Wisdom in Exile. Lama Jampa Thaye

strangely enough, in these two systems, one may still discern the ghost of Christianity, as we shall see.

      In recent times, political ideology has thus come to enjoy some of the unquestioning faith that was previously accorded to religion. The roots of such a development actually lie in the Reformation itself, when Luther’s attack on the hierarchical authority of Catholic Christianity in matters of religion soon spilled over into a demand by Anabaptists and other revolutionary Millenarians that society and authority should be levelled: a re-ordering that they associated with the return of Christ and his thousand-year kingdom over which he would rule together with the just. Although the German Peasants’ Revolt of 1525 and the various uprisings of the subsequent decade in Europe were crushed, they were harbingers of what was to come.⁴

      In the event, it would take nearly three centuries for a revolutionary movement finally to succeed in its aim of a total reconstitution of society, when the French Revolutionaries seized power at the end of the eighteenth century. However, by this time, the essentially apocalyptic Christian view of history that had been revolution’s initial impulse had been obscured. Revolution was to be, from then on, in the hands of the officially secular and anti-religious. Nevertheless, all revolutionary movements up to the present day are, in important respects, still indebted to Millenarian Christian views. All these movements anticipate an apocalypse that will consume the unrighteous and be followed by the age of perfection to be enjoyed by the just – as, indeed, the post-Reformation movements had envisioned.

      Despite the aspirations of its devotees, who are still highly influential in our culture, utopia has not put in an appearance. Its failure to do so should alert us to the intrinsic and inescapable flaw in this pattern of thought: its externalisation of the search for perfection. Contrary to what political ideologies assert, a totally positive re-ordering of society cannot take place in the absence of an interior transformation. Unless the actual roots of the suffering that we inflict upon ourselves and others are dissolved in the individual heart, political action is, at best, doomed to disappoint, and is more often likely to be disastrous. In short, as Buddha taught, it is only by cultivating a freedom from the tyranny of selfishness through sustained attention to ethics, meditation and wisdom that any engagement with the world can be well-founded. This is a point to which we will return in Chapter 4.

      By contrast, political ideologies, even those which seem benevolent in their intentions, rely for their energy upon the notion of external enemies – often, one suspects, to spare their followers the challenge of the confrontation with the enemy within. We see this time after time, when at last the revolution, having warred first with its visible enemies, finally consumes its own children, as in the French Revolutionary Terror of the 1790s. Again, we will have cause to say more about this later.

      If, in recent centuries, political ideologies have offered many a supposed route to happiness, science provides another. The rise of science itself is usually associated with the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ‘Age of Reason’ and the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ respectively. In those centuries, a new type of thinker achieved prominence: the ‘intellectual’ or ‘free thinker’, who came to replace the Church-sanctioned scholar, priest or minister as the new figure of prestige and authority.⁵ Yet this development too, as with the rise of a political culture, also has roots in the Reformation. There, Luther’s insistence on the primacy of the individual conscience, informed only by the Bible and not by tradition, was a first step towards the creation of a free-thinking intellectual, even though Luther had intended only a new orthodoxy.

      Even the free thinkers of the seventeenth century did not start off as explicitly anti-religious. The greatest of them, René Descartes (1596–1650), hoped, as a loyal Catholic, to endow theism with a sure defence when he argued that the existence and nature of God could be determined solely by the free exercise of reason.⁶ In so doing, he contradicted St Thomas Aquinas,⁷ perhaps the greatest of Christian thinkers, who, despite his Aristotelianism, had ruled that some matters were still the domain only of revelation and inaccessible to reason.

      Unfortunately for Descartes, just as Luther before him, his work would have entirely unintended consequences. Luther had failed to anticipate that, in making the Bible available to all, he would merely ensure that now there would be hundreds of different interpretations of Scripture, culminating in one that would reject it entirely. So too, Descartes did not foresee the consequences of his innovation. He had failed to anticipate that, by the end of the eighteenth century, the free exercise of reason would reach its inevitable apotheosis in the work of truly post-Christian thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Hume, who would respectively use it to satirise religious authority, plan for an entirely secular society and demolish any case for God’s manifestation in nature.

      Thus, by the nineteenth century, Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, was a defeated and discredited force among the opinion makers of the West. The notion was by now firmly entrenched that, through the application of reason to the natural world in scientific analysis, nature could be forced to yield up its secrets. Any sense of a sacred presence in nature – one demonstrated in mediaeval Catholicism by its shrines and other holy places – had been banished, first by the iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation and now by the new science. Thus grew the belief that the physical world, society and, finally, the mind itself, could all be understood and re-ordered on rational lines, and, with this, suffering would be banished. In short, the idea of the scientist as a kind of substitute God – who has assumed powers previously ascribed by Christianity to the Creator – was now in place, as slyly dissected in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein early in the nineteenth century.⁸

      There were, of course, dissenters from this mood of optimism, but even they, whether Romantics, or, some time later, Nietzsche, felt that modern humankind lived in an irredeemably de-sacralised world and was, likewise, forever cut off from the continuity of human experience present in tradition. Relatively few, such as the English poet William Blake (1757–1827), seem not to have completely accepted this.

      In such a way, scientific praxis became illegitimately wedded to an ideology that might more properly be termed ‘scientism’.⁹ Although scientism claims the authority of science, it has as many unexamined assumptions as any form of theism. The roots of this grim alchemical wedding between science and ideology lie in the anti-religious philosophical materialism that grew steadily throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and now enjoys considerable popularity amongst those who regard themselves as both fashionable and intellectual.

      In an amusing parallel to the optimism of the political ideologues concerning their utopian societies, devotees of this scientistic ideology confidently anticipate the day when the ‘problem of consciousness’ will be solved and all will be forced to accept the materialist thesis. In the meantime, any beneficial advances, such as, for instance, in medical care and treatment, properly due to the application of genuine scientific praxis by scientists, can be falsely claimed for materialism.

      It is essential to be clear about this point: the analysis to determine which particular physical processes are implicated in a particular disorder or disease, and, likewise, the formulation of specific remedies, does not entail a commitment to any one particular world-view of the ultimate nature of reality. Hence, the medical researcher may be Christian, Jewish, materialist or Buddhist, as scientific praxis is merely based upon the observation and understanding of how particular causes and conditions interact to produce particular effects in a given situation.

      However, it is by this illegitimate stratagem of disguising itself as science that scientism attempts to maintain its prestige. In this regard, it is noteworthy that it is particularly popular among those who are often untutored in science but may be hostile to religion for other reasons.

      Just as surely as the blindness in political vision has had unfortunate consequences, so also with the scientistic ideology. Unchecked, there is every possibility that it will render sentient beings into mere scientific specimens, whose defects and malfunctions it imagines can be eliminated and whose lives are to be managed from the time of controlled conception to controlled death. Its ambitions are such that it is determined to deny that human beings have consciousness and moral agency, by asserting that they are