if new atheists are not scared but angry, who bears the brunt of the anger?

Last week, the English philosopher John Gray wrote an essay entitled ‘What scares the new atheists?’. It is a long read but early in the essay he compares new atheist understandings today to the atheist understandings of the nineteenth century which were coloured by fallacious understandings about the scientific, biological basis of race. Gray says:

It has often been observed that Christianity follows changing moral fashions, all the while believing that it stands apart from the world. The same might be said, with more justice, of the prevalent version of atheism. If an earlier generation of unbelievers shared the racial prejudices of their time and elevated them to the status of scientific truths, evangelical atheists do the same with the liberal values to which western societies subscribe today – while looking with contempt upon “backward” cultures that have not abandoned religion. The racial theories promoted by atheists in the past have been consigned to the memory hole – and today’s most influential atheists would no more endorse racist biology than they would be seen following the guidance of an astrologer. But they have not renounced the conviction that human values must be based in science; now it is liberal values which receive that accolade.

He then makes this overarching point about new atheism:

The predominant varieties of atheist thinking, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, aimed to show that the secular west is the model for a universal civilisation. The missionary atheism of the present time is a replay of this theme; but the west is in retreat today, and beneath the fervour with which this atheism assaults religion there is an unmistakable mood of fear and anxiety. To a significant extent, the new atheism is the expression of a liberal moral panic.

I would add to his claims that new atheism today has not freed itself from racist or ethnocentric habits, even though it would not explicitly subscribe to or advocate the pseudoscience of race as its nineteenth century predecessor did. In fact, I would argue that anxieties about racial or ethnic or cultural difference reverberates through the Western liberal moral panic that new atheism expresses.

Along with others, the sociologist of religion Steve Bruce has articulated this response to Gray in this article entitled: ‘New atheists are not scared, but they are angry’:

The problem with sealed-room philosophy such as John Gray’s (What scares the new atheists, 3 March) is that it provides no evidence for its claims about the world. I spend my professional life studying the popularity of religion and see no evidence for his assertion that “religion is … in fact flourishing”. Church membership and attendance data, third-party censuses of church attendance, time-use diaries and surveys all show that religion in western liberal democracies (and that includes the US) continues to decline in popularity.

The only areas of religious “growth” in the UK are the result of immigration from traditionally religious countries such as Nigeria and Ghana, and far from attracting religiously indifferent white British natives this make such conversion less likely by reinforcing the notion that religion is what foreigners do.

I do not doubt Steve Bruce’s knowledge or expertise as such. Bruce says that participation specifically in churches are on the decline in Western liberal democracies. But this presumably is not equally the case for other religious traditions or for people of certain non-white ancestral heritages. And it may not be the case in other non-Western countries (Gray mentions the example of China where the Christian population could potentially be the biggest at 250million by 2030). Bruce acknowledges this as much when he says that immigrants have reinforced the notion that religion is what foreigners do.

 

So while these two empirical observations may problematise the extent to which Gray’s claim that religion is flourishing can be generalised, don’t these observations underscore rather than undermine the point about new atheism reflecting Western liberal moral panic — perhaps, against ‘culturally-bound’ citizens, migrants, foreigners, and so forth of non-Western or non-white heritages who seemingly refuse to surrender their ‘religious contraband’ when they cross the border into the ‘secular’ mainstream?

If anything, moral panic functions very well to legitimise but invisibilise operations of domination, control, and marginalisation. If it is the case that new atheists are not scared but are angry—angry at whom? angry about what? More importantly, who bears the brunt of the anger?

how to cultivate mindfulness of the media?

I’ve seen this several times. This is a common perception of what meditation is about: emptying the mind (cue Christian panic about the Devil entering). Certain 禅/Chán/Zen approaches do speak of the empty mind, but the guiding doctrine for this is not nothingness but the idea that form is not exclusive of emptiness and emptiness is not exclusive of form (色即是空，空即是色). Today the buzzword is mindfulness. Mindfulness requires and is nourished by concentration, but it is not reducible to concentration. It’s more like the appropriate use of concentration to ardently observe and clearly comprehend the conditionality of psychosomatic processes and the ethical implications of how we relate them in condition and effect. On its own, concentration can gather attention one pointedly as deep absorption. This can allow consciousness to be suffused with feelings of joy or bliss, or to abide in the seeming voidness of infinite space. When it is action-oriented it can allow for the performing of acts without the perception of a doer behind the deed, as was the objective in WWII Japanese Zen militarism, or more recently, the Norwegian mass murdering terrorist Anders Breivik’s claim that he found meditation helpful (this non-dualistic performativity also enacts selfless giving, merit-making, and service).

But to go with the tech-geek theme here, if it is neither about the interpretation or discursivity of representations nor the deleting of representational content, how might mindfulness of the media be cultivated in our digital environment framed and mirrored by screens gesturing touch gesturing screens gesturing touch…?

who gets mindfulness “right”? an engaged buddhist perspective

An opinion piece I wrote on the cultural politics of mindfulness has been published:

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/03/05/4191695.htm

on gifting and hosting: māgha pūjā

The 4th of March this year marks Māgha Pūjā (informally described a Sangha Day), which is commemorated in the Theravadin Buddhist lands of Southeast Asia.

There’s a lot of talk and certainty in ‘Western Buddhism’ about the Buddha, about the Scientific Buddha. There’s also a lot of talk and certainty in ‘Western Buddhism’ about the Dharma, about the scientific rationalism of the Dharma. But there is considerable less talk about the Sangha. I suspect the mutual hospitality, the distributional, sharing logic of the gift economy between the laity and monastics, is not something that can be transplanted easily or readily accepted in the liberal West, given the prevailing individualist ethos of entrepreneurship and the profit-making, wealth accumulation logic of the market economy. It is early days yet. The emergent ‘Western Buddhism’ is still grappling with the fact that the gift of Buddhism comprises the Triple Gems, which are not possessions to be owned but more like guests to be hosted.

the mindfulness explosion and poor innocent buddhism?

The Mind and Life Institute shared this article on Facebook, The Mindfulness Explosion. As it turns out, as a follow up to my previous piece ‘Who gets Buddhism right?’ I am starting a new opinion piece on this very topic.

I think the article presents a very good overview of the development of the mindfulness trend in the American context and of the key issues that have arisen. I like that it notes how an uneasiness about the ‘Eastern’ origins of mindfulness and meditation has troubled ‘Western’ adapters of the practice at every step. Reading the article, I was under the impression that the author would be open to the specificities of Buddhist understanding and practice. But I was very disappointed when I read these concluding paragraphs:

As to the question of whether poor, innocent, little Buddhism can withstand the withering pressures of the marketplace, there never was a time when it wasn’t deeply connected to the political and economic realities of the world. “The truth of the matter,” says Wilson, “is that Buddhism has not ever at any point from its very beginning, or at any stage of its evolution, been apart from economic matters.” The ideal of the master sitting alone in his cave or high on a mountain, isolated from the nonspiritual hoi polloi, is essentially a myth. Buddhism has long been deeply embedded in the larger political economy. Monks have often exchanged spiritual goods (chanting to produce merit for a donor or a donor’s family) for economic support by the community.

Furthermore, the benefits people hoped to achieve by supporting the sangha (but not meditating; that was the prerogative of the monks) were often less spiritual and more worldly, practical, personal, and even selfish: success in love and business, good health, relief from pain, protection from evil, safe childbirth, better karma for the next go-around. This makes what most lay Buddhists in historical times wanted from their religion no different from what most people in most eras have always wanted, including people today: protection from disaster and harm, hope for the next life (however conceived), and a sense of peace in the security of knowing that there was some greater meaning to the unpredictable, often frightening, frequently miserable ebb and flow of mortal existence

This is what I wrote on Facebook:

What the author says about the interdependency between the monastics and laity, and between Buddhism and society, is not untrue. But her historical pretensions are quite obviously ahistorical and she also leaves out uncomfortable questions. First, the gift economy between the monastics and laity, and the relationship between Buddhism and broader society in historical times is guided by certain Dharmic principles and cosmological outlooks. So it is rather glib and even disingenuous to say that Buddhism has always been situated in a larger political economy WITHOUT noting what the very vast difference between the political economic situation of the contemporary world and those of historical Buddhist civilisations. Likewise, when lay people in historical times performed merit-making, it was guided by certain understandings of ethical or karmic responsibility. It is not simply a matter of ‘what people want today’ of securing personal wellbeing or gain in the spirit of entrepreneurship that characterises our contemporary milieu. Karma is not about personal reward or retribution, but about responsibility for the unforeseeable consequence of our actions on self and others. In the context of engaged Buddhism, the teachings of karma is broadened such that personal responsibility flips over to social conscience and vice versa.

Our contemporary economic-political situation is a beast of its own, not to mention that more than ever the human estate today has the means to address worldwide inequality. But we are not. This ‘poor innocent little Buddhism’, even if not that poor or innocent in the larger scheme of history, may nevertheless have some important questions to raise about the challenges we face, if we do not reduce it to sameness, if we do not coat countless non-white people and cultures in historical times with a thick layer of white paint.