Universism and Buddhism Pop Up Again

Subscribers of TIA Daily were directed to a story called "Doubt is Their Co-Pilot", about a New-Age cult I've written about here a few times. I liked Robert Tracinski's commentary.

Fanatical religious fundamentalism is much less dangerous in the West than it is in the Muslim world--which has not had a tradition of science, reason, and secularism since it rejected those values nearly a thousand years ago. But if religious fanaticism is going to become a problem here, we will know who is at fault: the supposed representatives of secularism.

Here is a report on a growing movement of those on the left who are opposed to religious traditionalism--but instead of offering some kind, any kind, of coherent secular outlook, they try to create their own version of religion--a version so empty and incapable of offering guidance that it is no alternative at all. This is what is wrong with the world: that skepticism is offered as the only alternative to dogmatism.

Interestingly enough, this is not the first time Universism (or at least a follower of that religion) has reared its head at TIA Daily, though I am not sure Tracinski knows it. Back in December of last year, TIA Daily pointed to what was alone a decent editorial by one Sam Harris, author of a book I reviewed before the called The End of Faith. In the editorial, Harris made "a secular case that we are mired in a religious war."

Or so it seemed out of the context of the rest of his work. As becomes apparent after reading his book, Sam Harris's answer to faith is, as I said in a followup post to my initial review, is ... Eastern mysticism! Indeed, in December of 2004, Harris started a web site devoted to Universism, which I noted was (and on a cursory inspection, still is), oddly, not directly linked to his own site. As I noted awhile back:

Harris has been publicizing his book at least since October [of 2004] and clearly finds his mission important. So why not make it easier for the masses to attain enlightenment? Could it be that he realizes they might run the hell away if they realized that one thing is supposed to lead them to another?

Among his influences, Harris cites Buddhism in The End of Faith: "The esoteric teachings of Buddhism ... and Hinduism ..., as well as many years spent practicing various techniques of meditation, have done much to determine my view of our spiritual possibilities." (283) Interestingly enough, Harris also claims to be working towards a doctorate in neuroscience, "studying the neural basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)."

The technique (fMRI) Harris uses is the same one used in other research on people who are meditating, including work presented at the recent Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington, D.C., in a poster session titled "Thinking About Non-Thinking: Zen, Meditation, Attentional Performance, and the Default Mode of Human Brain Function". Other studies on meditation were aided by the Dalai Lama himself, who was controversially invited to speak at that very conference.

Knowing this, I checked into the possibility that Harris himself might have been involved in making this event happen. As far as I could tell, however, Harris did not present work at this conference (though this would not preclude him attending), and is not a member of the research group of the scientist who invited this religious figure to speak there. This doesn't rule out his involvement, but it makes it seem a more remote possibility. (Interestingly, I have in fact been unable to pin down either Harris's current institutional affiliation or, aside from nonscientific publications, a single example of his published writings.

That possibility was certainly intriguing enough, but it unfortunately did not surprise me that much to see that Harris probably was uninvolved with this speaker's incongruous appearance at a scientific conference. Why? Because the general intellectual trend on the "secular" left has been a militant agnosticism combined with a tendency towards scientism. Most scientists are leftists, many think science has a bearing on philosophical questions that in fact science depends upon, and some will lap up anything that offers lip service to these notions while praising "science".

Like the speech given by the Dalai Lama on which this article is based. I will simply excerpt what I think are the two most relevant parts.

(1) On the philosophical level, both Buddhism and modern science share a deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes, whether conceptualized as a transcendent being, as an eternal, unchanging principle such as soul, or as a fundamental substratum of reality.

(2) Purely from the scientific point of view, the creation of nuclear weapons is a truly amazing achievement.

However, since this creation has the potential to inflict so much suffering through unimaginable death and destruction, we regard it as destructive. It is the ethical evaluation that must determine what is positive and what is negative.

...

We must find a way of bringing fundamental humanitarian and ethical considerations to bear upon the direction of scientific development, especially in the life sciences.

By invoking fundamental ethical principles, I am not advocating a fusion of religious ethics and scientific inquiry.

Rather, I am speaking of what I call "secular ethics" that embrace the key ethical principles, such as compassion, tolerance, a sense of caring, consideration of others, and the responsible use of knowledge and power – principles that transcend the barriers between religious believers and non-believers, and followers of this religion or that religion.

Regarding (1) on the "deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes", recall what Tracinski said earlier: "This is what is wrong with the world: that skepticism is offered as the only alternative to dogmatism." The Dalai Lama, throughout his speech stresses the supposed commonality of his mystical approach with science, from his respect for empirical knowledge to his disdain for absolutes (presented positively in (2) as a transcendence of religion or even one's stand on religious belief). In other words, he notes the common, skeptical philosophical ground many scientists share with him.

But as with the Universists discussed by Tracinski above, pure skepticism is not an alternative. The Dalai Lama, in fact a mystic, realizes this and rushes in to fill the vaccum in (2), where he takes over as a moral authority for the scientists. He never explains how he derived "the key ethical principles, such as compassion, tolerance, a sense of caring, consideration of others, and the responsible [to whom? --ed] use of knowledge and power" from empirical evidence or why the scientists should accept the way that he formulated his ethics. But he doesn't have to. To the skeptic and the mystic alike, who dispense with reason in the ethical realm, emotion is king and anything that sounds good or makes one feel good will do.

This is not to say that one doesn't need ethics. Indeed, a reason-based system of ethics is sorely needed today. The Dalai Lama here sets back the cause by taking the limitations of science as limitations of reason in general, with an assist by the unfortunately common notion that pure skepticism is a mark of rationality.

Once again, reason is to be subordinated to faith. Just as the Christians declared philosophy to be the handmaiden of theology, so is the Dalai Lama declaring that the means of science be subordinated to the ends prescribed by mystics as a "secular ethics". (Also of note: The article mentions specifically an organization called the Mind & Life Institute, which looks quite dubious.)

On this score, I stated earlier when I first blogged about this event:

(1) [Although] one could argue that the Dalai Lama, after 15 years of working with neuroscientists might have some interesting things [of scientific value] to say, the last sentence in the description sounds like he will be using the lecture as an opportunity to promote his religious views at a scientific conference, something that is exactly what should not be going on. To paraphrase: The Dalai Lama will discuss the implications of this research in promoting "compassionate behavior in all human beings."

(2) Even if the research on meditation is rock solid (a contention that some scientists clearly do not agree with), this invitation can be easily manipulated to give his religion a veneer of credibility that only science can give it.

I certainly seem to have been correct about the first of these. Alas, I would wager that being known (falsely) as a "scientific collaborator" in neuroscientific research -- and one invited to speak at the biggest conference of the field at that -- aided him in the second.

Once again, we see a recurring theme in this blog: The skeptical left paves the way for religion.

-- CAV

Updates

11-17-05: Fixed typos.