An interview with Huston Smith

Introduction

A professor of philosophy and religion at several noted American universities for over fifty years, Smith is the author of many books, including the classic text The World’s Religions, which has sold over two million copies. He recently became known to an international audience through Bill Moyers’s widely acclaimed PBS series The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith. A central theme in Smith’s work is his assertion that while the scientific method is enormously powerful and has yielded great benefits, it has definite limits. In his book Beyond the Post-Modern Mind he writes: “Were we capable of keeping . . . science . . . in its place, there would be no problem, but the triumphs of science have been too impressive to allow this. Method has mushroomed into metaphysics, science into scientism, the latter defined as the drawing of conclusions from science that do not logically follow. . . . Scientism is a mark of our times, one we are all victims of and responsible for: in Descartes’s fall, we sinned all.”

While primarily a scholar, Smith has also spent many years as a practitioner of Christianity, Sufism, Tibetan and Zen Buddhism, and Vedanta. Reading Smith’s books or hearing him speak, one encounters a man whose humor and soft-spoken eloquence never disguise his bold and unwavering message: that the spiritual dimension of life and the sense of the sacred are of the utmost importance for the fulfillment of our humanity. He laments, quoting Saul Bellow: “It is a long time since the knees were bent in piety.” In a time when this perspective is often considered to be old-fashioned or too absolute, we are impressed by Huston Smith’s strength of conviction in what, to him, is perfectly obvious. His fearless stand against scientific materialism and existentialism within the very institutions most responsible for the promotion of these views is remarkable and inspiring. His voice is a touchstone in today’s bewildering world of modern philosophies—a world in which it is all too easy to lose one’s way.

The following interview was conducted by Michael Toms for New Dimensions Radio.

Interview

Michael Toms: Huston, why have religious structures seemingly lost the Vision, so that people have to seek it elsewhere?

Huston Smith: I think that they, like perhaps all the other institutions in the modern world, were taken in by a development that goes back about three or four hundred years and set the modern world on its course. That development was, of course, the emergence of modern science.

Science in the generic sense had been around as long as art and religion. But what was discovered then—in the sixteenth, seventeenth centuries—was the controlled experiment, which escalated science to a new order of power and exactitude. That power proved to be enough to create both a new world, this world that we now live in, and a new worldview. In the process it brought many, many benefits. But in terms of worldview, it inflicted a great blow on the human psyche by making it appear that life’s material side is its most important side. Now this is a logical mistake. Science didn’t really say this, but because its power derived from attending to the material aspects of nature, and because that power is great and effective and gave us many benefits, the outlook of modernity is unprecedentedly materialistic.

Now, you asked about religious institutions, the mainline churches. Unfortunately, they too succumbed to some extent to that slip. Not intentionally. But transcendence, as that which is not just larger than we are but also better than we are, got pushed into the background and lost our attention. All modern institutions, churches included, have suffered that loss.

Churches are doing many good things—social service causes, taking in the street people, and so on. They’re doing very good work. But the reason that they’ve failed to inspire as they once did is that their grasp on transcendence has slipped. That also accounts for why Asian spirituality has begun to appeal to people in the West. Not having suffered the modern reduction of reality, they have maintained a firmer hold on transcendence.

MT: Asian spirituality puts more emphasis on the experience. I think of my grandmother, for example. She was deeply saddened when the Catholic Church decided to change the ritual and go to an English Mass. The mystery of the Latin—the mystique—was changed, was transformed, in that simple act.

HS: That’s right. And the so-called liturgical reform that you’re referring to is an ambiguous move. Certain reemphases were perhaps called for, but there have also been losses. You mentioned one; I’ll mention another. I recently was at a gathering with Robert Bellah, the noted sociologist and author of Habits of the Heart. He’s a wise and right-thinking man. But he claimed that when the priest stopped facing the altar and turned to face the congregation, the Catholic Church gained, for the congregation felt included. Well, I have to confess that my take is just the opposite. Togetherness is nice. But it can’t match the symbolism of the priest and the people—everybody, the priest included—facing the cross, as something that is beyond them all. That’s what people need, more than they need the sense of togetherness or creating your own theology—the whole anthropological turn. Once more I’ll say that the situation is ambiguous. It’s not totally black-and-white. Because the gains are touted more than the losses, it’s important to balance the picture. I’m glad you brought up the issue.

MT: The aspect of community also comes up for me as we’re talking about the shift. In the previous form—with the priest and the congregation facing the cross, as you put it—there’s a recognition, I think, of each individual on his or her own journey in community.

HS: Right.

MT: Whereas, shifting it around it’s like, well, we’re all in this “together.”

HS: That’s right.

MT: But it’s not quite that way, it seems. It’s different. As you say, ambiguous is a good way to put it.

Another thing that keeps coming up for me as we’re talking about this has to do with the educational system, of which you’ve been a part for so many years. With the increasing emphasis on business, career and opportunity—at the sacrifice of what’s called the humanities, the bedrock of establishing values and ethics in ourselves—courses on those subjects are going by the by. What about that?

HS: I think it’s a serious matter. You may have seen a poll of students recently, freshmen, throughout the nation. One of the questions in the poll was, “Why have you come to college?” Seventy-five percent said, straight out, that their top priority was to make money, make more money. Few checked the option, “to develop a meaningful philosophy of life.”

MT: That’s almost a direct reversal of the way it was twenty years ago, in the 1960s.

HS: Exactly. I see the shift as ominous. The universities and colleges might say, “Well, that’s just a problem of our time. We face the yuppies, and that’s what they’re coming for.” But I personally think that we in academia have to take some responsibility for the shift. Again, there’s been no wrong intent. We’ve simply not seen clearly what has happened. And what has happened in academia is, as President Steven Muller of Johns Hopkins said in an interview, “The university is rooted in the scientific method, and the scientific method cannot provide a sense of values. As a result, we’re turning out skilled barbarians.”

Now, I think that’s basically true. But what academics do not see clearly enough is the way that their own disciplines, including their criteria for knowing, gravitate towards scientific ways of knowing which emphasize objective knowledge—public knowledge that can be verified.

MT: All the proper footnotes and bibliographies.

HS: That’s part of it. There’s also the jargon and the academese, much of which is unreadable. There’s the added problem that because such a large proportion of our population is going to college, professors can get their books published just by requiring their students to read them! There’s an ingrown character to academic writing. Professors speak to their colleagues and their own students. A gap emerges between the university mind and our public consciousness.

MT: Huston, you’re mentioning how the scientific paradigm has crept into academic circles, how the scientific model has actually become part of the research into the humanities, and how it can stifle creativity and originality. But in your writings you’ve also referred to David Bohm’s theory of wholeness and the implicate order. David Bohm is certainly one of the foremost theoretical physicists of our era and has pioneered, I think, a theory of physics that almost sounds like a spiritual philosophy.

HS: It does indeed.

MT: One very similar to some of the Oriental philosophies you’re so familiar with. What is your view of the possible coming-together, the linking, with science coming back around to its roots in natural philosophy?

HS: It’s an immensely exciting time. The outcome hasn’t been determined; we’ll find out how things go, but the incursions are fruitful. On one hand, the developments in science have undercut a kind of crass Newtonian view of reality as consisting of ultimate little atoms that are unrelated to other things—our century has undercut that. The interrelation between the parts of being—which David Bohm emphasizes with his concept of implicate wholeness—clearly is a move back towards the unity which traditional philosophies, those of Asia included, emphasized.

At the same time, I think we have to be careful here. Modern science has become a powerful symbol for transcendence—again I use “transcendence” to refer to that which is greater than we are by every criterion of worth we know, including intelligence and compassion. Modern science suggests such a realm, but I do not think that it proves it. Nor do I think that it can, for this reason: The crux of modern science is the controlled experiment; that’s what distinguishes modern science from generic science, and what gives it its power by virtue of its power to prove. It can winnow hypotheses and discard those that are inadequate. What we don’t see is the corollary of all this, which is that we can control only what is inferior to us. Things that are greater than we are, including more intelligent, dance circles around us, not we they. So there’s no way that we are going to get angels, or God, or whatever other beings there may be that are greater than we are, into our controlled experiments. So I think modern science will never prove anything in the area of the human spirit. But it can suggest, and I find it suggesting powerfully. For me, modern science has come to rival, even outstrip at times, sacred art and virgin nature as a symbol of the divine.

Now, if I can continue one more step. I think there’s a trap if those who share our kinds of spiritual interests rush on to say, “Well, that’s true of science up to this point. But that only shows that we need a new science that is larger in scope and can prove these transcendent realities.” When I hear that, and I hear it very often, my impulse is to say, “In proposing that move, you show me where your loyalties lie, namely, in science! You’re for transcendence, but you won’t really believe it exists until science proves that it does. So your move shows that you continue to accept science as the ultimate oracle as to what exists.” That acceptance is the heart of modernity’s problem, so the call for a science that proves transcendence only perpetuates the problem.

In probing the physical, material world, science is brilliant; it is a near perfect way of telling us about that. And to know about nature is a great good, for nature is awesome in its own right.

But science doesn’t have to do everything. And if we try to make it do everything, with every step of its expansion we will decrease its power and will end up with a kind of mushy science. Of course, we can define “science” in any way we please. I prefer keeping it hard-nosed, powerful and precise, while insisting that it can only disclose a part of reality.

MT: It occurs to me as I hear you present your case here—which I think is very compelling—that it may explain why it’s so difficult to get psychic and paranormal experiences to happen in the scientific laboratory.

HS: Exactly. I believe that paranormal powers are real. But to get anything into a laboratory, we have to reduce the variables to a single alternative so we can discover which side of it is true. Where the object in question exceeds us in complexity, we can’t do that.

MT: This may also explain why it has been so easy to change the agenda of colleges and universities, through the federal budget and the like. We’ve made science into some kind of god.

HS: Oh, clearly.

MT: And science has become our religion.

HS: Alex Comfort has a nice line on that. He says, “science is our sacral mode of knowing.” Sacral is a coined word—it comes from “sacred.” I think he’s right. Science has almost exactly replaced the role that revelation served in the Middle Ages. Then, if you wanted the final verdict on what is true, you would go to the scriptures and the traditions of the Church. Now we go to science. One intellectual historian has pointed out that as far back as a hundred years ago, more people believed, really believed, in the truth of the periodic table of chemical elements than believed anything in the Bible. In the century since then, we’ve moved further in that direction. Science has become the revelation of our time.

And to return to our previous point, it should be with regard to the material world. The slip is that we have turned science into scientism—scientism being defined as the assumption that science is the only reliable way of getting at truth, and that only the kinds of things it tells us about really exist.

MT: It may require some sense of humility to admit that we have confused science with scientism.

HS: It will. In a way, we know what we need to know. It’s one of these things that we know but never learn.

MT: Or that we know but haven’t integrated.

HS: That’s right. It has to be assimilated. But everything in our culture—almost everything—works against that assimilation. The visible bombards us from dawn to night. The tangible is so much with us that it’s hard to put it in perspective. That’s all we need to do, just put it in perspective. But that saving grace is difficult to allow.