Moral reading, part I

Reviews and thoughts on a couple of books ...

I've been reviewing books for "Body & Soul" magazine for a couple of months now, and for this month's issue I tackled philosopher Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists. B&S isn't the New York Times book section, covering all serious offerings for good or ill; we only review books that we're recommending. (The June issue also features a brief "Meet the Contributors" profile on me, in which I describe myself as "a book yenta--I matchmake between people and books," which is very true.) So obviously I liked Moral Clarity, but I liked it even more than most of the books I've read for B&S so far, which is why I'm recommending it here as well.

In clear and vigorous prose, Neiman defends the Enlightenment values of reason, reverence, happiness, and hope--none of which are quite what you're thinking they are right now, I can guarantee you that. Defends them against what? The appropriation and perversion by the political right, and the abandonment by the political left. Like Princeton philosopher K. Anthony Appiah, I'm slightly less convinced by her attack on the left. Really, if nihilistic post-modern uber-relativists are all that thick on the ground, I'm sure I'd have tripped over a few by now. I'm also not as impressed by her takedown of evolutionary psychology as I'd like to be. She's a philosopher, not a psychologist, and she doesn't know the literature as well as she should if she's going to take it on.

But the point isn't the few areas where I think Dr. Neiman overreached herself--the point is how very very much I want to sit down with her over a bottle of pinot grigio and debate it all long into the wee hours. It's that kind of book, it makes you want to debate and reconsider and come up with your own examples and counterexamples. (The interactive nature of it would make it an excellent choice for a fairly serious-minded book club.)

I'm planning on using a quote from her introduction as the opening to the religion chapter of my own book:

"Far less important than your belief that God exists, or that He doesn't, is what you think your belief entails. Does it direct your behavior by rules and commandments that are set out before you, or does it require you to think them through for yourself? Does it require you to make sense of the world, or does it give up on sense itself?"

Which takes us right into some of the themes of the second book, to be reviewed in "Moral reading, part II," coming soon ...