Tiger, Brit, and Kerouac
A lot of people are upset about Brit Humes' advice to Tiger Woods last week (linked here at TDE). "Post media critic Tom Shales put him in the category of a 'sanctimonious busybody' engaged in 'telling people what religious beliefs they ought to have.' Blogger Andrew Sullivan criticized Hume's 'pure sectarianism,' which helps abolish "the distinction between secular and religious discourse." MSNBC's David Shuster called Hume's religious advice 'truly embarrassing.'"
Michael Gerson responded to all this with a great column, which you can find here. My favorite passages (and I've italicized my favorite sentence):
The root of the anger against Hume is his religious exclusivity -- the belief, in Shuster's words, that "my faith is the right one." For this reason, according to Shales, Hume has "dissed about half a billion Buddhists on the planet."
But this supposed defense of other religious traditions betrays an unfamiliarity with religion itself. Religious faiths -- Christian, Buddhist, Zoroastrian -- generally make claims about the nature of reality that conflict with the claims of other faiths. Attacking Christian religious exclusivity is to attack nearly every vital religious tradition. It is not a scandal to believers that others hold differing beliefs. It is only a scandal to those offended by all belief. Though I am not a Buddhist or a Muslim, I am not "dissed" when a Muslim or a Buddhist advocates his views in public.
Hume's critics hold a strange view of pluralism. For religion to be tolerated, it must be privatized -- not, apparently, just in governmental settings but also on television networks. We must have not only a secular state but also a secular public discourse. And so tolerance, conveniently, is defined as shutting up people with whom secularists disagree.
This is the secularists' old dodge, which they used with great effect on the Warren Court. By excluding all religious discourse from the public square on First Amendment grounds, they thereby exclude religion altogether, which was never anybody's intent, until, at the very earliest, J.S. Mill in the nineteenth-century (the Warren Court applied Mills' philosophy of the Open Society to the First Amendment, which is odd, since Mill wrote a half-century after the First Amendment, but no matter).
With respect to the the Buddhist Tiger's sexual appetite, the whole thing reminded me of Tantric Buddhism and the excesses it celebrates through the cornerstone Buddhist doctrine of "emptiness." I touched on it in Touchstone years ago. Excerpt:
Kerouac's detachment ultimately failed for the same reason Salinger's did: It stemmed from the metaphysical system of the Oriental religions rather than love. Kerouac embraced the detachment of Buddhism. Although he never completely deserted his native Roman Catholicism, Kerouac was infatuated with Buddhism. He saturated many of his books, like The Dharma Bums, with Buddhist themes. He practiced dhyana, Buddhist meditation. He at times took vows to lead a Buddhist life. In one vow, he promised to limit his sexual activity to masturbation (apparently his idea of austerity), another time he vowed to eat only one meal per day and to write about nothing but Buddhism. He at times exclaimed, “I am Buddha”–a real possibility, given the metaphysics of Buddhism–and once asked D. T. Suzuki (a famous Zen master) if he could spend the rest of his life with him. It is no coincidence that Kerouac's religion embraced sexual perversity similar to the perversity of Tantric Buddhism and its degenerative sexual rituals, for both spring from the same metaphysical corruption, the error known as “emptiness,” which teaches that all things are one and that perceived distinctions, including distinctions of good and bad, are mere illusions. In such a metaphysical corruption, even virtue can become degenerate–as illustrated in the degenerative twisting of the virtues of peace and love in the 1960s movements that Kerouac helped spawn.
Paint Me Dizzy
I get dizzy looking up at skyscrapers. I can't imagine the vertigo if I were up there:
