About that Label …

As many of you know, there’s a “Religious Views” label on the Facebook “About” page. When I signed up for Facebook several years ago, I was pretty deeply into the New Atheist movement, spending much of my time griping about traditional religion and writing skeptical material on various pseudoscientific agricultural practices with some friends of mine. All that is a story for a different day; my point here is that when I saw the Facebook label, I hesitated for quite awhile before filling it out. I was firmly of the opinion that I held absolutely no “Religious Views”; all my views on religion were negative: religion was one form or another of confusion and nonsense.

However, I looked around at some of my similarly inclined friends, and saw that “Atheism” was one standard option for those of us who felt non-religious. I knew from my time in grad school taking classes in Philosophy of Religion that I was, in fact, an atheist; before then I’d considered myself agnostic. Exposure to a smart, Christian philosopher led me to change my view on the matter. I simply didn’t believe that God existed, where by “God” I took the standard, theological definition: an all powerful, all knowing, perfectly good person who created and/or sustains the universe.

So I was (and still am) a firmly convinced atheist, and had absolutely no problem letting people know it. I could, I thought, just leave the Facebook “About” section open, as some had done. I would then have no particular “Religious Views”, at least on public offer. But as I say, I was spending a lot of time arguing just those views publicly, at least in small online groups, so it was in fact part of my identity that I was an atheist. Hence I somewhat reluctantly decided to fill in my “Religious Views” as “Atheism”, even though “Atheism” is not a religious view.

As an aside, some wags like to claim that atheism is a form of faith or even religion. While I cannot deny that perhaps it might be so for some people, I see it instead as described in one pungent sentence: “Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.” Atheism is the absence of certain particular, mostly Western views of religion and religious devotion and practice. It is a form of secularism.

Religion and Secularism

Which brings us to Secular Buddhism. I’ve been associated with this site, writing regular blog posts and so on, for several months now. The more I get back into the material from the early Buddhist Canon the more I believe it has important lessons to provide us today, lessons not (so far as I am aware) available in any other tradition, Eastern or Western, or indeed from the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition. There are, of course, elements of it that by any reasonable definition are religious, bringing along all the problematic baggage that implies: supernatural elements, monasticism, doctrinal exclusivity, issues surrounding devotion, faith, and worship, and so on.

Part of my willingness to reconsider a Buddhist approach had to do with my developing judgment that religion was not all bad. While I never actually believed that religion was all bad (as the subtitle to Christopher Hitchens’s famous book implies), nevertheless my distaste for all things religious, stemming partly from 9/11 and the US administration’s incompetent response to it, made me much more attuned to religion’s faults than its benefits. For religion does have certain obvious benefits, such as providing one a sense of purpose, and a social and psychological safety net of fellow practitioners. There is also some admittedly sketchy and preliminary evidence that religious people are healthier and happier than their non-religious counterparts, and that therefore elements of religious belief and practice may actually make one a better person.

Also, daily contact with skeptics and secularists led me to realize that one did not become a paragon of knowledge and wisdom simply by rejecting religious views. Many secularists I knew embraced views which, to all intents and purposes, were just as false and dangerous as anything provided by mainstream religion, such as racism, sexism, naked greed, global warming and vaccine denialism, 9/11 trutherism and other kinds of conspiranoic thinking, promotion of quack medical treatments, and on and on.

So I got myself to a point where I wondered if it was possible to embrace the positives of religion without its negatives: the sense of shared purpose and social togetherness without the supernatural in particular.

There is, however, a real tension between shared social purpose on the one hand, and devotionalism and worship on the other, particularly within a secular context. One way to promote social cohesion is through ritual: this is something pretty well understood by anthropologists of religion. As Scott Atran says in his book In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion,

All religions require their members to sacrifice immediate self-interest in displays of moral commitment to a particular way of community life … For these displays to work their magic, however, they must be convincing. In the statistical long run, and on the average, displays of commitment are convincing only if people are sincerely committed to live up to their promises no matter the cost. To be convincing, then, displays of commitment must be uncontrollable and unreasonable enough to be hard to fake. (p. 145)

Sanctified displays and sacred vows of passionate commitment are promissory notes to others to deal with future needs arising from existential anxieties, where there is no predictable outcome, rational solution or prospect of reward. This gives people faith in one another’s uncalculating good will. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that just as a marriage commitment to one person precludes similar commitment to another, so a religious commitment to one society or moral order usually precludes commitment to another. (p. 269)

In order to foment real, meaningful social purpose, members of a group need to display to one another some form of real, meaningful, long-term, in-group commitment. In that sense, a shared path is more like getting married or joining a team than indulging in a sometime hobby.

Alone or Together?

In one of his earliest suttas, The Rhinoceros, the Buddha argued that if one could not find “a mature companion”, it was better to walk the path alone.

If you gain a mature companion,
a fellow traveler, right-living & wise,
overcoming all dangers
go with him, gratified,
mindful.

If you don’t gain a mature companion,
a fellow traveler, right-living & wise,
wander alone
like a king renouncing his kingdom,
like the elephant in the Matanga wilds,
his herd. …

People follow & associate
for a motive.
Friends without a motive these days
are rare.
They’re shrewd for their own ends, & impure.
Wander alone
like a rhinoceros. (Sutta Nipāta 1.3)

This approach, however, vitiates a central part of the benefit of religious practice, that of providing psychological aid through social cohesion with others. To the extent that you’re willing to leave behind your companions, your companions gain less benefit from your promise of aid in case of difficulty. At the “maturest” end of the Buddha’s path, of course, one is expected to give up such dependence upon others as another form of clinging that promotes dukkha. One should not cling to rites and rituals, and one should not cling to fellow saṇgha members; at its deepest, the path is trodden alone and so there is no need to convince anyone of anything by mere ritual.

The solitary approach is hardly one that can be embraced by a secular layperson, enmeshed in social obligations, often with family and friends who require one’s presence and help from time to time. Further, it’s hardly the sort of thing that the Buddha was consistent about promoting. For example, in his discourse with Ānanda,

[Ānanda:] “Venerable sir, this is half of the holy life, that is, good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship.”

[The Buddha:] “Not so, Ānanda! Not so, Ānanda! This is the entire holy life, Ānanda, that is, good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship. When a bhikkhu has a good friend, a good companion, a good comrade, it is to be expected that he will develop and cultivate the Noble Eightfold Path.” (Saṃyutta Nikāya 45.2)

To have such friends in whom one can rely for long periods of time requires the sort of “displays of moral commitment to a particular way of community life” that Atran mentioned. Without such displays, the commitment may still be present, but it’s not the sort of thing in which one can retain much confidence. Perhaps, once again, this is part of the Buddha’s insight into anicca, impermanence. But also perhaps it’s the distinction between a good friend and a mere acquaintance. A good friend is someone one can rely upon when the chips are down: when one is sick or in trouble. A mere acquaintance is a rhinoceros, off on his or her own, out for him or herself. While one can never be truly sure how good one’s friends are (this is anicca and dukkha in a nutshell), nevertheless there are degrees of concern, degrees of confidence one can have. Some methods of increasing such confidence can and are based on ritualized displays of commitment, including public displays of devotion and worship.

Secular Buddhism is left somewhere in the unstable center, between the full, ritualized commitment to socially organized religion, the sort of thing that provides friends fully committed to a path, and the complete go-it-aloneness of the rhinoceros.

So I bat one small display of commitment back and forth. Shall I change a label on a Facebook page about “Religious Views” from “Atheism” (one non-religion) to “Secular Buddhism” (another non-religion)? You may say this is a non-issue: it’s all about self-identification and views. It’s the sort of thing that in the long run only promotes clinging and dukkha. In the long run it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t matter, since it must be got beyond anyway. Like all ritual!

But in the long run am I really sure I’ll make it that far along the path for such an approach to be relevant to me? I’m at a place where “good friends, good companions, good comrades” is more important to me than being a rhinoceros, clinging to nothing and nobody.

But on the other hand, anything that strikes me as an expression of public commitment or devotion rubs me wrong. And I’m not entirely sure why.

In his fantastic book Land of No Buddha, Buddhist Studies professor Richard Hayes details many trenchant critiques of Buddhism from a secular standpoint that would be completely familiar to most readers of this site. (Indeed, it includes an enthusiastic blurb from Stephen Batchelor). But in the last chapter he backs off somewhat, urging more openness to more ritualistic aspects of the religion without necessarily swallowing it whole hog.

What I discovered by eliminating rituals altogether was that our meditation group had almost no sense of community. We were merely a collection of individuals who met once a week to meditate, each in our own way and for our own reasons. …

I still believe it is often the case that ritual forms artificial bonds among people, by which I mean that it may create a rapport among people who have almost nothing in common except that they happen to perform the ritual. Speaking of artificial bonds, however, suggests that there may be such a thing as real bonds to which the artificial ones stand in contrast. An example of a real bond, I would suggest, is that of friendship based upon a shared commitment to the pursuit of a goal. …

A ritual, even if it is based on an abstract ideal, is necessarily concrete; it consists of a prescribed set of words that must be recited in a particular way, and a set of actions that are to be performed in a pre-established manner and order. Much of the point of ritual is to be concrete and particular but to be so in a way that simultaneously disciplines the body, voice, and mind and provides an occasion for certain emotions to arise (p. 255).

Hayes recommends public commitment to the Three Jewels of Buddha, dhamma, and saṇgha, and even the performance of prostrations, which help produce a “humbled mentality” that then can be “more open and receptive … to listen and be given guidance” (p. 256).

Does putting a label up on Facebook count as a ritual, like publicly taking the Three Refuges? Anyway for now — at least for today — I’m still Mr. “Atheism” . Perhaps it’ll change it tomorrow.

————–

One housekeeping note: I will be away for several weeks starting in June (2013), so until late summer, blogging will be sporadic-to-nonexistent on my part.