Tag: Better Angels

Summer reading

Are the better angels of our nature winning out? Are we, as we achieve higher levels of civilisation, becoming any less violent? I hadn’t intended it this way but violence has been an undercurrent throughout almost all my summer reading. My blog’s name may be Zenpolitics but there are no easy rides.

I’ve been back, with the wonderful John Stoner and his novel ‘Augustus’, to the life and times of Caesar Augustus and his immediate precursors. (Books by Mary Beard and Tom Holland, serious non-fiction, underline just how bloody life could be in ancient Rome). Moving on 1400 years, to the decades either side of 1400 (a neat symmetry!), Helen Castor’s ‘The Eagle and the Hart’ (not a novel but narrative non-fiction) focuses on Richard II, a lover of peace assailed by violence on his home soil and over the Channel. His successor, Henry IV, copes better. A little more than a century later we’ve Luther nailing his theses on a Wittenberg door and precipitating the Reformation, and its appalling immediate aftermath, the German Peasants’ War, as wonderfully described (in ‘Summer of Fire and Blood’) by Lyndal Roper.

We’re visiting France next month so I read Emile Zola’s novel ‘Debacle’, about the Franco-Prussian War by way (a curious way, I admit – the book happened to be on my shelves) of preparation: the victors of the battle of Sedan in 1870 would return to France less than fifty years later.

I stayed with roughly the same period, moving on to 1874, when I picked up another John Stoner novel, ‘Butcher’s Crossing’. (Now a film.) If I was hoping for respite the title should have warned me. It’s about a journey from Kansas to the Rockies where they hunt buffalo (for their hides) in a high mountain valley, shooting thousands, with a view to leaving none behind. A direct route to extinction.

I found respite in a wonderful book, ‘Left Bank’, by Agnes Poirier about Paris in the 1940s and how its intellectual and cultural and café life survived the Nazi occupation. It’s the world of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, and fighting is in-fighting, literary and artistic. But there is a looming threat. Their opponents once the Germans are driven out are the hard-core Soviet-aligned, toe-the-socialist-realist-line Communists.

The dangers, as they might have been, to Paris and to France of hardline Soviet Communism are spelt out in a graphic way in Anne Applebaum’s remarkable book, ‘Red Terror’. Its subject is Ukraine in the inter-war years. By 1921 the various attempts to establish independence in the aftermath of World War One had all failed. Soviet power was firmly established. (It’s curious to read how in the years 1921-22 American aid had been enlisted to combat famine.)

Ukrainian language and culture were for a while encouraged as a way the Soviets saw of binding Ukrainians to a new Marxist dispensation. But by 1929 Stalin was in charge and the mood was changing. A trial of that year referred to ‘Ukrainian nationalism, nationalistic parties, their treacherous policies, their unworthy ideas of bourgeois independence, of Ukraine’s independence’. The brutal introduction of land reform, the obliteration of the kulaks as a class, and at the same time the requisitioning of the grain, on which the peasants survived, for the cities and for export, led to the Holodomor, the famine of 1932-33, during which up to five million people died. Stalin’s paranoia was by this time deep-rooted. His purges of the late 1930s all but wiped out Ukraine’s intellectual and cultural life.

There’s so much more I could say. Read the book. For my next book, something that’s maybe an easier read? Maybe, maybe not. Take each book as it comes.

Militant atheism and the spiritual path

Now that is quite a a title for a post…

I’ve just finished reading Sam Harris’s Waking Up – subtitle ‘searching for spirituality without religion’. When he claimed Chris Hitchens as a friend, I was instantly worried. And then I had the usual stuff about religions being mutually incompatible so no-one can possibly believe that ‘all religions are the same’. Well, we don’t believe they’re all the same – but we do find an underlying unity. He should have asked us first – but he hares off on the hackneyed ‘violence of religion’ tack, and even finds a Zen story where a disciple hacks a finger off – and then is suddenly enlightened.

The sad thing is that Harris has gained some kind of spiritual understanding over many years as a seeker and meditator, and he’s especially keen on, and good at describing, Dzogchen Buddhism (‘focusing on the intrinsic selflessness of awareness’). But he fails completely to recognise that it’s a specifically religious search for understanding in this life that led to the revelations that he now, as a militant atheist, has the benefit of.

And then we have the following on drugs: ‘The power of psychedelics is that they often reveal in a few hours depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime.’ Having been down that route, and experienced the ecstasy, I know that selflessness – the experience of non-self, anatta – and drug-induced ecstasy are two very different things. The path – I almost want to say ‘true path’, but that really does sound too religious! – is step-by-step, unfolding, learning, consolidating – I say learning, but it’s not learning in the sense of acquiring knowledge – it is simply that awareness that opens up beyond self. And where you find a differently kind of joy and peace from anything you’ve experienced before.

And a final grumble – no, more than a grumble. This is serious stuff. Reading a review of John Bew’s book, Realpolitik: A History (premise – pragmatism dictates that the overtly and obviously moral route can’t always be the one to follow – politics has sometimes to be about compromise), there’s a reference to Barack Obama drawing on the wisdom of the theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. Obama has tried to articulate a liberal realist world view – avoiding misconceived adventures on the one hand and isolation on the other…

Why is that relevant to Sam Harris’s book? Because Harris and his like go on about the evils of religion but overlook that it’s not violence but compassion that drives religion. And that the spiritual without compassion is selfish and not selfless. Compassion has to be at the heart of politics, and I believe that Obama has tried to do just that, and his successes and failures are indicative of how hard it is to follow that path in today’s world – and yet how essential it is to try.

Religion when taken over by the power-brokers of the world for their own ends has caused many a disaster. But religion allied to compassion, in the minds of a follower, disciple or believer (however you wish to describe yourself), has been the ultimate force for good in the world. (Now that I admit is a challenging statement – and meant to be such!)

I heard Steven Pinker speak about his then new book, Better Angels Of Our Nature, a year of two back. It’s predicated (and brilliantly argued) on the role of violence in human history – how over centuries and millennia we’ve created social and political structures to contain that violence, allowing the creation of stable, or relatively stable, societies and government. (And how violence continues to decline, even allowing for two world wars and many other horrific events.)

Pinker argues that the primacy of reason and enlightenment values from the 18th century onwards allowed empathetic values, not least compassion, to find expression. The pattern of history for me is very different – violence and compassion have existed side by side throughout recorded history – compassion is hardly a recent phenomena, and it’s in the exercise of that compassion that we as human beings have found our greatest fulfilment.

Compassion and religion have always been closely interconnected. And if you’re a militant atheist, that poses a problem.

My recommendation to Sam Harris would be – get off your podium, stop preaching, and get out there in the world. And if you do, you’ll find yourself working alongside some wonderful people – of all faiths, and none, including humanists. We all work together. We just don’t call each other names.