James P. Carse, The Religious Case Against Belief

James P. Carse's The Religious Case Against Belief is a curious book. Carse - a former head of the religious studies program at NYU - starts with a bold claim that pretty much all commonly accepted definitions and, more importantly, understanding of religion is wrong, and sets out to provide the correct one.

The big problem for him are belief systems. Pretty much anyone would agree that a religion is a set of beliefs, and that, according to Carse, is precisely what has led to millennia of violence and intolerance in the name of religion. He spends the entire first half of the book deconstructing and analyzing belief systems and how they work. This he does with clarity, elegance and much nuance. In fact, this analysis is the chief appeal of the book and to many will be the only part worth reading. Carse points out, for example, that a fundamental feature of belief systems is the need for opposition, that they derive their vitality from not only espousing a set of beliefs, but from disagreeing with a set of opposing beliefs just as vehemently. If all of a sudden everyone said to a proponent of a given system, "Sure, you're right, I agree with you," the system would implode. He also points out - and that may be obvious on a bit of reflection, but he does it well nonetheless - that belief systems are by definition closed, i.e. they accept no evidence that does not support the beliefs already held. That is precisely why science does not count. Any scientist believes a great many things at any given moment, of course, but is always open to having his mind changed by new evidence. The mental process that is essential for subscribing to a belief system he calls willful ignorance - a notion that becomes important in the second half of the book.

So if religion is not a belief system, what is it? Here, Carse is far less clear. In opposition to willful ignorance, he posits a higher ignorance. A kind of sense of wonder at the ever expanding mystery of the world around you. The key here is that by definition you will always remain ignorant of the ultimate truth, and the more you learn, the greater your ignorance becomes. This is why science doesn't count here either, although he does not say that. Any self-respecting scientist would say that we could eventually know everything about the world. It might be that we never will, but we could.

Mere higher ignorance, however, even if you could pinpoint it exactly, is not by itself religion. Carse defines religion in terms of the Latin word communitas. It takes him a while to arrive at a definition. Mostly, he defines it as being in opposition to civitas (essentially, formal authority), but eventually arrives at this: "[communitas] is a spontaneous gathering of persons who identify themselves and one another as members of a unified body" (p. 83). Finally, longevity is essential - communitas has to have existed long enough to be meaningful. Carse never defines "enough" - it's a case of "I'll know it when I see it." Thus, Catholicism is a religion (as is Christianity in general), but Mormonism is not. So religion, then, is a spontaneous gathering of people that has coalesced around a sense of higher ignorance and has been around long enough. Interestingly, on the same page where he defined communitas Carse says that we cannot really know what religion is. But it's something like that. Note also that I didn't say a religion. This is essential - there aren't many religions, it's all one thing. Christianity and Judaism are mere short-hands (though Carse doesn't use the term) for something that we cannot know and cannot even really name properly.

One of the interesting things is that in an entire book about religion and belief, there is no God anywhere. He is barely mentioned, and even then in passing, while discussing belief. Perhaps more shockingly, the same is true of faith. Again, Carse drops the word once or twice in an intuitively understandable context, but does not really examine it or address its relevance to religion, if any. If pressed, I suppose he would say that it is a requirement for belief, but not for religion.

All this is interesting as far as it goes, but ultimately frustrating. Carse says a lot about what a religion isn't, a fair amount about what it is (or at least tries to), but nothing about what it does. I suppose he would say it doesn't do anything, it simply is. But that's a cop-out. We humans are a practical bunch. Higher ignorance and a sense of wonder is all well and good, but for us to bother, we've got to get something out of it, especially a couple of thousand years ago when we didn't have the luxury of sitting around reading books by retired religion professors. But as soon as we draw the usual inferences - "it helps us explain the world around us," "we have something to blame when things go wrong," etc., we are in the territory of belief and not religion.

So does religion have essentially no purpose? I suspect Carse would say yes. I wish he did - it would have made at least the book useful to some people, if not religion itself. But advocating the utility of something would put is back in the territory of belief, wouldn't it?

Jason Wilson, Boozehound

If you are going to go to school to study writing, don't do it at Drexel University. That is where Jason Wilson, the author of Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits ostensibly teaches writing, and if the book is any indication, he is not very good at it. But I am getting ahead of myself. Boozehound is actually not a bad book. It's worth checking out by anyone who has any interest in distilled spirits and cocktails, primarily for the recipes. To his great credit, Wilson closes every chapter with a sizable selection of recipes, usually a mixture of classics and new-fangled concoctions, sometimes of his own creation. By the end of the book, all but the most obsessive amateur mixologist will be armed with a year's worth of experimental material.

As to the rest, Boozehound is largely true to food-writing form. Wilson travels around the Western hemisphere on his publisher's dime, visiting distilleries and bars, interviewing distillers and marketers and tasting a variety of spirits, some quite unusual, and marvels the whole time at his great fortune of being able to do this. Last I checked, this was called showing off.

Where Wilson really lost me, however, was the anecdotes of his supposedly misspent youth. Suburban New Jersey in the 1980s is an endless source of amusement to him, even all these years later. You would think that a college professor, ostensibly happily married with two kids, would have moved beyond this, and traveling around the world tasting exotic spirits would blow making out with a big-haired girl in a Camaro out of the water, but apparently not. Maybe it's just me. I never had the exhilarating experience of almost getting lucky with the most popular girl in the class on a high-school trip to Paris. But for my money, a well-mixed cocktail is best garnished with a twist of lemon peel, not a heap of teenage escapades.