Why Spirituality Is Difficult for Westerners (Societas) [Paperback]

This book is very good. Hay is a scientist, a zoologist of repute and a practising Christian, as well as being experienced in both religious and spiritual research. In this short and well -written essay in four chapters, he explains why he thinks that spirituality or what he otherwise describes as relational consciousness, far from being something we pick up from indoctrinations in our upbringing, is actually something we are born with, that has survived through biological natural selection as something that is of value to our survival. This, he says, underpins both religion and ethics, indeed is a precursor of both.
Hay begins by coming up with a working definition of spirituality and goes on to show us through empirical experimentation something I have always known from observing the young children in our own church school, that they are intuitively spiritual, that they are naturally aware of the spiritual in their life experiences. He also tells us that while religious observance is strong and indeed gaining political power globally, Christianity in Britain and in a number of other Western European countries is actually on the decline, alongside an outburst of what he calls "free-floating" spirituality.
He argues that advances in education and the acquired ability to read and write, with the resultant ease of information gathering and growth of self-awareness, has engendered a growth in individualism and the me-culture, inhibiting experience of the transcendental, as it reduces the perceived need, the significance for our survival, of relational consciousness or spirituality. This individualism, he argues, is further bolstered by the self -interest of our market economy and is leading to spiritual destruction. Why therefore, he asks, the often aggressive attacks on this weakened Western church, indeed on all religion and spirituality, from concerted atheist attention in the first decade of the new millennium, and why the decline in faith, and does it matter?
Hay is in no doubt that it does matter. Genuine religion, Hay explains, needs this relational consciousness, spirituality, or experience of the transcendent, and any further disengagement by the church from the spiritual awareness which underlies and underpins true religion does not bode well for our future.
He explains succinctly and with clarity just why religion has to be our continuing hope; only by embracing our faith and religion once again with proper and empathic understanding can we hope to counter the violent attacks on religion that we see in our world today, and can we be enabled to speak up to other faiths. Because, he reminds us, attacks come from a failure to understand the core values of faith, often based on ignorance which itself engenders fear and aggression. In a few understated yet fiercely incisive paragraphs in the last chapter he carefully undermines all the usual arguments rolled out by the atheists against God and religion. Whether the institution of the church survives the next half century will depend, he writes, on how it relates to this new era of spirituality, which as a Christian he sees as the upsurge of the Holy Spirit.
And he shows, again from a review of the relevant empirical scientific research, that there is indeed a move towards accepting that science and spirituality cannot be separated, that both are needed in a truly holistic understanding of who we are, an insight that will benefit both disciplines and the future of the world, an insight and view dear to my own heart. Spirituality, he concludes, will then "regain its rightful place at the heart of our understanding of what it is to be a true humanist."

I could not put this book down once started and recommend it to all those of any faith or none who care for the survival of the human race and who wish for a more peaceful and happier world.

I checked out this book because it has a chapter that supposedly deals with Max Stirner. However, as is all to common, the author doesn't really know anything about Stirner, except what he's read in articles or books by others who also know almost nothing about him, but always assume that it won't matter if they just (whether through incompetence or fraud) make it up instead! In the first place Max Stirner never advocated "egoism" as "an ideal" as the author suggests. Stirner explicitly and relentlessly rejects ALL ideals throughout his major work, which was egregiously and inexcusably mistranslated into English as "The Ego and Its Own." (There is no "ego" in the original German title, nor is there any positive mention of any "ego" in the entire book. The book's title is more literally, "The Unique and its Property.")
Stirner quite perceptively observed that his own life (and other people's lives) are first of all not ideas or thoughts or objects or even subjectivity (and especially not "egos"), all of which are to a greater degree than not, just abstractions. Instead he refers to the phenomenon of his life with the term "Einzige" (the "Unique"), by which he means only to point to himself as a whole (and not to any idea of himself) -- his whole life (he says "the whole man"). He means to point to his life as it is lived, and not as it is objectified by symbolization through language. And he wants to include every aspect of his life as it is actually lived, before it is ever analyzed in words and concepts. In other words, he wants to point to his life phenomenally. He also states that everyone can do the same and be equally correct in naming themselves the "Unique" if they wish, because no two people ever share the same life. Each is ultimately incomparably unique. We can only attempt to understand ourselves and others through communication, but we can never actually experience another's self and world directly, only through the interpretation of their sensible (to our sight, hearing, touch, etc.) behavior.
Stirner makes this move in order to be able to talk about his life (and our lives) without imposing any sort of conceptual scheme on his life. He wants to take it as it is empirically without any presuppositions or prejudices, as he finds it -- before it is analyzed into subject and world, and before subjectivity and the world are analyzed in order to determine their potential conceptual attributes (human, male/female, short/tall, black/white/brown, intelligent/slow, handsome/homely, etc., etc.).
On this basis, Stirner also describes himself (and everyone else) as "egoists." Not as ethical, rational or psychological egoists. But as phenomenological "egoists." By the term "egoist" he means, not someone who does what is in his or her own interest (interest considered as something outside her or himself, as a moral, rational or psychological ideal or goal), but as an inescapable stream of choices that in a fairly fundamental sense IS what we ARE phenomenally. (In other words, for Stirner, our choices can phenomenologically or empircally be considered our interests, but we simply don't calculatedly DO everything ONLY after consciously figuring out if these things are somehow in our -- ethical, rational or psychological -- interest.) For Stirner we are not first of all objects (whether conceived as matter, body or spirit) or subjects (whether conceived as mind or spirit or body, once again) or any other one-sided, abstract conception. For Stirner, if we want to describe ourselves through language, we need to include both the subjective and objective sides of ourselves (which must be abstractions when either is considered alone). He observes and describes himself as an ongoing process of self-creation through the decisions he constantly makes to appropriate aspects of his world (beginning with appropriating his own body). And he seens other people as experiencing similar processes. Therefore, we are unique individuals not because we want to be separate from other people. We are unique individuals because by our natures we can only experience our own selves and our own worlds, though they seem to overlap in some undefinable way which allows us to know others indirectly through our interactions with them.
Anyway, this is all a far cry from the reified individualism the author claims is Stirner's "ideal," which undermines a large part of his argument in this book. The rest of the book contains a number of rather standard, fairly illogical arguments that are trotted out over and over in all too many other superficial, self-contradictory books to argue for spiritual or religious or moral reification and self-alienation (two sides of the same phenomenon) -- i.e. in arguments that we should imagine that we are really something less than we can phenomenally observe ourselves to be in actuality as we experience our lives. Stirner basically says, why not grow up and quit trying to imagine that parts of your self and parts of your life and/or world are ghosts that make decisions for you (or that "should" be allowed to make decisions for you). All gods, spirits, ghosts, essences, etc. are really just self-alienated ideas that we imagine are separate entities. We can only imagine this because no god, spirit, ghost, essence, etc. can have any reality in the sensible world, or they would be natural objects and not the intangible gods, spirits, ghosts, essences, etc. that we make them out to be.
So, if you want to read something sophisticated and insightful about what the spiritual and religious consist, this is not the book to check out. Not that there are many sophisticated and insightful books anywhere on the subject. This author hasn't done his homework. And he is philosophically quite naive. BUT, on the other hand, if you want a silly, superficial book to read as a fairy story to tell you how to be "spiritual" in a silly and superficial way, I guess this could be the book for you!