PR notice whistled past the desk.
New atheist Sam Harris*, one of the four horsemen of the new atheist apocalypse, now thinks there is something to be said for mindfulness.
Sort of. But, turns out, only if it is a mere cookie stamped out by the Darwin industry’s cookie cutter.
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, Sam’s newest book, is part seeker’s memoir, part exploration of the scientific underpinnings of spirituality. No other book marries contemplative wisdom and modern science in this way, and no author other than Sam Harris—a scientist, philosopher, and famous skeptic—could write it.
Further to: A hundred people walked out of Darwin/evo psych indoctrination lecture at Oxford?, at The Minimalists, we learn from Harris:
In evolutionary terms, we’re probably lucky that we’re not more miserable than we are. After all, our genes haven’t been sculpted with our subjective well-being in mind. And the natural world surely wasn’t created for our enjoyment. We’ve evolved to survive and spawn—to just barely equip our progeny to do the same. All the other good things in life appear to be lucky accidents.
In large part, our problems are due to the immense power of language. We live in a world that is almost entirely defined by words—our relationships, fears, interests, cultural institutions, the very objects around us are all the product of concepts that depend upon language. And this is no less true of our inner lives. Thinking is so useful that we are probably wired to do it continuously. Unfortunately, much of what we think about makes us miserable.
To take a very simple example: Most people are very concerned about their social status, a preoccupation we share with our primate cousins. Unlike baboons, however, we can truly brood about our failures, projecting them into a recollected past and an imagined future. What’s more, we can do this in an ever-widening context of social knowledge. If you’re a baboon, at least you can seize the alpha male by the throat and try your luck. But when you’re on the Internet, contemplating the splendor of others—”Oh, Gwenyth Paltrow is spending Christmas on St. Barts, how nice….”—the odds are against your feeling fully satisfied with your place in the world. Millions of years of hominid evolution have not prepared us for Instagram.
Nor has evolution prepared some of us to take any interest in Harris’s forthcoming book, unless a shelf needs steadying.
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*See this for joke in headline.
Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose