep of heart failure.

Publications[link]

• 1936 The Spirit of Zen, Paperback. 1969 ISBN 0-8021-3056-9 A preview from Google Books
• 1937 The Legacy of Asia and Western Man
• 1940 The Meaning of Happiness, Paperback. 1970, ISBN 0-06-080178-6
• 1944 Theologica Mystica of St. Dionysius, (translation from Greek of pseudo-Dionysius, available online)
• 1948 Behold the Spirit:A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion, Vintage ed. 1972, ISBN 0-394-71761-9
• 1950 Easter – Its Story and Meaning
• 1950 The Supreme Identity, Vintage ed. 1972, ISBN 0-394-71835-6
• 1951 The Wisdom of Insecurity, Vintage ed. 1968, ISBN 0-394-70468-1
• 1953 Myth and Ritual in Christianity, Beacon Press 1971, ISBN 0-8070-1375-7
• 1957 The Way of Zen, Vintage Spiritual Classics 1999, ISBN 0-375-70510-4
• 1958 Nature, Man, and Woman, Vintage reissue 1991, ISBN 0-679-73233-0
• 1959 Beat Zen Square Zen and Zen, Paperback, ASIN B000F2RQL4
• 1960 "This Is It" and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, Vintage reprint 1973, ISBN 0-394-71904-2
• 1961 Psychotherapy East and West, Vintage ed. 1975, ISBN 0-394-71609-4 An excerpt
• 1962 The Joyous Cosmology – Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
• 1963 The Two Hands of God – The Myths of Polarity
• 1964 Beyond Theology – The Art of Godmanship, Vintage 1973, ISBN 0-394-71923-9
• 1966 The Book – On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Vintage reissue 1989, ISBN 0-679-72300-5 An excerpt
• 1967 Nonsense, ISBN 0-525-47463-3. (This book is a spiritual application of literary nonsense).
• 1970 Does It Matter?: Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality, Vintage ed. 1971, ISBN 0-394-71665-5
• 1971 Erotic Spirituality – The Vision of Konarak
• 1972 The Art of Contemplation
• 1972 In My Own Way – An Autobiography 1915–1965, Vintage 1973, ISBN 0-394-71951-4 A preview from Google Books
• 1973 Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal, Vintage 1974, ISBN 0-394-71999-9

Posthumous publications[link]

• 1974 The Essence of Alan Watts, ed. Mark Watts, Celestial Arts 1977, ISBN 0-89087-210-4
• 1975 Tao: The Watercourse Way, with Al Chung-liang Huang, Pantheon 1977, ISBN 0-394-73311-8
• 1976 Essential Alan Watts ed. Mark Watts,
• 1978 Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk: The Mystery of Life
• 1979 Om: Creative Meditations ed. Mark Watts,
• 1982 Play to Live ed. Mark Watts,
• 1983 Way of Liberation: Essays and Lectures on the Transformation of the Self ed. Mark Watts,
• 1985 Out of the Trap ed. Mark Watts,
• 1986 Diamond Web ed. Mark Watts,
• 1987 The Early Writings of Alan Watts, Paperback. 1995, ISBN 0-89087-794-7
• 1990 The Modern Mystic: A New Collection of Early Writings
• 1994 Talking Zen ed. Mark Watts,
• 1995 Become What You Are, Shambhala Expanded ed. 2003, ISBN 1-57062-940-4
• 1995 Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion ed. Mark Watts, A preview from Google Books
• 1995 The Philosophies of Asia ed. Mark Watts,
• 1995 The Tao of Philosophy, ed. Mark Watts, edited transcripts, Tuttle Publishing 1999, ISBN 0-8048-3204-8
• 1996 Myth and Religion ed. Mark Watts,
• 1997 Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking ed. Mark Watts,
• 1997 Zen and the Beat Way ed. Mark Watts,
• 1998 Culture of Counterculture ed. Mark Watts,
• 1999 Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion, ed. Mark Watts, edited transcripts, Tuttle Publishing, ISBN 0-8048-3203-X
• 2000 What Is Zen?, editor: Mark Watts, New World Library, ISBN 0-394-71951-4 A preview from Google Books
• 2000 What Is Tao?, ed. Mark Watts, New World Library, ISBN 1-57731-168-X
• 2000 Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation, ed. Mark Watts, New World Library, ISBN 1-57731-214-7
• 2000 Eastern Wisdom, ed. Mark Watts, MJF Books, ISBN 1-56731-491-0, three books in one volume: What is Zen?, What is Tao?, and An Introduction to Meditation (Still the Mind). These were assembled from transcriptions of audio tape recordings made by his son Mark, of lectures and seminars given by Alan Watts during the last decade of his life. They constitute simplified introductions to the philosophies he taught.
• 2002 Zen, the Supreme Experience: The Newly Discovered Scripts, ed. Mark Watts, Vega
• 2006 Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks, 1960-1969, New World Library

Audio and video works, essays[link]

Including recordings of lectures at major universities and multi-session seminars: Many of his works have made it easier for western people to apprehend eastern esoteric thinking, which until now required western people to travel to Asia and spend years learning the subtle nuances of the profound traditions.

• 1960 Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life, television series, (here)
• 1960 Essential Lectures, audio recordings, (here)
• 1960 Nature of Consciousness, essay, (here)
• 1960 The Value of Psychotic Experience
• 1960 The World As Emptiness
• 1960 From Time to Eternity
• 1960 Lecture On Zen
• 1960 The Cross of Cards
• 1960 Taoism
• 1962 This Is IT
• 1968 "Psychedelics & Religious Experience", in California Law Review (here)
• 1969 Why Not Now: The Art of Meditation
• 1971 A Conversation With Myself (part 1 part 2part 3)
• 1994 Zen: The Best of Alan Watts (VHS)
• 2005 Do You Do It, or Does It Do You?: how to let the universe meditate you (CD)
• 2007 Zen Meditations with Alan Watts, DVD, (here)

Biographical publications[link]

• Genuine Fake: a Biography of Alan Watts, by Monica Furlong, Published by Heinemann, 1986

Academic connections[link]

Saybrook University offers the only course on Watts in the United States and perhaps the world (HTP 3075: The Life of Alan Watts). Saybrook also has the only Watts academic chair in the world, which is held by Stanley Krippner, Executive Faculty Member.^{[citation needed]}

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Aitken, Robert. Original Dwelling Place. Counterpoint. Washington, D.C. 1997. ISBN 1-887178-41-4 (paperback)
• Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hard cover); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (paperback)
• Furlong, Monica, Zen Effects: The Life of Alan Watts Houghton Mifflin. New York. 1986 ISBN 0-395-45392-5, Skylight Paths 2001 edition of the biography, with new foreword by author: ISBN 1-893361-32-2
• Kapleau, Philip. Three Pillars of Zen (1967) Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-5975-7
• Stirling, Isabel. "Zen Pioneer: The Life & Works of Ruth Fuller Sasaki" Shoemaker & Hoard. 2006. ISBN 978-1-59376-110-3
• Watts, Alan, In My Own Way New York. Random House Pantheon. 1973 ISBN 0-394-46911-9 (his autobiography)

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Alan Watts

• The Alan Watts Electronic University – Alan Watts audio and video courses, co-founded by Alan Watts, Mark Watts, and Henry Jacobs in 1973.
• Alan Watts Podcast – The official Podcast of Alan Watts
• Master Enlightenments Arts Seminars and Lectures by Alan Watts – Looking at many different forms of enlightenment – Recorded by Henry Jacobs in 1964/65 who set up the original Alan Watts radio network.
• Alan Watts Online – Project Unicorn (also via Archive.org)
• Works by or about Alan Watts in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Watts essay on Nothingness (This link no longer functions.)
• Alan Watts Lectures and Essays Audio, video, essays and articles – resources from deoxy.org
• Alan Watts' This Is IT: The First Psychedelic LP essay by Patrick Lundborg
• Alan Watts Resource Compilation A collection of audio and video links of Alan Watts lecture and essays
• Alan Watts on YouTube, South Park Interview with Mark Watts on the resurgence of his father's work
• watts.progressiveradionetwork.org Gary Nulls online station with Alan Watts show including some archived audio lectures.
• Alan Watts. The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are