One of the greatest twists in the recent history of nonfiction came at the end of Sam Harris’s The End of Faith (2004). The book gave physical form to the message-board atheism of the early internet and launched a publishing boom for religious skeptics, but its final chapter struck a different note. Harris, it turned out, is a self-described mystical seeker with a long history of pilgrimages and discipleships under various Eastern gurus. He concluded the book by evangelizing on behalf of a scientifically filtered Buddhism that can awaken us to “the intrinsic freedom of consciousness” and help us grapple with “almost every problem we have” as a species.
Despite his infidel reputation, Harris belongs to the religious current that David McMahan calls “Buddhist modernism.” This is a global assortment of Buddhist movements formed under creative pressure from the dominant Western trends of the past few centuries, such as rationalism, Protestant anti-clericalism, and Romanticism. All of them sought to counter the judgment of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer that Buddhism is fundamentally pessimistic. At the same time, they accepted Schopenhauer’s claim that Buddhism is “the finest of all religions,” exceptional for its intellectual acuity and faithfulness to the human experience. In fact, a major strand of Buddhist modernism argues that Buddhism, properly understood, isn’t even a religion but a uniquely empirical way of life based on meditation — “a first-person science,” as Harris once phrased it.
Scientific prestige is key to Buddhist modernism’s appeal. Successive writers have tried to show that Buddhism is not only compatible with modern science but that it anticipated whatever theories happen to be fashionable. For a time, it was popular to discuss how, thousands of years ago, sages in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition beheld the central insight of quantum physics. “Everything is built on sand, and not even the grains of sand have a solid core or nucleus,” as one writer put it. More recently, the journalist Robert Wright, in his book Why Buddhism Is True (2017), portrayed the religion as a tool for “operationalizing” the truths of evolutionary psychology in order to reduce suffering. Buddhist liberation means cutting off the link between feelings, which are inescapable, and cravings, which can be overcome. Since cravings are built into us by nature, Buddhism is “a rebellion against natural selection.”
Harris amalgamates Buddhism with neuroscience and the Western philosophical study of consciousness. In Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014), he writes that the study of one’s consciousness is the proper basis of spiritual life, which is convenient enough for Westerners who want spirituality like they want any other good: with a minimum of social friction. Harris, to be fair, promotes his views with a Cartesian bravado that can be thrilling: “To say that consciousness may only seem to exist, from the inside, is to admit its existence in full — for if things seem any way at all, that is consciousness … the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.” Public interest in the “new atheism” may have declined in tandem with al Qaeda and organized Christianity, but the persistence of spiritual yearning has allowed Harris to transition smoothly into becoming a guru for godless seekers and harried professionals. His meditation app is one of the most popular “Health & Fitness” products in the Apple store.
Evan Thompson’s new book, Why I Am Not a Buddhist, is a short polemic fired like grapeshot at a cluster of Buddhist modernist ideas. Thompson considers himself a friend to Buddhism, “one of humanity’s great religious and intellectual traditions,” but he distinguishes it from the heresy found on bestseller lists or at Silicon Valley retreats. A professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Thompson is uniquely suited to dismantle the pretensions of the modernists. He co-authored the first academic book exploring “the relevance of Buddhist philosophy and meditation for cognitive science,” and he was involved with the development of the Mind & Life Institute, best known for its dialogues between scientists and the Dalai Lama. So similar is Thompson’s background to the figures he attacks that he reminds one of Richard Rorty, a philosopher whose early work in analytic philosophy made him, in later years, one of the surest and most formidable critics of that school.
Thompson argues that a marriage between Buddhism and science debases both partners. In his view, the two can be made to coexist, but “science can’t legitimize religion, and they can’t be merged into one.” Thompson introduces the book by recounting some of his experiences at meditation retreats designed for scientists and clinicians. Those assembled felt they were embarking on a new kind of scientific mission, charting the mind with the best of modern knowledge and ancient wisdom, but Thompson was amazed at how quickly they slipped into a warm bath of epistemological naivety. Scientists began confusing observation with expectation: “We were being given a powerful and collectively reinforced conceptual system for making sense of whatever happened to us,” he writes. “How could this not direct and shape what we were experiencing?”
At the same time, the attempt to “naturalize” Buddhism, to make it a set of instructions for achieving a “rationally comprehensible psychological state,” strips it of “its most radical and arresting ideas, the ones that challenge our narcissism, cultural complacency, and scientific triumphalism.” Thompson is eloquent about the central place of faith in Buddhism, and he argues that its conceptions of the “nonduality” and “ungraspability” of the mind amount to a critique of the scientific worldview.
The author’s father is William Irwin Thompson, a cultural historian and founder of the Lindisfarne Association, a New Age-y think tank that, while it existed, devoted itself “to the study and realization of a new planetary culture.” It is residual loyalty to this cosmopolitan project that makes the younger Thompson so dismayed by Western intellectuals who treat Buddhism as a favorite child among world religions, thereby corrupting it. He concludes the book by endorsing the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s vision of cosmopolitanism, in which religions converse amiably with each other without worrying about consensus, leaving space for cross-pollination. Thompson, for example, explains how he came to abandon the Buddhist doctrine that the self is an illusion, fully embraced in his first book, under the influence of Brahminical philosophers who used to debate the ancient Buddhists.
Thompson nevertheless leaves the reader in an all-too-familiar place, mired in the paradoxes of cosmopolitanism. It’s not clear why a cosmopolitan should single out Buddhist modernism for censure when many religious traditions are no less arrogant in their claims to superiority, no less philosophically problematic. In a telling moment, Thompson reflects on Bertrand Russell’s “Why I Am Not a Christian,” a 1927 lecture from which he draws his title. He assures us that, unlike Russell, he is not hostile to religion, although perhaps this is because Christianity no longer has the “pernicious social power” it enjoyed in Russell’s day. It is a strange kind of respect for religion that would wince at 2,000 years of Christendom. In esteeming all religions (except, perhaps, for Buddhist modernism), don’t we disesteem the claims they make for themselves?
Timothy Crimmins is a writer living in Chicago. Follow him on Twitter: @timcrimmins.
