Ross continues the discussion about Brooks’ “neural Buddhists” column, which Caleb Stegall has also discussed at Taki’s Magazine, and he has a very useful summary of Brooks’ argument and the problems with it:

This notion’s major premise is summed up nicely by Brooks as follows: “Particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.” No, the Christian would say: Particular religious systems are cultural artifacts, in a sense, yes, but they’re artifacts built around specific human experiences, not universal ones. Christian theology and Christian ritual are compatible with the universal human ability to experience the sacred through prayer and meditation, but they’re “built on top” of particular encounters and revelations that tend to have little in common with the “transcending boundaries/overflowing with love” experiences that neuroscientists are equipped to measure. Indeed, in both the Old and New Testaments, the foundational encounters with God – the religious experiences that created Judaism and Christianity – are nothing like a meditative, free-floating sense of one-ness with the universe.

Ross is correct to say that religions are cultural artifacts (it is the “just cultural artifacts” claim that the materialist or psychoanalyst wants to emphasise), and that they are rooted in specific experiences, since there is no way for people to have universal experiences.  To some extent, because all human experience is historical, all religions are historical, though not necessarily to the same degree, and in that light religions have to be artifacts that have arisen and developed over and in time.  Religion, strictly speaking, encompasses those things that man creates to worship or communicate with the noumenal.  Revelation implies that man has received something from the noumenal realm, and that it necessarily transcends the material and temporal.  In this respect, neuroscience can describe how we are experiencing contact with the noumenal, but it cannot tell us very much, if anything, about what we are experiencing or the content of the message that we are receiving.  On a more mundane level, neuroscience tells us very little about whether we are or should be willing to credit a textual tradition that purports to relate to us the will of God.  Higher criticism is in many ways more dangerous to taking Scripture to be the Word of God than neuroscience is, and like neuroscience it claims to be scientific without necessarily having as much reason for doing so.  Higher criticism tends to induce doubt in those who have approached Scripture with an utterly simplistic understanding of scriptural interpretation in the first place.  If Genesis may reflect the influence of the Babylonian Captivity and echoes certain Mespotamian creation myths, then for a person trained to think about Scripture in a certain way this discovery is devastating and horrifying.  For those who accept that God is the Lord of history, and understand that His revelation is being worked out in time, this is not disconcerting or even surprising, but should be expected.

I would go still farther and say that the brief nods in the column towards Buddhism and perhaps some New Age theories of “self-actualisation” are also misleading, because Buddhism, insofar as I understand its ideal expression, has no truck with the things Brooks is talking about in part of his column.  Brooks says:

Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

In this last sentence, it seems to me that he is describing some form of Vedanta, but Buddhism has no gods and repudiates attachment of every kind.  Detachment is, in fact, a place where Christian ascetics, Buddhists and philosophical pessimists seem to come together in a common experience of dying to the attachments of the world, albeit for very different reasons.  Nirvana is not the same as apatheia, and for Christian ascetics apatheia is acquired in the context of submission to God’s will, whereas Buddhists take for granted that attachment to this world–including the belief in a deity–is ultimately delusional and holds one back from escaping samsara.  As Ross’ title very perceptively notes, what Brooks is talking about bears some resemblance to the identity of Atman and Brahman in the Upanishads.  Obviously, this has nothing to do with Buddhism.

It’s questionable to me whether “an approach to spirituality that dispenses with the weirdness and scariness and miraculousness of the Judeo-Christian encounter with God, throws a scientific patina on prayer and meditation and promises that Love is all you need seems like a pretty obvious winner.”  I don’t mean that it is questionable whether it is a “winner” in some ultimate, spiritual sense, since I would, like Ross, obviously argue that it isn’t.  It seems to me that this sort of vague, nebulous “spirituality” will always attract a certain subset of any population, but once these people find that there is a richer, more concrete and more mystical (and sometimes more mystifying) tradition within one of the monotheistic religions, and particularly within Christianity (from which so many of these people in this country have fled without ever having really known it), they will give up on that “spiritual” path and seek something more compelling.

James is right when he says:

Obama’s remarks may make for wrongheaded policy — I happen to think that in some instances they do and in some they don’t — but Bush’s remarks typify the clumsy, overgeneralized, harping, dull, and rote approach to democratization that has made his administration such a sustained failure.

Certainly, that is what should be emphasised about Bush’s speech, along with its basic conceptual error that negotiations are an exercise in persuasion.  Diplomacy is much closer to haggling and pazari than it is to rhetoric.  In fact, a good diplomat doesn’t really care whether his opposite number has been persuaded by the virtue of his argument, but is most concerned to know that his opposite number is operating in good faith and will follow through on the bargain that has been reached.  There are things that will be non-negotiable for other regimes, just as there are for our own, and part of the art of diplomacy is to make maximal gains towards that limit of the non-negotiable for your side.  Or you can pretend that diplomacy has something to do with being nice and yielding to your rivals, as I assume Mr. Bush must believe for him to equate it with appeasement, which is almost the exact opposite of what proper diplomacy is.  It doesn’t matter to me that much whether or not Bush was referring to Obama.  I think he was, but that isn’t my concern.  What concerns me is that idea that Mr. Bush’s style of foreign policy can still be presented as self-evidently right and competent in the face of a mountain of evidence that it is neither.

I once said that Schaffer in Colorado had a decent chance of competing with Mark Udall for the open Senate seat.  I don’t think that anymore.  Here‘s why:

In Colorado, Bob Schaffer, the Republican Senate nominee, made a horrendous blunder last month when he touted the guest-worker program in the Northern Marianas Islands (notorious for forcing abortions and trafficking in sex slaves), which he had once visited on Abramoff’s dime.

It’s not really surprising, but Clinton leads McCain in Arkansas 53-39, while McCain leads Obama 57-33.  She gets 84% of Democrats, he gets 50%, and his unfavs are 61%, but who cares?  It’s just another one of those irrelevant states that she could win and he’s going to lose.  After all, we know that she drives away independents (she wins them 43-41) and he attracts them like moths to a flame (they go for McCain 56-32).

Via Yglesias, Matt Bai tries to make sense of McCain’s interventionist standards:

“I think in the case of Zimbabwe, it’s because of our history in Africa,” McCain said thoughtfully. “Not so much the United States but the Europeans, the colonialist history in Africa. The government of South Africa has obviously not been effective, to say the least, in trying to affect the situation in Zimbabwe, and one reason is that they don’t want to be tarred with the brush of modern colonialism. So that’s a problem I think we will continue to have on the continent of Africa. If you send in Western military forces, then you risk the backlash from the people, from the legacy that was left in Africa because of the era of colonialism.”

Fortunately, he said this “thoughtfully,” so I suppose this means we can forget about his apparent ignorance of the Near East’s colonial past.  By this standard, McCain could not support interventions on most continents, since every one has experienced some form of foreign, usually European, colonialism at some point.  (This is true of Europeans as well–eastern Europeans have experienced Ottoman, German and Soviet colonialism.)   Antarctica would theoretically still be available.  If McCain applied this standard consistently, most of our bases and deployments around the world could be shut down right away. 

While I don’t believe for a moment that McCain’s reluctance to intervene in Africa has something to do with concerns about the legacy of colonialism, McCain’s answer on Zimbabwe is the right one, though it doesn’t go quite far enough.  The complete answer would be: it would be resented as neo-colonialism and we have no reason to interfere in the affairs of Zimbabwe, bad as the situation may be.  A truly superior answer would include the added point: if these countries are ever going to be free of the effects of colonialism (and these effects include the abuses of the regimes created by old, kleptocratic anti-colonialists), they and their neighbours must solve their own problems without the possibility or expectation that outside forces are doing to sweep in and attempt to fix things.  Never mind that the attempt may make things worse or change nothing–even the expectation of intervention is the kind of crutch that you hold out to developing nations only if you want to keep them perpetually in a position of weakness and dependence.

Stuart Rothenberg re-examines some assumptions and looks at MS-01 again:

Most of the state legislators in the district outside the Memphis suburbs are Democrats, and statewide Democratic candidates, including Attorney General Jim Hood (D) in 2007 and Secretary of State Eric Clark (D) in 2003, have carried the district.

The Republican Congressional nominee should have an edge in this district not because it is such a red district but because Republican candidates normally draw at least a quarter of the white Democratic vote — conservative Democrats who have become accustomed to voting for Republican candidates in federal races.

Hold on, you may be thinking. Isn’t Davis’ inability to hold conservative Democrats a strong indication that President Bush and the damage to the Republican brand are responsible for Childers’ win? Maybe, but that’s far from certain.

Polling in the district showed Bush’s “favorables” well above 50 percent, and Democratic pollster Anzalone minced no words when he told me, Louisiana’s 6th and Mississippi’s 1st “are not referenda on Bush and Republicans in Congress.”

So what we really have in MS-01 is a case of a conservative Democrat winning the votes of conservative Democrats who often vote Republican at the federal level.  Commentary on the Mississippi special election has tended to treat this district as if it were deepest Provo, which has led most observers to exaggerate the national significance of the result because the competitiveness of the Democratic Party at the state and local level was neglected.  Of course, Childers comes out of county government, and perhaps was able to translate the local Democratic appeal into a pick-up in the House.  What Childers and Cazayoux seem to represent is the success of the new Democratic flexibility in recruiting more conservative Democratic candidates who are well-suited to their districts, and the electoral strength of a combined socially conservative, economically populist, antiwar message.  We could call it the gradual “Shulerisation” of the Congressional Democrats.  Observers are so quick to look for signs of Republican collapse that I think we overlook evidence that shows the Democrats simply beating the Republicans at their own game. 

This is not to let Greg Davis,, the NRCC and the national party off the hook for the dreadful, unimaginative campaign they ran, or to suggest that the Republicans are not going to be badly bloodied in House and Senate races this year.  They are.  But this does put things in some perspective, and it confirms my earlier skepticism that the MS-01 outcome was not as nationally meaningful as many seem to think it is.  However, the media will run with the story and this story will contribute to the narrative of Republican collapse.  The overall narrative has more of a basis than the story about MS-01 we have been hearing, but anything that can be made to fit that narrative does have an ultimayely negative impact on the fundraising and morale of the national party.

At the very least, those who want to expand the scope of our gunboat generosity ought to be less tiresome. ~James Antle

One can always hope, but it seems to me that demanding an ever-wider scope for interventionism must necessarily be tiresome to people who don’t think it is the task of the U.S. government (or any other government) to solve all the woes of the world.  The interventionists will always berate the rest of us for our callous indifference, and we will roll our eyes at their fanatical impulse to meddle in the affairs of other nations.  Meddlesome people are naturally going to be tiresome.  The key, then, is to get them to stop being so meddlesome.  

It seems to me that discussing the possibility of military action in Burma ought to be, if not out of bounds, such a futile exercise that no one would be interested in doing it.  The possibility of military action in Burma should be so remote, and seem so bizarre that talking about it would be a bit like speculating about how you would decorate your house on the moon.  From my perspective, we might as well talk about military action in Congo or Nepal or perhaps Cabinda (what sort of heartless villains could not be moved by the plight of Cabinda?), because these make as much (and as little) sense as talk of intervention in Burma.  Kaplan says that intervention seems like a simple moral decision, but is more complicated, but it doesn’t really seem to be anything of the kind.  The Burmese junta is a criminal and brutal regime, and it oppresses and abuses its people.  This was true last year when they were smashing protests and has been true for years as they slaughtered the Karen.  What is now supposed to make intervention in Burma more compelling is the scale of the regime’s inhumanity, when we have gone along quite satisfactorily until now largely untroubled by the regime’s brutality, and we have very deftly avoided intervening in other states where the death toll has been greater and the ongoing suffering every bit as severe.  If there were a moral imperative to intervene on behalf of the Burmese people, it should have moved us to intervene years ago.  In fact, there is not such an imperative to intervene.  Pragmatic arguments about why an intervention might not “work” or whether it would cost too much miss the heart of the matter, which is that there is neither a duty nor a right to intervene in the affairs of other states.

In what should be telling enough, Barack Obama automatically assumed the president was talking about him. Of course, given that he wants to meet with the leading terror sponsor Iran and his adviser until recently Robert Malley holds regular meetings with Hamas, perhaps Obama hath reason to protest so much. ~Philip Klein

Well, since Mr. Bush and his supporters routinely deploy the charge of “appeasement” against anyone who proposes diplomatically engaging with “rogue” states, and he deployed the charge of appeasement on the heels of attempts to link Obama to a negotiate-with-Hamas view (a view he has repeatedly repudiated) in the context of a presidential election in which Obama’s views on Israel have been repeatedly called into question, I think it’s fair to assume that Mr. Bush was talking about Obama.  At the very least, Obama was one of those to whom he was referring, and this seems all the more obvious since he made the charge of “appeasement” in Israel.  After all, who has been the subject of controversy over negotiating with enemies of Israel?  It’s quite clear that this was supposed to be a shot at Obama.  Contra Sullivan, however, I don’t see how this helps Obama.  It’s bad enough that he has to fight off the scurrilous charge that he is somehow soft on Hamas, when he takes an identical position towards Hamas as his Republican opponent, but now he has had the hoary charge of appeasement thrown at him; conflation with Bush is not good for McCain, but conflation with Chamberlain, if people believe it, is potentially very harmful.  It doesn’t matter that the charge of appeasement is bogus and is being made by one of the great foreign policy failures of the last 60 years.  A nation conditioned on Churchillolatry and WWII mythology is susceptible to these lazy arguments, even though the people who use these arguments have overused the appeasement card so badly that it does not have anywhere near the sting that it used to have.

You have to admire that “adviser until recently” circumlocution, which very carefully avoids mentioning that Malley is no longer an informal advisor to the campaign because he was engaged in independent talks with Hamas in his role as part of an entirely different group.  Malley’s status as a former informal advisor is a direct result of his dealings with Hamas, which Obama rejected and has ruled out as unacceptable.

P.S. Ambinder notes two things from the Bush-Obama exchange:

(1) Bush knew was what he saying — of course the first paragraph was aimed at Obama
(2) The Obama campaign is very, very touchy about anything related to Israel

On the second point, I can’t say I’m surprised.  After months of having a number of your advisors tarred as anti-Semites and/or foes of Israel, having positions the candidate doesn’t hold attributed to him, having his “pro-Israel” bona fides questioned on the basis of no significant evidence, and seeing scummy misrepresentations by leading Republicans of the candidate’s forthrightly “pro-Israel” statements that completely distort and twist the meaning of those statements into the opposite of what he said, I suppose any campaign might be a tad touchy about the subject, especially when they know as well as anyone that an “anti-Israel” label will be very politically damaging.

We already know that Joe Lieberman is a political ingrate, but what I find notable about the commentary on Lieberman’s new role as McCain’s personal lackey (rather than his old role of indistinguishable militarist colleague) is how it neglects to mention how especially tacky Lieberman’s criticism of Obama is.  As Obama fans and Lieberman would like to forget, Obama was one of a relative few sitting Senators who endorsed Lieberman in the Connecticut Senate primary in 2006, which he said he had done out of friendship and personal loyalty.  If you wanted to cast yourself as the true antiwar Democrat in a future campaign, this was not the thing to do back then.  How has Lieberman chosen to repay that very unpopular show of loyalty?  By trotting out Hamas’ “endorsement” of Obama as evidence that “suggests” a “difference” between the two candidates.  It was nice of him to mention that Obama did not share Hamas’ values!   

What is remarkable about this is how willing the supposed partisans of “strength” and “resolve” are to get down in the muck and treat the statements of terrorist groups about our election process as significant, as if they deserved anything but disdain.  Lieberman here is playing up the comments from a terrorist group as if these were politically relevant in the election of an American President.  Lieberman probably sees Hamas as an enemy of the United States, so he has chosen to give credibility to a group he regards as an enemy and he is trying to use them to influence our elections.