Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment
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4.05 · Rating details · 8,163 ratings · 913 reviews
From one of America’s greatest minds, a journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness.
Robert Wright famously explained in The Moral Animal how evolution shaped the human brain. The mind is designed to often delude us, he argued, about ourselves and about the world. And it is designed to make happiness hard to sustain.
But if we know our minds are rigged for anxiety, depression, anger, and greed, what do we do? Wright locates the answer in Buddhism, which figured out thousands of years ago what scientists are only discovering now. Buddhism holds that human suffering is a result of not seeing the world clearly—and proposes that seeing the world more clearly, through meditation, will make us better, happier people.
In Why Buddhism is True, Wright leads readers on a journey through psychology, philosophy, and a great many silent retreats to show how and why meditation can serve as the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age. At once excitingly ambitious and wittily accessible, this is the first book to combine evolutionary psychology with cutting-edge neuroscience to defend the radical claims at the heart of Buddhist philosophy. With bracing honesty and fierce wisdom, it will persuade you not just that Buddhism is true—which is to say, a way out of our delusion—but that it can ultimately save us from ourselves, as individuals and as a species. (less)
Robert Wright famously explained in The Moral Animal how evolution shaped the human brain. The mind is designed to often delude us, he argued, about ourselves and about the world. And it is designed to make happiness hard to sustain.
But if we know our minds are rigged for anxiety, depression, anger, and greed, what do we do? Wright locates the answer in Buddhism, which figured out thousands of years ago what scientists are only discovering now. Buddhism holds that human suffering is a result of not seeing the world clearly—and proposes that seeing the world more clearly, through meditation, will make us better, happier people.
In Why Buddhism is True, Wright leads readers on a journey through psychology, philosophy, and a great many silent retreats to show how and why meditation can serve as the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age. At once excitingly ambitious and wittily accessible, this is the first book to combine evolutionary psychology with cutting-edge neuroscience to defend the radical claims at the heart of Buddhist philosophy. With bracing honesty and fierce wisdom, it will persuade you not just that Buddhism is true—which is to say, a way out of our delusion—but that it can ultimately save us from ourselves, as individuals and as a species. (less)
Audiobook, 336 pages
Published August 8th 2017 by Simon Schuster Audio (first published 2017)
Original Title
Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment
ISBN
1508235406 (ISBN13: 9781508235408)
Edition Language
English
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“The problem with introspection is that it has no end.”
― Philip K. Dick
For years I've told people I was a Zen Mormon. More as a way to squirm into the edges of LDS cosmology, and less because I was practicing anything really approaching a hybrid of Buddhism and Mormonism. But I've always been attracted to Buddhism, like many Westerners before me. I'm thinking of Herman Hesse, W. Somerset Maugham, Jack Kerouac, and Peter Matthiessen. I've always been attracted to the intersection of cultures, philosophies, etc. So, I guess it is natural for me to be attracted (if somewhat lazily) to Western Buddhism, Zen gardens, and the potential of mediation.
I'm also a big, nerdy fan of Robert Wright. I've read most of his books. It is probably easier to just post the one book of his I haven't read, rather than list the ones I have.* I enjoy Wright's evolution from Evolutionary Psychology to Buddhist writings. I think the premise of Wright's book is mostly correct. There is something that evolution has burdoned us with, that meditation (specifically Mindfulness Meditation) and Buddhism can help us with.
The books title, I should note here, IS a little off putting. I think Wright almost meant it as a joke (with a hook of truth). It comes across like some Mormon, Southern Baptist or Jehovah's Witness tract; a bit evangelical. But Wright is not just trying to convert the reader (and he's not exactly NOT trying to convert the reader either). He lays out pretty good arguments about how Evolutionary Psychology and behavioral psychology show (lots of caveats, obviously the mind is complex and not everyone agrees with everything) that a lot of our feelings, motives, choices are built on genetic coding which might actually make us unhappy, unhealthy, etc. The Buddhists seemed to have climbed that mountain before us. Wright seems less of a philosophical or religious Buddhist and more of a pragmatic Buddhist. I think his time studying how religion, the mind, behaviors, etc., have evolved over time has also provided him with ample evidence about how these traits that were evolved to help our more primitive selves reproduce, survive, etc., don't always help us in a modern age that includes HR departments, Facebook, politics, etc. Buddhism, Wright would argue, can help untangle some of these evolutionary knots.
So? What does this book mean for me? Someone who calls himself (mostly in jest) a Zen Mormon who has spent exactly 10 minutes mediating in a half-assed way? Well, I'm thinking of hooking up with a local Buddhist/Meditation group and giving Mindful Mediation a try. I'm pretty chill, but I think mindfulness can only help. I'm also not above exploring truth beyond my own familiar cosmology. When I told my wife and kids of my plan, they did laugh however. My wife suggested meditation might not be easy for me, given my competitive nature.
Wife: "You can't win at meditation."
D8u: "Sure you can, isn't enlightenment basically winning?"
Daughter: "Yeah Mom, the Buddha definitely won."
D8U: "See?"
My daughter, laughing, said the closest I've come to meditating was my nightly scalding bath, with headphones in my ears, a cold diet Dr. Pepper, and candy. She thinks anything that would help me unplug one or two of my sensory addictions might not be a bad thing. I agree. It is worth a shot.
* I haven't read Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information. (less)
― Philip K. Dick
For years I've told people I was a Zen Mormon. More as a way to squirm into the edges of LDS cosmology, and less because I was practicing anything really approaching a hybrid of Buddhism and Mormonism. But I've always been attracted to Buddhism, like many Westerners before me. I'm thinking of Herman Hesse, W. Somerset Maugham, Jack Kerouac, and Peter Matthiessen. I've always been attracted to the intersection of cultures, philosophies, etc. So, I guess it is natural for me to be attracted (if somewhat lazily) to Western Buddhism, Zen gardens, and the potential of mediation.
I'm also a big, nerdy fan of Robert Wright. I've read most of his books. It is probably easier to just post the one book of his I haven't read, rather than list the ones I have.* I enjoy Wright's evolution from Evolutionary Psychology to Buddhist writings. I think the premise of Wright's book is mostly correct. There is something that evolution has burdoned us with, that meditation (specifically Mindfulness Meditation) and Buddhism can help us with.
The books title, I should note here, IS a little off putting. I think Wright almost meant it as a joke (with a hook of truth). It comes across like some Mormon, Southern Baptist or Jehovah's Witness tract; a bit evangelical. But Wright is not just trying to convert the reader (and he's not exactly NOT trying to convert the reader either). He lays out pretty good arguments about how Evolutionary Psychology and behavioral psychology show (lots of caveats, obviously the mind is complex and not everyone agrees with everything) that a lot of our feelings, motives, choices are built on genetic coding which might actually make us unhappy, unhealthy, etc. The Buddhists seemed to have climbed that mountain before us. Wright seems less of a philosophical or religious Buddhist and more of a pragmatic Buddhist. I think his time studying how religion, the mind, behaviors, etc., have evolved over time has also provided him with ample evidence about how these traits that were evolved to help our more primitive selves reproduce, survive, etc., don't always help us in a modern age that includes HR departments, Facebook, politics, etc. Buddhism, Wright would argue, can help untangle some of these evolutionary knots.
So? What does this book mean for me? Someone who calls himself (mostly in jest) a Zen Mormon who has spent exactly 10 minutes mediating in a half-assed way? Well, I'm thinking of hooking up with a local Buddhist/Meditation group and giving Mindful Mediation a try. I'm pretty chill, but I think mindfulness can only help. I'm also not above exploring truth beyond my own familiar cosmology. When I told my wife and kids of my plan, they did laugh however. My wife suggested meditation might not be easy for me, given my competitive nature.
Wife: "You can't win at meditation."
D8u: "Sure you can, isn't enlightenment basically winning?"
Daughter: "Yeah Mom, the Buddha definitely won."
D8U: "See?"
My daughter, laughing, said the closest I've come to meditating was my nightly scalding bath, with headphones in my ears, a cold diet Dr. Pepper, and candy. She thinks anything that would help me unplug one or two of my sensory addictions might not be a bad thing. I agree. It is worth a shot.
* I haven't read Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information. (less)
Jan 23, 2018Roy Lotz rated it liked it · review of another edition
A far more accurate title for this book would be Why Mindfulness Meditation is Good. For as Wright—who does not consider himself a Buddhist—admits, he is not really here to talk about any form of traditional Buddhism. He does not even present a strictly “orthodox” view of any secular, Western variety of Buddhism. Instead, this is a rather selective interpretation of some Buddhist doctrines in the light of evolutionary psychology.
Wright’s essential message is that the evolutionary process that shaped the human brain did not adequately program us for life in the modern world; and that mindfulness meditation can help to correct this bad programming.
The first of these claims is fairly uncontroversial. To give an obvious example, our love of salt, beneficial when sodium was hard to come by in natural products, has become maladaptive in the modern world where salt is cheap and plentiful. Our emotions, too, can misfire nowadays. Caring deeply that people have a high opinion of you makes sense when you are, say, living in a small village full of people you know and interact with daily; but it makes little sense when you are surrounded by strangers on a bus.
This mismatch between our emotional setup and the newly complex social world is one reason for rampant stress and anxiety. Something like a job interview—trying to impress a perfect stranger to earn a livelihood—simply didn’t exist for our ancestors. This can also explain tribalism, which Wright sees as the most pressing danger of the modern world. It makes evolutionary sense to care deeply for oneself and one’s kin, with some close friends thrown in; and those who fall outside of this circle should, following evolutionary logic, be treated with suspicion—which explains why humans are so prone to dividing themselves into mutually antagonistic groups.
But how can mindfulness meditation help? Most obviously, it is a practice designed to give us some distance from our emotions. This is done by separating the feeling from its narrative. In daily life, for example, anger is never experienced “purely"; we always get angry about something; and the thought of this event is a huge component of its experience. But the meditator does her best to focus on the feeling itself, to examine its manifestation in her body and brain, while letting go of the corresponding narrative. Stripped of the provoking incident, the feeling itself ceases to be provocative; and the anger may even disappear completely.
Explained in this way, mindfulness meditation is the mirror image of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). In CBT the anger is attacked from the opposite side: by focusing on the narrative and subjecting it to logical criticism. In my experience, at least, the things one tells oneself while angry rarely stand up to cool analysis. And when one ceases to believe in the thought, the feeling disappears. The efficacy of both mindfulness meditation and CBT, then, is based on the interdependence of feeling and thought. If separated—either by focusing on the feeling during meditation, or the thought through analysis—the emotion disappears.
This, in a nutshell, is how mindfulness meditation can be therapeutic. But Wright wants to make a far more grandiose claim: that mindfulness meditation can reveal truths about the nature of mind, the world, and morality.
One of the central ideas of Buddhism is that of “emptiness”: that the enlightened meditator sees the world as empty of essential form. The first time I encountered this idea in a Buddhist text it made no sense to me; but Wright gives it an intriguing interpretation. Our brain, designed to survive, naturally assigns value to things in our environment based on how useful or harmful they are to us. These evaluations are, according to Wright’s theory, experienced as emotional reactions. I have quite warm and fuzzy feelings about my laptop, for example; and even the communal computers where I work evoke in me a comforting sense of familiarity and utility.
These emotions, which are sometimes very tiny indeed, are what give experiential reality a sense of essence. The emotions, in other words, help us to quickly identify and use objects: I don’t have to closely examine the computers, for example, since the emotion brings their instrumental qualities quickly to my attention. The advantages of this are obvious to anyone in a hurry. Likewise, this emotional registering is equally advantageous in avoiding danger, since taking time to ponder a rattlesnake isn’t advisable.
But the downside is that we can look at the world quite narrowly, ignoring the sensuous qualities of objects in favor of an instrumental view. Visual art actively works against this tendency, I think, by creating images that thwart our normal registering system, thus prompting us into a sensuous examination of the work. Good paintings make us into children again, exploring the world without worrying about making use of things. Mindfulness meditation is supposed to engender this same attitude, not just with regards to a painting, but to everything. Stripped of these identifying emotional reactions, the world might indeed seem “empty”—empty of distinctions, though full of rich sensation.
With objects, it is hard to see why this state of emptiness would be very desirable. (Also it should be said that this idea of micro-emotions serving as registers of essential distinctions is Wright’s interpretation of the psychological data, and is rather speculative.) But with regards to humans, this mindset might have its advantages. Instead of attributing essential qualities of good and bad to somebody we might see that their behavior can vary quite a bit depending on circumstances, and this can make us less judgmental and more forgiving.
Wright also has a go at the traditional Buddhist idea that the self is a delusion. According to what we know about the brain, he says, there is no executive seat of consciousness. He cites the famous split-brain experiments, and others like it, to argue that consciousness is not the powerful decision-maker we once assumed, but is more like a publicity agent: making our actions seem more cogent to others.
This is necessary because, underneath the apparent unity of conscious experience, there are several domain-specific “modules”—such as for sexual jealousy, romantic wooing, and so on—that fight amongst themselves in the brain for power and attention. Each module governs our behavior in different ways; and environmental stimuli determine which module is in control. Our consciousness gives a sense of continuity and coherence to this shifting control, which makes us look better in the eyes of our peers—or that’s how the theory goes, which Wright says is well-supported.
In any case, the upshot of this theory still would not be that the self doesn’t exist; only that the self is more fragmented and less executive than we once supposed. Unfortunately, the book steeply declines in quality in the last few chapters—where Wright tackles the most mystical propositions of Buddhism—when the final stage of the no-self argument is given. This leads him into the following speculations:
If our thoughts are generated by a variety of modules, which use emotion to get our attention; and if we can learn to dissociate ourselves from these emotions and see the world as “empty”; if, in short, we can reach a certain level of detachment from our thoughts and emotions: then, perhaps, we can see sensations arising in our body as equivalent to sensations arising from without. And maybe, too, this state of detachment will allow us to experience other people’s emotions as equivalent to our own, like how we feel pain from seeing a loved one in pain. In this case, can we not be said to have seen the true oneness of reality and the corresponding unreality of personal identity?
These lofty considerations aside, when I am struck by a car they better not take the driver to the emergency room; and when Robert Wright gets a book deal he would be upset if they gave me the money. My point is that this experience of oneness in no way undermines the reality of distinct personal identity, without which we could hardly go a day. And this state of perfect detachment is arguably, contra Wright, a far less realistic way of seeing things, since being genuinely unconcerned as to whom a pain belonged, for example, would make us unable to help. (Also in this way, contra Wright, it would make us obviously less moral.)
More generally, I think Wright is wrong in insisting that meditation can help us to experience reality more “truly.” Admittedly, I know from experience that meditation can be a great aid to introspection and can allow us to deal with our emotions more effectively. But the notion that a meditative experience can allow us to see a metaphysical truth—the unreality of self or the oneness of the cosmos—I reject completely. An essentially private experience cannot confirm or deny anything, as Wright himself says earlier on.
I also reject Wright’s claim that meditation can help us to see moral reality more clearly. By this he means that the detachment engendered by meditation can allow us to see every person as equally valuable rather than selfishly considering one’s own desires more important.
Now, I do not doubt that meditation can make people calmer and even nicer. But detachment does not lead logically to any moral clarity. Detachment is just that—detachment, which means unconcern; and morality is impossible without concern. Indeed, it seems to me that an enlightened person would be even less likely to improve the world, since they can accept any situation with perfect equanimity. Granted, if everyone were perfectly enlightened there would be no reason to improve anything—but I believe the expression about hell freezing over applies here.
Aside from the intellectual weakness of these later chapters, full as they are of vague hand-waving, the book has other flaws. I often got the sense that Wright was presenting the psychological evidence very selectively, emphasizing the studies and theories that accorded with his interpretations of Buddhism, without taking nearly enough time to give the contrasting views. On the other hand, he interprets the Buddhist doctrines quite freely—so in the end, when he says that modern science is confirming Buddhism, I wonder what is confirming what, exactly. And the writing, while usually quite clear, was too hokey and jokey for me.
Last, I found his framing of meditation as a way to save humanity from destructive tribalism as both naïve and misguided. In brief, I think that we ought to try to create a society in which the selfish interests of the greatest number of people are aligned. Selfish attachment, while potentially narrow, need not be if these selves are in enmeshed in mutually beneficial relationships; and some amount of attachment, with its concomitant dissatisfactions, seems necessary for people to exert great effort in improving their station and thus changing our world.
Encouraging people to become selflessly detached, on the other hand, besides being unrealistic, also strikes me as generally undesirable. For all the suffering caused by attachment—of which I am well aware—I am not convinced that life is better without it. As Orwell said: “Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.” (less)
Wright’s essential message is that the evolutionary process that shaped the human brain did not adequately program us for life in the modern world; and that mindfulness meditation can help to correct this bad programming.
The first of these claims is fairly uncontroversial. To give an obvious example, our love of salt, beneficial when sodium was hard to come by in natural products, has become maladaptive in the modern world where salt is cheap and plentiful. Our emotions, too, can misfire nowadays. Caring deeply that people have a high opinion of you makes sense when you are, say, living in a small village full of people you know and interact with daily; but it makes little sense when you are surrounded by strangers on a bus.
This mismatch between our emotional setup and the newly complex social world is one reason for rampant stress and anxiety. Something like a job interview—trying to impress a perfect stranger to earn a livelihood—simply didn’t exist for our ancestors. This can also explain tribalism, which Wright sees as the most pressing danger of the modern world. It makes evolutionary sense to care deeply for oneself and one’s kin, with some close friends thrown in; and those who fall outside of this circle should, following evolutionary logic, be treated with suspicion—which explains why humans are so prone to dividing themselves into mutually antagonistic groups.
But how can mindfulness meditation help? Most obviously, it is a practice designed to give us some distance from our emotions. This is done by separating the feeling from its narrative. In daily life, for example, anger is never experienced “purely"; we always get angry about something; and the thought of this event is a huge component of its experience. But the meditator does her best to focus on the feeling itself, to examine its manifestation in her body and brain, while letting go of the corresponding narrative. Stripped of the provoking incident, the feeling itself ceases to be provocative; and the anger may even disappear completely.
Explained in this way, mindfulness meditation is the mirror image of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). In CBT the anger is attacked from the opposite side: by focusing on the narrative and subjecting it to logical criticism. In my experience, at least, the things one tells oneself while angry rarely stand up to cool analysis. And when one ceases to believe in the thought, the feeling disappears. The efficacy of both mindfulness meditation and CBT, then, is based on the interdependence of feeling and thought. If separated—either by focusing on the feeling during meditation, or the thought through analysis—the emotion disappears.
This, in a nutshell, is how mindfulness meditation can be therapeutic. But Wright wants to make a far more grandiose claim: that mindfulness meditation can reveal truths about the nature of mind, the world, and morality.
One of the central ideas of Buddhism is that of “emptiness”: that the enlightened meditator sees the world as empty of essential form. The first time I encountered this idea in a Buddhist text it made no sense to me; but Wright gives it an intriguing interpretation. Our brain, designed to survive, naturally assigns value to things in our environment based on how useful or harmful they are to us. These evaluations are, according to Wright’s theory, experienced as emotional reactions. I have quite warm and fuzzy feelings about my laptop, for example; and even the communal computers where I work evoke in me a comforting sense of familiarity and utility.
These emotions, which are sometimes very tiny indeed, are what give experiential reality a sense of essence. The emotions, in other words, help us to quickly identify and use objects: I don’t have to closely examine the computers, for example, since the emotion brings their instrumental qualities quickly to my attention. The advantages of this are obvious to anyone in a hurry. Likewise, this emotional registering is equally advantageous in avoiding danger, since taking time to ponder a rattlesnake isn’t advisable.
But the downside is that we can look at the world quite narrowly, ignoring the sensuous qualities of objects in favor of an instrumental view. Visual art actively works against this tendency, I think, by creating images that thwart our normal registering system, thus prompting us into a sensuous examination of the work. Good paintings make us into children again, exploring the world without worrying about making use of things. Mindfulness meditation is supposed to engender this same attitude, not just with regards to a painting, but to everything. Stripped of these identifying emotional reactions, the world might indeed seem “empty”—empty of distinctions, though full of rich sensation.
With objects, it is hard to see why this state of emptiness would be very desirable. (Also it should be said that this idea of micro-emotions serving as registers of essential distinctions is Wright’s interpretation of the psychological data, and is rather speculative.) But with regards to humans, this mindset might have its advantages. Instead of attributing essential qualities of good and bad to somebody we might see that their behavior can vary quite a bit depending on circumstances, and this can make us less judgmental and more forgiving.
Wright also has a go at the traditional Buddhist idea that the self is a delusion. According to what we know about the brain, he says, there is no executive seat of consciousness. He cites the famous split-brain experiments, and others like it, to argue that consciousness is not the powerful decision-maker we once assumed, but is more like a publicity agent: making our actions seem more cogent to others.
This is necessary because, underneath the apparent unity of conscious experience, there are several domain-specific “modules”—such as for sexual jealousy, romantic wooing, and so on—that fight amongst themselves in the brain for power and attention. Each module governs our behavior in different ways; and environmental stimuli determine which module is in control. Our consciousness gives a sense of continuity and coherence to this shifting control, which makes us look better in the eyes of our peers—or that’s how the theory goes, which Wright says is well-supported.
In any case, the upshot of this theory still would not be that the self doesn’t exist; only that the self is more fragmented and less executive than we once supposed. Unfortunately, the book steeply declines in quality in the last few chapters—where Wright tackles the most mystical propositions of Buddhism—when the final stage of the no-self argument is given. This leads him into the following speculations:
If our thoughts are generated by a variety of modules, which use emotion to get our attention; and if we can learn to dissociate ourselves from these emotions and see the world as “empty”; if, in short, we can reach a certain level of detachment from our thoughts and emotions: then, perhaps, we can see sensations arising in our body as equivalent to sensations arising from without. And maybe, too, this state of detachment will allow us to experience other people’s emotions as equivalent to our own, like how we feel pain from seeing a loved one in pain. In this case, can we not be said to have seen the true oneness of reality and the corresponding unreality of personal identity?
These lofty considerations aside, when I am struck by a car they better not take the driver to the emergency room; and when Robert Wright gets a book deal he would be upset if they gave me the money. My point is that this experience of oneness in no way undermines the reality of distinct personal identity, without which we could hardly go a day. And this state of perfect detachment is arguably, contra Wright, a far less realistic way of seeing things, since being genuinely unconcerned as to whom a pain belonged, for example, would make us unable to help. (Also in this way, contra Wright, it would make us obviously less moral.)
More generally, I think Wright is wrong in insisting that meditation can help us to experience reality more “truly.” Admittedly, I know from experience that meditation can be a great aid to introspection and can allow us to deal with our emotions more effectively. But the notion that a meditative experience can allow us to see a metaphysical truth—the unreality of self or the oneness of the cosmos—I reject completely. An essentially private experience cannot confirm or deny anything, as Wright himself says earlier on.
I also reject Wright’s claim that meditation can help us to see moral reality more clearly. By this he means that the detachment engendered by meditation can allow us to see every person as equally valuable rather than selfishly considering one’s own desires more important.
Now, I do not doubt that meditation can make people calmer and even nicer. But detachment does not lead logically to any moral clarity. Detachment is just that—detachment, which means unconcern; and morality is impossible without concern. Indeed, it seems to me that an enlightened person would be even less likely to improve the world, since they can accept any situation with perfect equanimity. Granted, if everyone were perfectly enlightened there would be no reason to improve anything—but I believe the expression about hell freezing over applies here.
Aside from the intellectual weakness of these later chapters, full as they are of vague hand-waving, the book has other flaws. I often got the sense that Wright was presenting the psychological evidence very selectively, emphasizing the studies and theories that accorded with his interpretations of Buddhism, without taking nearly enough time to give the contrasting views. On the other hand, he interprets the Buddhist doctrines quite freely—so in the end, when he says that modern science is confirming Buddhism, I wonder what is confirming what, exactly. And the writing, while usually quite clear, was too hokey and jokey for me.
Last, I found his framing of meditation as a way to save humanity from destructive tribalism as both naïve and misguided. In brief, I think that we ought to try to create a society in which the selfish interests of the greatest number of people are aligned. Selfish attachment, while potentially narrow, need not be if these selves are in enmeshed in mutually beneficial relationships; and some amount of attachment, with its concomitant dissatisfactions, seems necessary for people to exert great effort in improving their station and thus changing our world.
Encouraging people to become selflessly detached, on the other hand, besides being unrealistic, also strikes me as generally undesirable. For all the suffering caused by attachment—of which I am well aware—I am not convinced that life is better without it. As Orwell said: “Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.” (less)
Aug 11, 2017Mehrsa rated it it was amazing
I've read every book Wright's written and all have been fantastic. This is my favorite. It's the perfect book for the cultural moment we're in. Forget the title--it's misleading. The book is a nice primer on meditation and evolutionary theory with some helpful insights. Basically, our brains are not wired for peace and happiness--only to propel our genes forward. There's a yearning for more programmed into us and the only antidote is mindfulness meditation. I've read a ton of evolutionary theory and a bunch of buddhism lite, but this one is exactly the synthesis I've been waiting for (without knowing it). It changed the way I think about meditation and my thoughts and feelings. Read it and pass it along. We all need this book right now or we're going to nuke ourselves off the planet or otherwise destroy it through greed in no time. (less)
Aug 07, 2017Brian Bergstrom rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
This is a truly remarkable, fantastic book. It is one of those rare volumes that will turn your head inside out and leave you seeing the world differently, not because he (or it) is extreme, but because reality is extreme; he is sewing together science and philosophy and offering readers a breathtaking tapestry for their consideration. Briefly, his argument is that our minds are populated by evolved psychological adaptations that were naturally selected for their adaptive utility, NOT for seeing the world objectively. And especially when it comes to our feelings and emotions, our minds often saddle us with perceptual and conceptual distortions that lead to unnecessary suffering. This state of affairs, as revealed by psychological science, aligns well with Buddhist renderings of the human predicament, and (even more remarkably) psychological science is also showing that the Buddhist prescription of mindfulness meditation can indeed help alleviate much of this suffering. Mindfulness meditation works as a kind of cognitive exercise (a kind of mental resistance training), that over time affords us distance from the tumultuous workings of our mind and allows us to see things more clearly (which often drains anxiety and anger of their motivational power) and helps foster our ability to chart where our mind goes next. Not only does mindful distance get us closer to the Truth (or at least further from delusion), but Wright argues that it can also bring us closer to moral truth, enhancing our capacity for responding in idealistically ethical ways.
And that's just scratching the surface. The deeper details, duly contemplated, will leave readers enchanted (head often spinning, occasionally agitated). Robert Wright has always had a keen ability to integrate disparate ideas in science and philosophy (stepping back to view things in wider perspective than the original scientists whose work he builds upon) and this book is a gem that will not disappoint those who enjoyed his earlier books (e.g. The Moral Animal, Nonzero, The Evolution of God), especially his dry wit, everyday-guy accessibility, pragmatic reasoning, and clear writing.
As a psychology professor who teaches courses in evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and psychology of religion, I'm in something of a unique position to review the work. Certainly I can say that Wright's command of the subject matter, ranging from evolutionary psychology to abstruse Buddhist philosophy, is excellent. (Experts in those fields will find details to quibble about, of course, but Wright does his homework and--to his credit--modestly concedes that his interpretations are his own best renderings. And they are good renderings.)
I think everyone should read this wonderful and important book. I worry that many will be put off by the title alone. I worry that those conversant with the subtleties of Buddhist thought will not invest the time and effort to grapple with the subtleties of psychological science and evolutionary biology (and vice versa). It IS a book that, I think, requires more of a cognitive commitment from readers than others. But it will reward all who do. Whether readers come away in general agreement with Wright or not, I don't think it is possible to read the book and come away WITHOUT a better understanding of yourself and a better appreciation what it means to be human. That alone makes it an engine of insight.
(Thank you to NetGalley for the advance review copy!) (less)
And that's just scratching the surface. The deeper details, duly contemplated, will leave readers enchanted (head often spinning, occasionally agitated). Robert Wright has always had a keen ability to integrate disparate ideas in science and philosophy (stepping back to view things in wider perspective than the original scientists whose work he builds upon) and this book is a gem that will not disappoint those who enjoyed his earlier books (e.g. The Moral Animal, Nonzero, The Evolution of God), especially his dry wit, everyday-guy accessibility, pragmatic reasoning, and clear writing.
As a psychology professor who teaches courses in evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and psychology of religion, I'm in something of a unique position to review the work. Certainly I can say that Wright's command of the subject matter, ranging from evolutionary psychology to abstruse Buddhist philosophy, is excellent. (Experts in those fields will find details to quibble about, of course, but Wright does his homework and--to his credit--modestly concedes that his interpretations are his own best renderings. And they are good renderings.)
I think everyone should read this wonderful and important book. I worry that many will be put off by the title alone. I worry that those conversant with the subtleties of Buddhist thought will not invest the time and effort to grapple with the subtleties of psychological science and evolutionary biology (and vice versa). It IS a book that, I think, requires more of a cognitive commitment from readers than others. But it will reward all who do. Whether readers come away in general agreement with Wright or not, I don't think it is possible to read the book and come away WITHOUT a better understanding of yourself and a better appreciation what it means to be human. That alone makes it an engine of insight.
(Thank you to NetGalley for the advance review copy!) (less)
Aug 26, 2017Toto rated it did not like it
Neither scientific, nor philosophical, nor in fact, enlightened, this book is the perfect example of facile thinking.
You will say, I won't deal with the "supernatural" part of a religion, god, reincarnation and karma etc., but will riff only about what you like: mindfulness practice that helped you out of your southern baptist metaphysical prejudices;
You will not question one iota of the theory of evolutionary psychology, or darwinism in general and claim that the buddhism you prefer is consistent with darwinist natural selection, therefore (!) must be true;
You will not engage with neuroscience or biology;
You will not engage with cognitive behavioural therapy, which aims at the same goal but approaches it from a different angle, namely loosen the grip of feelings on behaviour;
You will explain Hume and his theory of self in one paragraph;
You will have endless silly examples of sugar covered donuts for quick and unhelpful examples of bad choices etc.;
But you will publish this book with a straight face and probably go on talk circuits and make money off motivational buddhism. Wow! I like this buddhism a lot; it is SO easy. Count me in. (less)
You will say, I won't deal with the "supernatural" part of a religion, god, reincarnation and karma etc., but will riff only about what you like: mindfulness practice that helped you out of your southern baptist metaphysical prejudices;
You will not question one iota of the theory of evolutionary psychology, or darwinism in general and claim that the buddhism you prefer is consistent with darwinist natural selection, therefore (!) must be true;
You will not engage with neuroscience or biology;
You will not engage with cognitive behavioural therapy, which aims at the same goal but approaches it from a different angle, namely loosen the grip of feelings on behaviour;
You will explain Hume and his theory of self in one paragraph;
You will have endless silly examples of sugar covered donuts for quick and unhelpful examples of bad choices etc.;
But you will publish this book with a straight face and probably go on talk circuits and make money off motivational buddhism. Wow! I like this buddhism a lot; it is SO easy. Count me in. (less)
Oct 09, 2017Ken rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: finished-in-2017, contemporary, philosophy-religion
In book titles, the sub-title after the title is a popular but often unnecessary thing. In this case, it's necessary. Why Buddhism Is True is very much indeed about The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.
Especially the science. Or so it struck me, who at times grew impatient with the science aspect. Frankly, I was much more engaged by the Buddhism part of the book--Wright's experiences, chiefly, and his attempts (in Buddhism, there can be nothing but attempts) to explain the religion (which isn't a religion so much as a paradox).
Speaking of, if you read this book, prepare for the paradoxical. Not even Buddhists can agree on Buddhism--and I mean Buddhists from the same branch (be it Mahayana or Theravada or Zen or whatever other sub-categories there might be... and there might very well be).
But back to science, is it that important that Buddhism's precepts be "proven" by science or, more sketchily, by psychology (which, like Buddhism, can be pretty paradoxical itself)? Wright seems to think so. He is in argument mode here, out to show that the "weird" parts of Buddhism are a lot less weird than first glance would lead you to believe.
Me, I'm not worried about such truck when it comes toreligion philosophy. But I had no choice but to be here. Meaning: move over Siddhartha. Make room for Darwin. Lots of natural selection, because natural selection works against Buddhism which works against natural selection.
And lots of talk of modules here, too. Good grief. Modules? Something to do with adopted behaviors. Somewhat like the lecture hall in Psych 101, I dozed a bit but kept hearing the word. Like a mantra, maybe. Om... module.
Happily, Wright sees Buddhism-style thinking as the only hope for an increasingly hopeless world. He never mentions He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Neither the one in Washington nor the one in Korea, but both could use a healthy dose of meditation and soul-searching, if there be one to search:
"...we're living in an age when information technologies make it easy for relatively small numbers of people bound by a common enmity to find each other, no matter where on earth they are, and then coordinate to deploy violence. Hatred, even when diffuse and far-flung, has increasingly lethal potential.
"What causes all the hatred? At some level it's always the same thing: human beings operating under the influence of human brains whose design presupposed their specialness. That is, human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields that control us in many and subtle ways, convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and that, when we do the occasional bad thing, it's not a reflection of the 'real us'; whereas they and theirs aren't in the right and aren't by nature good, and when they do the occasional good thing, it's not a reflection of the 'real them.' And it doesn't help matters that these reality-distortion fields often magnify, even out-and-out fabricate, the threat posed by them and theirs.
"So, yes, we need to reject the core evolutionary value of the specialness of self. Indeed there's probably never been a time in human history when this rejection was more vital."
The poisonous tribalism Wright sees Buddhism as an antidote for works not only from an international standpoint but from an intranational one. I mean you, red state and blue state where never the purple shall meet. So here's one science quote I did like that might apply:
"[Einstein] said, if you want a deeper understanding of physics, you need to detach yourself from your particular perspective--from any particular perspective--and ask: Suppose I occupied no vantage point? Since I wouldn't be able to ask how fast things are moving relative to me, what exactly would it mean to ask how fast things are moving?"
The answer, of course, is it would change the question entirely, just as Buddhism does. "After all," Wright writes, "without a perspective to serve, there would be no feelings in the first place."
Hoo, boy. Giving up feelings is a hard thing to do. Which is why you best get meditating. Another hard thing to do. But look at how far we've come taking the easy way out by ignoring self-awareness and catering to our desires.
Kind of like the band playing on as the Titanic took on Atlantic, in its way.(less)
Especially the science. Or so it struck me, who at times grew impatient with the science aspect. Frankly, I was much more engaged by the Buddhism part of the book--Wright's experiences, chiefly, and his attempts (in Buddhism, there can be nothing but attempts) to explain the religion (which isn't a religion so much as a paradox).
Speaking of, if you read this book, prepare for the paradoxical. Not even Buddhists can agree on Buddhism--and I mean Buddhists from the same branch (be it Mahayana or Theravada or Zen or whatever other sub-categories there might be... and there might very well be).
But back to science, is it that important that Buddhism's precepts be "proven" by science or, more sketchily, by psychology (which, like Buddhism, can be pretty paradoxical itself)? Wright seems to think so. He is in argument mode here, out to show that the "weird" parts of Buddhism are a lot less weird than first glance would lead you to believe.
Me, I'm not worried about such truck when it comes to
And lots of talk of modules here, too. Good grief. Modules? Something to do with adopted behaviors. Somewhat like the lecture hall in Psych 101, I dozed a bit but kept hearing the word. Like a mantra, maybe. Om... module.
Happily, Wright sees Buddhism-style thinking as the only hope for an increasingly hopeless world. He never mentions He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Neither the one in Washington nor the one in Korea, but both could use a healthy dose of meditation and soul-searching, if there be one to search:
"...we're living in an age when information technologies make it easy for relatively small numbers of people bound by a common enmity to find each other, no matter where on earth they are, and then coordinate to deploy violence. Hatred, even when diffuse and far-flung, has increasingly lethal potential.
"What causes all the hatred? At some level it's always the same thing: human beings operating under the influence of human brains whose design presupposed their specialness. That is, human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields that control us in many and subtle ways, convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and that, when we do the occasional bad thing, it's not a reflection of the 'real us'; whereas they and theirs aren't in the right and aren't by nature good, and when they do the occasional good thing, it's not a reflection of the 'real them.' And it doesn't help matters that these reality-distortion fields often magnify, even out-and-out fabricate, the threat posed by them and theirs.
"So, yes, we need to reject the core evolutionary value of the specialness of self. Indeed there's probably never been a time in human history when this rejection was more vital."
The poisonous tribalism Wright sees Buddhism as an antidote for works not only from an international standpoint but from an intranational one. I mean you, red state and blue state where never the purple shall meet. So here's one science quote I did like that might apply:
"[Einstein] said, if you want a deeper understanding of physics, you need to detach yourself from your particular perspective--from any particular perspective--and ask: Suppose I occupied no vantage point? Since I wouldn't be able to ask how fast things are moving relative to me, what exactly would it mean to ask how fast things are moving?"
The answer, of course, is it would change the question entirely, just as Buddhism does. "After all," Wright writes, "without a perspective to serve, there would be no feelings in the first place."
Hoo, boy. Giving up feelings is a hard thing to do. Which is why you best get meditating. Another hard thing to do. But look at how far we've come taking the easy way out by ignoring self-awareness and catering to our desires.
Kind of like the band playing on as the Titanic took on Atlantic, in its way.(less)
Oct 31, 2017Murtaza rated it really liked it
Growing up I always had a problem reading philosophy books, which often seemed to be written in a way that made them deliberately obtuse and inaccessible. For that reason I was really glad when I discovered the writing of Will Durant, an early 20th century writer who became popular for revisiting the arguments of the great philosophers in a clear and unpretentious language. It struck me as a very American thing to do, and I think with this book Robert Wright does much the same thing with Buddhist philosophy.
The book traces through the core teachings of Buddhism and how they relate to evolutionary biology, which is Wright's area of expertise. Many of our ingrained yet seemingly irrational social behaviors (i.e. flying into a rage while driving, gorging on sweets past the point of hunger) are evolutionary remnants from the time we lived as hunter-gatherers or in small tribes. While once useful these behaviors and feelings are not actually good for us today living in a modern society, nor are they good for what evolutionary biology gears us towards: protecting and spreading our own genes. Since feelings are in some sense a means of getting us to do what's good for us, these behaviors and emotions could be said to correspond to what Buddhists call "false" feelings. This was an interesting hypothesis and is clearly a product of Wright's own expertise in this field.
Much of the book also deals with Wright's own journey as a Buddhist, and he provides many helpful tips about both meditation and mindfulness. Among these are:
1) Consciously recognizing that your mind is wandering during meditation is actually a good thing, because it shows that you aware of the moment, which is the first step towards mindfulness.
2) Rather than you creating them, "thoughts think themselves" in your mind. They try to draw you into embracing them, but you are neither their slave or master. Once you become aware of that, it is easier to dismiss the ones you don't want or that are harmful to you. For example: frivolous thoughts during meditation or anxious ones when you have no reason to be unhappy.
3) Accepting and analyzing your feelings or temptations about something are a means of truly "owning" them and then deciding whether you want to accept them or not (again, you don't have to).
4) Declining to satisfy your temptations is a means of reducing their hold over you in the long term, as it gradually weakens the temptation-reward circuit in your brain.
Wright also briefly discusses some of the more blissful and you could say "supernatural" experiences that he has had while on the Buddhist path. Like writing about how a piece of cake tastes to someone who has never eaten one, this is a difficult thing to do and in a sense it is not really possible to convey in text to someone a thing that they just have to experience. He seems to be aware of this and the book is written in full humility about the limitations of text. It was interesting to me to contrast some of the teachings of Sufism, which I'm more familiar with, with the ideas that animate Buddhist meditation. While there are areas of crossover and perhaps the ending point is similar, I think that they are genuinely different paths.
All in all this was a rewarding book and the product of a deeply humane and thoughtful mind. (less)
The book traces through the core teachings of Buddhism and how they relate to evolutionary biology, which is Wright's area of expertise. Many of our ingrained yet seemingly irrational social behaviors (i.e. flying into a rage while driving, gorging on sweets past the point of hunger) are evolutionary remnants from the time we lived as hunter-gatherers or in small tribes. While once useful these behaviors and feelings are not actually good for us today living in a modern society, nor are they good for what evolutionary biology gears us towards: protecting and spreading our own genes. Since feelings are in some sense a means of getting us to do what's good for us, these behaviors and emotions could be said to correspond to what Buddhists call "false" feelings. This was an interesting hypothesis and is clearly a product of Wright's own expertise in this field.
Much of the book also deals with Wright's own journey as a Buddhist, and he provides many helpful tips about both meditation and mindfulness. Among these are:
1) Consciously recognizing that your mind is wandering during meditation is actually a good thing, because it shows that you aware of the moment, which is the first step towards mindfulness.
2) Rather than you creating them, "thoughts think themselves" in your mind. They try to draw you into embracing them, but you are neither their slave or master. Once you become aware of that, it is easier to dismiss the ones you don't want or that are harmful to you. For example: frivolous thoughts during meditation or anxious ones when you have no reason to be unhappy.
3) Accepting and analyzing your feelings or temptations about something are a means of truly "owning" them and then deciding whether you want to accept them or not (again, you don't have to).
4) Declining to satisfy your temptations is a means of reducing their hold over you in the long term, as it gradually weakens the temptation-reward circuit in your brain.
Wright also briefly discusses some of the more blissful and you could say "supernatural" experiences that he has had while on the Buddhist path. Like writing about how a piece of cake tastes to someone who has never eaten one, this is a difficult thing to do and in a sense it is not really possible to convey in text to someone a thing that they just have to experience. He seems to be aware of this and the book is written in full humility about the limitations of text. It was interesting to me to contrast some of the teachings of Sufism, which I'm more familiar with, with the ideas that animate Buddhist meditation. While there are areas of crossover and perhaps the ending point is similar, I think that they are genuinely different paths.
All in all this was a rewarding book and the product of a deeply humane and thoughtful mind. (less)
Oct 02, 2017Indran Fernando rated it did not like it
Even if this book has its occasional thought-provoking moment, my overwhelming reaction is shock at how fluffy and slipshod the writing is. It seems as if Wright submitted a rough draft to make some quick cash. (Why waste time on an editor--just throw a goldfish on the cover and wait for the Whole-Foods-goers to take out their mandala-adorned hemp wallets.) A promising book was undermined by the author's unwillingness to do research or teach himself about Buddhism or anthropology.
Instead, he often takes the easy route by focusing on his own personality, his own anxieties & insecurities. This might have been okay if he had come across as a more likable person, but I felt trapped in a room with an uptight, narcissistic, falsely-modest bloviator. I'm glad to finally be liberated. (less)
Instead, he often takes the easy route by focusing on his own personality, his own anxieties & insecurities. This might have been okay if he had come across as a more likable person, but I felt trapped in a room with an uptight, narcissistic, falsely-modest bloviator. I'm glad to finally be liberated. (less)
Nov 18, 2017Shilpi Gowda rated it it was amazing
For the first time ever, as soon as I finished this book, I returned to the beginning and began it again.
Sep 29, 2017Radiantflux rated it it was ok · review of another edition
Shelves: audiobook, self-help, spirituality
62nd book of 2017.
I imagine the author at a diner party, demanding complete attention from those present, while he describes at length being at an intense macho meditation retreat in the Maine woods, having the unfortunate luck of sitting next to a fat flatulent person. Telling all present very seriously that he's not the sort of person who is OK with flatulence, especially from other people, especially if they are fat, but because of his very serious (but also very modest) attempts at mediation he was able to step-back from his intense hatred of the person sitting next to him, and was able to experience the beauty of each particular fart in turn, smelling different notes, and if not loving them, at least seeing their beauty for what they are. He also felt some sort of oneness with the farter next too him. Now he tells us how some super-meditator, that he (blush) could never be, was put in a brain scanner, and showed almost no brain response when smelling evil odours. Imagine that! Now throw in some random passage from either Buddhist scripture or some other pre-20th C source to make some sort of weak point. Now repeat for another +300 pages.
I would have been much happier if it had either (1) been a serious attempt at accessing the science and philosophy of meditation and enlightenment; or (2) been offered a serious discussion of Buddhism. The book offers neither. It's a shame because I think the topic itself is worthy of a serious book.(less)
I imagine the author at a diner party, demanding complete attention from those present, while he describes at length being at an intense macho meditation retreat in the Maine woods, having the unfortunate luck of sitting next to a fat flatulent person. Telling all present very seriously that he's not the sort of person who is OK with flatulence, especially from other people, especially if they are fat, but because of his very serious (but also very modest) attempts at mediation he was able to step-back from his intense hatred of the person sitting next to him, and was able to experience the beauty of each particular fart in turn, smelling different notes, and if not loving them, at least seeing their beauty for what they are. He also felt some sort of oneness with the farter next too him. Now he tells us how some super-meditator, that he (blush) could never be, was put in a brain scanner, and showed almost no brain response when smelling evil odours. Imagine that! Now throw in some random passage from either Buddhist scripture or some other pre-20th C source to make some sort of weak point. Now repeat for another +300 pages.
I would have been much happier if it had either (1) been a serious attempt at accessing the science and philosophy of meditation and enlightenment; or (2) been offered a serious discussion of Buddhism. The book offers neither. It's a shame because I think the topic itself is worthy of a serious book.(less)
Jan 26, 2019Michael Austin rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: read-in-2019
Here are a two things about myself that shaped my reading of Why Buddhism Is True
First, I like to play at evolutionary theory. I am not a scientist, but I did write a book on evolutionary psychology (Useful Fictions: Evolution, Anxiety, and the Origins of Literature) as it applies to the human attraction to literature, and, in writing this book, I read a lot of popular-science-type evolutionary psychology, including Robert Wright’s first three books. I liked them, and I thought that they were a notch above most of the genre. So, in a heavily qualified and limited way, I am a fan.
Second, I have a deep intellectual attraction to Buddhism. I love reading about it and thinking about it. It makes sense to me on an intellectual level. I do not have a strong spiritual attraction to it, though, which is not surprising because I don’t really have a strong spiritual attraction to anything. I am religious, but not spiritual. I love religions, but I don’t go in for the spooky stuff. I see religion largely as a facilitator of deep human connections, which has always made Buddhism a bit problematic for me, as, in the orthodox varieties, human connections are among the things that you are supposed to not have attachments to because they only make you miserable. I don’t disagree. But I still want human attachments.
Robert Wright’s view of Buddhism, then, is at the right level of abstraction for me. He is intellectualizing it too, as I would, and he dismisses most of the spooky stuff the beginning. In fact, he makes it clear that what he is really talking about in this book is not Buddhism as practiced in most Buddhist nations, but the sort of Westernized pseudo-Buddhism that goes in for yoga and mindfulness meditation but not for Bodhisattva vows and celibacy. He acknowledges that he is working from a very limited palette of Buddhism.
So, how does he do? There are some terrific insights in the book. Two of them, I think, stand out for their clarity and usefulness. First, he observes that natural selection causes us to anticipate more pleasure in things like food, sex, and achievement than we will actually ever feel. We are supposed to keep wanting these things, but never to feel like we “have” them (or we will stop pursuing them), so we will always overestimate the happiness that they will bring us. This puts us on a vicious cycle of trying, and failing, to achieve happiness through mechanisms that are never going to bring it to us. This is an important observation in Buddhism, and, by showing that it has an evolutionary foundation, Wright makes it all the more compelling.
The second key observation is that most of the things that motivate us can be described as illusions. What he is really talking about here is anxiety. Human beings are really good at worrying about stuff that is never going to happen, or, if it does happen, never going to be as bad as we think it is going to be. This is because natural selection does not care if we are happy. It only cares that we are surviving and reproducing. And high anxiety correlates strongly with survival. The theory here is that, if we run away from everything, we will eventually run away from something dangerous, and even if we run away from a thousand non-dangerous things, running away from the real dangerous thing just once will save our life and our genes.
Understanding this has been key to my own psychological development. It is a known thing in evolutionary theory (usually called the “Smoke Detector Principle”). I encountered it in researching my own book, and it became the basis for the cognitive self-talk that brought me out of a period of crippling anxiety many years ago. I had never connected it to Buddhism before, but it makes sense.
In both of these areas, Wright’s marriage of Buddhism and evolutionary psychology works. And it works in a way that makes the argument stronger. The Noble Truths of Buddhism really do have as scientific foundation. Desire leads to suffering. We are programmed to believe that things will make us happy, and we are programmed to overestimate the happiness they will bring us. So disappointment is inherent in desire. Similarly, we are motivated by anxiety, and we are programmed to feel a lot more anxiety than we need. So, in a very real sense, the things that make us anxious are “illusions.”
Not all of Wright’s points of contact between evolutionary psychology and Buddhism work this well. He devotes two chapters, for example (Chapters 5 and 6) to defending the Buddhist principle that the self is, on some level, an illusion. To do this, he makes the same sorts of arguments that Daniel Dennett makes in Consciousness Explained : we tend to think of ourselves as a discrete and consistent phenomenon, we see our brain as the CEO of our being, we imagine ourselves sitting in a ‘Cartesian Theater’ watching a set of concrete actions and motives that we call “us.”
These are defensible positions, but they have almost nothing to do with Buddhism, which sees the isolation of the self as the illusion, not the consistency of the self. (Hence the old joke about the Buddhist monk who orders a hot dog by saying “make me one with everything”). The idea of connectedness, or interbeing, gets fairly short shrift in Why Buddhism Is True. I find this problematic for two reasons. First, it seems to me to miss the whole point of why Buddhists say that the self is an illusion, and second, it drives the narrative further into the self (to try to understand what is really behind the illusion), whereas (I would argue) Buddhism forces the self into seeing more connections with everything else.
I think that Wright misses a huge opportunity here to talk about the fact that evolution always occurs in an ecosystem that includes, in broadest terms, the entire universe. Things that happened worlds away affected human evolution. Everything that surrounds us created the context in which we evolved. And we affect the way that other things evolve. Even within societies, human beings are adapted to other human beings. There is a strong evolutionary basis here to talk about the interconnectedness of all living things as both a Buddhist principle and a biological fact. I would have found this more interesting than a rehasing of recent evolutionary theories about the non-existence of a Cartesian Theater.
I also felt that, during the last half of the book, Wright overused the "modular mind" theory, or the idea, popular in evolutionary psychology, that our mind has a series of "modules," or brain apps, that interact with each other to produce our thoughts and actions. We may have a "get sex" module, or a "do things to be popular module," or a "understand what other people are thinking" module. This is not a generally accepted idea outside of Evopsych circles, and at best it is an extremely abstracted metaphor for what really goes on inside of our minds. I don't think that it supports all of the uses that Wright puts it to in explaining things like self-discipline, meditation, and the interplay between reason and emotions. And I don't really think it is necessary. It ends up getting in the way of his explanations more than it further supports them.
But now I’m starting to quibble. Wright narrows the case that he is making and acknowledges up front that he is using a very specific version of Buddhism to tell equally specific stories about the evolution of human consciousness. He does this, and he is a good writer. He is funny and interesting, and he makes some good points about important things. I wanted the book to be more, and I was disappointed that it was not. But, according to Wright, we always want things to be more than they are and we are always disappointed that they are not. So it would be both ungenerous and unscientific to expect Wright himself to be any different.
All of this said, I can conclude that, while I enjoyed Wright's book, it did not unseat my favorite Buddhism-and-Science mashup: The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life. This is a dialogue between a father and a son. The son, Matthieu Ricard, is a former biologist who became a Buddhist monk. The father, Jean-François Revel, is a reasonably well-known philosopher and atheist who loves his son. Through a dialectical process, they arrive (and guide the reader to) a deep understanding and appreciation of Buddhism as both an intellectual and a spiritual phenomenon. It is a phenomenal read. (less)
First, I like to play at evolutionary theory. I am not a scientist, but I did write a book on evolutionary psychology (Useful Fictions: Evolution, Anxiety, and the Origins of Literature) as it applies to the human attraction to literature, and, in writing this book, I read a lot of popular-science-type evolutionary psychology, including Robert Wright’s first three books. I liked them, and I thought that they were a notch above most of the genre. So, in a heavily qualified and limited way, I am a fan.
Second, I have a deep intellectual attraction to Buddhism. I love reading about it and thinking about it. It makes sense to me on an intellectual level. I do not have a strong spiritual attraction to it, though, which is not surprising because I don’t really have a strong spiritual attraction to anything. I am religious, but not spiritual. I love religions, but I don’t go in for the spooky stuff. I see religion largely as a facilitator of deep human connections, which has always made Buddhism a bit problematic for me, as, in the orthodox varieties, human connections are among the things that you are supposed to not have attachments to because they only make you miserable. I don’t disagree. But I still want human attachments.
Robert Wright’s view of Buddhism, then, is at the right level of abstraction for me. He is intellectualizing it too, as I would, and he dismisses most of the spooky stuff the beginning. In fact, he makes it clear that what he is really talking about in this book is not Buddhism as practiced in most Buddhist nations, but the sort of Westernized pseudo-Buddhism that goes in for yoga and mindfulness meditation but not for Bodhisattva vows and celibacy. He acknowledges that he is working from a very limited palette of Buddhism.
So, how does he do? There are some terrific insights in the book. Two of them, I think, stand out for their clarity and usefulness. First, he observes that natural selection causes us to anticipate more pleasure in things like food, sex, and achievement than we will actually ever feel. We are supposed to keep wanting these things, but never to feel like we “have” them (or we will stop pursuing them), so we will always overestimate the happiness that they will bring us. This puts us on a vicious cycle of trying, and failing, to achieve happiness through mechanisms that are never going to bring it to us. This is an important observation in Buddhism, and, by showing that it has an evolutionary foundation, Wright makes it all the more compelling.
The second key observation is that most of the things that motivate us can be described as illusions. What he is really talking about here is anxiety. Human beings are really good at worrying about stuff that is never going to happen, or, if it does happen, never going to be as bad as we think it is going to be. This is because natural selection does not care if we are happy. It only cares that we are surviving and reproducing. And high anxiety correlates strongly with survival. The theory here is that, if we run away from everything, we will eventually run away from something dangerous, and even if we run away from a thousand non-dangerous things, running away from the real dangerous thing just once will save our life and our genes.
Understanding this has been key to my own psychological development. It is a known thing in evolutionary theory (usually called the “Smoke Detector Principle”). I encountered it in researching my own book, and it became the basis for the cognitive self-talk that brought me out of a period of crippling anxiety many years ago. I had never connected it to Buddhism before, but it makes sense.
In both of these areas, Wright’s marriage of Buddhism and evolutionary psychology works. And it works in a way that makes the argument stronger. The Noble Truths of Buddhism really do have as scientific foundation. Desire leads to suffering. We are programmed to believe that things will make us happy, and we are programmed to overestimate the happiness they will bring us. So disappointment is inherent in desire. Similarly, we are motivated by anxiety, and we are programmed to feel a lot more anxiety than we need. So, in a very real sense, the things that make us anxious are “illusions.”
Not all of Wright’s points of contact between evolutionary psychology and Buddhism work this well. He devotes two chapters, for example (Chapters 5 and 6) to defending the Buddhist principle that the self is, on some level, an illusion. To do this, he makes the same sorts of arguments that Daniel Dennett makes in Consciousness Explained : we tend to think of ourselves as a discrete and consistent phenomenon, we see our brain as the CEO of our being, we imagine ourselves sitting in a ‘Cartesian Theater’ watching a set of concrete actions and motives that we call “us.”
These are defensible positions, but they have almost nothing to do with Buddhism, which sees the isolation of the self as the illusion, not the consistency of the self. (Hence the old joke about the Buddhist monk who orders a hot dog by saying “make me one with everything”). The idea of connectedness, or interbeing, gets fairly short shrift in Why Buddhism Is True. I find this problematic for two reasons. First, it seems to me to miss the whole point of why Buddhists say that the self is an illusion, and second, it drives the narrative further into the self (to try to understand what is really behind the illusion), whereas (I would argue) Buddhism forces the self into seeing more connections with everything else.
I think that Wright misses a huge opportunity here to talk about the fact that evolution always occurs in an ecosystem that includes, in broadest terms, the entire universe. Things that happened worlds away affected human evolution. Everything that surrounds us created the context in which we evolved. And we affect the way that other things evolve. Even within societies, human beings are adapted to other human beings. There is a strong evolutionary basis here to talk about the interconnectedness of all living things as both a Buddhist principle and a biological fact. I would have found this more interesting than a rehasing of recent evolutionary theories about the non-existence of a Cartesian Theater.
I also felt that, during the last half of the book, Wright overused the "modular mind" theory, or the idea, popular in evolutionary psychology, that our mind has a series of "modules," or brain apps, that interact with each other to produce our thoughts and actions. We may have a "get sex" module, or a "do things to be popular module," or a "understand what other people are thinking" module. This is not a generally accepted idea outside of Evopsych circles, and at best it is an extremely abstracted metaphor for what really goes on inside of our minds. I don't think that it supports all of the uses that Wright puts it to in explaining things like self-discipline, meditation, and the interplay between reason and emotions. And I don't really think it is necessary. It ends up getting in the way of his explanations more than it further supports them.
But now I’m starting to quibble. Wright narrows the case that he is making and acknowledges up front that he is using a very specific version of Buddhism to tell equally specific stories about the evolution of human consciousness. He does this, and he is a good writer. He is funny and interesting, and he makes some good points about important things. I wanted the book to be more, and I was disappointed that it was not. But, according to Wright, we always want things to be more than they are and we are always disappointed that they are not. So it would be both ungenerous and unscientific to expect Wright himself to be any different.
All of this said, I can conclude that, while I enjoyed Wright's book, it did not unseat my favorite Buddhism-and-Science mashup: The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life. This is a dialogue between a father and a son. The son, Matthieu Ricard, is a former biologist who became a Buddhist monk. The father, Jean-François Revel, is a reasonably well-known philosopher and atheist who loves his son. Through a dialectical process, they arrive (and guide the reader to) a deep understanding and appreciation of Buddhism as both an intellectual and a spiritual phenomenon. It is a phenomenal read. (less)
Oct 11, 2017Ross Blocher rated it really liked it
I've been interested in many of Robert Wright's other books, but this is the first one I've read. The title is misleading (and perhaps nonsensical?), but there's plenty of interesting reflection here on the benefits of mindfulness meditation, both in terms of personal health and wellbeing, and in better understanding the nature of self and the universe in ways consistent with what scientific discovery has revealed on those subjects. It is in THAT sense that Buddhism is "true", and Wright hastens to separate secular Buddhism from the metaphysical claims and figures (such as Mara, the demonic deceiver) that attend some strains of Buddhism. I feel it is strange to label any belief system as "true" or "false", terms better suited to describing individual claims.
Wright shares his own stories from various retreats, personal experience, and discussions with sage practitioners. There's a LOT of repetition here, which can prove boring, but the book is punctuated by moments of profundity that could be collated into a much shorter work of greater impact. It didn't help that I was already convinced of the thesis, which is that a habit of introspection and contemplation offers many important benefits (and Buddhism has a long and impressive history of presenting the best methods for fueling that habit). Taking the time to inspect one's thoughts, to realize we are but temporary collections of atoms, and to see there is no self... directly improves one's grasp of reality and sense of humility. Adding a filter of detachment and examination of one's emotions provides an extra beat before reacting. This one habit allows a chance to assume the best in others, to put yourself in their shoes, and to reconsider passionate or angry responses that might prove ineffective.
An expert on evolution and morality, Wright spends a lot of time exploring how natural selection has primed us with certain behaviors. He looks at many pre-programmed urges in turn, and demonstrates how they've been co-opted in ways that no longer improve our reproductive success, yet still rule our habits and interactions. Meditation can be a great tool for examining those motivations and resisting them where they are unhelpful. There are mentions here and there of brain studies that buttress these findings, though not as many as I might have expected.
There are a lot of terms related to meditation practice: schools of thought and names of techniques that I must confess have not stayed in my head. Part of it is that I heard them pronounced on the audio book, but did not see how they are spelled. The other part is that I have a hard time engaging with these other-language terms because I fear I could only employ them superficially or incompletely. That's purely my fault - I can't blame the book for that. Throughout, Wright is self-deprecating and makes clear that his years of mindfulness study have only equipped him enough to be dangerous, but nods toward the findings of advanced practitioners. I'll admit a certain level of skepticism toward those claims, and the utility of such extensive withdrawal from society, but I can't fault those who have devoted years to internal searching. There are far more harmful things they could be doing, and the world could use a lot more introspection and awareness right now. Not less.
I was about to give this three stars, but realized I was docking it mainly for the soporific narration in the audio book, which is how I consumed this. That was the longest 10 1/2 hours of my life, and I've done Scientology auditing. I had to frequently rewind to figure out where I'd left off before my mind had started wandering. Robert Wright would remind me to use that as an opportunity to examine my thoughts question the nature of the sensation of "boredom". (less)
Wright shares his own stories from various retreats, personal experience, and discussions with sage practitioners. There's a LOT of repetition here, which can prove boring, but the book is punctuated by moments of profundity that could be collated into a much shorter work of greater impact. It didn't help that I was already convinced of the thesis, which is that a habit of introspection and contemplation offers many important benefits (and Buddhism has a long and impressive history of presenting the best methods for fueling that habit). Taking the time to inspect one's thoughts, to realize we are but temporary collections of atoms, and to see there is no self... directly improves one's grasp of reality and sense of humility. Adding a filter of detachment and examination of one's emotions provides an extra beat before reacting. This one habit allows a chance to assume the best in others, to put yourself in their shoes, and to reconsider passionate or angry responses that might prove ineffective.
An expert on evolution and morality, Wright spends a lot of time exploring how natural selection has primed us with certain behaviors. He looks at many pre-programmed urges in turn, and demonstrates how they've been co-opted in ways that no longer improve our reproductive success, yet still rule our habits and interactions. Meditation can be a great tool for examining those motivations and resisting them where they are unhelpful. There are mentions here and there of brain studies that buttress these findings, though not as many as I might have expected.
There are a lot of terms related to meditation practice: schools of thought and names of techniques that I must confess have not stayed in my head. Part of it is that I heard them pronounced on the audio book, but did not see how they are spelled. The other part is that I have a hard time engaging with these other-language terms because I fear I could only employ them superficially or incompletely. That's purely my fault - I can't blame the book for that. Throughout, Wright is self-deprecating and makes clear that his years of mindfulness study have only equipped him enough to be dangerous, but nods toward the findings of advanced practitioners. I'll admit a certain level of skepticism toward those claims, and the utility of such extensive withdrawal from society, but I can't fault those who have devoted years to internal searching. There are far more harmful things they could be doing, and the world could use a lot more introspection and awareness right now. Not less.
I was about to give this three stars, but realized I was docking it mainly for the soporific narration in the audio book, which is how I consumed this. That was the longest 10 1/2 hours of my life, and I've done Scientology auditing. I had to frequently rewind to figure out where I'd left off before my mind had started wandering. Robert Wright would remind me to use that as an opportunity to examine my thoughts question the nature of the sensation of "boredom". (less)
Aug 28, 2017Richard rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: ebook, nonfiction, philosophy, cognition
I’d strongly recommend this for anyone curious about meditation, specifically the Buddhist Vipassanā “mindfulness” meditation that everyone and their dog is doing, attempting, or at least talking about.
What Robert Wright provides is the very welcome examination of the scientific basis of the claims and practice. Wright is a journalist so deeply embedded in cognitive science that he has taught in the philosophy department at Princeton and the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written several books on related topics, and taught a six-week Coursera online course on “Buddhism and Modern Psychology”, which was part of his preparation for writing this. Wright has also been meditating seriously for many years.
So you could think of this as a mostly unbiased, non-spiritual defense of Buddhism. Unlike every other book on the topic out there, he doesn’t assert the Buddha was the enlightened one and genuflect; in fact, the concept of enlightenment comes in for some rough treatment before Wright concludes that the goal isn’t as important as the attempt to progress towards that somewhat amorphous objective.
The early chapters provide the scientific basis; the later ones are about Wright’s philosophical examination of meditation — and frankly, those latter chapters got kind of repetitive and boring.
But meditation is connected in multiple ways to current cognitive science.
■ The attempt of the meditator to take control of their own thought process is related to the gradual recognition of the default mode network, which is that part of your brain that is active when you’re daydreaming, or when distracting ideas come unbidden when you’re trying to focus, or even when you're trying to get to sleep. When you’re really focused on something, this network is usually quiet, but it gets in the way a lot. Meditation is an attempt to tame that.
■ The connection between thoughts and emotions is examined. There’s a strong case here that no thought can exist without being tied somehow to an emotion, which is why your subconscious “cares enough” about it to present the thought to your conscious self. This is consistent with recent work in identity-protective cognition, which tells us that we didn’t evolve the ability to think in order to be logical and rational, but to aggressively defend those emotionally-connected thoughts. Wright mentions tribal cognition several times, which is the social version of those identity-protective mental heuristics. I agree with Wright that tribalism can be highly caustic in modern society, and he believes that meditation is the best chance at saving the world. I’m doubtful, primarily because of free riders and the coordination problem, but his point is a good one otherwise.
■ He doesn’t explicitly refer to Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 thinking modes, but the connection is obvious. Meditation is designed to take control of the automatic part of the fast, instinctive, and emotional System 1, and be capable of using the slower, deliberative, and logical System 2 whenever the practitioner desires. This also connects to the “elephant and rider” analogy in Jonathan Haidt’s excellent The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.
■ And, as I noted, mindfulness meditation is now everywhere. In the August 29, 2017 episode of the excellent science podcast STEM-Talk, the hosts interview David Spiegel, a psychologist who is one of the nation’s foremost experts on hypnosis. I listen to that podcast because it dives deep into the science, but I really wasn’t surprised when the connection between hypnosis and meditation came up early on, and Dr. Spiegel noted that they work in related ways, and that people who are good at meditation tend to be good good subjects of hypnosis.
If you’re interested in mindfulness meditation but need convincing that it isn’t just a bunch of mystical nonsense — or you’re just curious — then this is the only book out there.(less)
What Robert Wright provides is the very welcome examination of the scientific basis of the claims and practice. Wright is a journalist so deeply embedded in cognitive science that he has taught in the philosophy department at Princeton and the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written several books on related topics, and taught a six-week Coursera online course on “Buddhism and Modern Psychology”, which was part of his preparation for writing this. Wright has also been meditating seriously for many years.
So you could think of this as a mostly unbiased, non-spiritual defense of Buddhism. Unlike every other book on the topic out there, he doesn’t assert the Buddha was the enlightened one and genuflect; in fact, the concept of enlightenment comes in for some rough treatment before Wright concludes that the goal isn’t as important as the attempt to progress towards that somewhat amorphous objective.
The early chapters provide the scientific basis; the later ones are about Wright’s philosophical examination of meditation — and frankly, those latter chapters got kind of repetitive and boring.
But meditation is connected in multiple ways to current cognitive science.
■ The attempt of the meditator to take control of their own thought process is related to the gradual recognition of the default mode network, which is that part of your brain that is active when you’re daydreaming, or when distracting ideas come unbidden when you’re trying to focus, or even when you're trying to get to sleep. When you’re really focused on something, this network is usually quiet, but it gets in the way a lot. Meditation is an attempt to tame that.
■ The connection between thoughts and emotions is examined. There’s a strong case here that no thought can exist without being tied somehow to an emotion, which is why your subconscious “cares enough” about it to present the thought to your conscious self. This is consistent with recent work in identity-protective cognition, which tells us that we didn’t evolve the ability to think in order to be logical and rational, but to aggressively defend those emotionally-connected thoughts. Wright mentions tribal cognition several times, which is the social version of those identity-protective mental heuristics. I agree with Wright that tribalism can be highly caustic in modern society, and he believes that meditation is the best chance at saving the world. I’m doubtful, primarily because of free riders and the coordination problem, but his point is a good one otherwise.
■ He doesn’t explicitly refer to Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 thinking modes, but the connection is obvious. Meditation is designed to take control of the automatic part of the fast, instinctive, and emotional System 1, and be capable of using the slower, deliberative, and logical System 2 whenever the practitioner desires. This also connects to the “elephant and rider” analogy in Jonathan Haidt’s excellent The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.
■ And, as I noted, mindfulness meditation is now everywhere. In the August 29, 2017 episode of the excellent science podcast STEM-Talk, the hosts interview David Spiegel, a psychologist who is one of the nation’s foremost experts on hypnosis. I listen to that podcast because it dives deep into the science, but I really wasn’t surprised when the connection between hypnosis and meditation came up early on, and Dr. Spiegel noted that they work in related ways, and that people who are good at meditation tend to be good good subjects of hypnosis.
If you’re interested in mindfulness meditation but need convincing that it isn’t just a bunch of mystical nonsense — or you’re just curious — then this is the only book out there.(less)
Aug 31, 2018Carrie Poppy rated it it was amazing
Life changing.
I was a huge fan of Wright's EVOLUTION OF GOD where he tracked the progress in humanity's idea of God from an evolutionary paradigm. That is why I was surprised by his new book: In what sense did he mean Buddhism is "true"? Well, he is still a naturalist but he has discovered that Buddhism has done the best job of describing the human problem and how to transcend our natural states and live happier, more peaceful lives--namely, through the practice of meditation. He even has some eschatological urgency to his mission since he thinks the forces of tribalization might end humanity's prospects for future thriving and so the best prospects for becoming nontribal is through becoming mindful souls who can transcend our fears and anxieties. Also, Wright's Buddhism is itself nontribal in that he describes the practice in terms of science and psychology and so requires no religious attachment in order to benefit from these spiritual exercises. As a Christian, I see no problem in fully embracing his insights and recommendations for meditating and becoming mindful. It simply reinforces the idea that spiritual growth requires deep self-knowledge and reflection, and too many of us treat these as optional. (less)
