Two fascinating books have, thanks to the generosity of friends, come my way as I stood back from Wychwood Circle: How The World Thinks (Julian Baggini) and The Righteous Mind
(Jonathan Haidt). The first expands
one’s horizon by looking at the vast array of alternative views of the
world, from Japan to India and from enlightenment France to the Middle East. It
feels all-encompassing and quite a tour de force, and it leaves you with a
strong sense of the deep connections between philosophy and culture.
WEIRD morality
The second might best be
approached via the chapter on ‘WEIRD morality’ which can shake one's complacent,
culturally conditioned approach to politics and religion. Haidt pulls you up short – if your culture is
typically Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic – with the
observation that there are more foundations for basing your morality than the
common liberal one of avoiding harm to others but otherwise just getting on
with your life. In other cultures you
might balance your ‘ethic of autonomy’ with an ‘ethic of community’ or even ‘an
ethic of divinity’.
Moral foundations
Or you could re-examine the
basis of your morality altogether by considering a range of 'foundational intuitive
factors', ranging from the desire to avoid harm and to seek fairness (however
defined); through the instinct to resist oppression; to the goals of respect for loyalty, authority
and, finally, ‘sanctity’ (or avoiding degrading ourselves or others). Haidt examines all these foundations in fascinating
detail before looking at their implications for politics and religion.
One of the earliest
discussions at Wychwood Circle was based on Finding Happiness – Monastic
Steps for a Fulfilling Life, by Abbot Christopher Jamison. Those monastic steps, it turned out, could be
applied to any of us – that is, as long as we are as interested as the Abbot in
what might be called an integrated ‘interior life’. If we are, then we might find that we need to
look at our ‘spiritual hygiene’ in the same way as, with our basic familiarity
with modern medicine, we have been brought up to observe physical hygiene.
Freedom of spirit
Jamison’s starting point is
that the phrase “Blessed are the pure in heart” could be construed in the
modern mind as [my form of words] ‘blessed are those who seek interior, and not
just, exterior freedom’: his argument is
that happiness or fulfilment depend on choosing that interior freedom, that
freedom of spirit. His belief is that the urge for that monastic wisdom is
present in every ‘spiritually healthy adult’ in the form of ‘the contemplative
urge, the desire to step back, be still and look inwards, the desire to find
sanctuary’.
The outline of the book, as
some of us will recall, is the Eight Thoughts of that early ‘desert father’
John Cassian (b 360 AD), soon to be taken up by St Benedict and others. The purpose of examining these Thoughts – beginning
with ‘Acedia’, or spiritual laziness or apathy, and going on to the
better-known ‘deadly sins’ of gluttony, vanity, lust etc – is to increase
self-awareness. Cassian would urge us,
in this way, to ‘freely choose purity of heart at every moment of the day’,
says Jamison.
The way to do that as a monk
may be to pray, which includes contemplation and reflective reading; some in 2020 may be more likely to turn to
meditation and some specifically to mindfulness meditation. One meditation textbook describes how our
unconscious conditioning ‘can be purified by the illuminating power of
mindfulness’. A definition of mindfulness might be the practice of cultivating
‘spacious, appreciative awareness’ and in 2016 we were fortunate to have the
guru of British mindfulness, Mark Williams, to speak to a packed village hall,
followed in 2019 by author and trainer Tim Stead. Mindfulness meditation helps us to get to know
our minds, beginning by noticing our thoughts and sensations coming and going
and deciding whether we want them to define us, choosing to respond rather than
react, and so on. I imagine Cassian
would have been happy with that.
Not doing harm to others?
Our attitudes are shaped by
our thoughts: as the Buddha said, ‘what we incline the mind towards is what the
mind becomes’. Jamison stresses that
self-awareness is not just about a private world of introspection, but
‘attentiveness to my way of relating to people and things’ and this brings us again
to Jonathan Haidt’s eye-opening and seminal book on moral psychology and its
interface with religion and politics. Our
interaction with the world includes our attitudes as well as our actions, says
Jamison, an approach which denies the belief (which Haidt emphatically
challenges) that ‘something is good so long as it does no harm to others’.
My inner world can do harm
as well as good, to me as well as to others.
The examined life (to misquote Socrates) might indeed make life far more
worth living. And then we might better understand
others too.
Post by David Soward