Karen Armstrong, is perhaps best known outside theological circles for Through the Narrow Gate (1982), her book about the experience of leaving, after seven years, a religious teaching order to read English at Oxford. She is also well known to SOF members for her lectures and for her many academic publications following A History of God (1993). Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life is a departure from these more recent books, as it is written in a non-academic and very accessible style for a more general audience, though still managing to pass on insights and understandings gained from a long study of religious history and practice.
Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life struck me as a cross between a contemporary self-help book and a commentary on – or companion to – an ancient Religious Rule. Armstrong's years of serious research into the Abrahamic religions in particular – but into Buddhism and Confucianism too – have brought her to a place where she is anxious to emphasise commonalities and areas of agreement, most particularly 'The Golden Rule'.
This is the basis, as she sees it, of all religions and is at the core of what she understands by 'compassion'. Armstrong encourages her readers to expand their spectrum of concern by following a graduated and ever-widening series of steps from attending to self through to loving one's enemies.
The background of this publication is an interesting one. The book came out three years after Armstrong was chosen as one of the three joint winners of the 2008 TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Prize, better known in the USA, where the TED Conference began in 1984 as a private non-profit organisation supporting those whom it feels have 'ideas worth spreading'. It awards $100,000 to those it judges already to have 'made a difference' but who, with its help, are thought likely to make an even greater impact. The Conference also grants them a 'wish for a better world', which the winners reveal in an 18-minute speech to those attending the prizegiving. Armstrong's speech, which is available on YouTube, has been subsequently delivered in various places, including last November at the Liberal Synagogue in St. John's Wood where a number of SOF members came to hear an expanded version.
Armstrong attributes The Golden Rule to Confucian origins. She believes (a word which incidentally she feels – strongly – has unfortunately strayed far from its Anglo-Saxon roots in 'love' and 'belonging') that the world urgently needs to cultivate empathy and altruism at the centre of private and public life. Further, she is convinced that this is something that can be learned, practised and taken forward by individuals and wider societies if her twelve steps are followed conscientiously. This is not to say, however, that she fails fully to acknowledge the challenge and difficulties of doing so. For Armstrong religions are essentially about doing and behaving rather than believing.
Armstrong points out where pitfalls lie at every step but she encourages perseverance towards an end-point of an all-encompassing, compassionate life which translates into acts of kindness and charity. World Compassion is no longer a mere welcome bi-product of religious practice but, in the words of Martin Luther King, 'an absolute necessity for our survival'.
I found the book both informative and generally inspiring, welcoming the way Armstrong had fed into every chapter's 'step' apposite and wise teachings from east as well as west. My main reservations lay around her optimistic – but I felt naïve – faith in the ability of individuals and society to overcome the negative forces underlying personal, social and political interaction. If only we could all reach ekstasis, not only recognising but going on to overcome the subtle complexity of the many factors which influence our behaviour for the worse! Armstrong encourages us to master each step in turn before proceeding to the next. I confess that I haven't yet got beyond Step One!
Penny Mawdsley is the editor of Portholes. She is a former Chair of SOF and currently a SOF Trustee.
Reviewed: Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life by Karen Armstrong, Bodley Head (London 2011), Pbk. 224 pages, £12.99.