A showcase for a fantastical but unsubstantiated theory.
Debut author Shupe contends that the modern condition is emotionally pulverizing—but that people can still find their way back to spiritual freedom.
Every historical age is relentlessly self-critical, which has spawned a saturated genre of books about modernity’s many ailments. The author, an electronics engineer, makes his own contribution to this pile-on, contending that modern existence is a “desert for the soul”—a crushing experience that has left humankind spiritually lost. The culprit is language, the invention of which facilitated a toxic temporizing, the author asserts; instead of happily living in the present, people began to fret anxiously about the future. According to Shupe, our convoluted belief systems, laws, and theologies are simply “rules instituted by artificial systems of order” and “culturally imposed moral edicts.” Humanity took a sort of evolutionary wrong turn as a consequence of language acquisition, the author seems to say, as its reliance upon feeling and instinct was replaced by an insistence upon rational cogitation. Shupe describes the idyllic condition of that natural way of life in sweepingly vague terms, without apparent concern for empirical proof—an unfortunate hallmark of the entire book: “In that natural way of life, people lived in the unfolding moment. Life usually worked out, because our way of life was governed by Nature, through our feelings. The sizes of our families were stable, for example, and we never worried about the future, because we had no way to control it.” The author goes on to detail his path to “reclaim our natural way of life” and recover our discarded “spiritual freedom” and our natural, intuitive propensity for happiness.
Shupe’s principal themes are hardly new, and one can find similar indictments of civilization and its tyranny over nature in 18th-century philosophy, including the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This book is certainly an ambitious one; it attempts nothing less than a wholesale cure of the ennui of the age—one in which mankind returns, in effect, to its spiritual home. However, its ambition isn’t matched by its philosophical depth or analytical rigor; Shupe inclines toward panoramic generalization and peremptory judgment in lieu of vigorous argument. He also has a penchant for hyperbole: “Feelings have no place in our way of life, which is dictated by our belief that life is a rational process.” However, the study’s chief failing is its persistent indefiniteness; it’s never clear who precisely these “early humans” are, for example, or why he’s so sure that they “flourished.” Similarly, his account of spiritual freedom is as fuzzy as it is derivative, and it’s never clear how such a condition could be reestablished. To the author’s credit, he freely admits he has neither a “plan to offer” nor “experiential evidence” of aspirational “spiritual homes,” about which he can only offer ethereal speculations. However, these deficiencies apparently make him no less confident that these spiritual homes will “organically and spontaneously” arise out of the arid soil of a civilization that’s inhospitable to them.
A showcase for a fantastical but unsubstantiated theory.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-09-830399-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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