Terry Eagleton's "Why Marx Was Right": Book Review

"I am out to present Marx's ideas as not perfect but plausible": this caution opens ten chapters which refute standard criticisms. Eagleton reminds us how Marx celebrated as well as condemned what capitalism had achieved to unleash its energies on the modern world: "the system breeds freedom as well as barbarism, emancipation along with enslavement. Capitalist society generates enormous wealth, but in a way that cannot help putting it beyond the reach of most citizens. Even so, that wealth can always be brought within reach. It can be disentangled from the acquisitive, individualist forms which bred it, invested in the community as a whole, and used to keep disagreeable work to the minimum. It can thus release men and women from the chains of economic necessity into a life where they are free to realize their creative potential. This is Marx's vision of communism." (59)

As this excerpt demonstrates, it will not convert the skeptics and it will not overturn the empire. It posits a humanist Marx devotedly, and how this vision would be realized may be as much a question for seminars as Christianity is in seminaries. How this lofty aspiration relates to our everyday world needs explanation, and Eagleton for an open-minded reader may provoke more than soothe, as he sets out I suspect to do. My review comes from neutral territory if any still exists for a reader approaching Marx. I am not a political insider, a trained economist, or a tenured radical, so my interest in this comes from a layman's need for an accessible, cogent interpretation. Eagleton's coming to Marx from lit-crit and not poli-sci: this needs emphasis, given some hasty generalizations, logical weaknesses, and underdeveloped sections of what attempts to be a précis. Still, after exposure to Eagleton in grad school (his "Literary Theory" must bring in plenty of royalties as the standard text), I figured I'd give this little book a try, given current events.

I will review its ten chapters briefly. It elaborates what the extreme compression of his 1999 Routledge booklet in the Great Philosophies series, "Marx," could not. Eagleton conveys his material with characteristic wit, odd images and tangents against such surprising targets as Keith Richards, Mel Gibson, and (repeatedly) Prince Andrew. These enliven what can admittedly be slow going, even in a version of Marx for the distracted masses. Eagleton starts this 2011 account with a typical nod: "You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism." (xi)

Here's my summary: I am paraphrasing Eagleton. Eagleton asserts Marx's valid critique against this system attests to its relevance, even when its rival replaced it. We need a democratic, socialist, non-coercive alternative to it, for without a more humane, self-governing and cooperative market or economic model, we face only barbarism. Chapter Two extends the "underlying logic" of Marxist thought. It offers us a counterforce to the material advances capitalism affords us so unevenly, rewarding a few, tempting the rest, and denying many billions their more than fair share of the profits which the proletariat--however broadly defined despite stereotypes; the word comes from the Roman women producing their only contribution to the workforce, raw labor as offspring--contributes to our globalized and relentlessly competitive demand.

The Soviet revolution was a "tragic irony," for "socialism proved least possible where it was most necessary." (20) Instead of cruel party control, Eagleton searches in Marx to articulate a more humane, localized balance to top-down imposition, although he wanders around to try to explain how centralized direction is also necessary for the decentralized, competing markets to function with enough resources. This was the fate of the communist regime in Russia: it lacked the resources that the capitalists held and would not surrender; it forced the USSR into an arms race that crippled its own nation's development and without all the world on an internationalist, leveled playing field, no socialist reform could ever occur as long as resources were not available to new systems fairly. This may sound like special pleading to opponents, but Eagleton tries to argue his case patiently. He loses  track now and then, as he shifts away from markets to directed control as another, if vague, solution.

He's on surer ground back in his version of how Marx used capitalism, as cited in my opening paragraph from Chapter Three. This refutes the deterministic element in Marx, with mixed success. Same with the next chapter, the longest, as it tries to express a philosophical anthropology of an ethics of love grounded in individual freedom as a realizable ideal, not an impossible utopia. Eagleton cites the Manifesto: "The free development of each becomes the condition for the free development of all." (86) He seems to accept this only to claim on the next page it's a goal that never can be fully attained. It's a direction to aim at, not a "tangible" entity any more than the total triumph of a free market. This may dishearten radicals but please those less fanatical: Eagleton settles in this account refreshingly for compromise, rather than force theories down the throats of imperfect humans like us.

Profits shared, egalitarian governance, cooperatives in common: this structure does not demand "a race of Cordelias," only the best way to further the most people's well-being, and as with capitalism, shirkers, thieves, and slackers will remain, as with road accidents and I suppose the common cold. This part of the book felt to me weaker, and the practicality of this proposal receded despite Eagleton's fervor. I suspect that economics challenges him more than the philosophical side of Marx. Eagleton seeks fewer vices, not a perfect vacuum where human emotions and tensions evaporate. Marx for him's a "visionary" and a "sober realist," a rare combination of humanist and theorist.

In the fifth chapter, "praxis" as "production" giving liberated people a chance to connect with their livelihood and share its rewards would bestow more possibility than capitalism, where the "meaning of my work is determined by the institution" (89) despite our delusions that we advance the common good rather than the gains going far more than us to feral stockholders of rapacious multinationals. "The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalism." (115) It shows us how corporate commodification of all we see, do, and dream is far more reductionist than Marxism.

Materialism is the "theory of how historical animals function," rooted in our bodies and not our thoughts. This may sound crude, but Eagleton shows next how what we think and dream emerges from our state as agents, acting on our motivations as beings and not as spirits. I left this curious about how religion and spirituality fit or did not fit, as Eagleton's recent work has addressed the state of Christianity as well as Marxism as to flaws and strengths. For Christianity, to my disappointment, as well as any cultural phenomenon addressing the less tangible, he does not do so sufficiently here.

Chapter Seven follows with a definition of class as a "capacity to deploy one's power over others to one's own advantage," (171). Eagleton shows how few of us possess much status in the knowledge or post-industrial economies as these undergo managerial control and technological efficiency, linked to increasing surveillance over activities on and off the job. Like the industrial models already shifting into service and clerical work a century ago, the new systems extend power of the few over the many.

Chapter Eight notes how few rebel against this. When "scraps and leavings" are tossed by those in control down to the rest, the rest unless very desperate will tend to wait and keep low, rather than revolting. Violence is part of the capitalist system, which has had centuries to inflict what Mao, Stalin, and despots have in decades as to death tolls and live suffering. Without a humane socialist alternative, barbarism may be the only option if capitalism, as we see lately, totters. Eagleton assumes no other choice awaits us. His own critics may differ, arguing for social welfare as many nations did.

"The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they're winning." (197) Certainly events around the time this book appeared in late 2011 prove that correct. Eagleton dispels "dictatorship" as a bad word, tracing it to an "extralegal breach of a political constitution," (204) which may or may not clarify this as used in Marx's time. He needed to explain this better. Eagleton translates the feared term as "popular democracy" with "rule by the majority."

The majority today may be more diverse in terms of inclusions since Marx: the closing chapter examines him in light of his detractors from feminism, post-colonial, and environmental movements. Marx cannot be blamed for all those coming after him have accused him of, Eagleton avers, and he cleverly here manages to deflect many attacks by later theorists and global activists, even if these ripostes may not convince all his critics. He makes a valiant attempt to link materialism to stewardship of nature and not its exploitation as grounded in Marx's writings, no small feat.

The book closes with two eloquent paragraphs continuing this revision of the thoughts and theories of a man who was a "firm apologist" for--and a "ferocious antagonist" of--liberalism and the Enlightenment's campaign to free men and women from their self-imposed and socially constrained shackles. While a more thorough index and greater consistency in linking parts of his doggedly pursued argument would have strengthened this introduction, for readers like me needing a succinct, popular interpretation, this fills enough of my need for now to listen to Marx (if as with Christ one can separate the founder's message from the machinations of his followers) with fresh ears and to confront his work (apart from the distortions of "state socialism" and police states) with open eyes.
(Amazon US 6-17-12. Thanks to Anthony McIntyre and comrades who commented on this at his spirited blog where it was reprinted 11-10-12, The Pensive Quill)

Jonathan Sperber's "Karl Marx": Book Review

During our current economic crisis, a handful of prominent critics if far fewer politicians acclaim Marx's relevance. For example, Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right--expanding his briefer "Marx" monograph--champions a social-democratic visionary rather than a heartless prophet. Hauling donations to Occupy L.A. encampment's lending library, I noticed Marxian pamphlets scattered, underfoot, piled up, neglected.

This leads to the theme of Jonathan Sperber's biography. Rather than promoting a spokesman for our times, he argues that Marx's ideas have run their course. More a product of the French Revolution and Hegel, early English industrialization and political economies of the emerging modern age, than any avant-garde inspiration, Marx "is more usefully understood as a backward-looking figure," who from his own century's first half took the facts "and projected them into the future."

As a professor of history at the University of Missouri, Sperber aims this work at a general audience. I welcomed this approach. I'd been searching after Eagleton's lively if rapid apologia for a popular, if more in-depth, entry to Marx's work within the perspective of "a nineteenth-century life" and his times.

Sperber draws upon the MEGA edition of Marx and Frederick Engels' writings--a project inherited from the Soviets by the newly unified German nation--which includes correspondence of all sorts (notes scribbled on envelopes) and letters addressed to the pair as well as from them. He widens contexts beyond the usual political and economic texts into more idiosyncratic works. He opens up Marx's public and private complexities to show him as an intellectual and an activist, not always in the most flattering light. His ties within the underground of the time blend with interactions with prominent men such as a lord, king, emperor, and chancellor--as well as David Ricardo and Charles Darwin.

This professor follows today's scholars who downplay the singular impact of the Industrial Revolution. They prefer to integrate the French Revolution, religious ideas, nationalism, and family life and gender relations as widening the perspective established by Marx and Engels in their own historical moment. Capitalism has changed: it's not the bourgeoisie but global forces which activate it, so translations need updating. Sperber does not support projecting later formulations back on Marx, nor does he try (as quasi-religious reformers attempt) to purge an ideology of accretions to cleanse a purified founding figure's glow. He emphasizes our distance from Marx's era, not (as in 1989 or 2011) a few "moments of familiarity."

Beginning in Trier, a Rhineland Catholic pilgrimage center, Sperber charts the forward path of Marx's father Heinrich, who worked first under Napoleonic forces, then for their Prussian conquerors. He converted from Judaism to Protestantism to leave behind the subordination of his people, in a "society of orders" under autocracy. He advanced his legal career, and sought to act on his own beliefs in rational Enlightenment values. Within this context, in 1818, one of his nine children (within eleven years to Henriette, of Dutch Jewish stock) inherited his ambitions and drive. Karl added irascibility.

Karl's first rebellion, Sperber shows, came before his heady exposure to Hegelian theology or atheist philosophy as a law student. He became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, four years older: this was sufficient radicalism to outrage Heinrich. Karl's doctorate on Epicurus demonstrated his classical education, while his enthusiasm for the biblical Higher Criticism foreshadowed his confidence in a human transcendence, based not on divine revelations but scholarly analyses and robust exegeses.

Sperber packs a lot into this hefty volume, ensuring that we can follow the rivalries, theories, and upheavals which caused Marx to move back and forth, not always by choice, from Cologne to Paris or Brussels, before spending the last half of his life in London exile. Sperber delivers this story efficiently. He rarely steps aside from the long historical and biographical narrative to offer his own judgment explicitly. He prefers to let a close reading of the documents--combined with primary sources from correspondence, archives, and accounts--tell the tale. It provides a sober and careful study, for the general reader as well as scholar curious about how this combative figure triumphed.

Marx's involvement--more by goading than participating in the insurrections of the later 1840s as radical ideas sparked populist fury against Prussian and French rule--led to the pamphlets and books which gradually evolved his concept of an Hegelian framework. This depended not on appeals to reform by elevated idealism, but a reliance on the working class. Sperber demonstrates how this proletariat emerges more as an invention of Marx to advance the dialectic materialism he concocted than an actual milieu within which he moved at ease.

For, his journalism in Germany and then France and Belgium--as he was hounded as a subversive--tended to be crammed so full of erudition that the laborers it meant to direct found it too heady to figure out. Compare the radical literature strewn on that autumn campsite of Occupy L.A. Funded at one desperate moment by Cologne capitalists when he had to decamp for Paris (one of three escapes there), Marx cultivated carefully his allies who'd support him and his growing family as his journalism failed and he lacked steady work otherwise. But, he thrived on alienating his comrades.

Even as he crafted his vision of a future when communism would bring about amity, the necessary war and class revolution before that attenuated age of peace seemed to reify--in his backbiting and putdowns. He liked to put into the mouths of his often equally radical if insufficiently enlightened foes anti-communist critiques. He held no scruple about deploying anti-semitic jibes against his opponents of the same Jewish background he renounced. He managed self-criticism of his earlier, more compromising positions by attributing them to his enemies--of which he made many, goading him on the move, still unsettled. His letters display a dominance by ideology, via petty score-settling.

One of many intellectual refugees who would be cast adrift from Central Europe in the wake of 1848 and the crackdown after the Manifesto he and Friedrich Engels conspired to issue would emerge, Marx found in London's comparative isolation a safer asylum, if an even more destitute shelter. Then, Engels agreed to manage his family's textile mill in Manchester to pay the bills for Karl, Jenny, and children. Engels also aided Marx when he (Sperber agrees this happened as far as we can surmise) fathered a child by his maid--Engels took the claim of paternity to save Marx's marriage in a situation which despite archival searching remains understandably obscure. Three of his children born in Soho by Jenny died, including a beloved son at the age of eight. When Marx returned from his 9-to-7 stint in the British Library's Reading Room, one acquaintance noted how he'd be met by not Marx's compliments but discussion of economic categories. Marx lived in close quarters with his growing family, but his mind, as far as can be followed on paper, sought comfort in dense calculations gleaned from relentless theorizing.

During the 1850s, as repression returned and reactionaries regrouped, Marx's expectation that the masses would seize control ebbed. Sperber comments: "At least temporarily unable to change the world, as he aspired to do in his theses by Feuerbach, he had to settle for interpreting it." His financial worries and his separation from Continental contacts impelled Marx to return to freelance journalism.  Much of this was for editor Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, nearly 500 pieces--if but a quarter of the total under Marx's name. Engels ghostwrote the rest after Marx ailed. Marx continued to trade in irony and satire as he covered the Crimean War, European politics, and parliamentary debates in his adopted city. His domestic debts eased, enough for him to move to an unfinished suburb, but his isolation from the German community increased. Engels had to step in to bail out the family once more. (They kept not only at least one maid but a governess no matter their income, typical of their genteel status if not cash flow.)

The biographer reminds us that Marx had in the late 1840s called for a unified Germany to fight tsarist Russia. The 1853-56 Crimean War generated his enthusiasm: he anticipated an insurgency across the Continent would better that of the French in 1789. He hated capitalist hypocrites. Britain would not back a total war, so Marx railed, unlike his followers, against the "Peacemongering Bourgeoisie." Marx in his coverage of British India balanced condemnation of imperialism per se with an acknowledgement of the benefits of world markets which colonization introduced. Marx followed Victorian social scientists who judged the East as static and despotic; the West for all its woes forced progress. Of course, in his model, this historical process led to global uprising--under a Eurocentric vanguard.

The coming socialist revolution, he and Engels assumed, would burst out of their own Continent. He cheered, as another destabilizing force, the first world-wide recession, starting in America in 1857. His activism renewed, Marx resumed vigorous agitation and journalistic investigation of tumult in Italy, Austria, America, and Germany, culminating in the Paris Commune and then the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870-71.

However, continuing troubles over finances, health, and worry distracted Marx and scattered his concentration over the two decades after his flight to London. So, Engels had to assist with the massive Capital as a demonstration of Marx's culminating synthesis. As Sperber sees it, Capital builds upon Hegelian structures applied to economics. It partially integrates positivist and Darwinian theories linked to David Ricardo's readings of Adam Smith's capitalism. These connections, Sperber concludes, keep Capital within a 19th-century framework, looking back to 1800-50 for political and economic grounding. While later labor socialists took up the countercultural aspects of Marx, the marginal utility economists emerged, late in Marx's career, to push ahead past him. Therefore, his great attempt to tie scientific and materialist structures to economy remains historically much more a part of Marx's formative years than he and his followers might have wished.

Marx's last years forced him--wearied by financial worries, family stress, the deaths of Jenny and one of his three surviving children (all daughters), and failing health--to recognize that the revolution would not happen soon. He continued to rely upon Engels for bailouts. He opposed whomever called for gradual reform. He demanded among the fractious and finally failing First International that his comrades adhere to violent overthrow as a prerequisite. While his theories altered over the decades, his opposition to the Prussian and Russian regimes remained perhaps his ultimately only unchanged orientation. This directed his Central and Eastern European followers, under Engels' interpretations (he survived his partner by enough years to matter more, when it came to editing Capital and establishing Marx in a particularly defiant stance) to dominate the  Second International. Finally, as a German, Marx continued his defiance of the occupying and surrounding powers of his homeland. Given his hatred of the tsar as well as kaiser, he advised late in life Russian dissidents struggling to apply Marx's model to what would become the Third International.

In his 1883 obituaries, three identifiers persisted: Marx was a scientist applying positivist principles to a materialist basis for social transformation, class war, and economic upheaval to usher in a proletariat harmony ruling over a changed earth. Sperber diminishes this perspective by reminding us of the ambivalent and only partially favorable ways in which Marx viewed positivism. Next, the "Jewish folk hero" concept tagged Marx and won over many adherents in Russia and Europe, generations as disenchanted with Judaism as were Heinrich and his family. Sperber reckons how, negatively or positively, the identification of the baby Karl baptized a Lutheran with the people his parents rejected continued to tag Marx as Jewish. Marx appears from the letters more culturally Jewish now and then, if not much overall. Given his public aspersions against Judaism, his private reactions, if sometimes slightly nuanced, do not change his overall position that he wished Jews, as with any other religious group, to assimilate.

The most persistent label, of an "intransigent revolutionary," endured. Engels popularized this stance in his partner over the dozen years he survived Marx. This ensured that Bolsheviks and German insurgents would perpetuate it into the twentieth century's appropriations of Marxism's founding icon. This icon, moreover, perpetuated itself as a giant bust, a monolith similar to the graven image that replaced a humbler stone to memorialize him and Jenny at their plot in London's Highgate cemetery. For Sperber, this fossilized Marx and limited his direction: to look back to 1789. What now proves arguably a telling coda is that the British Communist Party that had erected the monument did so in the year of Hungarian repression by Stalin's forces, 1956, and that the Party in Britain now is defunct.
(3-1-13 to PopMatters with slight editing. Amazon US 3-4-13. The Pensive Quill 9-6-13 by kind reprinting. Publisher's website)

Slavoj Žižek's "The Year of Dreaming Dangerously": Book Review

Critic and philosopher Slavoj Žižek gathers his thoughts about last year's resistance to capitalism and globalization. They comprise loosely topical, often rambling and discursive chapters "outlining the contours of its hegemonic ideology, focusing on the reactionary phenomena (populist revolts in particular) that arise in reaction to social antagonisms". These themes segue into "the two great emancipatory movements of 2011--the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street" and then a discussion of The Wire. These sections consider how to fight the system's power without furthering its dominance.

The earlier selections float about ethnic tension, culture clash, and Western distrust of fundamentalist dogma. None of this discussion will be unfamiliar to his audience. Žižek roams around the wreckage of capitalism and the attempts to counter its damage. Marxian critiques dominate, although Žižek realizes that whatever (utopia shimmers behind the flames vaguely) can replace today's monolithic structure flits away, frustratingly for the reader if less so for him--as a veteran Slovene provocateur. Lacan, Jameson, Chesterton, Lenin, Rand, Hegel: the range of sometimes disparate thinkers intrigues, but the level of most of these contents prefers academic terms. The second sentence of the book's second paragraph embeds "a Greimasian semiotic square" with neither context nor apology.

However, clearer phrasing emerges for a patient reader. As in his previous work, he challenges the status quo yet, similar to street activists, sidesteps what must be done for practical reform. Hints of violence, overthrow, and revolution lurk, but peer out nearly rarely, as in the end of his Occupy chapter: "Is there a name for this reinvented democracy beyond the multi-party representational system? There is indeed: the dictatorship of the proletariat."

He stimulates his sympathetic readers while leaping clear of collusion with a discredited Marxist orthodoxy. This clever stance may encourage fellow travelers, but it may irritate those readers wishing for clear guidance. What can be gleaned sparkles here and there amid the dust-ups and pepper spray. He appeals to the radical left to further the threatened gains of liberalism. He pointedly asks what happens, as in the Arab uprisings, if democracy (as of the writing of this book in June 2012) grows, while poverty remains?

"Hysterical actors" jump out of the marches with Molotovs. Occupy's protesters demanded more than recycling, clicking online to donate a few bucks to charity, or a one-percent donation via a Starbucks cappuccino. Such desperation, as we know, fizzled out or was stamped out soon for many of last year's activists.

Today, their rage simmers. "The self-propelling circulation of Capital remains more than the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by definition cannot be controlled." Perhaps Marx can help. Freedom beckons not as an end achieved within the political sphere but ultimately in the liberation of the network of "social relations," Žižek reminds us.

Meanwhile, we may vote for a candidate, but never on who owns what, who controls the financiers who control the politicians who control the electorate. Citizens, trapped by representational democracy in cahoots with capitalists, had to bailout the banks. Banks, not uncontrolled government spending, he insists, bear the blame for the breakdown and the taxpayer's forced repair of the rapacious system that rules nearly the entire world.

The chapter on Occupy Wall Street succeeds best in raising necessary questions about where (if far less so how) to confront this predicament. Žižek cites Alain Badiou: "Today, the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It's called Democracy." This articulates, in Žižek's paraphrase, an embrace of a "democratic illusion". This deludes the populace that only democratic procedures can foment possible change.

Citizens lull themselves into a situation where only "legal rights" can be exercised. For instance, nobody can countenance taking over the banks and putting them "under the people's control". The people persist within dream that overshadows "any radical transformation of capitalist relations". The same parties keep getting elected which ruled over the triumphant recovery led by and benefiting the bankers.

Three closing sections enter into pop culture and belief, as they settle into or rise above our political and economic oppression. "The Circle of Life" from The Lion King, Monteverde's Orfeo, and the recent film adaptation of Coriolanus typify the broader cultural connections Žižek enjoys, in another loosely composed but intermittently involving exploration of rebels and sociopaths on screen, following a look at the likes of McNulty, Lester, and Omar from The Wire.

Finally, Pascal's concept of the "deus absconditus," the "hidden God," infuses a "decisionist nihilism" that rejects a safe moderation. Pascal's "existentialist wager" melts into the dramatic skepticism of the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark before transforming into a return to Hegel's rejection of the known for the unknown, in this novel if blurred vision of radical utopia.

All this winds up chaotic, willfully so or due to the author's expectation that his diligent and combative readers do the heavy lifting to enact change, beyond that of intellectual suggestions or ideological explorations.

Admittedly, Žižek without acknowledgement recycles material from his restive, theoretically dense, if also aphoristic, journalism for The Guardian and the London Review of Books, as well as references and passages unattributed from his previous, prolific publications. This collection resembles a rapidly compiled anthology rather than a bold, fresh contribution from a familiar provocateur. Still, Žižek raises, again, this era's telling question: "is playing with the capitalist beast the only game in town?"
(To Amazon US 10-14-12 and slightly altered to PopMatters 10-22-12. Thanks to Anthony McIntyre and the The Pensive Quill for carrying this 11-19-12. See also my Dec. '08 review of Z's book on Violence.)

Beirt baile na h-iarnróid

Chuaigh mé go dhá iarsmalann faoi deireadh. Tá beirt i mbailte na h-iarnróid ann. Roinnte siad geimhreadh agus gaoth--agus carraigeachaí de luach.

Chuir cuairt mé go mBoron i gCalifoirnea--agus múseam umhal--ar feadh ar coicis seo caite. Tharlaíonn miandoireacht borax ann. Tá fásach is mó go léir ar fud an bealach gnótach na hAigéin ó Thuas ann.

Fhill mé go Utah aréir! Chonaic mé an Loch Salann Mór. Ansin, thiómaint Léna i stiorm sneachta go Sléibhte Wasatch go dtí gCathair na bPairc. D'fhán ag na loiste na scíala is níos iontach i Ghleann na Fianna in aice leis.

Thug mé caint faoi Caoimhin de Barra, an scribhneoir nua, don Chomhdáil Thiar Mheiricéa ó Léann Éireannach. Bhain sult as Léna agus agam ag plé an craic leis eile ina h-óstan mar sin fheictear. D'ith agus ag ól ina tithe tábhairne (ach, bhí drioglann Siar Ard, go fírinne) in gcríolár an bhaile d'aois fós.

Mar go raibh múseam in aon bhaile na h-iarnróid, mar sin sa tír eile. Bhuel, ní raibh muid an iarraidh a íoc deich dollar gach chun dul isteach an ceann ansin. Chuala muid faoi "Teach Sínis na Joss" trasna na teorann ina h-Evanston, Wyoming, an lar de réir na Iarnróid na h-Aontas Aigéin ansin agus gual anois.

D'imigh muid Utah. Duirt leis an stiurthoir ó An Muséam na gContae Uinta i h-Evanston. Thaispéain sí duinn sin agus an Teach Sinís fréisin. Is maith linn an beirt acu--agus an teach tábhairne timpeall an chúinne ina sean-bhaile eile ó Thiar. 

Two railroad towns

I went to two museums recently, They're in a pair of railroad towns. They share sand and wind--and rocks of value.

I paid a visit to Boron in California and its humble museum during the past two weeks. Mining of borax happens there. The vast desert is all around the Southern Pacific's busy tracks.

I returned from Utah last night! I saw the Great Salt Lake. Then, we drove to the Wasatch Mountains in a snowstorm to Park City. We stayed at a very wonderful ski lodge in Deer Valley nearby.

I gave a paper about Kevin Barry, a new writer, to the Western American Conference of Irish Studies. Layne and I enjoyed discussing the craic with others at such a charming hotel. We ate and drank well in pubs (but, one was High West Distillery, truthfully) in the heart of the old town.

As with one rail town's museum, so with the other. Well, we did not want to pay ten dollars each to go inside the one there. We heard about a "Chinese Joss Museum" across the border in Evanston, Wyoming, an old center on account of the Union Pacific Railroad then and coal now.

We left Utah. We spoke to the director of the Uinta County Museum in Evanston. She showed us that and the Chinese House too. We liked both of them--and the brewpub around the corner in another Western old town.

Grianghraif/Photos: Lora Hartley, Museums of the Mojave/ Múseaim na Mojave; feach eolas faoi/see information about the Uinta County Museum/ Múseam na gContae hUintah anseo/here.

Rupert Gethin's "Sayings of the Buddha": Book Review

After reading Gethin's "The Foundations of Buddhism" I sought out this companion volume from the same press, Oxford. True to that institute's reputation, "Foundations" proved both rewarding and challenging; "Sayings" sustains the discipline applied by this scholar to his subject. Both books, taken together, in a comparatively brief study manage to cover the essentials of, respectively, the common doctrine and the earliest suttas.

Enamorato's review, also online elsewhere via a FWBO site, sums up Gethin's anthology alongside Bhikkhu Bodhi's "In the Buddha's Words" and John Holder's scholarly collection of teachings. Mine will focus on its editorial approach. I came to Gethin's edition after Glenn Wallis' "Basic Teachings of the Buddha". I admired Dr. Wallis' reader-response theory and philosophical approach, conveyed well in his introduction and commentary. Similarly, Dr. Gethin constructs from a solid linguistic command of the earliest extant Nikaya collections from the Pali his own rigorous interpretation of the core of the Theravada, Southeastern Asian dharma teachings. Unlike more popularized collections, this can be used by a student in a class or on one's own to study the stories seriously--that is, with a guide taking one closer to the dialect in which the historical Buddha is said to have conveyed the teachings, as transmitted by monks into oral and then written form a few centuries later.

These are sorted traditionally as longer, middle-length, grouped, and numbered discourses. Gethin follows this organization and offers examples of all four from the vast number edited by scholars. He tries to give an accurate rendering, including the repetition that hammers home the point even if this may be strange to readers. He reasons that this oral feature embedded itself in the writing down, and this repeating of phrases offers its own pleasure in the recital of these passages and their inculcation.

As with Glenn Wallis' more compact but equally eloquent translation and commentary of sixteen essential suttas ("well-said" sayings), his fellow scholar Gethin captures in his introduction an enthusiasm for dharma. He may translate it as "Truth," "teaching," "practice," or "quality" to catch the most precise meaning of this all-encompassing term. He bases this on his own research into Pali.

The contents speak for themselves. Suffice to say that Gethin (as does Wallis) allows the suttas to sit as complete narratives, in their original form, so as to let readers appreciate the elaboration of points, their repetition, and their gradual unfolding in the words attributed to the historical Buddha. What in his "Foundations" study may become paraphrased, debated, and cited here, by contrast, emerges as if told by one person to others. You will find preaching, but you will also find dialogues and advice.

Each entry is preceded by an efficiently condensed preface and supported with precise end-notes. These may refer one to linguistic points, or other works elaborating topics here alluded to or compressed. Therefore, this is an excellent introduction that I'd recommend following up Wallis, and perhaps preceding Bhikkhu Bodhi's "In the Buddha's Words," for three variants on this wise teaching. (Amazon US 4-9-12)

Bhikkhu Bodhi's "In the Buddha's Words": Book Review

The need for a larger anthology of the earliest extant texts attributed to the Buddha has been met by this compilation. Bhikkhu Bodhi is a Brooklyn-born monk in the Theravada tradition who has translated the Nikaya suttas. These "longer," "medium-length," "grouped" and "numbered" collections in the Pali dialect closer to what the Buddha had used when he orally transmitted the dharma are as far back as we can go when trying to find the "original" sayings that summed up and expanded the many teachings of the founder over four decades of preaching.

These can be famously repetitive, astringent. This comes from their oral nature, as this aids memory and invokes its own state of reception. These formulae for repetition and recursion remain here, but modified in the middle of repeated paragraphs so the first and the last are kept full but not the intervening. It's a fair compromise for the reader, and it allows more selections to be included in this generous, sober, stolid, if daunting, collection.

Bodhi here compiles highlights from the Nikayas. He tends towards conservative interpretations, as a monk himself seeking the early texts to put in Theravada context. He orders them into what makes sense for a student needing a way in to the vast corpus of suttas. It starts with the human condition before the teaching is heard, then moves step-by-step along as the Buddha arrives, so to speak, and the dharma unfolds and grows in complexity as the hearer advances along the path to awakening. Bodhi arranges substantial sections of the suttas so a reader can get a sense of the core teachings. He prefaces each thematic or cognitively arranged chapter with a detailed introduction and follows with endnotes. This leaves the texts themselves to be faced apart from an orientation or commentary.

Now, unlike the shorter collections of equal value, Rupert Gethin's "Sayings of the Buddha" let alone Glenn Wallis' "Basic Teachings of the Buddha" (both reviewed by me before I read this anthology--I'd sample these before taking on Bodhi's bigger book), Bodhi does adhere to a conventional, more obedient stance regarding the dharma. That is, as a monk, he's grounded in elucidating this dharma as not a scholarly enterprise or a linguistic exercise or a philosophical confrontation. Rather, he mixes a more devotional approach that assumes the dharma's truth-claims while inviting a reader to understand the original suttas in light of later monastic commentaries and interpretations. Wallis eschews this approach and Gethin minimizes it; Bodhi as a monk embraces the suttas within a larger framework of those Theravadin monks who have pored over the Pali texts and come to their own conclusions, as his predecessors and masters within the South Asian community. I admit I lean more towards those who challenge the texts rather than bow to them, but that may be my nature! One can't fault Bodhi for a more "literal' stance towards the canon, but this needs mention. He does peer beyond the Pali to later commentaries to tackle textual cruxes and obscure passages.

Wallis and Gethin have based some of their work on Bodhi's even if they differ from some of his choices for translation; Bodhi has pioneered anthologies aimed at a wider Western audience than professors or linguists, and for this, the affordable and handsomely designed book (as with many from Wisdom Publications) fills a space on a short shelf. Endnotes, a brief glossary, charts of where the texts fit into the canon, and a full index with italicized Pali and Sanskrit terms enhance its use. As I consult this more as a researcher than an insider, my judgment of it is aimed at a similar reader.  (Many previous reviewers have reacted to this book with bursts of heartfelt praise; I wanted to provide rather a sense of how it compares and contrasts with other popular press Nikaya collections.) [Amazon US 8-29-12]

Steve Hagen's "Buddhism Plain and Simple": Book Review

No gilded statues on pedestals, no gongs, bells, or chants. This Zen teacher relays "uncluttered, original insights and observations" from the Buddha, gleaned from Hagen's three decades of practice and study. He refreshingly dismisses, when instructing one in beginning meditation, to stay with the basic breath-awareness, for instance, free of "visual object, sound, or thought." He insists throughout to "'see' Reality" as that which Zen masters define as One Mind, the unchanging seamless Whole behind a parade of passing moments.

He coats his approach with a light but sturdy veneer of Dogen's "just thusness," with a touch of Nagajuna, and a dab of Shunryu Suzuki. As in that teacher's "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" (see my review), this is not an historical survey. Like Suzuki's book, this brief account uses parables to teach, but Steve Hagen adds his own lessons from our own Western lifestyles in more American prose, in an unassuming style which sounds like a good friend's side of a conversation.

Unlike most popular books aimed at fundamentals of the buddha-dharma (Hagen wisely prefers this term to "Buddhism" with its institutional accretions and cultural obfuscations), this author stresses a streamlined approach. Hagen constantly repeats the message of the dharma of the awakened one: to "'see' Reality." He, as with the more advanced recent works of Stephen Batchelor (great follow-ups are "Buddhism Without Beliefs" and "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist," both reviewed by me), advocates the eventual possibility of "leaving the raft behind" once the teaching's succeeded.

That is, not to confuse as so many practitioners do the "territory for the map," as if one tries to cling to a particular practice or hold on the dharma, as if to "box it up and cart it away." He cautions about "the deep end of 'duhkha'-- existential angst," (111) and he resists the temptations of settling into a smug routine. "Final job of teacher: free student of teacher" (82) remains wise advice he passes along. The dharma is none other than things as they are, filtered via our senses. "It hurts to defy Reality." (127)

While accessible for beginners, this book does skip about, and it does not always convey its structure as clearly as it might have. (One paragraph as a précis on pg. 4 is very general.) Hagen follows the typical outline of introducing the Buddha (two pages to cover the supposed facts of his life--this book eschews legends and claptrap) and the four truths before extending its reach into the eightfold path for two-thirds of the narrative, concluding too hastily in a compression of the twelvefold chain. Hagen keeps the enumerations (which some writers use to weigh down their expositions) to a blessed minimum, but he needed more pages to elaborate this final section; the chart's too pithy and the appendix too truncated.

Hagen also jumps past his initial treatment of inherently good or bad people as categories impeding "right speech." He criticizes "judgment or discriminate thinking" but he doesn't return to this until more than forty pages later, when decoding (well) what the Buddha called "frozen views" of conceptions. Hagen muddles his interpretation of a classic "Gestapo ask where the innocent family is hiding--do you lie?" case study, and this inclusion and related eightfold sections needed tightening.

But, even if an index and suggested reading list are absent and the organization of this narrative can slacken as well as tauten, the no-nonsense direction generally favored by Hagen may appeal to many seeking a discussion of buddha-dharma scoured of incense smoke and guru dust. He prefers straight-talk to platitudes. "The buddha-dharma doesn't ask us to give up control. Instead, it acknowledges we never had it in the first place." (51) (Amazon US 2-25-12; cf. his sequel reviewed 3-21-13, "Buddhism Is Not What You Believe")

Carole Tonkinson's "Big Sky Mind": Book Review

"Show me a good Buddhist novelist." So challenges William Burroughs, in italics. In his Retreat Diaries, he prefaces this with a nod to how he uses writing for meditation. However, he distrusts giving up what Buddhism deems "distractions" such as "visions and fireworks" in order to find creativity. "Indeed existence is the cause of suffering and suffering may be good copy." (298)

This tension permeates many within this anthology subtitled "Buddhism and the Beat Generation." The editor conflates the Buddhist transmission with the literary and intellectual impact of the Beats. She argues for a more spiritual appreciation of their cultural mission, and she shows briefly how what had been orally passed along in Asia now started to find Western recipients, eager to learn not from books but each other the dharma. Some poets had stumbled upon the teachings on their own, and were astonished to learn that others had preceded them. Jack Kerouac strutted into a gathering announcing himself a Zen "expert" only to find that all those there knew at least one Asian language.

Tonkinson arranges authors by "The Beats" (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Diane Di Prima, Harold Norse); "The San Francisco Poets'' (Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Joanne Kyger, Lew Welch among others); "Echoes" (Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Michael McClure); "Like Minds," fellow travelers Kenneth Rexroth and Anne Waldman. Stephen Prothero adds an introductory essay emphasizing how the "middle way" of the Beats, inspired by Transcendentalism a century before, connected the "early era of armchair Buddhism" with the contemporary practice of a formal setting and recognized teacher. As this 1995 collection comes under the aegis of the American Buddhist review Tricycle, it fits into the readership anticipating a sustained presentation of Beats as bhikkus. Examined carefully, hints of complexity emerge to counter the usual pop culture, marketed storyline.

Kerouac's familiar celebration of Japhy's (Snyder) "rucksack revolution" appears from The Dharma Bums. Yet, less famous works do too: he watches a Mexican bullfight as "the bull slid in dust like a dead fly kicked unconsciously." So does his 1960 departure from a Buddhist affiliation via an interview in a "men's magazine" Escapade. Kerouac explains how he could no longer reject the love of women (while the as of 1995 unpublished Some of the Dharma notebooks document his earlier, more fervent stages in exhaustive detail, a facsimile of the notebooks he kept while trying to live like a monk in the world).

Tonkinson does not include those notebooks or Kerouac's life of the Buddha, Wake Up! (Copyright issues may be to blame, as both works appeared only in the next decade.) Still, the editor shows how he and Ginsberg utilized meditation--as would Burroughs in less dogmatically earnest fashion--to inspire insight for prose and verse. Spontaneous writing guides them, and it's not so much writing as reading, Burroughs insists, what has previously been revealed. Ginsberg ties this to the "actual breath" for the line, and this expands for him and the 60's revolutionary stances assumed by Diane Di Prima into a "spiritual poetics," a "disembodied" adaptation of Keats' "negative capability."

Lew Welch tried to follow a hermit's path, taking Kerouac's direction further. He fashioned North American koans. In "He Prepares to Take Leave of His Hut," he ends up with two juxtaposed quotes. "Why should it be so hard to give up something you know you can't possess?" "Who ever said it was easy?" (259) He wound up ending his life.

Gary Snyder sought nature also, and found more healing and similar honesty there. He contrasts in a 1977 essay here the mountains and waters of Asian "mythic iconography" with the "dusty world" of 7-Elevens and parking meters to which we must return. His 1961/9 essay "Buddhist Anarchism" gains inclusion. It calls for the "mercy" of the Western "social revolution" joined to the Eastern "individual insight into the basic self/void." (178) This compliments the reminder from that essay about the cost exacted of "natural-spiritual price" when we pay for "this particular piece of affluence, comfort, pleasure, or labor saving." (182)

Snyder's journey to a more formal identification with Japanese practice intersects with Philip Whalen, who wound up leading a San Francisco monastery. Still, Joanne Kyger--in a poem about his green Walgreen's tropical hat perched high on his bald pate as he sits--finds humor in such a meditative state. It concludes: {...}I ask him which mantra he is doing--but he tells me/ in Zen, you don't have to bother with any of that./ You can just play with the beads." (239)

Finally, Kenneth Rexroth, who as an earlier student of Asian culture as well as a proto-radical had jump-started the Beats out in San Francisco even as he then quickly sidestepped away from the hype, weighs in. His poetry tends to be more academically mainstream, more controlled. Similarly, he finds a more analytical ground in his 1980 interview "The Jewel Net of Indra" with the pioneering chronicler of Buddhism in the U.S, Rick Fields. Rexroth preferred less explicit identification with Buddhism until much later than the Beats. He sought to accommodate the dharma within a more eclectic mindset, as did in a different fashion on paper his contemporary Burroughs.

Still both men, as the Beats themselves, could not fall in line with conformity. Rexroth's anarchism (shared with Snyder) meshed with his pacifism. "A life lived according to the Buddha law will not need much. If Christianity was put into effect tomorrow every state on earth would collapse in twenty-four hours." (336) He may differ somewhat from other radicals, as he places Buddhist practice apart from political alignment. He takes pains to show how Zen had been connected with right-wing Japanese movements, and how the power structure in many Asian regimes helped form a "synthetic" Buddhism abhorred by "Buddhologists" from the West who seek in vain to recover a pure form from the "so-called historic Shakyamuni." (337-9) For Rexroth, the meaning lies in recognizing that evil is always present, and always passes. War continued as sport under the Buddhist reigns in Japan, for fun. Honesty exacts a toll. Illusion is confronted and worn down by steady observation and principled scrutiny. He cites St. John of the Cross: "the measure of the defect of vision is visions."

Here, Rexroth as elder statesmen comes round to what one of his first Beat proteges also figured out, in time, by that Escapade interview in 1960. "Buddhism is just words. Also, wisdom is heartless. I quit Buddhism because Buddhism--or Mahayana Buddhism--preaches against entanglement with women. To me, the most important thing in life is love." (83) As you can see, this anthology reveals many provocative moments, and it digs deeper than the stereotypes to uncover--beneath trace elements of pious smugness inherent to shallower Beat braggadocio--the core of a tougher, sometimes playful but often more persistent, existential, everyday dharma encountered, transformed.

(See my reviews of Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums,"  "Some of the Dharma,"  "Wake Up! A Life of the Buddha" and "On the Road: the Original Scroll". I also reviewed Prothero's subsequent "Religious Literacy"  and "The American Bible") (Amazon US 8-26-12)

Alain de Botton's "Religion for Atheists": Book Review

As with his previous books for the "educated reader" looking for a light but worthwhile introduction to philosophical and moral issues, Alain de Botton relies upon a mix of photos and illustrations with witty or profound captions to lighten the heavier lessons of his text. He glides over as much as he digs into. Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion indicates by its subtitle the utility to which he puts beliefs and rituals. Whether this fervent application of Photoshop and pious belief in the transformational potential of humanism will find many converts, given its erratic and at times superficial coverage of issues and ideas, remains as open-ended as its contents. These direct the seeker to secularize ancient stories and venerable practices in the therapeutic service of one's own growth and that of the community, bereft of belief in a higher power.

Born in England to a family of Jewish ancestry but one lacking personal investment in its spiritual inheritance, de Botton respects the cultural legacy and virtuous examples inculcated by religion. He contrasts his gentler skepticism with the harsher diatribes of prominent neo-atheists. Instead of damning the damage done in the name of faith, de Botton urges a mature acceptance of the benefits religion has given people in the past. By applying ethical lessons in short but sprawling chapters organized around a righteous virtue or moral principle, he encourages skeptics and non-believers today to learn from centuries of religious experience in dealing with human limitations.

De Botton begins by listing the reasons humans invented religion: to live in communities while overcoming selfish and violent impulses; to cope with pain--caused by our failures, troubled relationships, and the death of loved ones--and to face "our own decay and demise." (9) This short study, the size of a prayerbook for a secular aspirant, serves as inspirational reading for those who may admire some elements of sacramental rituals, Zen tea ceremonies, or Torah readings, but who cannot believe in them as other than inventions of our ancestors to explain or interpret the mysteries around us.

The first chapter argues for reversing the societal "process of religious colonization" to claim its moral legacy and cultural richness while separating secular identity from religious rituals and beliefs, thus to enrich "our soul-related needs" (13). De Botton refuses to discard the lessons of religion along with its encouragements and prohibitions, for religion’s enduring impacts can teach us how to live better. By burning off the residue of an outmoded set of dogmas and doctrines, he seeks to distill the essence of what can nourish a non-believer.

Next chapter, bonding gains analysis. The comfort of the Catholic Mass, a Passover meal, Yom Kippur’s congregational confession, and the upending of the medieval Feast of Fools are all examined skillfully as communal rituals uniting and enriching us. The satire of the last example channels the playful nature underlying games and rules which humans create. People need to letting loose rather than restraining sillier impulses. De Botton proposes a standardized framework that allows tension to be released now and then. He imagines, as he inserts altered photographs throughout this volume, the opening of an Agape Restaurant able to satisfy the culinary and communal longings of its non-churchgoing clientele.

De Botton reminds us of how religions cement people together, whereas modernism tends to isolate them. Reflecting on the appeal of paternalism and guidance rather than a vain libertarianism elevating individual gain above all other priorities, de Botton remarks how reform can come from efforts which involve others. "Religions understand this: they know to sustain goodness, it helps to have an audience." (39) Chapter Three explores the continuing need for direction, if not from heaven, than from the angels of our better nature. While atheists lament the imposition of scriptural injunctions in public spaces, they overlook their own complicity in encouraging the relentless promotion of consumerism and consumption, in ways as damaging to modern sensibilities as the outmoded frames of traditional reverence which secular adherents disdain.

Chapter Four contrasts secular education's ambitions that cultural events and literary studies may supplant spiritual searches. De Botton also confronts the lack at the heart of university preparation which stresses careers over insight, and which divorces the improvement of the soul from soulless practicalities for the job-seeker. He suggests that re-reading texts and repeating rituals, as is done in the yearly cycle of Torah readings or the Zen tea ceremony, might serve as models for secular instruction aimed at inculcating lasting, as incremental and lifelong, alteration of one's outlook and one's relationship with the self and with others.

He then powerfully speaks to what atheists deny: our frailty when nobody is there to comfort us as flailing adults. The fifth chapter discusses eloquently the need fulfilled by Buddhist or Catholic models of maternal compassion. He wonders if "Temples to Tenderness" might not replace shrines and statues for those moored within an uncaring world. Earlier, he noted how hard it may be to take solace from our common humanity when enduring the crush of people on Oxford Street or the airport terminal, and here, de Botton reminds readers of the coldness of modernity, and the timeless appeal of being held, caressed, and soothed.

The following chapter praises another quality inherited from religious tradition, that of pessimism. Secular people today tend to be more optimistic than believers, a reversal de Botton notes from past patterns. The admonition "why can't you be more perfect?", he adds, may be more common in marriages between those who lack Christian or Jewish beliefs. These insist on stability more than happiness as the prerequisite for an adult relationship that will endure as a partnership to perpetuate and direct the ongoing family. Secular people, by comparison, may flee fidelity. They pursue their own ideals and dreams, chasing an elusive fulfillment. Modern people need, he concludes, a Wailing Wall to share and shove the little messages of our problems into perspective, amidst fellow sufferers.

He pithily summarizes the anguish within the Book of Job and Baruch Spinoza's philosophical constructs, both of which tried to place human despair within a universal perspective. De Botton turns to vast space seen by the Hubble telescope today as a corrective for our own myopic era. Chapter Seven reminds us of how puny any earthly ambition or failure registers when set within such an immense panorama.

Then, de Botton adjusts his scrutiny. He wonders what happens when religious works, sold or stolen from their chapels or temples, adorn modern museums. How can art, for a patron, speak to a century where few kneel before reliquaries or relics in churches empty of the faithful who once filled them in an older Europe? Atheists might be inspired, de Botton proposes in Chapter Eight, to erect an atelier of modern artists "depicting a Seven Sorrows of Parenthood, a Twelve Sorrows of Adolescence or a Twenty-one Sorrows of Divorce." (I am not sure how many will rush to contemplate such monuments to desolation, on the other hand.) De Botton examines for instances of popularized sympathy examples from Christian art and contemporary photography, and he repeats in one caption his moral: "what separates indifference from compassion is the angle of vision."

Visualizing within a wired age, we have only our feet to gaze at, De Botton avers, not our concrete jungles and stucco canyons. Perhaps we can appreciate why monasteries were invented. After all, Protestants bear the blame for modern architecture. That is, they denuded church interiors, and stripped buildings down to austere dimensions. Modern cities and suburban landscapes attest to this imposed sense of being made to "feel small". De Botton suggests in his ninth chapter a remedy to such diminished dimensions. Temples to Perspective might show us how humans fit, although our hominid era albeit may be barely visible, into the towering scheme of time and space, and this might restore a humbling sense of our dimensions in the cosmos.

With their reliance on modest reason rather than pious elevation, secular intellectuals, de Botton observes of his earnest colleagues, usually lack the historical or cultural advantages afforded their religious counterparts. The unbelievers as "volatile individual practitioners run what are in effect cottage industries, while organized religions infiltrate our consciousness with all the might and sophistication available to institutional power." De Botton contrasts the scholarly success of Thomas Aquinas in a popular career against the obscurity endured by Friedrich Nietzsche during his life in support of this argument. This appears, however, to skim over the neo-atheist appeal of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens among audiences. De Botton aims this volume at overcoming the weaknesses of this cabal, but he exaggerates the difficulty of secular proponents finding a ready audience and warm welcome in person and via many media.

While de Botton understates the role in the century and more since Nietzsche of tenure, talk shows, and an occasional book to spark controversy (at least for a few media-savvy competitors to de Botton--although his own accessible but erudite works have gained him far more acclaim than those of most philosophers these days), one notes how inspirational volumes often top American lists. Consider one of the past year's most persistent number-one titles, a toddler's testimony Heaven Is For Real “as told to” his father (an evangelical pastor in Nebraska), about the not-quite-four year old's meeting--after an appendectomy gone awry--with Samson, John the Baptist, and a blue-eyed Christ. Nearby on the bestseller charts, self-help nostrums adapt conventional pieties as marketed for niche Christian, New Age, and/or business-oriented audiences.

Commodification has its benefits, as religions organized around easily recognizable symbols, icons, and rituals verify. The author encourages secular proponents to transmit their views more forcefully and cleverly, to compete by campaigns of wise and witty branding. He intersperses mock-ups of these throughout his volume. Despite de Botton's earnestness and wit, these altered images may provoke mockery or parody rather than convey comfort or inspiration.

Its American dust jacket features a paper imitation of a leather bound bible. What Sartre called a "god-shaped hole" provides a clever depiction of the existentialist audience primed for its preaching. The title nestles inside the void opened up by the cut-out, and the burnished letters of Holy Writ, half-visible, half-excised, symbolize de Botton's mission: to accept the possible limits of humanism without discarding the cost-benefit equations tallied up over thousands of years of religious practice.

He wraps up this brief handbook with a nod to his "only intermittently sane" ideological forebear, Auguste Comte, who in the early nineteenth century established a template for, and hoped for temples to, a Religion of Humanity. However, as de Botton admits, Comte's rational replacements for religion failed to inspire but a few of his French heirs to separation of Church and State after revolution and the Enlightenment, a consequence this author may underestimate as a cautionary tale. Visitors to Notre-Dame vastly outnumber those to any shrine to Comte's ambition. Granted, worshipers at such cathedrals usually are dwarfed by tourists, while parishes and shrines languish; de Botton's European perspective neglects the megachurch phenomenon popular in the U.S. and increasing in the Third World.

De Botton acknowledges the difficulty of constructing such a rational, but inspirational, effort, when religions have centuries if not millenniums of a headstart on human habits. Still, he reminds his readers at the close of this diligently illustrated, devotedly skeptical, but ultimately encouraging guide: "Religions are intermittently too useful, effective and intelligent to be abandoned to the religious alone." This curious, if cautiously phrased, conclusion sums up this message of this philosophical heir to Comte and centuries of dogged rationalists who seek the solace of a higher power: as a force for inspiration generated from our own ambitions, dreams, and longings. (As above, shared on The Pensive Quill 12-9-12; Edited and shorter version to Amazon US 3-5-12; 3-8-12 at PopMatters)

Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell": Book Review

Every reader of this book needs to constantly keep in mind Dennett's reminders about his authorial attitude. On pg. 103, speaking of the three favorite purposes for religion (comfort, explaining, cooperating), he reminds us: "The main point of this book is to insist that we don't [italicized emphasis in original type] yet know--but we can discover--the answers to these important questions if we make a concerted effort." That is, questions about why these three purposes emerged, how they were diffused, and why these and not other ideas about religion's efficacy. "Probably some of the features of the story I tell will prove in due course to be mistaken." He stresses: "The purpose of trying to sketch a whole [italics in original] story now is to get something on the table that is both testable and worth testing." (103-4) As he says, so I concur: "Many people may wish that these were unanswerable questions. Let's see what happens when we defy their defensive pessimism and give it a try." (104)

Now, I as with anyone who has actually read all of this book (including endnotes and appendices), can cavil with some of his "sketch"--but like Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel," Dennett is giving us the big picture, not filling in the details. This does make for a very uneven survey.

If I could finesse my rating it'd be 3.65/5 stars at best. It could have been so much better if he took more time to polish his arrangement and explication. He wants to pour it all out right away on to paper, and the book for all its learning documented reads as if too rushed off to take advantage of the notoriety aroused by 2004's Sam Harris' "The End of Faith." Too often--in both books--chapters drift in and out of focus. Subtopics come up as in an intelligent conversation, but in permanent form (for both Harris & Dennett) more cohesion with the rest of the chapter is often woefully absent. Inevitable perhaps for popularizing books tackling for a wider audience an immense and subtle and rather intangible morass of belief, fact, and supposition. Dennett's engaging, even if he too thinks smugly from his tenured comforts and rarified perch that "brights" are smarter, better, and wiser than believers.

He also, I find, tends to assume brights are all atheist. Liberal Christians and progressive Jews, I suggest, share many of the "God as essence but not as being" tendencies that exposure to higher education (in or out of college) has given recent generations raised with notions of biblical 20c "higher criticism" or Mordecai Kaplan's "Judaism as a Civilization." He also gives but one bare mention in the entire book to even the word "agnostic." (Not to mention Buddhists and their own approach to the divine.) I think many of the topics here are mulled over also by agnostics and rationalists who still support culturally religious identities. Dennett seems to want to set off a binary atheist vs. believer standoff, but glosses over many millions (perhaps billions if more of us were honest with our own souls and selves?) who waver in between the two too easily polarized and stereotyped positions of faith vs. reason, assertion vs. evidence, secular vs. spiritual. Lots of us live in the middle.

I think too he takes easy potshots at those smart people who have chosen to place their trust in prayer--especially those in contemplative monastic orders, for example; his attempt to explain "ex nihilo" creation as if it came out of a substance nearly indistinguishable from nothing (a close paraphrase of his phrase) seems shaky when placed against those positing a prime mover or first cause: are not theists and scientists occupying the same ground (or lack of matter!) for argument here, when the names and labels are removed? But, Dennett's a good sport, and notes again with italics: "Assuming that these propositions are true without further research could lead to calamitous results." He wishes on pg. 311 this could be placed as a cautionary sticker on this book's cover: may I suggest this for the paperback edition?

His conclusions are about as commonsensical or as quixotic as those of Sam Harris' "The End of Faith" (also reviewed by me on Amazon): Harris urged idealistically that if only all parents told their children only the truth, the future could be secured for rationalists. Dennett too places his trust in the secular. That's about it for big answers. These are so simple, yet so elusive: do not many true believers of gods or God or no gods think exactly that? That we no matter what we preach have a handle on the truth, and that we mean best for our progeny as we raise them in the light of our own understanding; all the while, however, unable to step out of our own limited perspective of the universal and the eternal?

Dennett's devilishly entertaining, if a bit too enamored of his own cleverness. You need to imagine him on the first day of the term impishly riling up a class full of naive freshmen. He manages to make you think, although I personally was never shook up, let alone shocked, by what he had to say--despite his oft-repeated desire to ruffle (if not pluck out) all of our protective covering of faith-based feathers.

A savvy reader, in fact, will note that his book does not exactly disprove God/gods. Dennett's only asking why and how do many believe based on natural rather than supernatural explanations. A good counterpart: Randall Sullivan's "The Miracle Detectives," all about how the Vatican investigates the veracity of otherworldly visions and purported miracles. Like Dennett, Sullivan creates a readable, erratic, but thought-provoking account of how grownups in the early 21c can go about asking tough questions about faith-based suppositions and expect honest answers, or at least acknowledgements that none of us have all the answers. Both authors (like Harris, too, in another erratic but worthwhile screed) express refreshing caution in an era too in love with righteousness. Dennett's book makes a big splash, and gets our attention. From here, it's up to all challengers to take him on and support or qualify his initial rabble-rousing. He wakes us up. What will we do when jolted out of our spell?

His note #18 on pg 412 bears repeating: "(As all you careful readers know full well, I am an equal-opportunity teaser, who refuses to tiptoe around for fear of offending people--because I want to take the 'I'm mortally offended' card out of the game.) It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, falls into my trap. They won't be assiduous note readers, will they?" Caveat lector.

(Amazon US 5-12-06. As I wrote this before I started blogging, I figured it merited a reprise here.)

Donald S. Lopez' "The Scientific Buddha": Book Review

Professor Donald Lopez investigates the past century and a half of how the West invents a Buddha in its own image with typical incisiveness: “Why do we yearn for the teachings of an itinerant mendicant in Iron Age India, even of such profound insight to somehow anticipate the formulae of Einstein?” (15)  Dr. Lopez proposes a revised version of Buddhist thought in these 2008 Terry Lectures at Yale, established in 1905 to examine “religion in the light of science and philosophy”. He examines cultural impacts and purportedly scientific shifts in modern reception of a congenial Buddhism which tallies as rational, mindful, and practical. 

He explains how, in the 1840s, European scholars began to analyze Eastern texts in the original languages. Philology applied scientific approaches, correcting misconceptions from missionaries, explorers, and merchants. “The myriad idols coalesced into a simple figure, who then became an historical figure, a founder of a religion, and a superstition became a philosophy. This is what used to be described unequivocally as progress.” (39) 

A textually based and earnestly fundamentalist Buddhism emerged to compete against Christian claims to reasoned inquiry and factual verification. A “primitive,” humane, and historical Buddha emerged, as a founder of a progressive tradition ideal for the scientific, secular age. Westerners—aided by certain Asians recently—rushed to credit this reconstructed Buddha with prescient insights from “a natural law of the mechanisms of the universe to the structure of the atom, from morality to the deepest workings of the human mind”. (41) 

After this survey of that manufactured scientific Buddha, Donald Lopez examines the problem of karma. Darwinism ensures a species’ survival by random mutation and natural selection, whereas Buddhism encourages natural extinction. It insists that creation must lead to cessation, an end to attachments by “conscious intervention” of the advanced sentient being. (73) Darwinism finds physical endangerment in pollution; sentient beings in Buddhism find mental entanglement in preservation, by karmic perpetuation, by polluting desires for permanence rather than liberation.

This conservative tendency sustains the Buddha’s teaching while disclaiming whatever innovations keep it adapting for twenty-five centuries. Confronting this mindset, Dr. Lopez encourages not harmony with science, but incompatibility. He rejects “mindfulness” and quantum analogies by medical and pop-culture practitioners. He proposes “seeking extinction rather than survival, seeing persistence only in impermanence, stressing intention over compulsion, consciousness over matter”. This potent Buddhism may enable its power to remain metaphysical, “beyond the world, completely at odds with the world, and with science”. (79) 

Rather than expect an ancient wanderer’s mentality to anticipate Newton, then Einstein, particle physics, and the Big Bang, Professor Lopez prefers the honesty of rejecting earnest efforts to make the dharma a “post-scientific religion, the one religion that has withstood the critique of science”. (78) As a counter-evolutionary, the Buddha sought “to escape the burning house” of birth, death, and rebirth. He wanted to extinguish life to free it from suffering. He desired to eradicate the selfish gene of self-perpetuation. 

An interlude in these linked lectures follows. This elucidates categories of meditation, and—similar to Owen Flanagan’s The Bodhisattva's Brain (2012)--Donald Lopez diminishes the prevalence for the ordinary adept of meditation. He promotes the ethical imperative and communal necessity of acting upon the compelling insights gained from the tradition. 

He also dismisses “stress reduction” peddled by wellness providers. Meditation seeks to hammer home in a “non-judgmental” manner a renunciation of “all the objects of ordinary experience” as scarred by the “three marks” of reality in Buddhist teaching: “impermanence, suffering, and no-self”. (108) If the Buddha had wanted us to bathe or floss, “two millennia ago he would have set forth the Indoor Plumbing Sutra and the Lotus of Good Dental Hygiene.” (109)

Instead, Dr. Lopez rejects “false resonances” of karma with evolutionary theory, emptiness with physics, or antiquated cosmology with contemporary astronomy. Yet, he pauses with a provocative if elusive suggestion. He advocates research that delves into the “irretrievable” findings of meditating monastics.  He wonders how this might somehow translate beyond verbal articulation into scientific data. 

In conclusion, Donald Lopez rejects the Victorian construct of the Buddha. This emanation’s time has passed. The Buddha, in Lopez’s estimation, leads beings compassionately towards their own extinction. This liberation cannot coexist with perpetuation.  Morally, concern for one’s self brings one to Buddhahood. From there, the enlightened being shepherds others along the path to nirvana. “The sucker is exalted to the rank of savior.” (131)

This engaging series of lectures demonstrates the appeal of the Buddha and how this venerable icon has been remodeled to please modern desires. With references to Moby Dick and Google search, Viagra and a curious apocalypse of “third-grade tyranny”, it sustains in characteristically lively fashion Donald S. Lopez, Jr.’s contributions to Buddhist studies. It continues his career full of sly, scholarly challenges to the common wisdom peddled as dharma, karma, and nirvana. 

(In slightly edited form to New York Journal of Books 9-25-12. Expanded and revised substantially for The Non-Buddhist 6-2-13 as "The Buddha as Counter-evolutionary"). See also Lopez's Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West.)