[Buddha-l] Re: Anyone up for another year?

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 16:26 -0800, Franz Metcalf wrote:

> First, I love that Harris is out there, but I have to say he's also 
> "out there," as in way out there.

I'm not sure where way out there is. I find his views are pretty good
expressions of my own views, and I'm sure as hell not way out there. I'm
right here.

> This is a shame, since his central 
> argument makes sense (at least to me). But then, his central argument 
> is, as Curt pointed out, something at least as old as Durkheim. I would 
> add all the great fathers of the human sciences and make a list of it: 
> Marx, Weber, Freud, Durkheim. Others might be added. (Nietzsche, 
> Feuerbach, Hume, etc.)

If the only measure of the quality of a book is its novelty, then
Harris's book will not score high marks. I would guess, on the basis of
his 60+ pages of footnotes and his nearly 30-page bibliography, that
Harris does not claim to be saying much of anything new. He cites Marx,
Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, Freud and Habermass (but not
Dürkheim). His training, after all, is in philosophy and comparative
religions. 

If his brings anything new to the discussion it is a sense of urgency, a
recognition that delusion is especially dangerous when we live in a
world in which (as Harris quotes physicist Martin Rees as observing) "a
single person can, by one clandestine act, cause millions of deaths or
render a city uninhabitable for years." His claim that beliefs are not
private when people act on them, and that when beliefs are public we all
have a stake in them and an obligation to overturn inadequate beliefs,
seems quite modest.

What I find important to me personally is his challenging claim that it
much of the burden of the rapid spread of terrorism rests on the
shoulders of religious moderates and pluralists, who have fostered a
culture of leaving religious dogmas alone and relatively immune from
serious critical investigation. This is important to me, because I am a
religious moderate and pluralist and have done my share of promoting the
culture that Harris claims is now bankrupt.

What I especially like about Harris's book is that it's so damn well
written. I find myself reading some passages several times, just to
savor the way they are written. I like, for example, this critique of
religious moderates:

\begin{quote}
But religious moderation still represents a failure to criticize the
unreasonable (and dangerous) certainty of others. As a consequence of
our silence on these matters, we live in a country in which a person
cannot get elected president if he openly doubts the existence of heaven
and hell. This is truly remarkable, given that there is no other body of
"knowledge" that we require our political leaders to master. Even a
hiarstylist must pass a licensing exam before plying his trade in the
United States, and yet those given the power to make war and national
policy---those whose decisions will inevitably affect human life for
generations---are not expected to know anything in particular before
setting to work. They do not have to be political scientists, economists
or even lawyers; they do not need to have studied human relations,
military history, resource management, civil engineering, or any field
of knowledge tht might be brought to bear in the governance of a modern
superpower; they need only be expert fund-raisers, comport themselves
well on television, and be indulgent of certain myths.
\end{quote}

And further on:

\begin{quote}
It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is
no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the
universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men
and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom the wheelbarrow
would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely
on such a document as the basis for our worldview---however the heroic
efforts of its redactors---is to repudiate two thousand years of
civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe
upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture.
\end{quote} 

> Really, though, creeds are not the problem; people are the problem.
> It's just like with guns and bullets: the former harm no one without
> the latter.

Reminds me of the T-shirt I saw some guy wearing in Toronto: "Guns don't
kill. Exit wounds kill." (Given that on the day after Christmas a
teenage girl shopper was gunned down in downtown Toronto recently,
apparently caught in the crossfire of a ferocious gun battle between
gangs on Yonge Street in broad daylight, this T-shirt is not very funny
to most Torontonians right now.)  But I digress.

One of the problems with people is that they are willing to kill for
their beliefs, and that they are capable of deluding themselves into
thinking that their beliefs come to them from some superhuman source. As
Harris argues, some beliefs are intrinsically more prone than others to
being used to justify violence and destruction. And those are the
beliefs, he argues, we have a moral obligation to eliminate as best we
can. 

This claim does not seem at all "way out there." Nor does his claim
that, among the less dangerous religious dogmas are those of Buddhism.
(I would want to add that the Lotus Sutra, and perhaps the Kalacakra,
are Buddhist texts that DO promote a potentially dangerous dogma; I
think Harris is a little negligent in the task of impugning some
Mahayana Buddhist authors with as much gusto as he pillories the authors
of the Bible and the Qur'an.)

> Thanking goodness I'm just a dummy,

Yeah, right, and I'm the Queen of the Night.

-- 
Richard Hayes
***
"The spiritual path is never one of achievement; it is always one of
letting go. The more we let go, the more there is empty and open space
for us to see reality." 
                                              --Sister Ayya Khema