Abstract
After pondering what Robert Wright has to say in this book, one can well wonder whether the more appropriate title might have been: Why Buddhism Is Necessary: The Ethical Urgency of Meditation and Enlightenment. He makes a compelling case that Buddhism offers an effective response to “the particular moral challenge that centrally motivated the writing of this book”—that is, “overcoming, or at least eroding, the psychology of tribalism” (258).
This problem of tribalism, or as he also defines it “the specialness of the self,” was “built into us by our creator, natural selection” (245). W. carefully lays out how natural selection has formed our brains and equipped them with what evolutionary psychologists call specialized “modules” and spontaneous feelings that steer our way of seeing and reacting to our environment so that we can make sure that our genes are part of the ever-widening pool. This “machinery in my mind . . . designed to maximize genetic proliferation” has succeeded in advancing evolution. But “that it no longer reliably does so is among the absurdities of being a human” (162).
For W., we humans are stuck. Evolution has done a marvelous job in getting us this far. But as is evident in our present context of environmental and geopolitical crises, we must move beyond clinging to the specialness of the self (my self, my tribe, my nation, or religion). But how? How do we free ourselves from this epistemological “Matrix” that prevents us from seeing reality and ourselves as we really are or can be? Like Bernard Lonergan, W. is calling for an intellectual or cognitive conversion—what he terms a “Metacognitive Revolution” (257).
And for W., Buddhism is one (he never says only) of the most effective means of fostering this revolution. But he assures his evidently secular audience that his take on Buddhism is “naturalistic”; he has “jettisoned” the “supernatural [and] exotic ideas that would be more at home in the religion department” (261).
Drawing mainly on Vipassana teachers and Theravadin texts (he mentions Zen and Tibetan Buddhism only twice), and especially on evidence gleaned from his own many retreats at the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, MA, W. lays out an extensive, and for me inspiring, analysis of how the Buddhist practice of mindfulness can indeed, gradually but effectively, free us from the conditioned, limiting feelings and thoughts that prevent us from waking up to Reality as it truly is. By mindfully recognizing, witnessing, and distancing ourselves from the constant flutter of feelings and thoughts, we can, as it were, defang their often poisonous control over us; we can have feelings rather than feelings having us.
And in the process, W. describes how such liberating mindfulness leads to a sense of the “porousness of the bounds of the self” (262); one realizes that “harming others is tantamount to harming yourself” (229). W. even calls this a sense of “benevolent transcendence” (240). He shows how the practice of mindfulness can lead to metaphysical insights (connectedness), then to moral consequences (compassion), and finally to personal results (happiness) (262–63).
A Christian theologian, though resonating with W.’s proposal, will also have some concerns. Is W. really faithful to his empirical data when he resolves to “jettison” all appeals to the religious or “exotic”? In concluding sections, he seems to confess that this jettisoning is neither so complete nor coherent. A subtitle reads: “How Weird Is the Unconditioned?” (220). He might have written “how exotic,” for he goes on to acknowledge that his practice of meditation led him to feel “a hidden order that seems to lie at a level deeper than natural selection . . . an infrastructure of interconnection.” It’s an unseen order that opens his heart to others and to the beauty of the world, a hiddenness before which he “remains flummoxed” but for which he is “increasingly thankful” (262–66). Sounds like pretty exotic or religious language to me.
Here W. would have been helped by extending his study, and practice, to Tibetan Buddhism, which affirms the reality of an unseen “spacious” order (229). Tibetans would also remind W. that his “metacognitive revolution” must include an affective revolution. For them, wisdom and compassion form a non-duality; one leads to and includes the other.
Such critical concerns in no way diminish the challenge and the opportunities that W.’s book offers Christians. Among the most relevant, I suggest, is the Buddhist reminder that the root of so many of our problems lies in the way we have been conditioned (by natural selection or Original Sin?) to feel and see the world. “To be saved,” we have to deal with our perceptions. The intricate methods for doing that found in Buddhist meditation can be a needed enrichment for both Christian practice and theology.