Neuropean Not-So-Buddhism and Other Mystical Experiences

Daniel's comments on Caleb's comments on the much-gummed Brooks piece are worth reading, and he is right to coin a new phrase. Indeed, that commenter somewhere in the Scene combox below my post on the Brooks piece is also right to emphasize (as does Daniel and Ross) that Buddhism is really the wrong word to slap on the Eros lo Volt! crowd.

While I'm on a Rorty kick (see below), I should also point out that the strange newness of this intellectual western scientific mysticism was somehow lost on Rorty, who thought that God and Truth would simply wink out from neglect and fruitlessness if we dedicated life to whatever talk wins in an open encounter. Rorty strangely failed to take having our cake and eating it too all the way down, failed to see Jung in the shadow of Freud, failed to see how, if Humbert had lived, he could easily have converted (or converted on his deathbed!) without creating any further paradoxes or regressing away from his character.

Rorty seemed to think of religion as the one pathology that boundless personal idiosyncrasy could somehow not thrive on. This is a major failure of the imagination where religion is concerned -- or at any rate 'spirituality', which, as religion without a dogma, is not quite what this Neuropean Buddhism thing is either. Bumper sticker version: Rorty can't explain Wilde. That's why Rieff is a better Freudian. Ironic, isn't it? Rorty is also wrong on opinion -- or rather on the collective unconscious. Still love the guy. But I digress.

One other thing on Daniel's dukkha reference:

In the March 1992 issue of the Atlantic one could read about Dr. Ralph G.H. Siu, author of Less Suffering for Everybody. Dr. Siu is the founder of the new science of panetics, which aims to help reduce suffering by designing scientific criteria for quantifying it. (He has named his proposed unit of suffering the dukkha, from the Pali language spoken by the Buddha.) Having determined the quotient in dukkhas of every known kind of suffering, we could construct dukkha flow diagrams, which would display the net suffering costs (or benefits) of policy alternatives by charting the degree to which the sum of dukkhas relieved by it. "Someday," Dr. Siu has suggested, "you could diagram the whole United States. Can you imagine all the thousands, all the millions, of streams of dukkhas going in and out?"

That's from "Rousseau and the Discovery of Political Compassion" by Cliff Orwin in the edited volume The Legacy of Rousseau (Chicago, 1997). Siu has disappeared, but his dukkha flow diagrams now exist and flourish, marketed under various names (Sitemeter, Google Analytics, etc.).