philosophy archives: [all belief is a hoax buffet?]

RageBoy's fragments of mysticism

Chris Locke has a fascinating sketch of what he's thinking about how the West turned Zen into a New Age religion. (I'm not being condescending by calling it a sketch; Chris warns us that he hasn't stitched the pieces together yet.)

For me and a gazillion other half-baked students in the '60s, D.T. Suzuki was the guy to read for the thrill of radical otherness that Zen promised. But, says Chris:

D.T. Suzuki and his Japanese masters conceived just such a questionable need to make Buddhism look and feel and act like Christianity. As a result, what was presented to the West as "Zen" is an animal that never existed. And this bait-and-switch routine has had consequences that still reverberate in our current cultural assumptions, not only about who and what those others are, but about who and what we are — ultimately, about who and what human beings are. And are not.

Because this is just a sketch and some notes, Chris doesn't say more. We'll just have to wait for the fullness of time. As if time were real.

Chris does also quote Robert Sharf, however, which gives a hint of where he's going with this:

Philosophers and scholars of religion were attracted to Zen for the same reason that they were attracted to the mysticism of James, Otto and Underhill: it offered a solution to the seemingly intractable problem of relativism engendered in the confrontation with cultural difference...

My mother was something of a pan-religionist. She was eager to embrace every culture's religious ideas, in part out of an admirable respect for the diversity of our world. But to embrace all religions, you have to drop the particularities of practice and belief. You end up reducing religion to a mere spiritualism — Yes, I am aware that "reduce" and "mere" are evaluative terms — that attempts to get you past the despair of relativism (just as Chris says) by finding a common core to all religion.

Spirituality may seem to be what all religions have in common, but that doesn't mean it's their core. Religions differ over the importance of belief, faith, action, practice and ritual; it only seems obvious to some religions that spirituality is the core of religion.

Personally, I think a whole lot of the problems vanish if we just accept the idea of local revelation, and reject any religion's claim to universality. This enables us to preserve the notion of difference — which is a way of respecting the local — without falling into the depression of relativism.

(There you have it: A solution to the world's problems in just two sentences! Now onto curing cancer...)

Anyway, see Chris' Mystic Bourgeoisie blog for more on how Zen became NewAge++. [Tags: RageBoy ChrisLocke MysticBourgeoisie zen religion spirituality NewAge]

Posted by self at 08:13 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
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Aristotle and conversation: Maybe I wasn't completely wrong

A couple of days ago, I wrote up a thought that I was afraid sounds better than it is. But now I think maybe it isn't as hollow as I'd thought.

The idea was this: Aristotle says that to know x is to place x into a relationship of similarity and difference: A robin is a type of bird (same as all other birds) but is a unique species of bird (different from all other birds). This is a world-changing insight, especially since Aristotle thought it was true not just of knowledge but of reality. But as our belief in a single, uninterpreted reality — or our ability to know a single reality — falters, we find ourselves in a global network of conversations. And conversations iterate differences on the ground of shared beliefs — difference and similarity.

I was worried that the formal similarity between Aristotle's idea and the nature of conversation was too facile. But this morning I think there's also something right. In these billions of conversations, we attempt to work out what's true. But, especially as the conversation goes global and involves people with deep differences, we (= I) have no hope of ever resolving issues and creating anything like an eternal tree of knowledge. That dream of Reason is gone. (Appropriate exceptions admitted.) Instead, for the rest of our time on the planet, we will be iterating differences, hopefully on an increasing ground of commonality. But we're never going to all agree and fall silent. That's not even a desirable outcome.

So, I think maybe I do believe that knowledge is becoming the eternality of conversations dancing difference over common ground.

(I reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow.) [Technorati tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous aristotle philosophy]
Posted by self at 06:33 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
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December 05, 2004
D'Souza on authenticity

ToTheSource has sent out a brief essay by Dinesh D'Souza that gives some insight into the conservative majority's point of view. I find myself agreeing with much of it, but then feel dismay and disappointment as D'Souza swerves, betraying a contempt for those with whom he disagrees. (I can't find the essay online — what's up with that, ToTheSource?)

He quickly traces the historical/philosophical roots of the notion that morality is grounded in following one's inner voice. In his narrative, our inner voice gets increasingly removed from the larger, outer voice:

Augustine contends that God is the lamp that illuminates the inner soul. Rousseau broke with Augustine by severing this connection between the inner voice and any external authority. For Rousseau the inner voice is the sovereign and final authority.

This is the moral code that we have inherited today...

D'Souza avoids the easy rant against the "imperial self" (although the term gives away his attitude towards it):

...We are wrong to dismiss this as a mere affirmation of selfishness, a rejection of morality. It is a massive shift in the source of morality — away from the external order, toward the inner self. Nor should the new code be understood as relativism or nihilism. It does not affirm that "anything goes.," It insists that the inner voice is morally authoritative and should be followed without question.

Yes, it isn't "anything goes," but the imperial self is still non-moral. Imagine that when we're born, we "imprint" on the third person we see and believe that morality consists in being true to #3. That's not "Anything goes, but it's not moral. So, why is doing whatever #1 says any more moral than doing what the random #3 says? But D'Souza doesn't draw that conclusion. Instead, he proffers what at first sounds like respect for this alternative view of morality:

I do not believe that this new ethic of the Imperial Self can be completely uprooted, as some people who bemoan the decline of the old moral consensus would like to do. But I am also concerned with the moral danger of conceding final moral authority to the Imperial Self. Human nature is flawed and the "voice within" is sometimes unreliable and sometimes wrong. As Immanuel Kant warned, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."

Perhaps a more practical goal is to contain, and perhaps to roll back, some of the excesses of the new ethic of authenticity. This involves a recovered sense of the moral sources that continue to inform our moral self-understanding, sources that can be found in our religious and ethical traditions but which have disappeared from our public debate. The urgent task at hand is to recognize the power of the new ethic of authenticity while steering it toward something higher, to ennoble the self by directing it toward the good.

There's a bunch of signs and signals going on here. On the one hand, we have the imperial selves. D'Souza has made it clear earlier in the article who they are, for the imperial self:

...was first adopted by intellectuals and artists in England, France, and the United States. These elite groups, of the kind that dominated the Parisian café, the Bloomsbury society in England, and Greenwich Village in the United States, have been living according to the bohemian code for a long time. What changed in the 1960s is that these values, once confined to small enclaves in society, now became part of the social mainstream.

Then we have the traditionalists who "bemoan" the decline of the "old moral consensus." Think: The preaching Christians who chastise and berate on the channels you skip over. D'Souza is distancing himself from them.

Then there are the moderns like D'Souza who recognize that ideas have histories and who adapt to modern practicalities. These moderns recognize that you can't reform hippies; they're always going to insist on "doing their own thing." They're too far gone to ever become truly moral the way D'Souza is. The best you can do is try to redirect the inner light to better moral goals.

There's arrogance there. It's one thing to think that following one's inner light is only accidentally moral — like happening to imprint on a moral #3 — and another to recommend dealing with those who hold such a view as if they were children.

And there's also some pernicious line-drawing by which only those who believe in a particular "external moral order" get to count as moral:

One can no longer make a public appeal to the external moral code. The Clinton sex scandals were clear proof of this: some Americans considered his actions morally scandalous, but others thought it was no big deal.

Say wha'? Many of us who thought that Clinton's adulterous blow jobs and lies about said blow jobs were not enough of a big deal to impeach him but still think adultery and lying are morally wrong. Thinking that MonicaGate was blown out of proportion (so to speak) by a right wing that was lying in wait doesn't mean that one forsaken all external moral codes.

In fact, here surfaces the danger of D'Souza's view: External moral codes disagree in theory and in application. With the Clinton example, D'Souza reveals that he's playing a game of shirts vs. skins in which those who do not believe in a particular moral code are bohemian hippies who immorally follow their own "inner light." But the real game is that we have skins of many colors and shirts of many stripes that desperately need to figure out how to share a planet. That can't be done with either of the positions D'Souza gives us: Follow your inner lighters can't do it because they have no way to mediate disputes with inner lights that point elsewhere. Eternal moral coders can't do it unless they accept that they don't have a lock on what that their external authority (um, G-d) says.

D'Souza's compromise is phony. Doing an end run around someone's immorality does morality a disservice.

By the way, D'Souza's notion that our "religious and ethical traditions" have "disappeared from our public debate" is a hoot. Was D'Souza away during the recent election year?

Posted by self at 10:21 AM | Comments (20) | TrackBack
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