Inappropriate Appropriation

I'm not sure why this cheered me up, but it did.

It seems that Elizabeth Warren's campaign recently announced an "Interfaith Advisory Council" made up of religious leaders of various stripes, and almost immediately took it down.  Even the Wayback Machine can't seem to find the original tweet, but the press release yet lives.  It drew criticism and mockery because the list included fourteen Christian clergy, a rabbi, and a partridge in -- no, a Zen Buddhist teacher from North Carolina.

The thread I found on Twitter included a lot of boyish tittering because the Buddhist sensei is an apparently white American woman.

I don't know if that reply is accurate or just a snarky allusion to Warren's now-abandoned claim of Cherokee ancestry, but it doesn't matter, because Buddhism, like most religions, is not a race or even an ethnicity.  (Guess what, guys - Roman Catholics are not all, or even mostly, Roman!)  Buddhism isn't racially homogeneous even in Asia, and though it originally came to the United States with Asian immigrants in the 1800s, by the twentieth century Buddhist missionaries were coming here to bring enlightenment and salvation, yea, even to white people.  Before long they were ordaining clergy among the "natives."  (Just as Christian clergy in Asia are now usually Asian.)  The assumption that Buddhists aren't white is racist to the core.

This one too:

So, Matt, how about those Korean and Japanese Catholic bishops?  Are they "appropriating" Western culture?  (Of course not: they're just dupes of the imperialists!)  How about "Asian" Americans who speak English?  One person had the sense to point out: "I don't know who she is, but if she was legit ordained by a Zen master she has more right to wear those clothes than the average Japanese person."  This led to more discussion among people who don't know that "Christian name" used to, and sometimes still does refer to the new name converts adopted on baptism.

Or think of Malcolm Little, who first changed his surname to X when he joined the Nation of Islam, then adopted the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz after his pilgrimage to Mecca.  Adopting a new name for religious reasons is not exactly an obscure practice, even in the US.  Of course a atheist like Matt LP may not feel it important to know such superstitious drivel, but I think that an atheist who wants to comment on religion should be at least as knowledgeable as his targets - especially an atheist who claims that "Constructive criticism and knowledge is my forte. A better world is possible if we fight for it. #NotMeUs".  (Notice: not his aspiration, but his "forte.")  It would also be good not to be bluntly racist, but that's probably too much to ask of an American.

Yes, it is hilarious that Warren's campaign rolled out such a half-assed initiative.  One would think that a little more thought would have gone into a project by a well-funded, professional organization made up of educated people; I thought white liberals had tokenism down to a science.  Instead Warren got something like Pete Buttigieg's ill-starred attempt to inflate his support among African-Americans in North Carolina without bothering to consult the people whose names he, um, appropriated.  But then some of Warren's critics made equally big fools of themselves.

P.S. This was yesterday, but it fits:

As Jake and several commenters chortled, quite a few of those canonical Western artists were not straight.  (Many of the names named are 'known' to have been gay by gossip, not history, but never mind.)  Nor were the famous Eyetalians, at least, white by modern scientific-racist standards.  But aside from that, even as a canon-revisionist myself, it occurs to me that much of the attitude alluded to in that quotation is wrong-headed.  Yes, students should be exposed to and instructed about art from outside the Western traditions, and an introductory survey is one good place to do it.  But would they criticize, say, a class on Japanese art history for being overwhelmingly Japanese, let alone male?  As the Feminist Press found when they assembled textbooks on writing by women outside the West, they encountered not just resistance but outright denial that Chinese, Indian, or East Asian women had ever written anything.  And I don't think it was only because the indigenous academics involved had often been trained in the West.  A lot of culturally-sensitive discourse turns out to be as knee-jerk uninformed and blinkered as the traditions it opposes.

Wars of Compassion; or, Pacifists Who Kill

I've written before about Brian Daizen Victoria's work on the collaboration between Zen Buddhism and imperialist warfare.  Since then I've read his book Zen at War (Rowman, 1997; second edition 2006), followed by Christopher Ives's Imperial-Way Zen (Hawai'i, 2009), which is critical of some details of Victoria's thesis but overall agrees that the major Zen sects in Japan actively colluded with and rationalized Japanese imperial violence.  Now I've reading Victoria's Zen War Stories (Routledge, 2003), which adds more material to his argument.

The first chapter is a knockout.  Victoria recounts his 1999 visit to the Rinzai Zen Master Nakajima Genjō, a year before the latter's death at age 85.  Genjō told Victoria

that he had served in the Imperial Japanese Navy for some ten years, voluntarily enlisting at the age of twenty-one.  Significantly, the year prior to his enlistment Genjo had his initial enlightenment experience (kenshō).

... To my surprise, Genjō readily agreed to share his wartime experiences with me, but, shortly after he began to speak, tears welled up in his eyes and his voice cracked.  Overcome by emotion, he was unable to continue.  By this time his tears had triggered my own, and we both sat round the temple's open hearth crying for some time.  When at length Genjō regained his composure, he informed me that he had just completed writing his autobiography, including a description of his years in the military [3].

Genjō was the first Zen master Victoria had met in person who had served in the military, so he gratefully accepted the master's offer of a copy of his autobiography on its publication.  Victoria then provides a "somewhat abridged" translation of the portion describing Genjō's wartime experience.  He kept in touch with his own master, Yamamoto Gempō, who continued his Zen training by correspondence while encouraging him to be "the genuine article, the real thing!  Zen priests mustn't rely on the experience of others.  Do today what has to be done today.  Tomorrow is too late!" (4).

When Genjō's ship landed in Zhenjiang, China, in 1937, he visited the famous temple of Jinshani there.  He found five hundred novices engaged in meditation practice, and being "young and immature," he remonstrated with the abbot.

What do you think you're doing!  In Japan everyone is consumed by the war with China, and this is all you can do?  [The abbot replied,] And just who are you to talk?  I hear that you are a priest.  War is for soldiers.  A priest's work is to read the sūtras and meditate!

The abbot didn't say any more than this, but I felt as if I had been hit on the head with a sledgehammer.  As a result I immediately became a pacifist [7].

Pacifist or no, Genjō continued to serve in the Japanese Navy.  He dismisses reports of the infamous massacres in Nanking: "... I am firmly convinced that there was no such thing.  It was wartime, so there may have been a little trouble with the women.  In any event, after things start to settle down, it is pretty difficult to kill anyone" (ibid.).

Genjō sketches out the rest of the war from a Japanese sailor's perspective.  In 1943 his ship was torpedoed and, while drifting in the South China Sea, he had another enlightenment experience as he grappled with "life and death."

There was nothing to do but totally devote myself to Zen practice within the context of the ocean itself.  It would be a shame to die here I thought, for I wanted to return to being a Zen priest.  Therefore I single-mindedly devoted myself to making every possible effort to survive, abandoning all thought of life and death.  It was just at that moment that I freed myself from life and death.

This freedom from life and death was in reality the realization of great enlightenment (daigo)... I wanted to meet my master so badly, but there was no way to contact him [9].

Looking back, Genjō waxes indignant, even wrathful, over what he perceives as the cowardice and incompetence of the top brass.

In the Meiji era [1868-1912] military men had character and a sense of history.  Gradually, however, the military was taken over by men who did well in school and whose lives were centered on their families.  It became a collection of men lacking intestinal fortitude and vision.  Furthermore, they suffered from a lack of Japanese spirit and ultimately allowed personal ambition to take control of their lives [10].

The national polity of Japan is characterized by the fact that ours is a land of the gods.  The gods are bright and like water, both aspects immeasurable by nature ... Stupid military men, however, thought: "A country that can fight well is a land of the gods.  The gods will surely protect such a country."  I only wish that the top echelons of the military had absorbed even a little of the spirit of the real national polity [11].

In conclusion, Genjō laments:

This was a stupid war.  Engulfed in a stupid war, there was nothing I could do.  I wish to apologize, from the bottom of my heart, to those of my fellow soldiers who fell in battle.  As I look back on it now, I realize that I was in the navy for a total of ten years.  For me, those ten years felt like an eternity.  And it distresses me to think of all the comrades I lost [11].

Reading Genjō's memoir made Victoria realize that when the two of them wept over the war, Genjō was mourning only the Japanese military personnel who suffered and died in the conflict, especially those who died from disease and hunger rather than from a more fitting and glorious death in battle.  He also considers the war "stupid," not because it was a war of aggression, or even because it was a gigantic cataclysm of destructive violence, but because, "unlike in other wars, Japan had been defeated" (11) due to the leaders' incompetence in planning and strategy.  This immediately made me think of many Americans' judgment of our invasion of Vietnam, which is often touted as the first US defeat; that we killed millions of innocent people who had not attacked the US is of no interest to them at all, only that we failed to extract another victory to add to our large, glorious collection of trophies, at the cost of American lives.

Imagine someone who informs you, while tucking into a big juicy steak, that after a stunning confrontation with a religious teacher, she immediately became a vegetarian, and remains so to this day.  In what sense Genjō considers himself a pacifist, considering that he nowhere rejects war in principle, baffles me, as it baffles Victoria; Genjō's account "suggests that in practice Genjō's newly found pacifism amounted to little more than 'feel good, accomplish nothing' mental masturbation" (14).  To the credit of both men, he followed up this question.  (I say both men because it would not be surprising for a revered senior monk to slap down probing questions from an impertinent junior and a foreigner at that; but as you'll see, Genjō didn't do so.)

In fact, during a second visit to Shōinji in January 2000, I personally queried Genjō on this very point: I asked him why he hadn't attempted, in one way or another, to distance himself from Japan's war effort following his change of heart.  His reply was short and to the point: "I would have been court-martialed and shot had I done so."

No doubt, Genjō was speaking the truth, and I for one am not going to claim that I would have acted any differently (though I hope I would have).  This said, Genjō does not hesitate to present himself to his readers as the very embodiment of the Buddha's enlightenment.  The question must therefore be asked, is the killing of countless human beings in order to save one's own life an authentic expression of the Buddha Dharma, of the Buddha's enlightennment? [14]

A few things should be borne in mind here.  One is that, while Genjō's disinclination to face court-martial and execution for rejecting the Japanese war is understandable during the war -- and like Victoria, I don't condemn him for it, being even less sure than Victoria that I'd have done any differently in his place -- he continued to accept the validity of the war even sixty years later, when the political situation had changed and he would probably have faced no consequences for rejecting it.  This too is similar to many Americans' reluctance in retrospect to condemn the Vietnam War, or the 2003 Gulf War for that matter.  It's okay and quite safe to criticize the way those wars were prosecuted, but to argue that they should not have been fought at all is Going Too Far.  It's popular (both in Japan and in 'the West') to point to the conformism and groupthink of Japanese society to explain the paucity of dissent by Japanese, but Americans are not very different in that respect.

Brian Victoria has a personal history of dissenting within institutions.  As a young American Methodist in 1961 he became a conscientious objector, several years before the rise of a movement against the US invasion of Vietnam, though that invasion was already well under way.  He became a missionary to fulfill the alternative service required of COs, but when he rejected the "political indoctrination classes" he was expected to take he was turned down for service first in Hong Kong and then in Taiwan.  He was sent to Japan instead, which didn't have the same doctrinal uniformity among its Christian groups.  There he became interested in Zen and was ordained as a Soto Zen monk a few years later.  After working in the movement against the US invasion of Vietnam, which brought him into conflict with Zen superiors who didn't think priests should get involved in politics, he became aware of the previous Buddhist role in Japanese imperialism, which led him to the writing of Zen at War.

A reviewer of Zen War Stories for the Journal of Buddhist Ethics commented:

Reading Victoria’s new book in late 2003, as an American reflecting on recent and past U.S. policy in the Middle East, I cannot help wondering about the comparable role of Christianity in the West. In criticizing the nationalistic role of Zen, are we holding Japanese Buddhism to higher standards than we have upheld ourselves? To say that Buddhism was distorted by Japanese society: in the end, does that mean anything more than that Buddhism too is a religion practiced by human beings?

This seems disingenous to me.  I haven't seen anything by Victoria which indicates that he's "holding Japanese Buddhism to higher standards" than he would hold Christianity, since he has been no less critical of Christianity, and of the US (his home country).  The reviewer's complaint is typical of tactics used to discredit critics of any tradition: if you criticize US foreign policy, for example, or Israeli oppression of Palestinians, or various misconduct by Christians, you will be accused of considering America (or Israel) to be uniquely bad, perhaps claiming that it is 'the source of everything that's wrong in the world.'  Victoria's thoughtcrime lies not in considering Buddhism unique, but in rejecting the claim that it is unique, a religion like others, and in criticizing it from within.  It's perfectly acceptable, and indeed normal, to treat Buddhism, or Christianity, or America, or Science, as uniquely good; apologists only fall back to the line of "we're just human beings like everybody else" for damage control.

That "Buddhism too is a religion practiced by human beings" is precisely what Brian Victoria has been saying all along.  As the Austrian-born Hindu monk and sociologist Agehananda Bharati said, one can be a believer and a sound scholar if one "radically criticize[s] the doctrine with which one identifies, pointing out its weaknesses, its foibles, and the clay feet of its founders and sustainers, at every step."  (Which is why I myself criticize atheists along with theists, and my own country along with others.)  Victoria judges Zen and Christianity, Japan and America, by a single standard.  But that is exactly what no doctrine wants its followers to do.

It's also okay for good believers to criticize competing traditions as harshly as is expedient.  Christians and other monotheists are notorious for doing so -- see the passages Victoria quotes from Christian scholarly texts on Buddhism on page xiv, for example -- but the tendency isn't limited to them.  Buddhism has a long pacifist tradition, as does Christianity; Victoria quotes a story that the Buddha, questioned by a professional soldier, "informed him that if the latter were to die on the battlefield he could expect to be 'reborn in a hell or as an animal' for his transgressions."  This is a much harsher judgment than anything Jesus is reported to have said; he never condemned war himself, perhaps because he expected to lead the war against unbelievers in the final judgment.  (Indeed, according to the gospels, he was quite friendly and helpful to soldiers of the Roman occupation of his country.)  Victoria continues: "Inasmuch as I make no claim to omniscience for myself, I do not know in what state, or even if, the protagonists in this book will be reborn.  But, like the Buddha himself, I do not hesitate to judge them on the basis of their deeds, whether of body or speech" (xv).  Like Christianity, Buddhism has a long tradition of violence and warfare, and it didn't begin in twentieth-century Japan.

We Are the Hollow Men

When I saw a link to a Salon article called "So What If America Is the Most Religious Nation?" I thought it was by the dread and inconsistent Mary Elizabeth Williams, so I clicked to see what she had to say on the subject. Instead the article turned out to be by one Bernard Starr, "formerly professor of developmental and educational psychology at the City University of New York, Brooklyn College, writes a blog for the Huffington Post. His latest book, 'Escape Your Own Prison: Why We Need Spirituality and Psychology to be Truly Free,' is published by Rowman and Littlefield." (According to the image at Amazon, however, the subtitle of the book is "What Spirituality Provides that Psychology Can't.")

The article itself was about what I expected, summed up well by its subtitle, "If you compare creed and deed, the claim is hollow." Starr begins with a derisive swipe at atheists:

A Rice University study of 275 scientists at 21 “elite” research universities in the United States found that while 61 percent declared themselves atheists or agnostics, 17 percent have attended church services. Whether genuine devotees, just hedging their bets or doing it for the children (as some say), there’s little doubt that America is a religious nation.

I haven't checked all the links in his essay, but clicking through to the Rice study gave me reason not to trust the author. I checked it because I wondered if the 17 percent who have attended church services were 17 percent of the self-declared atheists or agnostics, or 17 percent of the total sample. It was the former, but it's still meaningless. I'm an atheist, and I've attended church services, either with my mother's family when I was a child, or more educationally at a variety of churches with my father until I was about ten. As an adult I've very occasionally attended services with believing friends, but without any real interest (let alone conviction) on my part. I attended Friends' silent meetings a few times while I was in college about 40 years ago, but while I found them interesting and attractive -- an atheist could be a Quaker, I believe, without compromising his or her atheism -- I haven't been back in a long time. Read the linked article yourself and see if you think Starr described it accurately.

Starr also shows his ecumenical knowledge by rendering the plural of "mitzvah" as "mitzvahs" instead of "mitzvot," though I admit I'm nitpicking. From there, of course, the lengthy piece is mostly about the gulf between "creed and deed" in American religion, ranging from poverty to our inadequate health care system, concluding with our sins against ecology:

In our hubris we forget that we are guests on a tiny rock floating — in an infinite universe of rocks — that uniquely supports life in a delicate balance of natural and mysterious forces. We have the choice and the responsibility to act. Or, as one theologian cautioned: ”God will not save us.”

Another nitpick: human beings are not "guests" on the earth: we are part of the biosphere, no more guests than bacteria. beetles, or wildebeests. (That's an acceptable plural form, along with "wildebai.") He concludes:

What is religion?: Love, caring, serving, giving, sharing, oneness, brother and sisterhood, compassion and selflessness. Summed up: “Thy neighbor is thyself.”

Yet one more nitpick: "Thy neighbor is thyself" is not biblical (it almost sounds as if he confused "Love your neighbor as yourself"), and I couldn't find it on Google. Nor does it ''sum up' Starr's list of virtues. I think it stinks of solipsism: my neighbor is an Other, but that's no reason not to engage with him or her. Like people who talk as though diversity is okay only as long as we're all alike anyway, Starr seems to think we should only care for others because they are us anyway. (We have met the enemy and he is ... ?) Jesus did better than that with the parable of the Good Samaritan.

What really stinks, though, is Starr's definition of religion. First, you can find love, caring, serving, giving, and the rest as virtues in most religions, but that is because they are human virtues. Human beings created and constructed and revised our religions, so it's hardly surprising that our virtues (as well as our vices) found their way into the religions we made. It would be just as accurate to say that religion is hate, disdain, demanding, taking, enmity, indifference, and selfishness, because we put in those qualities too.

Second, most atheists and agnostics would agree with Starr's list of virtues, or most of it. So he's either claiming that atheists and agnostics don't care about love, caring, etc. — which is false — or it implies that we’re really “religious” after all, whatever we happen to think. I think that virtues are double-edged, and can easily spill over into vices, but that's another post. If Starr wants to claim that I'm really being religious, despite my atheism, when I exercise compassion, then he's engaging in religious imperialism, and failing in several of his virtues.

Third, and more important, Starr is playing the game of No True Scotsman. He defines religion so as to suit himself, but he's begging the question. How does he know what religion "is"? I'd say it's reasonable to suggest that instead of idealizing and abstracting, we should look at a real-world religion and see what it looks like.

Read the entire New Testament, or if that’s too much work, read just one of the gospels in its entirety.  (Mark is the shortest one, if that helps.) True, Jesus talks about love, but he also talks about demons, the final judgment, miracles, the wrath and vengeance of God, the torments of hell, and becoming a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven.  (That last one is in Matthew, not Mark: 19:12, to be exact.) "Love" in the New Testament is actually hard to reconcile with love as human beings know it.

I've found that pointing this out infuriates liberal Christians more than almost anything I can say about their cult. They pay lip service to "holistic" interpretations of the Bible, but in practice their approach to the Bible is fiercely one-sided. They pick one or two verses out of context, usually “Love your neighbor as yourself” (which is, of course, an Old Testament quotation), “Let him who is without sin be first to cast a stone” (which probably isn’t an authentic part of the New Testament anyway but a later addition), and maybe “God is love” (from one of the Johannine epistles, again out of context) or Paul’s hymn to love from 1 Corinthians. They ignore the context in the gospels: the faith healing, the hellfire and brimstone preaching, the apocalyptic threats and promises, the hostility to sex and the body (such as “If your eye leads you to sin pluck it out”), the hostility to the family in favor of the cult (“Those who do the will of my father in heaven are my mother and brothers and sisters”, “Let the dead bury the dead”), and so on. But reading for context is difficult; cherrypicking verses to bash your opponents with is easy and more fun.

Then look at what people want from religion. A few years ago I wrote about a Pew Poll on the factors that bring the fallen-away back to church. "Those who leave the ranks of the unaffiliated cite several reasons for joining a faith, such as the attraction of religious services and styles of worship (74%), having been spiritually unfulfilled while unaffiliated (51%) or feeling called by God (55%)." Not "I felt there wasn’t enough love, compassion, giving, or selflessness in my life," but something more like "I felt there wasn’t enough praying, kneeling, incense, hymns, organ music, and sermons in my life." To each his own, of course. Look at other world religions, and you'll see that this tendency isn't limited to Christianity. Buddhism, for example, began as an iconoclastic sect that broke off from Hinduism; agnostic about and indifferent to gods, the Buddha stressed right thinking and right practice, boiling everything down to a simple list of Noble Truths. Before too long (if indeed Gautama ever really had gotten rid of these accretions), Buddhism became a religion of rites and hierarchies. In practice, religion includes simplicity and complexity, leveling and elitism, compassion for suffering and contempt for those who haven't freed themselves from illusion.

Finally, to refer back to the original subtitle of Starr's book, neither "psychology" nor "spirituality" has much to be with being free. Most modern psychology denies the existence of human freedom, as far as I can tell: free will is an illusion, we’re the slaves of our brains or our genes. Most spiritual traditions are at best ambivalent about freedom: it’s more a come-on for religious hucksters: come follow me and do what I tell you to do, and you’ll be free! No, thanks. Freedom is a complex matter, but neither religion nor psychology has said much to say about it that I’ve found useful.