Secular Right

Sadly this fascinating piece by Lydia Aran on how Tibetan Buddhism has been rebranded for western consumption is trapped behind Commentary’s subscription wall, but this extract gives a good flavor:

Catering to the tastes of Western academics and New Age adepts alike, the diaspora establishment led by the Dalai Lama also began stressing the elements of the sacred and the mystical in Tibetan discourse. For both internal and foreign consumption, it selected for publication mostly religious texts, especially hagiographies, while barring critical historical analysis and allowing very few translations into Tibetan from other languages. For a long time, contact with foreign cultures was limited to a small, English-speaking elite…

…And yet, despite the achievements of recent scholarship, the Shangri-La image continues to enjoy wide currency in the West, and not only among activists and partisans but among reputable scholars as well. To illustrate, let me briefly focus on the quality perhaps responsible more than any other for Tibet’s popularity in the West: namely, its allegedly deep-seated cultural affinity for nonviolence. Even a cursory look at history reveals that nonviolence has never been a traditional Tibetan practice, or a societal norm, or, for that matter, a teaching of Tibetan Buddhism. Before the present Dalai Lama’s encounter with the Gandhian concept of ahimsa, no Dalai Lama had ever invoked nonviolence as a virtue. Nor does ahimsa—meaning the abstinence from causing injury to any living creature—have any equivalent in Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

True, compassion (Tibetan snying rje, Sanskrit karuna) is an important religious and philosophical tenet, but it denotes above all the wish to save others from suffering by imparting to them Buddhist wisdom. In any case, it is not known ever to have been applied to political life in the way that, for instance, Gandhi took ahimsa as mandating a strategy of passive resistance to evil.

Pre-modern and modern Tibet engaged in many offensive campaigns against its neighbors, all of them sanctioned by Dalai Lamas. Domestically, too, Tibetan monasteries maintained private armies that were deployed in conflicts with the local government, with other monasteries, and sometimes even among schools within the same monastery. Fighting “dobdos” were known to constitute 15 percent of the monks of the great Gelugpa monasteries in and around Lhasa. Political rivalries were often settled by assassination. Some Dalai Lamas may have been kind and compassionate in person, but the historical record before 1960 unequivocally contradicts the image of a Dalai Lama preaching or practicing nonviolence.

Yet here is Robert Thurman, the well-known professor of Tibetan studies at Columbia University—and a leading pro-Tibet activist—declaring that the great 5th Dalai Lama (1617-1682) was “a compassionate and peace-loving ruler who created in Tibet a unilaterally disarmed society.” And here, by way of contrast, are the instructions of the 5th Dalai Lama himself to his commanders, who had been ordered to subdue a rebellion in Tsang in 1660:

“Make the male lines like trees that have had their roots cut; make the female lines like brooks that have dried up in winter; make the children and grandchildren like eggs smashed against rocks; make the servants and followers like heaps of grass consumed by fire; make their dominion like a lamp whose oil has been exhausted; in short, annihilate any traces of them, even their names.”

Yet another religion of peace, it would seem.

Interesting thread on abortion. Just a few at random.

•  In Mr. Hume’s post and the comments threads we’ve so far turned up Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin as having carried out legislative actions suggesting that, at the least, they didn’t/don’t mind abortion very much. I’d add Margaret Thatcher, who IMS voted in Parliament for the 1967 bill that liberalized British abortion law, and certainly who as Prime Minister never made any move against the newly-liberalized abortion regime. So … tell me again how
you can’t be a conservative if you’re not anti-abortion?

[I can speak to the liberalization of the abortion laws in Britain in more detail, from observation and countless conversations in that country through the pre-1967 controversy. The two driving forces were (a) class, and (b) our old pal disgust. The class angle was the one most often heard in conversation. Under the old, quite strictly anti-abortion regime (still in force in Northern Ireland last time I looked), it was perfectly easy for well-off women — not rich, just upper-lower-middle-class and above — to get a hygienic abortion in a decent clinic. Everybody knew this. Even the price was well-known: it cost £200 in 1963-4 (about three months wages for a working-class man at the time). Working-class girls, however, had to resort to “back-alley” abortions: older women of the same class wielding bicycle pumps and shirt hangers. (Frank Sinatra’s mum was in this line of business, I believe, so things were probably much the same over here, at any rate in Hoboken.) This was regarded as grossly unfair class-wise; and in post-WW2 Britain that was sufficient to get a political movement airborne. The disgust was directed at the biddies with the bicycle pumps. If people are intent on having abortions, as they obviously are, always and everywhere; and if, as is the case, it is rather easy for a doctor to write up the procedure as something else, at least for early abortions (“dilatation and curettage” was the usual formula, making it sound like a sort of gynecological house cleaning — “… and to my great surprise, there was an embryo in there!”); then at least let’s make sure the thing is done to some medical standards. Those were the talking points behind abortion law reform in Britain. British people don’t go in much for metaphysics. At least they didn’t used to, when they were a sane nation.]

•  Isn’t there any way to wean people off the silly, prissy, dishonest terminology of “pro-life” and “pro-choice”?  What’s wrong with “anti-abortion” and “pro-abortion”?  That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it? Does anyone think the homicide rate among “anti-life” abortion liberalizers is higher than it is among “pro-lifers” (My guess would be, it’s lower.) I understand the marketing strategies here, but there is great clarification to be got from just using plain names for things.

•  The whole idea of ensoulment is a fascinating topic in cognitive psychology. Doug Hofstadter has witty things to say about it in his 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop.  The common human perception seems to be, though — contra one of the commentators here — that souls come in different sizes. Doug notes, for example, that the English word “magnanimity” and the Hindu (Sanskrit?) title “Mahatma” both mean “great-souled.” He attempts a quantification of soul-size, based on a unit called the huneker — you have to read the book to get that reference. There is a two-page discussion about the size of a mosquito’s soul, coming up at last with 10^–10 hunekers, the average human soul size being of course 100 hunekers.  Says Doug:

I have never been specific about the kinds of traits a high-huneker or low-huneker soul would tend to exhibit. Indeed, any hint at such a distinction risks becoming inflammatory, because in our culture there is a dogma that states, roughly, that all human lives are worth exactly the same amount.

You thus have one of those doublethink situations that cog-sci types get excited about: on the one hand, the intuition, universal and embodied in language, that some souls are bigger than others, on the other hand, a cultural dogma that all human souls are equi-capacitous. Prof. Pinker, call your office.

•  Still on the cog-sci beat, I think the other reader is right that we have, as part of our mental equipment, a module that, for any other human being, computes a sort of “potential-for-accumulating-experience” quotient, and assigns the human being a value on that basis. This module likely only kicks in when confronted with an observable human being, though. Probably our brains just didn’t evolve to have valuation modules for embryos and fetuses, which we didn’t much encounter until recently. Following on from that, I’d guess that much of the salience of the abortion issue in modern life is driven by the good-quality medical imaging that’s become available in recent decades. I’d guess, in fact, that really good quality imaging of fetuses, if cheaply and widely available, would lead to public demands for earlier limits on legal abortion terms. The theocons can metaphysic all they want, but further policy/legal changes in this zone will likely be driven by things we can see and hear, and by the effects those things have on our emotions.  Metaphysics butters no parsnips.

•  I remember Nat Hentoff all right. He wrote the cover notes for the first British LP issue of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” Sixties survivors don’t forget stuff like that.

A listener to my Radio Derb podcast had this to say:

Why you won’t ever be Rush [Limbaugh] is, I think, pretty simple; you are not “pro-life.” I just don’t think the Right Over Here is willing to make room for you. As a Christian, I think the movement to outlaw the death penalty in conjunction with the movement to kill pre-born children (yes, including embryos), is the surest evidence that “The West” is finished. Without a firm popular regard for justice — meaning in-kind punishment for the guilty and protection of the innocent — civilization, as we “knew it” is dead. I know you don’t agree with this, but I certainly hope that my simple analysis of your place in the conservative pantheon is incorrect. In my view, one of the true marks of the Right …  is the freedom to disagree with your allies — something missing from all totalitarian dogmas, such as modern “liberalism.”

The first part is correct, I think. The whole “right to life” business is over my head. I don’t even understand what it means. If I fall down the basement steps and break my neck tomorrow, what happened to my “right to life”? I do of course have the legal right to expect that, if somebody wilfully kills me, he will be punished (by the death penalty, if it’s up to me — no inconsistency here!) I’d extend the same privilege to a new-born baby. Back beyond that — five minutes, or five months before the baby is born — the mother is rather intimately involved (and the father somewhat less so), and you are in a different situation.

I have no patience with the angels-on-pin-heads logic-chopping about “when life begins.” (Though I like the answer a biologist friend once gave: “Life begins in the Pre-Cambrian Epoch …” You have to think about it a minute.) Without a moral metaphysic and a belief in ensoulment, neither of which I have, it’s all hot air.

The killing of embryos and fetuses is intrinsically disturbing and disgusting to normal people, including me. As with other such acts — the eating of corpses, for example — an organized society needs some consensus, embodied in law, about what may and may not be done; though also (I’d argue) an understanding that that consensus is founded on nothing but those widespread common emotions — disturbance and disgust. I’d guess that most people in today’s U.S.A. would settle for unconditional abortion up to 12 weeks, conditional abortion up to 20, severely conditional thereafter. Whatever the consensus is, let’s settle on it and enforce the laws.

I disagree with my reader’s fourth sentence, though. (“Without a firm popular regard” etc.) Worthy and admirable civilizations can co-exist with all sorts of attitudes to fetuses, and even to newborns. The ancient Athenians exposed unwanted babies on the Acropolis. Were they not civilized? Abortion has been a human universal everywhere, among civilizations high and low, and also among primitives. (Geoff Blainey notes it in his history of the Aborigines.)

And what do the right-to-lifers want? A total nationwide ban on all abortions, at any time? Yes, that seems to be what they want. Do they really imagine that’s going to happen? What a waste of political energy!

My reader is correct, though. If you’re not in lockstep with the right-to-lifers, you’re never really quite the thing in U.S. conservative circles. It’s a marker of acceptability. I was phone-in guest on a radio show recently. Waiting for the on-air, some glitch allowed me to overhear the two hosts talking behind the commercial break. “Funny sort of conservative,” said one. “I mean, he’s OK with abortion …?” Yep, I’m OK with it. Sorry, guy.

I doubt there’s anything that can be done about this. I wish, though, that some of the time and energy that conservatives give to thinking about fetuses could be diverted to real problems of governance. As a political prospect, the anti-abortion crusade is just Prohibition redux; as a social phenomenon, it’s off-puttingly cultish (to me, and to a lot of people who might otherwise be more sympathetic to conservatism); as an intellectual construct, it loses most of its point once you drop ensoulment. Yes, I know the arguments to the contrary. I never heard a non-believer make them, though.

It was difficult to read this New York Times piece without feeling just a little cheered…

Mr. Zuckerman, a sociologist who teaches at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., has reported his findings on religion in Denmark and Sweden in “Society Without God” (New York University Press, 2008). Much that he found will surprise many people, as it did him. The many nonbelievers he interviewed, both informally and in structured, taped and transcribed sessions, were anything but antireligious, for example. They typically balked at the label “atheist.” An overwhelming majority had in fact been baptized, and many had been confirmed or married in church. Though they denied most of the traditional teachings of Christianity, they called themselves Christians, and most were content to remain in the Danish National Church or the Church of Sweden, the traditional national branches of Lutheranism. At the same time, they were “often disinclined or hesitant to talk with me about religion,” Mr. Zuckerman reported, “and even once they agreed to do so, they usually had very little to say on the matter.” Were they reticent because they considered religion, as Scandinavians generally do, a private, personal matter? Is there, perhaps, as one Lutheran bishop in Denmark has argued, a deep religiosity to be discovered if only one scratches this taciturn surface? “I spent a year scratching,” Mr. Zuckerman writes. “I scratched and I scratched and I scratched.” “And he concluded that “religion wasn’t really so much a private, personal issue, but rather, a nonissue.” His interviewees just didn’t care about it.

I know the feeling.

The piece can also be seen as an interesting examination of the way that the state churches of protestant northern Europe (the Church of England – as opposed to ‘Anglicanism’ – is another example of this phenomenon) still represent a strong and largely benign national/cultural presence in countries where the majority population has retained little or nothing in the way of formal religious belief.      

Read the whole thing.