Why Religion Matters by Huston Smith Humanity by Jonathan Glover
Griffith, Paul J.
WANTED: THE VISION THING Why Religion Matters by Huston Smith Humanity A Moral History of the 20th Century Jonathan Glover Paul J. Griffiths________ The books under review here are alike...
...But in this book his tone darkens: he is worried by what he sees as the contemporary constriction of our spirits and is critical of the cultural forces that have caused or at least permitted this...
...But at this point there are some obvious worries...
...but each has a lesson to teach that he thinks we ignore at our peril...
...This narcissistic spiritual starvation is, for Smith, our fundamental problem as the third millennium begins...
...Glover's response to this episode is revealing...
...And that in turn means (as most of the readers of this journal will already know) that the only bulwark recognizable to Catholic Christians is precisely the constant cultivation on the part of every Christian of the sense of sin, the sense that each of us is always 24 hovering on the edge of being a rapist, a killer, a torturer, a slaughterer of the innocent...
...but those to whom it will appeal are precisely those who (self-deceptively) don't think they need it...
...they are, moreover, the problems of those who are quite sure that they themselves are not and cannot be murderers, torturers, rapists, and so on...
...Good jeremiads encourage repentance...
...These are, in Smith's understanding, imperialist and exclusivist views...
...On this ground Anscombe, unsuccessfully but with passion, urged Oxford not to honor Truman...
...Huston Smith's jeremiad is chattily Californian while Jonathan Glover's is gloomily British (and much closer to Jeremiah in tone...
...This weakness is evident throughout Glover's book, and is a direct result of his rejection of the possibility of a moral stance grounded in a response to God's gift...
...But the breakwaters he proposes to prevent or minimize the occurrence of such horrors in the future are flimsy, and this is largely because Glover has no belief in what he calls a religious moral law, and no confidence that such belief is still lively or widespread enough to help...
...He concurs with Nietzsche that a recovery of Kantian confidence in the existence of an eternal moral law and in human capacity to know and act upon it is unlikely...
...He endorses Anscombe's conclusion and excoriates her opponents for moral failure...
...He is abundantly correct that a proper response to human evils requires detailed knowledge of what those evils are and how they come to happen...
...The truth is that if there is a bulwark against atrocity if s to be found only among those who are willing to die to prevent it, not among those who would like to cultivate the moral imagination...
...Life without such a Big Picture 23 is narrow, dark, and toilsome...
...If s a nice idea...
...Smith's jeremiad touches neither genocide nor martyrdom, and as a result remains on the surface in its diagnosis of our difficulties and in its proposed answers to those difficulties...
...Huston Smith has had a long and public career as an apologist for the significance of religion and a defender and explainer of the category "religion...
...This attempt appeals most fundamentally to the possibility that we might bootstrap ourselves out of our tribalisms by cultivating the moral imagination...
...Glover offers such a replacement not to encourage pessimism or despair so much as to help prevent the horrors of the twentieth century from disfiguring the twenty-first...
...Glover also thinks that traditional Christian diagnoses of the human condition as inevitably sinful—a diagnosis that requires every Christian to say, following Paul in 1 Timothy 1:15, that he or she is the chief among sinners—no longer carry conviction...
...Anscombe, who died recently, argued against this award on the ground that the just-war tradition, properly interpreted, makes the use of atomic weapons against cities an unjustifiable action and those who ordered and performed it murderers...
...But he does not endorse her argument, and this principally because it "assumes a moral law whose authority is independent of its consequences for people...
...Glover begins with a brief history of moral thinking since Nietzsche...
...but anyone who seriously expects more is living in a dream...
...a lover's intent is to give ethics a useful empirical aspect by paying close attention to what it is that we—and Glover's "we" means "we humans"— actually do, and especially to the atrocities we have so frequently committed in the twentieth century...
...This constriction prevents us from having a Big Picture (the upper case is his preference for this phrase), a view of things as a whole from which we can derive a sense of meaning and direction for our lives...
...The long-term absence of any such view starves the spirit and brings with it varieties of malaise...
...Having a Big Picture will give us access to meaning and will permit us, spiritually speaking, to breathe freely again and to have a more complete view of things...
...Most of his work is upbeat, to the taste of this reviewer almost relentlessly so: he understands religion as a force for good and has been largely concerned to extol its virtues...
...But it is exceedingly odd to say that this authority is independent of its consequences for people...
...A close reading of his remarkable book has much to teach about the texture of human sin in the century just behind us...
...They also share a concern for suggesting what might be done about it...
...The problems that trouble Smith—problems to which being religious is presented as the answer—are those characteristic of prosperous citizens of late-modern democracies at the dawn of the third millennium...
...In the absence of this—and there is often an elegiac tone to Glover's pronouncements on its loss, a tone not much different from (and just as historically mistaken as) Matthew Arnold's in "Dover Beach"— there can only be "an attempt to keep ethics afloat without external support...
...As a result, we cannot be seriously religious—or at least, those in charge, the intellectuals and the media barons and the aggressively materialistic advocates of scientism, cannot be, and this means that serious religion is no part of our public life...
...The bulk of Glover's book is thus a catalogue of horrors, set before the increasingly agonized reader in order to show in detail how genocide happens, how it can come to seem inevitable and even desirable that innocent people should be obliterated by the systematic fire-bombing of cities (a policy that, by itself, suffices to delegitimize the entire Second World War from the viewpoint of mainstream Catholic just-war theory), how co-operation in social policy that means the death of millions, such as the forced displacement and mass starvation of the so-called kulaks under Stalin in 1930s Russia, can come to seem the only possible option—and so forth...
...The irreligious tunnel we've entered and from which we cannot see a way out is, above all else, a creature of the scientism and materialism of modernity...
...The greatest strength of the book lies in its detailed analysis of cases...
...Repentance and confession are the only things that will help at all, and even they won't help much...
...It would be better to say that a Catholic like Anscombe identifies the consequences that count differently than does someone like Glover, who cannot see beyond the possibility of quantifiable effects here below...
...Glover's historical work, so far as I can judge, is careful and thorough...
...These facts, he thinks, make of properly moral thought and action an attempt to build breakwaters against the human tendency to do terrible things rather than an attempt to discover eternal moral verities and live by them...
...Their widespread dominance is supported by secularized universities, assumed by television and the press, buttressed in the United States by the recent practice of reading the religion clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution in such a way as to prohibit support or toleration of any religious activity on the part of the state...
...For Smith, in this book as in many of his others, religion (not any particular religion, but rather any and every "organized, institutionalized spirituality," which is one of his definitions of religion) is the answer to these problems...
...By this Glover means, in part, that the source of the moral law appealed to by Anscombe is God, who is the supreme authority...
...They are the worries of those for whom death by torture, gassing, bombing, or starvation is neither close nor real...
...Paul J. Griffiths is the Schmitt Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago...
...We—and Smith's "we" is, for the most part, contemporary middle-class citizens of the United States—have, he says, entered a tunnel whose end we cannot see and whose walls turn our gaze away from the world beyond us and back upon ourselves...
...It is because of this that Smith's identification of spiritual constriction and meaninglessness as the central problems of our age carries little conviction...
...The dream of a world free of systemic violence is, in the end, a dream, and Glover, reluctantly, almost says as much...
...Glover's does this, and it deserves to be widely read and discussed for that reason...
...They differ in almost every other respect, but in these shared interests they both belong to the ancient and always fascinating genre of the jeremiad...
...and this in turn requires close attention to the kinds of terrible things we do and the reasons and causes that contribute to our doing them...
...Such actions cannot, Anscombe argued, be defended on the ground of the just-war theory, even if they have other good consequences...
...We can shore some fragments against our ruins and perhaps reduce the body count a little...
...Anscombe took sin seriously while Glover does not, and this permitted her a moral response to atrocity of a depth and power barred to Glover...
...WANTED: THE VISION THING Why Religion Matters by Huston Smith Humanity A Moral History of the 20th Century Jonathan Glover Paul J. Griffiths________ The books under review here are alike in their conviction that something is deeply wrong with us...
...His is an intelligent, clear, and lively book, but it is in the end a superficial one, one whose audience is prevented by their prosperity from perceiving the real and deep problems of our time...
...This, he recognizes, requires close attention to history, and where the history is that of the twentieth century, the result will inevitably be the replacement of "the thin, mechanical psychology of the Enlightenment with something more complex, something closer to reality...
...He is the author of what may still be the most widely used introductory textbook on religion, and has written much in both scholarly and popular genres on the topic...
...The bulk of the book attempts to provide this, treating the moral psychology of waging war (with special attention to Vietnam and Afghanistan, and to the killing-at-a-distance exemplified by the bombing of Hiroshima), the nature of tribalism (with special attention to Rwanda), and the uses of state terror by Hitler and Stalin...
...All this makes it impossible for us to take seriously any non- or antimaterialist Big Pictures...
...In those respects it is very different from Glover's stark and horrifying work on the moral history of the twentieth century...
...The principal reason for this conclusion is that, in the case of a weapon like that used on Hiroshima, the killing of large numbers of innocent noncombatants is an intrinsic part of the action (and, arguably, among its intended consequences...
...The thinness of Glover's response to particular atrocities is well illustrated by his treatment of the English Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe's argument against Oxford University's award of an honorary degree to President Harry Truman in the 1950s...
...The intentional taking of innocent life has no defense...
Vol. 128 • June 2001 • No. 11
