Book review | The Australian Friend

Wisdom: Knowing What’s Important.

1206 June 2012 No Responses »

May 182012

Reg Naulty, Canberra Regional Meeting.

Review of Hall, S. (2010) Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

Stephen S. Hall asks whether there is any real place for wisdom in our frenetic, postmodern, quasi-apocalyptic, multi-tasking, dual-income, economically challenging world.

Wisdom is an unusual quality which is difficult to define, but easy to identify. Former Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, remarked that you have only to speak to someone for twenty minutes to find out whether they have any. Wisdom is not the same as intelligence. Everyone can think of intelligent people who are not wise. Hall, who has both, writes that knowledge is fixed, impersonal, and in odd way, non-social. Wisdom, on the other hand, is profoundly social, deeply personal, adaptive and intuitive. It has an important emotional component.

Hall writes about science and society for The New York Times Magazine. He has written five other books and seems to have interviewed just about everyone in America in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience who writes about wisdom. He has done a daunting amount of reading, enlivened by meetings with kindred spirits at Fanelli`s Restaurant and Bar, New York.

Hall does not neglect the classics. What Socrates, Confucius, and Buddha have in common in their thinking about wisdom, he writes, is a concern for social justice and a code of public morality, altruism, an insistence on mastering the emotions that urge immediate sensory gratification, and a mission to share their knowledge. My major criticism of this delightful and instructive book is that, in my view, these thinkers have something else in common. They draw on a wisdom which is higher than human. Socrates attended to an inner voice that stopped him in the middle of a speech; Confucius said that at fifty he knew the biddings of Heaven, and that at sixty he heard them with a docile ear. The Buddha believed in a metaphysical dimension to life: ‘There is, oh monks, that which is not born, not become, not made, not compounded.’

Hall enumerates different aspects of wisdom: patience, altruism, discernment, emotional calm. He realizes that love is not enough. Altruism needs a diverse suite of cognitive and emotional skills: discerning the fundamental unfairness of a situation; having the courage to defy one`s immediate self-interest; patience to wait for the rewards of a larger goal.

The book claims to move from philosophy to neuroscience, and there is a lot of neuroscience in it. But what has that got to do with qualities of wisdom like knowing what`s important and a capacity to deal with uncertainty? Hall himself puts the question: ‘does all this dense, constrained, hyper-qualified and speculative science-speak ultimately tell us anything useful about wisdom?’ But it remains unclear from the book that studying our brains will make us wiser. The description of the neural machinery throws into strong relief the distinctness of mind and brain. We know from within what it is like to evaluate, deliberate and ponder. We never notice from within the hiss and the pop of neural circuitry. I infer that it is taking place in a different reality.

Occasionally, Hall transfers a description which belongs to mind and applies it to brain, with unintended comic effect. For example, he writes of an immensely ‘astute’ molecule called dopamine ‘like a movie critic assessing, broadcasting its opinion’ (p. 48). What a smart little molecule!

The psychologists and neuroscientists Hall brings to these pages come across as intelligent, constructive, sensitive to criticism, and humane. They may save America yet. Philosophers make a splendid contribution to the book, especially Confucius. Though he spent the last ten years of his life in poverty, he is still being heard.

Pushing at the Frontiers of Change.

1206 June 2012 No Responses »

Apr 272012

Roger Sawkins, Queensland Regional Meeting.

Review of David Blamires (2012) Pushing at the frontiers of change; A memoir of Quaker involvement with homosexuality. London: Quaker Books. (ISBN 978-1-907123-23-8, paperback 100 pages)

Changes in attitudes to homosexuality in the Western world have been dramatic over the last 50 years. No less so within the Religious Society of Friends. David Blamires has been involved in these changes for much of that time and his book gives a valuable insight into Quaker responses.

Although David was not part of the group which wrote Towards a Quaker view of sex, published in 1963, he knew many of the authors and gives a full account of the lead-up to that booklet. Not only was it ahead of its time, it caused much discussion both within and without Quakers, including in Australia. Curiously, much of the discussion was about the authors’ call for acceptance of relationships outside marriage as much as their accepting attitude to homosexual relationships.

Although the booklet was published by Quakers it was not an official view but that of the contributors. The same applied to David’s own book Homosexuality from the inside, published ten years later in 1973. It was this booklet which resulted in him being invited, whilst he was on a visit to Sydney that year, to fly to Brisbane with the help of Queensland Regional Meeting and give a public lecture. Out of that came the suggestion to our Yearly Meeting in 1974 that we should support the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts, culminating in our public statement at Yearly Meeting 1975.

Since then in both the UK and Australia there have been many, sometimes very painful, discussions around support for homosexual relationships and the more recent acceptance of gay marriage. Through all that time Quakers have struggled to balance the testimony to equality with the conventional idea that marriage was for heterosexual couples. This, of course, culminated in the acceptance of gay marriage and calls for changes in the law by Britain Yearly Meeting in 2009 and Australia Yearly Meeting in 2011.

David’s final comment is ‘The story of Quaker involvement is still worth telling … because it shows how small groups, working together under concern and prepared to devote the necessary time, made a difference to the resolution of an important area of social injustice.’

The history of homosexuality and homosexual relationships has been largely hidden over many centuries, and our understanding of all types of relationships is very different from that of our ancestors. It is important to document recent changes as fully as possible so that future generations can see how we dealt with them. David’s book is an important, interesting and very readable contribution to that process.

References:

A Group of Friends (1963). Towards a Quaker view of sex. London: Friends Home Service Committee.

Blamires, D. (1973). Homosexuality from the inside. London: Social Responsibility Council of the Religious Society of Friends.

Is Quakerism a ‘Religion For Atheists’.

1206 June 2012 5 Responses »

Mar 282012

Review of Alain De Botton (2012) Religion for Atheists. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Ian Hughes, New South Wales Regional Meeting.

Alain De Botton 'Religion for Atheists'

I have heard interviews on radio and watched interviews on television. I’ve also read reviews in newspapers, and now wonder if Quakerism might be the religion for atheists that De Botton is looking for.

Reading the book, I was left with an impression that De Botton is nostalgic for a bygone age when religion held communities together, enabling whole villages and towns to lead ethical and transcendent lives. It is an easy book to read, with gems of insight and even wisdom.

De Botton claims that, in the West, ‘we have allowed religion to claim as its exclusive domain areas of experience which should rightly belong to all mankind’ (p. 15). He thinks religions have combined theories about ethics and metaphysics with a practical involvement in education, health and other everyday concerns in ways which no secular institution has managed. He proposes a new secular religion of wisdom without doctrine, with secular temples which aim to raise the human spirit, with secular schools and universities which teach morality, not just facts and theories. In short, he proposes a religion without God.

I kept wishing that De Botton had dome some research into existing religions, such as Buddhism, Taoism and Indigenous Australian Religions. I would like him to read Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World and Towards the True Kinship of Faiths, both by the Dalai Lama. He might inquire how Hinduism has many Gods, which some scholars understand as projections of human minds rather than independently existing supernatural beings. De Botton limits his discussion to the Abrahamic Religions, and even here he seems unaware of the acceptance of non-theists in some Jewish and Christian congregations.

Alain De Botton is an atheist brought up by non-observant parents from a Jewish family with a long and proud heritage. He was educated in Anglican boarding schools and at Cambridge University. De Botton writes that ‘for some atheists, one of the most difficult aspects of renouncing religion is having to give up on ecclesiastical art and all the beauty and emotion therein’ (p208). I speculate whether De Botton is worried that a public commitment to atheism means forgoing his Jewish heritage.

This leads me to wonder: ‘Should I tell De Botton about Quakers?’

For more than 300 years many Quakers have not believed in the God described by mainstream Catholics and Protestants. Non-theism is openly discussed and accepted by liberal unprogrammed Meetings in the United States, Britain and Australia. We have the wisdom without doctrine that De Botton seeks, and we bring ethics and transcendence to unity.

But we don’t have some of the other things which De Botton looks for, the sacramental genius of the Mass, the splendour of religious art, the inspiring cathedrals and uplifting music or the Jewish family rituals. Perhaps he would be disappointed by the quiet simplicity of Quaker Worship.

Quakerism may not provide what De Botton is seeking, but my personal hope is that we are and continue to be a religion for atheists.

Links

Click here [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oe6HUgrRlQ ] for video of Alain de Botton talking about this book. For different opinions about this book visit The Guardian, Huffington Post or New Statesman

The Gardener’s Gamble

1109 September 2011 No Responses »

Oct 072011

Book review by Frances Parsons, Tasmania Regional Meeting.

The Gardener’s Gamble : a social history of Australia through the Dawson Family by Helen Laidlaw (2010, Cedar Ridge Books, Kiama) available from www.thegardenersgamble.com.au

Helen Laidlaw’s Th e Gardener’s Gamble is, as she says on the title page, ‘A Social History of Australia through the Dawson Family’.

‘The gambling gardener’ was her great, great, great grandfather, John Dawson,who with wife Mary and nine children came to Sydney on the Canton in 1835, hoping to improve their standard of living and social status. The experiences and rigours of that journey (in a purpose built migrant ship) and the enforced on-shore quarantine (because there had been smallpox on board) are recorded from the day they left England in the journal kept by John, the 15-year old son.

They were a literate family, and the author has been fortunate in having access to many journals, scrapbooks, collections of letters and photographs. The text has been enriched by frequent quotation from these and other primary sources, as well as by the many illustrations. Her research led her to archival material in State, University, newspaper, school, Quaker and town collections; glance at the bibliography and notes at the end of the book, before you begin at the beginning.

It took Helen 20 years to piece together. Despite the uncertainties, the accidents, illnesses and deaths, the family prospered, and there is much interesting detail about the way districts such as Camden and the Illawarra were settled, and about the role members of the family played in setting up hospitals, schools, agricultural shows, Blind Institutes and general social amenities. Even a bill of sale throws light on farm and household equipment.

The amount of work done by women is staggering. From 5am to 11pm they had the dairy herd to milk (twice), milk to set in pans for the cream to rise, butter making, (and marketing) the hens, lambs and pig pens to see to, household scrubbing and polishing, laundering, dressmaking, mending, gardening, and of course cooking, preserving and bottling the produce of the fertile soils of the farms which they leased until they could buy.

It was during this early period that the Quakers, Backhouse and Walker, visited the Australian colonies, and the Dawson family often attended Meetings for Worship arranged by them as they tramped the Illawarra, Jervis Bay, Shoalhaven and Camden districts. Backhouse had as secretary Abraham Davy, a reformed convict (whom Backhouse had possibly first met at Macquarie Harbour), who began to court Jane Dawson. This raised difficult questions for early Quakers regarding the status of emancipists and the role of ‘disownment’. Central to the difficulties was the question of ‘marrying out’ (i.e. marrying someone not in good standing in the Meeting). Friends from Hobart (the ‘Senior’ Meeting) came to Sydney to help sort out the problems. Among them were Robert and Joseph Mather. Abraham and Jane, impatient of the dissention, married in a Presbyterian Church in 1838 and not long after Abraham was ’disowned’. However, they remained in close contact with Friends and Davy exchanged letters with Backhouse for many years.

Another of the problems among Friends in Sydney was a split between a group of enthusiastic young Friends and the older, conservative Members. At one time, police locked the young group out of the Meeting House. About this time, another pair of Quaker missionaries visited: Joseph James Neave and Walter Robson, as did Francis Cotton of Kelvedon. Neave became enamoured of Helen Davy, daughter of Jane and Abraham. Their courtship was protracted as Neave wanted to complete his travelling in the ministry, but they were eventually married in Saffron Walden before returning to Sydney where they did much to revive the Meeting. Their eldest children attended the Friends’ School as boarders. Among the luggage of the Dawsons on the Canton was a cradle. Their own family was complete but they must have been looking to the future — there are 70 grandchildren listed in the family trees at the end of the book. As the author says in her conclusion The Grimsby Gardener’s gamble had paid off … within three generations the family included an architect, artists, bank managers, barristers, businessmen, chemists, doctors, engineers and a judge.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love

1109 September 2011 No Responses »

Oct 062011

Seascape from the book cover.

Book review by Heather Herbert, Canberra Regional Meeting

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love by Elspeth Liberty (2011) available from
www.elspethliberty.com)

Though only 260 pages, this is not a light read – not a walk in the park. The wild and exuberant seascape by Rebecca Arman that lights up the cover of the book also lights up Elspeth’s office wall, and serves her as an icon of her journey.

Each chapter is bracketed by her reflection on the picture, and on the many moods of Bass Strait, which borders (sometimes overwhelms) the beach she frequents. These two seascapes both encapsulate the tumult she is writing about, and serve to ground both Elspeth and the reader in the present moment and her life now – so we don’t drown in her journey. Tumult in the foreground, serenity on the horizon.

This is a very courageous book – the product of a very courageous life.

It begins with her attempt at eighteen or nineteen to drown out a confusing and despair-making childhood in the multifaceted
and over-stimulating world of Kings Cross, and the unsurprising attempt to find refuge in drugs and alcohol. There had been church and Sunday school connections among her childhood experiences, and ‘sometimes I sensed God in the midst of it all’.

That candle of hope, and Elspeth’s ingrained desire to help others upheld her ongoing attempts to detox, to do something fruitful with her life. Her story exemplifies the great damage that abuse wreaks on the self-image of the victim.

As she shares with us her tumultuous journey, and the enterprises, programs and counsellors she encountered along the way, we are invited into a very profound, agonising and productive adventure. She explores in retrospect the methods that were effective, and confirms Bruce Perry’s conclusion that ‘people, not programs, change people’.*

Along her way Elspeth has revelled in the processes of using and achieving credentials in Transactional Analysis, theology, counselling. Her evolving acquaintance with Godness will resonate with many. It was also the ultimate antidote to her intimate acquaintance with evil in her childhood and youth.

For me Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love requires us

to acknowledge the presence of great evil among us;
to have greater compassion for those many who have been traumatised by its various forms; to work on how we fit its reality into our cosmology;
and to strengthen our efforts not to contribute to it. Elspeth’s closing words fill us with hope:

‘I have no idea what comes next but whatever it may be I have the strength to embrace it and live it to the full. No matter what life throws at me I have the courage and faith to survive it. I now have a life that is brimming with possibilities and sparkling with God’.

Reference:

* Perry, B. and Szalavit, M. (2006)The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love and Healing. New York: Basic Books, p.80