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I just cited this review in my email posts, then went and read it, aha,
Wright’s book:
Sullivan reviews Wright’s The Evolution Of God
I should acknowledge in advance that I am not only biased against Wright,
I have a
nearly canine rabidity as to his books. Thus I almost howled in
dog-drooling delight when an unsuspecting PR person from the publisher
requested to send me a review copy.
I should recuse myself here, but fear I shan’t, although I will muster what
objectivity I can under the circumstances.
Not having read the book, I will examine Sullivan’s take.
Based on Sullivan’s review I am puzzled already. You can’t really do the
‘evolution of god’ over history in isolation from all other religions. No
mention of Buddhism? To discuss this question in isolation isn’t going to
amount to an explanation of much.
Christianity springs from Israelite religion, as does Judaism, but it is
also strongly influenced by Mahayana Buddhism, we suspect. The monastic
tradition and the onset of celibacy in medieval times is a strange case of
rejecting dharmic religion even as their practices are embraced in disguise,
a complex interaction.
The evolution of god, hm… reminds me of Hegel: his evolving god was a ‘geist’,
spirit, etc,… consult his Phenomenology of Geist for the gory details, the
biography of a bloodthirsty un-thing-in-itself, that stomped across the
planet indifferent to the beings crushed in its teleological march. Its
final phenomenology took place in Hegel’s day at the ‘end of history’,
apparently in Prussia, although Marx and Engels found that a bit much, and
took the pastrami sandwhich–hold the pastrami, and ran with it, substituting
historical materialism for the ghostly geist.
Hegel’s evolving ’spirit’ in any case was tied into dialectical philosophy,
a spock like geist who, like/unlike Spock, must have thought dialectical
progressions quite ‘logical’.
Wonder how Wright can one up on Hegel’s evolution of god. Wright seems to be
echoing the de rigeur stance of historical materialism trying to link god
evolution to trade and globalization. Brilliant.
It is starting to sound like an awful book, and maybe I should recuse myself
after all.
Meanwhile, I will bet a nickel, no more, that the book never mentions the
Axial Age.
It is impossible to understand the evolution of monotheism without
considering the Axial phenomenon, and its relationship to the eonic effect.
We shall see.
The possibility of a reasonable engagement between faith and reason, between
doctrine and biblical scholarship, between a mature theology and a golden
age of scientific research — all this seems very distant right now.
And that’s why a new book gives me hope. It reminds us that if you take a
few thousand steps back from our current crisis, the long-term prognosis is
much better than you might imagine.
The book is The Evolution of God (due out in the US next month) and it is
by Robert Wright, a secular writer best known in America for thoughtful
defences of evolutionary psychology and free trade. The tone of the book is
dry scepticism with a dash of humour; the content is supple, dense and
layered. What makes it fresh and necessary is that it’s a non-believer’s
open-minded exploration of how religious doctrine and practice have changed
through human history — usually for the better.
From primitive animists to the legends of the first gods, battling like
irrational cloud-inhabiting humans over the cosmos, Wright tells the story
of how war and trade, technology and human interaction slowly exposed humans
to the gods of others. How this awareness led to the Jewish innovation of a
hidden and universal God, how the cosmopolitan early Christians, in order to
market their doctrines more successfully, universalised and sanitised this
Jewish God in turn, and how Islam equally included a civilising universalism
despite its doctrinal rigidity and founding violence.
Fundamentalism, in this reading, is a kind of repetitive neurotic
interlude in the evolution of religion towards more benign and global forms.
It’s not a linear process — misunderstanding, violence, stupidity, pride and
anger will always propel human beings backwards just when they seem on the
verge of progress. Greater proximity has often meant greater hatred — as one
god has marshalled earthly forces against another. But in the very, very
long run, as human beings have realised that religion is nothing if not true
and that truth can be grasped or sought in many different ways, doctrines
have evolved. Through science and travel, conversation and scholarship,
interpretation and mysticism — our faiths have adapted throughout history,
like finches on Darwin’s islands.
Wright’s core and vital point is that this is not a descent into total
relativism or randomness. It is propelled by reason interacting with
revelation, coupled with sporadic outbreaks of religious doubt and sheer
curiosity. The Evolution of God is best understood as the evolution of human
understanding of truth — even to the edge of our knowledge where mystery and
meditation take over.
What’s subtle about the book is that while it makes a materialist case
for how God evolved — as a function of trade and travel, globalisation and
science — it does not reduce faith to these facts on the ground. Hovering
over the book is a small sense that, far from disproving the existence of
God, this evolving doctrine might point merely to humankind’s slow education
into the real nature of the divine.
Meanwhile, Hegel is a hard act to follow.
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