This morning I awoke in a wistful mood. The birdsong coming through my bedroom window reminded me of something softer and higher but also, and less faintly, of something long absent. When I’m feeling wistful, my mind gets older and, without my consent, returns to Larkin’s empty church. In ‘Church Going’, a poem set in the years following World War II, the speaker describes his experience in this once-sacred space. He steps inside, has a look around, yet remains outside its meaning. Recalling the old rituals, he says, “‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant” and hears “The echoes snigger briefly,” then wonders what ends church used to serve and pictures what aims, if any, it could fulfil in the coming years. Is it destined to become a relic? A ruin? In any case, “A shape less recognizable each week.”

During quiet moments, disquieted and contemplative, I come back to the poem, reading it silently and aloud, mumbling the words, certain that, if nothing else, it records with accuracy and feeling our historical moment. Walking beside the speaker who recognizes a divine aura but who has forgotten how to pray, we also intuit the absence of a previous way of life—the rituals and ceremonies we once knew, the words we once learned, the virtues we once possessed, the higher things we used to love—as well as the longing for a new, equally holy way of life amid the “unignorable silence.” The church may not express our spiritual sentiments, yet the ends it once fulfilled have not been entirely forgotten nor has it been turned–not yet anyway–into a museum or a tomb. My morning mood, the speaker’s reticent wonderment, our cultural moment: all these partake of the “no more,” the “not yet,” and the “what now.”

Oh, what now! Our state of confusion concerning how to live is revealed most clearly in our understanding of and our attitude toward work. In my philosophy practice, I hear plenty of creative types, lawyers, and investors speak about being at wits’ end and feeling burnt out. They are not alone. In an article that appeared in the July/August 2011 issue of Mother Jones, coeditors Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery claim that companies are in the midst of a “great speedup,” with each worker being asked to be more productive and to work longer hours so that the company won’t have to fire old employees or hire new ones. (Meanwhile, Bauerlein and Jeffrey also report that corporate profits are up 22 percent over the past four years.) This “great speedup” is taking place at the same time that organizations, in step with neoliberal doctrine, are hollowing themselves out, replacing full-time employees with a mélange of unpaid interns, in-house freelancers, per-project contractors, and highly paid consultants. In effect, this has meant that full-timers are now collaborating increasingly with strangers, allies, and rivals. Meetings are beginning to resemble meet-and-greets and speed dates and meet-ups. Name tags are obligatory.

The picture gets even darker when one combines the work-life scenario described above with the escalating responsibilities associated with family life. Given the increasing demands of the work world, it would seem natural that parents would devote less time to raising their children or would farm out the housework and child-rearing to nannies, cooks, tutors, day-planners, camp organizers, and housekeepers. Among wealthy professionals, this is no doubt the case, but the broader historical trend points in the opposite direction. According to a University of Southern California study cited by The New York Times, from 1965 to 2007 “the amount of child care time spent by parents at all income levels—and especially those with a college education—has risen ‘dramatically’ since the mid-1990s.” In my work with creative types, I have begun calling this three-fold situation—being damnably overworked, having to collaborate with freelance colleagues/rivals, and feeling the crushing demands of being good parents and caring spouses—“the work life crucible of the new economy.”

It is clear not just that this model for individual and social life is structurally unsound but also that it cannot be sustained indefinitely. In economic terms, the model is based (metaphorically, that is) on extending lines of credit, accumulating considerable debit, and deferring the day of reckoning until the next fiscal year. It is Greece personified. In psychological terms, the model leads to anger, anxiety, and depression; in sociological terms, to anomie and alienation; and in philosophical terms, to nihilism, that supreme form of meaninglessness and despair. Fuck it, why bother, get out, piss off.

At some point, though, we cannot consent to more, cannot be any more efficient or more productive or more motivated unless we know the reason why we are being asked to be more efficient, more productive, more motivated in the first place. We may be inclined to explain why modern work is structurally untenable by tracing, by means of a chain of efficient causes, the crisis back to neoliberalism or, if we are feeling especially ambitious, back even further to the rise of industrial capitalism. Yet though this answer would clarify our historical moment, it would fail to satisfy our deeper spiritual desire to know what meaningful work ought to look like in our time. For this, we would need to hit upon an explanation that moves in the direction of final ends: things valuable for their own sake, good-enough reasons for laboring and toiling and going on.

In Naming the Movement, my friend Keith Kahn-Harris explores our disquietude with the modern world and describes the non-hierarchical, anarchic forces that, should they manage to reflect upon their collective aims and initiatives, may be able to sustain themselves. In a way, Keith’s question is how thinkers who think aloud can learn to think together, how dancers can become a dance, how movers can become a movement. To name a collective sentiment, therefore, is to try to raise language to a poetic register in order to name our present complaints and constraints, to give voice to our sense of living in common (sensus communis), and to imagine how new rituals, practices, and forms of life could unfold.

I want also to discover a poetic language that can make sense of, without doing a disservice to, our historical moment. I am reminded of William Blake’s radiant thought that working is worshipping. It is a thought that travels across England from Blake to Carlyle and Ruskin and on through Gill and Coomaraswamy and that finds a home in the US with Wendell Berry and Peter Nadin. In 1992, the English ex-pat and the artist-farmer Nadin left the art world and went upstate to cultivate an art farm with his wife. He explains, “A carrot is not a work of art,” but they are “both results of the same process.” Can we, like Blake and Nadin, like Gill and Berry, find space in our lives for “re-animating” work, for reconnecting work with fine and excellent things, for seeing carrots and paintings as of a piece? After the death of God, the work-worship formula may sound nostalgic, conservative, and shamelessly New Agey, yet the Japanese tea ceremony says otherwise. It says that the most mundane objects—tea leaves and tea things—and the most ordinary practices like sitting and drinking can, to quote the poet Pindar out of context, be “raised up to the liquid sky.”

First, though, I want to dwell a little longer on our feeling of disquietude in order to understand it more fully. Our wistful mood flows from the incongruity between the modern world and our conceptual schema, from the latter’s inadequacy in the face of the former’s irreducible complexity. In the 21st century, for instance, “Anglican church” or “Catholic church” fails to pick out our punctual spiritual experiences, the “corporation” fails to make sense of our work experiences, the “bourgeois family” of our experiences of love or coupling, the “state” our understanding of politics. To cope with this irreducible complexity, our 21st-century response was to train scores of experts in theology, politics, economics, health care, nutrition science, risk management, executive leadership, and in other fields. Yet, more recently, our faith in expertise—our rants, our melancholy, our exhaustion—and thus in analytic knowledge has been brought into doubt not only by the economic collapse and the rise of terrorism, not just because of the glut of information and the prioritization of choice for its own sake over the choiceworthiness of things, but also by the erosion of virtually all forms of binding authority. All this has led, in the realm of politics, to the reactionary backlash—the Tea Party movement in the US, the English Defence League in the UK, the riots in north London—now playing out before us. The puzzle is that we no longer trust our basic concepts but neither do we grant legitimate authority to the expert class. And so, we have come to rely increasingly on sentiment, habits, cognitive biases, rules of thumb, siloing, and folk wisdom. The criterion we apply is not apodictic certainty; it is survivalism, a knack for getting by with whatever is we find at hand.

Yet, alongside the fervent nationalism and the ignorant armies, I feel stirrings of higher things. ‘Innisfree’ is not so far off. Neither is Walden. Thoreau still entreats us to simplify, thus giving words to a longing for elementals, thus enjoining us to live according to what is most essential to living well. In the early 21st century, can we, as Epicurus insisted we must, do more with less? Can we examine our set of desires in order to distinguish the natural and necessary (good work, aesthetic appreciation, leisure) from the non-natural and unnecessary (excessive wealth, high status, extreme vulgarity)? Can we surround ourselves with friends for whom food is not just energy but that which is mouthed and tongued, for whom books not just fetishes but textures and shadings, land not just resource but earth and soil, home more than refuge, hosting a venerable art of welcoming? And can we, for a time at least, turn down the volume on all the buzzing and all the hurrying, all the anger and the strife, and can we, in this stillness, relearn self-sufficiency and self-reflection as well as the social virtues of honesty and sincerity?

Getting rid of my mobile phone would be a start. I knew, however, that I couldn’t do this unless I had put my life in order. First I would have to say good-bye to the cancellers and re-schedulers, to the self-absorbed and the chronically late; these were not friends nor could they be. Then I would have to build a philosophical practice that was based on working with nourishing individuas, not exhausting and dispiriting them. Each day, I would need to transform the mundane objects of my existence—the trees I run past, the “after-you’s” I hear, the payments offered and received—into beautiful experiences worthy of adoration. Finally I would have to make room in my life for leisure, for Sabbath, for the achingly slow rhythms of the mind in solitude. To settle in, then, in my own skin.

I know that simplicity is not the final word on our strange time; it is not an ultimate solution to the problem of disquietude, not a good-enough recipe for living well. At certain moments, it feels quixotic and insignificant, cloying and bathetic. At others, though, it seems just about right: a time of stillness, a wistful, reflective mood that may reveal the way forward, the means by which we may struggle again, the manner in which we may commit ourselves once more, this time with more energy, greater hope, and more humility. A scene in the middle of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels (1990) captures the softness of the mood:

Daisy quarreled much less than most people with time. The past did not occupy her thoughts unless it had to, nor did the future. At the present moment she was on a country walk, and she wanted to do things right.

Till now, we have had to quarrel with our time; this has been our burden. Now, we want to do things right. Our life-task, so large, so urgent, is to make up the how.

Andrew Taggart is a philosophical counselor living in New York. He is currently writing a book on philosophy as a way of life.

Monsignor Quixote – Graham Greene

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Whenever there was a chance to have a shot at Catholicism in his writing, George Orwell could always be relied on to take aim and discharge both barrels. With the grim vision of Vatican support for Franco fresh in his mind, he was hardly without justification. Polemical righteousness brimming over, he rashly wrote in the 30s that the English novel was “practically a Protestant art form”, and that Catholic practitioners were thin on the ground both numerically and qualitatively. Practically as he put pen to paper however, two of the greatest English authors of the mid century – Henry Graham Greene and Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh – were surfacing to take the literary world by ferocious storm. And it’s fair to say the pair weren’t exactly short on Catholic sensitivities. A bad call from Mr Orwell on this one at least.

In many respects the authors could scarcely be more different. Greene’s milieu was the forgotten corners and back alleys of life. The jittery street gang, the persecuted runaway, the jaded official in a fading Imperial outpost. Boozy landladies, failed accountants. Greene’s every fibre was tuned with sympathy for the underdog, siding with the rebellious and the forgotten, his narrative home the sleazy underbelly of life. Not so Waugh. His territory was the landed estates of the southern counties and their intersection with the cold elites of London high society. While his misanthropic satire found endless and endlessly amusing reasons for his narrative contempt towards the dramatis personae of lower gentry and upper bourgeois who populated his books, there was no denying that, at heart, he identified with them. Indeed, his lampooning of the upper and upper middle classes hinged largely round the fact that they failed to live up to his reactionary ideal. Moving outside this caste, his attitude shifts from mere contempt to outright hatred.

While both transcended both, Greene’s style skirted round the genre of the thriller, Waugh around that of the comedic farce. Greene’s narratives are littered with gangland intrigue, colonial corruption, the grimy and sweaty fear of pursuit. Action, in the purest sense, is central, as is plot. The characters are conveyed via a direct mental inner voice toward the reader, their dialogue, and interaction with each other being secondary to this. Again, the contrast with Waugh could hardly be greater. His narratives are comedies of manners, black comedy but comedy nonetheless. His genius stems from the ironic nuance of the reciprocal voices on display, the interaction of their dialogue being vital. Unlike Greene, the plots of his novels are essentially secondary, framing devices against which the characters can “flourish”, were that not so inappropriate a word for the languishing on display. These are characters whose inner lives are implied rather than explored, conveyed in shadow.

What they did have in common was an intense sense of inner desolation, an acidic looking within, and it was their Catholicism that both mirrored and embodied this. Read any novel by either author, and whichever of the myriad delights you my obtain from the experience, the lasting impression, the “aftertaste”, is a subtle yet distinct despair, an existential dislocation obtained via osmosis from the central characters. “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil – or else an absolute ignorance,” declares Greene, with Waugh in full agreement.

In the past a Catholic in Britain was, by definition, an outsider. Even today, Britain is officially a Protestant nation with a Protestant monarch, an identity forged in the fire of adversity to the Romanist other. These atavistic rivalries may have dwindled and mean little to the majority of people in the UK today, but in the 30s the rifts were still raw. It wasn’t too long before then that suspicion toward Catholics was much like that shown towards Muslims today. Worse in fact, with official sanctions barring the “other” from office, and from voting. Most Catholics in the country are there by the apparent virtue of the Faith being handed down. In the main they come from immigrant backgrounds, chiefly from the Irish diaspora of the past two centuries. A disenfranchised, working class tribe, greatly over-represented in the industrial north of England, and in Scotland (this before we even begin to touch on Northern Ireland.) None of this, however, applied to either Greene and Waugh, bourgeois, upper middle purebred English southerners both. They were Catholics by choice, by their own conversion. Outsiders by choice too.

Both seemed to want a Faith which underlined and justified the constant sense of separation they had always felt towards their peers. They also seemed to want to find as stark and unforgiving a theology to identify themselves with as possible. Greene converted to the Faith in 1926 at the age of 22, following a lonely and troubled youth savagely punctuated by suicide attempts. Suffering what is now termed bipolar disorder, Greene spent his whole life engaged in extremes of behaviour, not least in his prodigious sexual incontinence and proclivities. Greene stated he became a Catholic as something to “measure his evil against”. In later years he adulterously fucked behind Italian altars for the thrill. There must be a suspicion Greene was playing with the Faith for his own sense of internal drama, much like Dali, whose use of the religion was a prop to adorn his art with ever more outlandishly theological accoutrements. Catholicism is after all, a religion of the picturesquely ornate, of the dramatic. The stained glass and incense filled churches, the arcane blood and flesh fuelled doctrines of transubstantiation, the unflinchingly Manichean morality, the sheer ancient grim majesty of it all. This is truly the religion of the drama queen. You don’t get that with Methodism. For all this though, Greene was not merely playing with some theological dressing up box. There can be no doubting the sincerity of his conversion. His private letters show his Faith was central to his life.

In both life and literature however, Greene was a poor advertisement for the familiar argument of religion being a solace in life, the “heart in a heartless world”. Two of his most celebrated central characters, the colonial administrator Scobie inThe Heart of the Matter, and the nameless whiskey priest of The Power and the Glory, are hopeless, tired and desperate shadows of men, whose Faith only serves to make them spiritual as well as emotional wrecks. Both live daily with the knowledge their actions, be they treacherous or adulterous, are condemning them, with absolute certainty, to eternal damnation. These are not truly bad men, but by the standards of their own Faith they are beyond redemption, sealing their own personal tragedies. Then on the other hand, we have Pinkie, the psychopathic young gangster of Brighton Rock. Here is a truly bad man, and one whose certainty of his own damnation only serves to spur him on to ever greater evil. “He was damned already and there was nothing more to fear ever again.” In each case, the religion makes for a wonderfully powerful and evocative component of the novels, a character in itself, more than that even. Wonderful for the reader. But wonderful for Greene himself? Noel Coward met Greene when they both prowled in the same Hollywood circles, touting their works for adaptation on the silver screen. He came to remark on Greene’s “strange, tortured mind”. Whether his Faith served to salve or further inflame the wounds of this torture is open to conjecture.

Waugh’s conversion was more clearly that of a man desperate to retreat into a mythical past. This was after all the man who proclaimed “the trouble with the Conservative Party is it has not turned back the clock one second.” There was a spate of conversions to the Faith in the 30s of men from the upper-middle-class, men trying to find a mooring, a sense of backward-looking solidity in a traumatic age. Once more however, there is something far deeper, and steeped in an ambivalence.

Waugh came to prominence as a novelist in 1928 with Decline and Fall, two years before his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Famous and feted at the age of 25, Waugh continued with the drunken hedonism he had begun in his Oxford years. He was indeed one of the feckless “bright young things” he wrote about. His growing horror at the spiritual emptiness he saw in this gadddabout life was what spurred him into the arms of the Church, which he saw as the most Eternal of institutions, a haven amongst the creeping chaos.

In the views of Waugh, we see in sharp relief the antagonism between the heart of Conservatism, and the capitalism that it defends. Margaret Thatcher herself for instance, would have been personally shocked and repulsed if she spent any great time in the company of her shock troops, the coked up young yuppies of the 80s, as they lined it up on the toilet tops. Waugh’s contempt for the fly by night shallowness of the young rich sat ill at ease with his support for of the Tory Party without which their lives of philistine luxury would be unsustainable. Hence his impotent railing against clocks going forward. The real establishment of England was once Catholic of course, back in the 15^th century, an age so long ago as to have lost all contemporary meaning. His Catholicism therefore was a very real sense of clinging to a past so elusive as to be non-existent, grasping at a phantasm.

In his novels, the Faith emerges as the still at the centre, the calm amongst the inferno. This can be seen most clearly in Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder’s agnostism is set against the Faith of the Marchmain family, or in The Sword of Honour triliogy, wherein the aristocratic Crouchback’s represent even more clearly the valiant rearguard action of the Church, and indeed old England itself, against all the forces of modernity. In other novels the Faith’s talismanic status is subtler. Tony Last, the cuckolded husband in A Handful of Dust, is presented as belonging to the past, underlined by his church attendance, however vague minded that may be. His humiliation by non churchgoing wife Brenda and the vulgar ( key word ) social climber John Beaver shows once more the clash between the (virtuous) old and the (degenerate) new. It is a mythological battle between Old England, the rural, certainty, tradition and social cohesion, against the New World, the urban, capitalism, dynamism, change, hedonism, class conflict and progress. In Sword of Honour, Waugh sees Guy Crouchback, when he still thinks he is fighting against Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany both, claims “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.”

It’s an internal battle the Right will never resolve. That Catholicism is no longer the religion of the “establishment” serves Waugh well. As he sees the massed ranks of modernity triumph, as he surely knows they will, he can psychologically cast himself in the role of the king over the water, exiled valiant victim and patrician overseer simultaneously. Such was the source of both his art, and the bilious, bitter anger that never left him.

In Britain we have the paradox that Catholicism – in the wider world so very often the creed of the oppressor over the centuries – is the religion of the persecuted underdog. This has led to the most bizarre and schizophrenic political allegiances and alliances. In 30s Lancashire, unemployed Communist marchers would doff their caps when passing Catholic churches, at the same time as senior clerics were backing Franco. Orwell wrote of visiting workers’ houses with “the crucifix on the wall, and the Daily Worker on the table”. There has never been a shortage of left-wing British writers of Catholic background, but seems fair to say this has usually stemmed from their “outsider” nature, their working class and/or Irish background, rather than the religion itself. With Anthony Burgess – in later life a bitter rival of Greene’s – we have a descendant of the Irish diaspora, his childhood in Manchester’s Moss Side influenced the Left perspective of his early writing, his Catholicism informing his later conservative slant.

The upper and middle-class converts to the Faith of the 30s however, were far more often doing so for reasons which became reactionary by default, even if that was not the initial intention. In this sense Waugh was the more typical figure. In 1937, when Nancy Cunard sent a survey to leading novelists of the UK asking which side they took in the Spanish Civil war, Waugh was one of the tiny minority who declared their support for the Falange. A minority view among authors, but not among the kind of dyspeptic saloon bar Tory he came more and more to exemplify and signify as both his age and drinking increased. The Blimpish caricature he succumbed to by the end was probably an extreme rather than a typical example however, and by a sublime irony was mirrored in the similar decline into self-parody of Kingsley Amis a generation later, a writer Waugh lambasted as “lower-middle-class scum” at the beginning of the latter’s career.

Amongst the 30s converts, the Left-radicalism of Greene therefore must be seen as a great exception. Once again though, the tale is more complicated. Greene started out on the Right. Along with many youths of his class, he acted as a strike-breaker during the 1926 General Strike. After his conversion, he wrote for the right-wing Spectator magazine and took the side of the put-upon Mexican clergy following the revolution in that country. His earlier novels contained numerous mildly anti-Semitic asides (excised on republishing at his behest.) In many ways therefore, he seemed destined to trudge down a classic Conservative path.

But Greene was one of those converts, a minority amongst the Blimps of his class, who heard the message of social justice ring louder than that of defence of hierarchical tradition in the call of the Faith. Greene’s vision of Catholicism stirred him to side with the downtrodden in the world, and for him that meant the Left. He became an intractable and articulate foe of US imperialism, especially of its machinations in Southern and Central America. In 1955 he wrote The Quiet American, a novel which was to become a classic anti-imperialist parable. In later years he was to meet and correspond with Fidel Castro, and while still critical of the curtailing of religious and intellectual freedom in the country, strongly supported Cuba’s struggle against US hegemony.

In Latin America of course, the populace shared his Faith, yet he was conscious that the dominant reactionary elements within Catholicism had no interest at all in his anti-imperialist vision. When therefore, in the 80s a new strain of Faith within the region came to prominence which shared his vision, he could scarcely contain his intellectual glee. Liberation Theology combined the apparently antagonistic Catholicism and socialism which had both so inspired Greene, uniting against the US backed juntas of the subcontinent. Oscar Romero in Salvador and Evaristo Arns in Brazil were just two of many to speak out the US sponsored repression and poverty which racked their nations. Greene came to personally befriend another such Liberation priest, Leopoldo Duran.

That such movements were to fail, crushed by the Washington backed strong-men, Oscar Romero assassinated – Greene, eternal pessimist as he was, no doubt anticipated. That they failed to receive the backing of the Vatican, that indeed that they were explicitly denounced by them, he may have found harder to reconcile. Perhaps this contributed to the weary irony of his statement to interviewer John Cornwell in 1989, that he was now a “Catholic agnostic”.

Had he lived to see it however, he may well have been heartened to see the success of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia, a new generation of leaders combining socialism with their Catholicism. The latest success of the left-leaning bishop Fernando Lugo becoming president in Paraguay would no doubt of gladdened him most of all. Who could doubt he would have seen some vindication here, and an answer both to the Catholic hierarchy who saw in the Left its great nemesis, and those on the Left who argued that believers could only ever be reactionary. Waugh, meanwhile, would have spun once more in his grave, a tomb already doubtless given to much rapid rotation.

Greene and Waugh may have had diametrically opposed positions in their politics from their own interpretations of the Faith. But, transcending politics, what both seemed to take from the Faith in their writing was a sense of the complete fragility and frailty of the human condition, the essential unworthiness of people gained from Original Sin. In Greene this seemed to inspire a sense of poetic heroism amidst inevitable failure and desperation, in Waugh a very real contempt not just for humanity as a whole in the abstract, but for all human beings individually. That sense of the tragic which under-writes and illuminates the drama in the one, the sharp satire in the other, a sense of the comedic and the sublime in both. It also served to solidify the bond which grew between the two. Melancholic heavy drinkers, red eyes unsatisfied, tilting at the cold Protestant world from different angles. For all their myriad differences, the two became firm friends, and remained so until Waugh’s death in 1966.

Larkin claimed “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth”.

With Greene and Waugh, the inspiration, the framework, the habitat, spark and realm of their work was neither harsh mental state nor delicate flower. Catholicism was the muse for them both. As a very lapsed member of the Faith myself, and distinctly sceptical as to any positive influence it may lend to the modern age, I can at least offer it gratitude for giving the work of both to the world.

Cleansing the Doors of Perception – Huston Smith

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Popular culture is, for the first time since Aldous Huxley published his (in)famous book The Doors of Perception in 1954, without a narcomancer. With the recent passing of Terrence McKenna, a void has been left in our culture. No one dominant individual is out there positing far out theories about the purported benefits of various mind altering substances and, as such, this would probably be a good time to sit down and take an objective look at the validity of the claims that individuals such as Huxley, Leary, McKenna, and Saunders have made over the years.

Unfortunately, its nearly impossible to discuss drugs objectively because we live in a culture that loves to get itself worked into a frenzy of self righteous hysteria over all drugs other than those that have become the Western world’s holy trinity; alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine, and because, when it comes to what Huxley et al were peddling, essentially a religious experience, it is impossible to be objective. Who am I to say what happened to Leary when he ate those mushrooms down in Mexico, or, for that matter, to say whether any religious experience, drug induced or not, is valid? The problem with discussing religion is that, like drugs, people almost always approach the subject with an agenda, looking either to build up or tear down and, as such, very little of significance really gets said.

Enter Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals, a slim yet dense collection of essays by renowned religious scholar Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions, often considered the premiere text on this planet’s various spiritual doctrines. Smith was also former assistant to Huxley when he was at M.I.T., and a participant in the Good Friday Experiment, in which theology students and professors were given psilocybin before the Good Friday service at Boston University. On top of that, Huston was an associate of Timothy Leary back before he fell out of favour in academia for believing too fervently in the substances he was studying.

Smith was present at the birth of the psychedelic movement, and he sampled the goods, but, unlike many others, he managed to contain his enthusiasm and approach the subject of drugs and religion with something resembling scholarly rigor. That rigor was brought to numerous essays which appeared in various academic journals over the years but, remained uncollected until Smith was asked to bring them together by the Council on Spiritual Practices, an entheogen promoting think tank.

Smith writes from the perspective of someone who has had what he considers to be mystical experiences engendered by entheogenic drugs, but is still skeptical, not about the drugs, but about the ability of people to gain real, lasting insight from their entheogenic experiences. The book’s most interesting essay, "Psychedelic Theophanies and the Religious Life", was written in the late sixties and contains an insightful critique of the psychedelic movement which, well over thirty years later, is still entirely relevant. Huston asserts that psychedelic religious experiences often don’t have any lasting effects because people are more interested in having a religious experience (i.e. getting high) than living a religious life.

With this assertion Smith gets right to the heart of why the Western world has no tradition of the use of entheogenic substances for religious purposes. Drug taking in Western society is largely a recreational, some may say hedonistic, pastime and, as such, is probably not going to attract large numbers of people who have, or wish to cultivate the discipline that serious spirituality requires. The only large scale success of entheogen as sacrament has come from the Native American Church, which uses peyote in its ceremonies, but the people in that church, all indigenous peoples, have a long established history of using peyote for religious reasons.

Overall the essays in Cleansing the Doors of Perception are well written, although somewhat dry, which is to be expected given that they were, for the most part, written with a primarily academic audience in mind. Its main flaw is the weak connection between the various essays. While Smith does try, with prefaces to almost every piece, to unify the book into a coherent whole, he is only partially successful. Some of the essays included, like Smith’s review of Gordon R. Wasson’s SOMA, and his account of his participation the Good Friday experiment are interesting only from a historical perspective. One, on Cardinal John Henry Newman, makes one wonder what it is doing there at all. This reviewer couldn’t help but think after reading this collection of largely unconnected pieces that, if Smith had put his mind to going back over his writings and putting together a more coherent book with an overall thesis that he could have produced a fascinating book instead of merely an interesting one.