[Buddha-l] What Batcehlor actually said

[Richard Hayes]

Dr Curtis Steinmetz wrote:

> It is a common misconception that "until recently religions maintained
> that the earth was flat." ("Buddhism Without Beliefs" p. 35)

Just for the sake of completeness, here is the entire paragraph from which the 
phrase above was taken. It may be worth noting that the paragraph appears in 
a chapter entitled "Rebirth."

\begin{quote}
Yet while religions may agree that life continues in some form after death, 
this does not indicate the claim to be true. Until quite recently religions 
maintained that the earth was flat, but such widespread belief did not affect 
the shape of the planet. In accepting the idea of rebirth, the Buddha 
reflected the worldview of his time. In common with Indian tradition, he 
maintained that the aim of life is to attain freedom from the anguished cycle 
of compulsive rebirth. (It's a curious twist that Westerners find the idea of 
rebirth consoling.) This view was endorsed by subsequent generations of 
Buddhists in much the same way as we would now endorse many scientific views, 
which, if pressed, we would find hard to demonstrate.
\end{quote}

If we examine the proposition about the flat-earth dogma, we note that it is 
not quantified as a universal proposition. He does not say that all religions 
taught that the earth is flat. All that is required for Batchelor's 
proposition as stated to be true is that there are religions that taught a 
flat-earth mythology. And this proposition is true. But more to the point is 
that neither this or any other religious claim determines what is in fact the 
case. The universe operates according to its own principles (or lack thereof) 
with no regard at all to what human beings believe. This observation seems 
pretty tame and uncontroversial to me.

A second key point that Batchelor makes is that what people believe tends to 
be influenced by the culture in which they belong, and the vast majority of 
people (even highly accomplished people) accept a great deal of what their 
culture teaches without questioning it and would be unable to defend most of 
their beliefs if they were challenged. This is no less the case with people 
who believe the findings of science than with people who believe the 
reflections of the Pope. This is a very old point, one that William James 
articulated quite fully in his essay "The will to believe." (Batchelor would 
probably not entirely agree with James's conclusions in that essay.)

The most important point made by Batchelor is that when one lives in a culture 
whose beliefs are not the same as the beliefs of another culture, then one 
can (and perhaps even must) be selective in which beliefs of that other 
culture one accepts. So one might accept, for example, the ancient Indian 
teaching that selfishness is a cause of unhappiness but reject the teaching 
that Mount Meru is at the center of the world or that one's personal 
consciousness and/or identity continues to exist after the death of the 
physical body. (It is difficult to imagine, by the way, how anyone could 
believe that Mount Meru is the center of the world unless she believes the 
world is flat. If Meru were at the center of a sphere, it would not be on the 
earth but inside it. But I digress.)

Batchelor's conclusion from these observations is that Western Buddhists need 
not accept rebirth as one of their beliefs, or even as one of their 
metaphors. Notice that what he says is that Western Buddhists need not accept 
rebirth. He does not say that Western (or any other) Buddhists need to reject 
it. In fact, what he explicitly says about himself is that he neither accepts 
it nor rejects it. He summarizes the implications of what he has observed as 
follows:

\begin{quote}
Where does this leave us? It may seem that there are two options: either to 
believe in rebirth or not. But there is a third alternative: to acknowledge, 
in all honesty, \italics{I do not know.} We neither have to adopt the literal 
versions of rebirth presented by religious tradition nor fall into the 
extreme of regarding death as annihilation. Regardless of what we believe, 
our actions will reverberate beyond our deaths. Irrespective of our personal 
survival, the legacy of out thoughts, words, and deeds will continue through 
the impressions we leave behind in the lives of those we have influenced or 
touched in any way.
\end{quote}

He concludes the chapter by saying that agnosticism is not a call to inaction. 
On the contrary, it involves calling our attention away from speculations 
about what may be in the future and back to the present. And agnosticism, he 
says, "demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and 
hope."

Now out of this entire chapter, Dr. Steinmetz focuses on one point, the one 
about the earth being flat, and concludes by asking the following leading 
question:

> Or is
> this just another example of Stephen Batchelor being completely wrong?

If one reads Batchelor's entire chapter on rebirth, not to mention his entire 
book, it is pretty clear that Batchelor is not pushing science or rationalism 
or any of the other bêtes noires that his critics mistakenly think he is 
pushing. If read at face value, Batchelor ends up sounding as if he is 
emphasizing a lot of things very similar to what the Buddha reportedly 
emphasized. If Batchelor is completely wrong in the substance of what he 
actually advocates, then so was Gotama (whether we take the Gotama of the 
Pali canon to be a real person or a character in a work of fiction of epic 
proportions).

While I certainly believe that Batchelor, like everyone else who either speaks 
or remains silent, can be justly criticized, I think he deserves more careful 
criticism than the sloppy caricatures, ad hominem arguments, innuendos and 
straw man arguments that Dr Steinmetz presents.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://home.comcast.net/~dayamati