Gods & Kings for Modern Times
 All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age
By Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly
Free Press 2011; 272 pp., $26
To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India
By Bruce Rich
Beacon Press 2010; 256 pp., $23
REVIEWED BY GAYLON FERGUSON
After
a recent visit to my doctor for an annual physical exam, I thought
about the anxiety-reducing effect of receiving an insightful medical
diagnosis. Even before beginning a course of treatment, there is often
some relief in just being told what the problem is, its underlying
causes, and the best course of treatment.
Ancient
spiritual teachings were often grounded in penetratingly accurate
diagnoses. Consider, for a famous example, the Buddha’s four noble
truths, which could be summarized this way: Being immersed in a painful
process of getting and losing is the illness; its root causes are
diagnosed as craving and fixation; and the recommended cure is a mindful
approach to living (the eightfold path). There is inspiration in so
clearly seeing the challenges of living a good human life.
All Things Shining and To Uphold the World
provide contrasting forms of approaching some very large questions: How
are we doing collectively? What are the possibilities for increasing,
not only our personal sanity and happiness, but global harmony and
justice? Can we find valuable resources for restoring contemporary
communal health in classical Indian and Greek societies?
In All Things Shining, philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly sing the praises of the sacred world vividly evoked in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey:
“The intense and meaningful lives of Homer’s Greeks, and the grand
hierarchy of meaning that structured Dante’s medieval Christian world,
both stand in contrast to our secular age. The world used to be, in its
various forms, a world of sacred, shining things. The shining things now
seem far away.”
Their name for this modern ailment is nihilism,
the sense that nothing grounds the choices we make. In the modern
world, we have a wider range of choices than ever before—choices about
who to become, how to act, and with whom to align ourselves—and we feel a
lack of genuine motivation to choose one option over the others. “Far
from being certain and unhesitating,” say Dreyfus and Kelly, “our lives
can at the extreme seem shot through with hesitation and indecision,
culminating in choices finally made on the basis of nothing at all.”
Dreyfus
and Kelly distinguish trivial, everyday questions such as “Shall I hit
the snooze bar again?” or “Is this shirt too wrinkled?” from deeper
choices such as “Is it time to move on from this relationship or job?”;
“Shall I pursue this opportunity or that one, or none at all?”; “Shall I
align myself with this candidate, this coworker, this social group?”;
or “Shall I choose this part of the family over the rest?”
Deeper
choices can feel as though they cut to the core of who we really are
and can seem so familiar to us that we assume that human beings
everywhere, at all times in all places, were subject to the same
dilemmas. Not so, according to these passionate professors of culture
and history. “Although the burden of choice can seem inevitable,” they
say, “in fact it is unique to contemporary life. It is not just that in
earlier epochs one knew on what basis one’s most fundamental existential
choices were made: it is that the existential questions didn’t even
make sense.”
In
the medieval Christian West, for instance, people could not help but
experience themselves as created and determined by God. In a thoroughly
religious culture, theology comfortingly grounds one’s identity,
authoritatively telling us who we are: the children of God who should
act accordingly, obeying His laws. This suggests some of the appeal,
even for many today, of religious faith and some forms of
fundamentalism, despite the extensive rational critique of religion by
“new atheists” such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.
Dreyfus
and Kelly identify the widespread illness of the contemporary world as
“not just that we know the right course of action and fail to pursue it;
we often seem not to have any sense for what the standards for living a
good life are in the first place. Or said another way, we seem to have
no ground for choosing one course of action over any other.” This is the
disease of cultural nihilism, the anxious sense that nothing beyond our
own sheer willfulness underwrites the values and choices we make every
day.
Most of All Things Shining
is the story of how culture shifted “from the fixed certainty of
Dante’s world to the existential uncertainty of our own.” Dreyfus and
Kelly are lively storytellers, narrating in a persuasive fashion the
decisive tipping points and transitions over the last three millennia.
The crux of the matter seems to have been the radical diminishing of
human connectedness to the natural world and sacred powers, until, after
Descartes, we have come to experience ourselves as isolated, autonomous
individuals, fundamentally separate from the reality of a dead world
around us. I may be attracted to the beauties and wonders of my
surrounding world, but the choice to move toward someone or something
is, we feel nowadays, entirely my own. Not so in the stories of Homer’s
Greeks. There is a divine force called Aphrodite that moves Helen to
fall in love outside her marriage, and a martial energy called Ares that
brilliantly motivates Achilles as a warrior in action.
There
are modern examples of being strongly motivated by something larger
than ourselves, and Dreyfus and Kelly want us to take such moments
seriously. These amazing upsurges of being moved to action manifest in
inspiring political speeches, stellar achievements in sports, and the
compassionate actions of contemporary heroes like Wesley Autrey, the New
York “subway hero.” In 2007, Autrey dove onto subway tracks and saved a
stranger who had fallen between the rails during a seizure, holding him
down as a train screeched to a halt inches above them. He commented
afterward that he didn’t feel like a hero, just simply someone doing
what had to be done.
The
experience of certainty about the significance of events is what both
distinguishes and links life in Homer’s Greece and ours in the
twenty-first century. “The most important things, the most real things
in Homer’s world,” say Dreyfus and Kelly, “well up and take us over,
hold us for a while and then, finally, let us go. If we had to translate
Homer’s word physis,
then whooshing is about as close as we can get. What there really is,
for Homer, is whooshing up: the whooshing up of shining Achilles in the
midst of battle, or of an overwhelming eroticism in the presence of a
radiant stranger… These were the shining moments of reality in Homer’s
world.”
The
key to experiencing whooshing up is gratitude, appreciation, and a
sense of wonder in everyday life. In this way, it is related to
mindfulness. Mindfulness releases us from the mental prison of taking
the ordinary details of life for granted, from the sense of if you’ve seen one breakfast before work, you’ve seen them all. When we wake up to the sensuous details of this
morning’s yogurt and orange juice—plus the kindness of our companion
across the table from us—we discover a new world in the old, whooshing
up in the midst of our everyday life.
In Bruce Rich’s history of Indian emperor Ashoka in To Uphold the World,
we see the violence and destruction that often accompanies martial
whooshing ups. Ashoka, whose grandfather Chandragupta Maurya is said to
have met Alexander the Great, was born more than 2,300 years ago into
the reigning Maurya dynasty. Ashoka’s armies slaughtered more than a
hundred thousand people in a famous victorious battle to unify his
empire. Saddened by the sight of such violence and hearing the Buddha’s
teachings on loving-kindness and compassion, Ashoka renounced violent
conquest. His name literally means “not sad,” since after his conversion
he rejoiced in propagating a nonviolent way of life. The Oxford History of India
characterized Ashoka’s bloody conquest, his remorse, and conversion to a
new ethos as “one of the decisive moments in the history of the world.”
Rich’s
journey with Ashoka begins at the battle site of Dhauli in Orissa,
India, where, as the Dalai Lama says, “Ashoka changed his mind.” Rich,
an attorney and author widely known for his work on global environmental
and development issues, explains that when the British deciphered the
Ashokan rock inscriptions found there, “they were astounded to find that
they commemorate not a victory but the king’s conversion to a state
policy of nonviolence and the protection of all living things. The king
declares his ‘debt to all beings,’ announces a halt to almost all
killing of animals on his part for rituals and food, and proclaims the
establishment of hospitals for both humans and animals. He declares
religious tolerance for all sects and sets forth principles of good
governance.”
What
is the relevance of this ancient king for our own time? Rich notes that
“after September 11, 2001, more thoughtful observers began to link the
violent eruption of fundamentalist terror with growing disjunctures in
the global system.” Philanthropist George Soros calls our attention to
“an overarching message from 9/11 that world politicians still are
mostly ignoring.” Here is Soros’ succinct geopolitical diagnosis and
cure: “We have global markets but we do not have a global society. And
we cannot build a global society without taking into account moral
considerations.”
Ashoka
faced a similar dilemma. On the one hand, there were advocates for an
amoral, ruthlessly efficient political economy; on the other hand, there
was the clear necessity for a humanely ethical basis for society. Rich
is critically realistic in his assessments yet unwaveringly optimistic
about the enduring value of Ashoka’s reconciling aspiration:
Ashoka’s
shorter-term goal of a unifying ethic for his empire was perhaps
foreordained to eventual failure. But like all the great ethical
teachers of humanity, he consciously left a message for all times, and
here paradoxically he has succeeded. Certainly Ashoka’s attempt to put
into practice over a huge empire an ethos of nonviolence and
pacifism—imperfect in practice, and not always applied though it was—is
one of the most astonishing events in history… The beauty and simplicity
of the Ashokan Dhamma is that the principles of protection of human
rights and environmental protection all flow from a secular application
of the Buddhist/Jain principles of nonviolence, ahimsa, and respect for all sentient beings.
When Ashoka heard the Buddha’s teachings on compassion, says the Dalai Lama in his afterword to Rich’s book, he
became convinced that nonviolence and service to others was the path to
a meaningful life. “It is my hope and prayer,” the Dalai Lama says,
“that readers today may be inspired by this tale of a powerful ruler,
who was such a force for good throughout ancient India, to find ways to
contribute to making the world in which we live a more just and peaceful
place.”
All Things Shining and To Uphold the World
look back to two ancient visions of a good life—Homeric Greek and
Ashokan Indian—and shed light on how we can move forward in our own
perilously challenged times. As always, it’s up to us. Once again we are
called by these cultural diagnoses to mindfully engage the challenges
of personal and communal, national and global transformation.
Gaylon
Ferguson is an acharya in the Shambhala Buddhist community, and a
faculty member in religious studies and interdisciplinary studies at
Naropa University. He is the author of Natural Wakefulness: Discovering the Wisdom We Were Born With.
|
