Dave's Mormon Inquiry Weblog: Book Reviews

The C-Word

Thu, 19 Feb 2004 19:35:49 GMT

The use of the term "cult" to denigrate non-mainstream Christian denominations like Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and Latter-day Saints was popularized in the 1960s. Yet when real religious cults like the People's Temple (Jonestown) and the Branch Davidians (Waco) emerged in America, they were led by Christian ministers and were populated by what can only be termed fundamentalist Christians. The irony seems lost on Christian apologists, who show a remarkable inability to draw the obvious conclusion, still thinking the term "cult" applies to everyone but themselves -- how convenient, how self-serving, how hypocritical. Since the term "cult" is here to stay, what we really need is a defensible definition and exposition of what a cult or cult behavior is, to counter the inaccurate, perjorative use perpetuated by Christian apologists.

Enter Arthur Deikman, a practicing psychiatrist and academic, who in 1990 published The Wrong Way Home: Uncovering the Patterns of Cult Behavior in American Society (my short summary and review is posted here on this site, with a permanent link on the sidebar). I stumbled across it at my local library. Wrong Way Home is the first discussion of "cults" I have encountered that succeeds in defining the phenomenon objectively and considers the degree to which it is reflected in institutions of all types in American society. Corporations, the government, the military, religious denominations or congregations -- all these groups might reflect cult behavior. Per Deikman, "cult behavior" is a particular type of group dynamic to which any group or institution may succumb, characterized by a strong emphasis on group compliance, dependence on a leader, devaluing outsiders, and avoiding dissent. Knowledge is power; understanding Deikman's discussion of cult behavior will allow you to recognize it in the institutions you affiliate with and avoid some of its deleterious effects. Go read my review, then find the book and read it too.

You may be the kind of person (and there's nothing wrong with this) who is comfortable in hierarchical organizations, who likes clear lines of authority, and who favors defined rules and clear directives. If so, this book will raise your awareness of how those exercising power in such organizations might unwittingly (or perhaps quite wittingly) lead their department, division, agency, congregation, or denomination to adopt these modes of behavior and conduct. Forewarned is forearmed; if you don't know what to look for and recognize, you are vulnerable. If you are informed, you can be part of the solution rather than part of the problem in your favorite corporate entity.

On the other hand, you may be the kind of person (and there's nothing wrong with this either) who has never been comfortable in corporate settings, whether that be in business corporations, the military, bureacracies of any sort, or corporate religions. If so, this book will help you understand why you are not comfortable in those organizations. Maybe you don't have "a problem with authority," maybe you aren't an incurable non-conformist, maybe you haven't simply succumbed to the wiles of the adversary. It is possible you simply have a naturally heightened sensitivity to the attributes of cult behavior in organizations and are uncomfortable in such settings. This book will help you understand why you are running an arts and crafts shop in Newport Beach instead of following Dad's footsteps up the corporate ladder. Or maybe why your uncle quit his Mormon mission after three months. Or maybe why you feel a little nauseous after every weekly department meeting. You could really learn something from this book.

Thomas Jefferson

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 04:58:43 GMT

A New World Man

Just read Joyce Appleby's Thomas Jefferson (Henry Holt, 2003), a short biography of our finest president. So accomplished was he that being President for eight years did not even make his short gravestone resume, which notes the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and the University of Virginia as the three achievements he was most proud of. He was one of only a handful of men to witness both revolutions that define the modern world, the American Revolution in the 1770s and the French Revolution in the 1790s. This frontier aristocrat, whose boyhood backyard stretched 500 miles to the Mississippi, defined the Enlightenment for succeeding centuries. Not Rousseau, not Voltaire, not Locke, not Adam Smith, but this young American wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

He paved the way for modern America. First, he almost singlehandedly defeated the Federalist agenda of establishing an American social and political aristocracy by forming an opposition party, getting elected President in the election of 1800, and sweeping away the pomp and circumstance grafted onto representative government by Washington and Adams. And he did it peacefully -- it was a bloodless democratic revolution. Second, he purchased Louisiana (for a mere $15 million), doubling the size of America and paving the way to the Pacific. He gave us a continent.

Great men have their tragic flaws. Hagiographies gloss over, ignore, or simply rewrite these flaws, especially for religious figures and leaders, but one must open one's eyes to the flaws to really know the man, warts and all. His ambivalent position on slavery tarnishes Jefferson to the modern mind, although had he pushed an anti-slavery theme he would have been marginalized politically. He did include an anti-slavery paragraph in his first draft of the Declaration (it was removed in view of southern sensibilities). Even so, Washington manumitted his slaves at death; Jefferson did not. And his relationship with Sally Hemmings, while still controversial, is increasingly regarded as probable. Perhaps it shows us something of the limits of even the most exemplary human character.

In a burst of synchronicity, Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, the same day as his nemesis turned friend John Adams passed away, fifty years to the day after they both signed the Declaration of Independence. He is buried on the estate at Monticello. Look west across the misty Blue Ridge Mountains and you'll glimpse the American promised land he never entered.

You Can't Get Any Higher Than This

Wed, 04 Feb 2004 06:44:09 GMT

Chomolungma, the Nepalese Mother Goddess of the World

I listened to the 8-disc unabridged reading of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air last week -- believe me, it will take your breath away. Presented by a reader who can do dead-ringer Kiwi, Aussi, and dude accents, this narrative of life and death on the upper reaches of Mt. Everest really came alive. I thought it would just be a story about mountain climbing on Everest (see here for interactive photos at a nice PBS site on that theme), but in fact the book is an extended inquiry into the foibles of human judgment in extreme situations -- life or death decisions that you or I might face only once or twice in a lifetime, if that. The book is riveting; it's a story you'll never forget, ever.

Ordinarily, the loss of several members of a climbing expedition would be a merely human tragedy. But with Krakauer along, a veteran adventure writer as well as an experienced climber, the tragedy acquired a literary dimension. Only by special dispensation does God place a gifted writer at the scene of such a sublime and troubling event. Don't spurn the offering; read it, or better yet, hear it.

Why blog this here? First, because it's my weblog and I want to. Second, I am struck by the deep irony that only because of this tragedy and Krakauer's resulting bestseller did he have the authorial capital with his publisher to tackle Under the Banner of Heaven, his recent survey of Mormon polygamy as practiced by fundamentalists in the 20th century and mainstream Mormons in the 19th century. No, I'm not suggesting divine intent, but it's an odd and unlikely literary conjunction.

This Book Has Ruined Me

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 08:56:24 GMT

A traveller from an antique land views a ruin

Christopher Woodward, an Englishman and Director of the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath, England, has written a beguiling little book entitled In Ruins (Pantheon Books, 2001), complementing an exhibition of the same name and theme at his museum. Go find it at your local library and you will be well rewarded. Rather than a book praising ancient structures and their remains, Woodward gives us instead a visit with those who have seen ruins, a celebration of the ruin as archetype, a portrait of the artist as a Jung man, compassed 'round by mossy slabs now earthbound.

Woodward peeks over the shoulders of those whose path he retraces amongst the ruins of Italy, Greece, and the Near East, artists, poets, and travelers who painted, versed, and lettered their way through the visible remains of the ancient world. Ruins, it seems, are a creative force. Thus Charles Dickens, surveying the sleeping remnants of Roman greatness near the Appian Way at gloomy dusk, wrote (p. 39):

I almost felt as if the sun would never rise again,
but look its last, that night, upon a ruined world.

Thus Shelley, among the Baths of Caracella, found inspiration for Prometheus Unbound (p. 67):

To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

Thus Woodward himself, viewing the Coliseum in Rome, now tended by keepers who kill weeds, polish rocks, and lock the gates at 6 pm, muses (p. 31):

At nightfall one day in the 1820s Stendahl watched an Englishman ride his horse
through the deserted arena. I wish that could be me.

Why blog this book here, you ask? You know, it wasn't until halfway through In Ruins that it hit me how pervasive is the ruin motif in the Book of Mormon. And, while almost entirely forgotten today, fanciful tales of the former inhabitants of the woodlands of eastern North America, the Moundbuilders, flourished in the 19th century. A creative force, indeed. But I will save further investigation of that interesting theme for another blog. Instead I will give a list of some striking photos of ruins in North America (a theme not covered in Woodward's book), some ancient and some more recent, to illustrate how ruins do, in fact, have more impact on us than we may initially recognize. See what you think.

Great Serpent Mound, Ohio
The Alamo, Texas
Cahokia and Monks Mound, Illinois
Totem Poles, Pacific Northwest and Canada
Petroglyphs and Rock Art, Southwest
Old North Church, Boston ("One if by land, two if by sea")
Appomatox Courthouse, Virginia
Pueblo Ruins, Southwest
USS Arizona, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
Horseshoe Canyon, Utah (Anasazi rock art--you gotta see this!)
Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (Pueblo site)
Statute of Liberty, in Paris, in America, in the Future?

The Metaphysical Club

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 08:41:57 GMT

In The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001), Louis Menand tells the story of America's only home-grown philosophical school, Pragmatism. He tells it well--the book won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2002. A historian, Menand approaches Pragmatism through the professional biographies of four thinkers who together created it: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. The title is misleading--Pragmatism is anti-metaphysical to the core. It might better be called Philosophical Pluralism. I'm reviewing it here because Pragmatism is a corrective for overreaching by the two camps of absolute truth in today's world, religion and science. See my earlier review of Stephen Toulmin's Return to Reason. Pragmatism speaks to how people really come to believe the things they believe.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. - Soldier, Jurist, Pragmatist

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was one of the few Harvard men in his class to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War, and he did so with courage and distinction. The war colored his future views against absolutist positions. He later socialized and studied with both James and Peirce, and at 40 he had a faculty position at Harvard. Holmes was almost immediately appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and later to the United States Supreme Court. He eschewed doctrinaire reasoning: "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience," he penned (p. 341). In his Lochner dissent, he said that "general propositions do not decide concrete cases" (p. 342). So what does? Common law judges, using their "beliefs, sentiments, customs, values, policies, prejudices"--in a word, experience, or possibly culture (p. 342). Judgment, not logic, describes the process.

William James comes across as the least brilliant but the best writer of the bunch. Like Nietzsche, James was a psychological philosopher who had a knack for insightful concepts and readable prose, and he is still quite readable a century later. In his essay The Will to Believe, James used Pragmatism to defend the legitimacy of religious belief in an increasingly scientific culture. If our collective grasp of reality is irredeemably pluralistic, then no one perspective can read the others out of the book of human knowledge and experience. But Pragmatism is not a philosophical answer book; rather, it tries to be "an account of the way people think--the way they come up with ideas, form beliefs, and reach decisions" (p. 351). Of course, that account touches the way people form religious beliefs as well as the way they form scientific or aesthetic beliefs, so Pragmatism defends religious belief for a price.

Charles Sanders Peirce was American philosophy's missed opportunity. Brilliant and broadly trained in science and mathematics, he was also quirky and rather self-absorbed. He failed to gain a position in academic philosophy despite the dedicated sponsorship of his friend William James. Much of his later work was therefore fragmentary and incomplete, as he struggled to maintain his health and his finances in the face of unemployment and depression. Yet, Peirce might nevertheless be rightly regarded as the founder of both Pragmatism and modern Semiotics (the theory of signs). A short passage from Menand:

For Peirce, knowing was inseparable from what he called semiosis, the making of signs, and of the making of signs there is no end. If you look up a word in the dictionary, you find it defined by a string of other words, the meanings of which can be discovered by looking them up in a dictionary, leading to more words to be looked up in turn. There is no exit from the dictionary. Peirce didn't simply think that language is like that. He thought that the universe is like that.

John Dewey, Philosopher and Educator

John Dewey favored education the way James favored religion. If you attended public school in America, you can thank the innovative Dewey in part for your doing projects, experiments, and "manipulative learning activities" rather than memorizing passages from dead English poets. He was the moving force behind the formation of the AAUP and the establishment of academic freedom for college professors. He was quite involved in various progressive social causes and, with his pleasant, mild personality, became sort of an ambassador to America for philosophy (he lived until 1952!). His engagement and his educational philosophy reflected his technical epistemological theory, which saw knowledge as being tightly linked to and dependent on doing and acting (p. 322). His "experimental logic" followed James in using psychology to inform philosophy. To do Dewey justice here, I'll quote from the Dewey entry in the IEP:

Dewey came to believe that a productive, naturalistic approach to the theory of knowledge must begin with a consideration of the development of knowledge as an adaptive human response to environing conditions aimed at an active restructuring of these conditions. Unlike traditional approaches in the theory of knowledge, which saw thought as a subjective primitive out of which knowledge was composed, Dewey's approach understood thought genetically, as the product of the interaction between organism and environment, and knowledge as having practical instrumentality in the guidance and control of that interaction. Thus Dewey adopted the term "instrumentalism" as a descriptive appellation for his new approach.

Conclusion. Pragmatism is not of merely historical interest. As Menand the historian points out in his final chapter, Pragmatism disappeared almost overnight at the start of the Cold War as equity and tolerance, hallmarks of Dewey's approach especially, went into sudden eclipse (p. 438-41). Then, forty years later, the Cold War simply evaporated and Pragmatism reemerged as a potent force. Seems almost like history, not logic, is pulling the strings of philosophy, doesn't it? Too, the sparkling Richard Rorty is the current exponent of Pragmatism, working to hold the middle ground between the representational absolutist claims of science and postmodern skepticism. That middle ground has something to offer religion as well as science and philosophy, and to us, we who ponder all three disciplines. Philosophy is, after all, really about us, not our disciplines.

Return to Reason

Tue, 02 Dec 2003 06:41:45 GMT

Stephen Toulmin

I just finished Return to Reason (Harvard Univ. Press, 2001), a highly accessible summary of Stephen Toulmin's version of pragmatism, released in paperback in 2003. Toulmin, a seasoned philosopher on the faculty at USC, brings together much of his earlier work in this manageable (238 pages) volume. In the first half of the book he recounts the rise and fall of the modern era's rationality project, erected on the foundation of Euclidean mathematics and Newtonian physics but leveled, in the 20th century, by Poincare's chaotic mathematics, Einstein's relativity physics, and Heisenberg's quantum mechanics. It's not just that things don't quite add up anymore; they never really did. This was evident even in the 17th century to Leibniz from the failure of Newton's physics to give a closed solution to the three-body problem (which is symbolized, I think, on the front cover).

In the second half of the book, Toulmin reviews the potential for reason and reasonableness (his preferred terms for the pragmatic approach, contrasted with arid rationality) to pick up the pieces. He applauds case studies and the clinical approach employed in such areas as medical ethics, ethnography, and institutional economics. He prescribes Aristotelean phronesis as a corrective to three centuries of overemphasis on now-discredited episteme. A defensible Theory of Something is better than a failed Theory of Everything, it seems. He likes Aristotle, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Dewey, and spends time on each in the course of his discussion.

How does this approach work when transposed to the specific area of religious knowledge? Toulmin treats pragmatic moral reasoning in several contexts and criticizes rationalist science for sending moral considerations into exile, but he never adopts the "feelings of the heart" arguments that earlier pragmatists used to defend and justify religious belief. Applying his more general discussion from the book, I think he would look askance at "religion writ large," a religious Theory of Everything, but have warmer feelings toward "religion writ small," religious conviction grounded in human experience, reason, and moral sense. I'll quote one paragraph, the frontpiece to Chapter 12, "The World of Where and When":

Everyday experience reinforces the recognition that the seventeenth century stood the human situation on its head. Like Virginia Woolf's novels, the essays of Montaigne convey the texture of the world we live in better than any theory. Thus, pragmatism and skepticism are the beginning of a wisdom that is better than the dreams of the rationalists (p. 190).

The Transformation of American Religion

Wed, 19 Nov 2003 06:52:45 GMT

The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith

This new book is by Alan Wolfe (Free Press, 2003). Written by a sociologist, this interesting new book seems quite friendly to religion as a whole, but paints a picture of watered-down modern American religion that is "practicing the culture" rather than "practicing the faith." A thorough review of the book at Christianity Today gives the following quote: Christians and Jews . . . have ignored doctrines, reinvented traditions, switched denominations, redefined morality, and translated their obligation to witness into a lifestyle. Ouch! Look up Mormonism in the index when you see it at your local bookstore and see how we measure up (can't do much worse).

Update: Took my own advice and went by Barnes and Noble. They didn't have Radio Userland Kick Start but they did have Wolfe's book, with eight pages devoted to the Mormons and how they are the exception to the general decline in morality observed in society and many churches. Among Mormon advantages he noted the complete lack of theological rigor (you can believe whatever you want), the crisp, functional corporate structure, the feel-good focus of religious life and worship, and the focus on proselyting to build membership. It's strange, really: Christians hate us (we're not "their kind of Christian," it seems); sociologists love us (Mormonism works for Mormons while other denominations seem to be failing). Go figure.

Online Reviews of Under the Banner of Heaven

Tue, 19 Aug 2003 22:17:08 GMT

Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven continues to draw media attention, most recently in a short piece highlighting Krakauer in Monday's Seattle Times ("Outdoor Writer Krakauer Examines Violence in Mormon History"). In the article, Krakauer responds to the rather pointed criticism leveled at his recent book by LDS officials and supporters, saying he "felt some of their attacks are really unfair and untrue." Other favorable reviews have been published by the New York Times ("Thou Shalt Kill") and CNN ("New Krakauer Provocative").

Critical reviews include one in the Boston Globe ("Among the Believers," by Terryl Givens, an LDS scholar). The semi-official Mormon response by Richard E. Turley, the Managing Director of the Family and Church History Dept. of the LDS Church, can be found at the FAIR website ("Faulty History").