"He is an happy man, that hath learned to read himself, more than all books."

Theodore Dalrymple is someone I find, if not a kindred, an allied spirit, which is to say our paths are at an acute angle to each other, not that far apart:  a nonbeliever (so far) with great respect for tradition (I'm more of a stealth believer with much less patience with tradition); an essayist (for City Journal and New English Review) who misses and emulates the confidence and elegance bestowed by civilization; a "deliberate" (a new word I'm trying out, connoting balance, for "moderate") who scorns the intoxicating distortions of extremes:

It is true that the evangelicals exert a strong influence; but that is what democracy is about. There are, after all, a lot of them in the country and they cannot be disenfranchised. No doubt they have a moral vision that they wish to impose on the country, but so does everybody else. To argue that a woman has a right to an abortion because she is sovereign over her own body is no less a moral position than that to kill a conceptus is ethically equivalent to shooting a man in cold blood in the street. Personally I think that both these positions are wrong, and that so long as the debate is posed in these terms it will remain crude and generate a lot of hatred.

He has a long essay on "the new atheists" that's worth reading, in which I found this quote that I like a lot. It's from Characters of Virtues and Vices by Joseph Hall (full text at the link), Doctor of Divinity, an Anglican divine and "moderate Puritan" of the seventeenth century for whom "life is instinct wth meaning":

He is an happy man, that hath learned to read himself, more than all books; and hath so taken out this lesson, that he can never forget it: that knows the world, and cares not for it; that, after many traverses of thoughts, is grown to know what he may trust to; and stands now equally armed for all events: that hath got the mastery at home; so as he can cross his will without a mutiny, and so please it that he makes it not a wanton: that, in earthly things, wishes no more than nature; in spiritual, is ever graciously ambitious: that, for his condition, stands on his own feet, not needing to lean upon the great; and can so frame his thoughts to his estate, that when he hath least, he cannot want, because he is as free from desire, as superfluity: that hath seasonably broken the headstrong restiness of prosperity; and can now manage it, at pleasure: upon whom, all smaller crosses light as hailstones upon a roof; and, for the greater calamities, he can take them as tributes of life and tokens of love; and, if his ship be tossed, yet he is sure his anchor is fast. If all the world were his, he could be no other than he is; no whit gladder of himself, no whit higher in his carriage; because he knows, that contentment lies not in the things he hath, but in the mind that values them.

After holding another quote from Hall up against an excerpt from Sam Harris's antireligion screed The End of Faith, Dalrymple asks:

Who sounds more charitable, more generous, more just, more profound, more honest, more humane: Sam Harris or Joseph Hall, D.D., late lord bishop of Exeter and of Norwich?

No doubt it helps that Hall lived at a time of sonorous prose, prose that merely because of its sonority resonates in our souls; prose of the kind that none of us, because of the time in which we live, could ever equal. But the style applies to the thought as well as the prose.

Dalrymple then wrote a follow-up essay in the New English Review on the violence of reader reactions to his essay on the new atheists, ruing the fact that he had provoked the very extremism he sought to eschew.

It seems to me that a sense of a transcendent meaning or purpose to existence is a great comfort, and something that is sorely lacking for the great majority of young Europeans. 

This is not at all the same thing as wishing to live under a theocracy, in which conformity to the outward observances of belief are enforced. But some of the responses I received to an article I wrote recently for The City Journal, in which I suggested that the best-selling books by militant atheists, that have appeared with the suddenness of a change of hemlines in the fashion world, did not advance any new arguments against the existence of God (indeed, you would have by now to be a very great philosopher to advance a new argument either for or against), and that used a historiography of religion that was fundamentally flawed and dishonest, were so vehement that you might have supposed that I was Torquemada or Khomenei rather than a mere scribbler expressing an opinion that was, in effect, a plea for greater subtlety of understanding.

A plea for greater subtlety of understanding. Did I say kindred?  Maybe I should've.

(Hat tip:  The Misfit.)

P.S.  More and more I think so; here's Dalrymple sounding quite ambiva- :

The question of whether morals and values are absolute or relative – a question to which I am inclined to give different answers at different times and on different occasions, according to my mood and my interlocutor – is perhaps the most crucial one of our time. No doubt my wavering is a sign of lack of intellectual power: at my time of life I should have worked out a wholly consistent position, and the fact that I have not done so probably means that I now never shall. The problem is simply too difficult for me, and I lack the patience or persistence to worry at it until I have found the indubitably correct answer – if there is one, that is.

And after that humorous beginning, what a wise and thoughtful essay it turns out to be.  "A recently retired doctor and psychiatrist working in a slum hospital and prison in Birmingham, England," Dalrymple (a k a Dr. Anthony Daniels) reads Lorca's play Yerma and relates it to the predicament of young British Muslim women he saw in his practice.  As someone who came of age on a less extreme but related cusp in women's identities, and who was so confounded by the challenge of "having it all" that it sometimes seems I ended up wth none of it, I was not so much struck as clobbered by this:

The young Moslem women were thus, like Yerma, caught on the cusp of a profound change or cultural shift. They were partly of a non-individualistic culture, in which social shame and duty are more important than personal guilt and happiness; but also partly of an individualistic culture, in which personal guilt and happiness are more important than social shame and duty. The conflict within them was not reconcilable, and I do not think I have encountered states of misery to equal theirs, short of civil war. [...]

The question of whether the old social system was a bad one, morally much worse than the new one in any absolute sense, doesn’t seem to me to be quite the right one. The real question is this: can it be maintained in a situation in which people do not accept it unthinkingly as inevitable, as the only possible way to live?

The answer is that it can probably be maintained for a time, but only by force or the threat of force, and at the cost of a great deal of avoidable misery. It is not that freedom conduces always to happiness; clearly it does not. It is rather that, once people can conceive of alternatives to the course in life offered to them as the only one, they are changed forever, and to deny them opportunities that they once might never even have known were there (and therefore were not there), is to inflict intolerable misery on them.

Think I'll go on a binge.  If you care to join me, there's lots more here and here.

Comments

[Icepick]

Wow. The way Althouse tears into Glenn Greenwald for his run-on sentences, can you imagine what she'd do to Joseph Hall?! Yeah, sonorous or not, Hall would have to tighten that up if he wanted to survive in the blogging world.

/ pointless literary critique

[amba]

She'd tear him a new . . . semicolon?

[Icepick]

Ouch.

[Richard]

This is why I have taken to calling myself (if I'm forced to label myself) a "Schopenhauerian atheist" to distinguish myself from the modern, reductionist atheism of someone like Dawkins. I don't believe in a "higher power" or any form of "God," but I'm open to the possibility that something "survives" the death of the body or that the "mind" is more than the brain.

[amba]

A Schopenhauerian atheist. Hmmm. Another new point on my map of the world.

[Richard]

I think his version of transcendental idealism offers a way to bypass this pointless theism/atheism dialectic. It was discussed here:

"See previous post on Schopenhauer who essentially solves, without realizing it, the theoretical possibility (beyond empiricism) of how this situation might be understood. His version, which never even mentions reincarnation (and isn’t about that), might give a hint. It is not a question of a psyche-soul surviving death, but of the source of representations that was never born and never dies in a relationship of space-time and something not in space-time. Unless you have developed an alternate possibility by whatever method, that bardo would induce complete blackout. Remember the ‘experiencer’ you take as you doesn’t survive death.
Note that Schopenhauer didn’t believe in souls, and wasn’t trying to explicate reincarnation. His indirect stumbling backwards into the solution is therefore all the more valuable, ironically."

http://darwiniana.com/2007/01/13/reincarnation-hopeless-confusion/

From Dale Jacquette's book "The Philosophy of Schopenhauer:"

"Schopenhauer’s Kantian and Platonic metaphysics is tempered by its uniquely Buddhistic and Hinduistic, rather than Jewish, Christian or Islamic, concept of the soul’s salvation. The immortality of the soul is understood by Schopenhauer as the indestructibility of Will as thing-in-itself, the pure willing that transcends or underlies the empirical individual willing that Schopenhauer refers to as the will to life. As thinking subjects we are immortal only in the attenuated sense that Will willing purely within us can never be destroyed. When the world as representation in its entirety, including the representing subject’s body, ceases to exist with the passing of the representing subject’s last moment of conciousness, Will as thing-in-itself at the core of each thinking subject alone remains (WWR 2: 215). There is therefore something in each of us that is immortal. The part of us that survives death is not, according to Schopenhauer, as some sects of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have taught, the personality or self or soul of the thinking subject. It is rather the impersonal Will within, the indestructible thing-in-itself, transcending space, .time and causality, that is in no way part of the world as representation or subject to any sort of change."

http://darwiniana.com/2006/04/23/schopenhauer-on-death/

[amba]

Yow!

That's Buddhistic as all hell.