Many of us have cause to be grateful to the renowned psychologist Dorothy Rowe. Her best-selling 1983 book on depression (Depression – The Way Out of Your Prison, 1983) provided us with a perspective we were urgently seeking. It helped us to make sense of and to see a way through the blackness and bleakness that had overtaken someone we knew. In that book she made abundantly clear the difference between the world and our interpretation of it. She pointed out that our understandings are human constructs not absolute truths. In the course of helping us towards comprehension of a bewildering phenomenon, she took us in the direction of a SOF-type philosophy.
Since then Rowe has written a dozen or more popular books, each offering help in understanding a particular emotional need or problem. In them all the underlying presumption is that we create our own reality. Our thinking is based on premises we ourselves have developed. It seemed reasonable to assume, then, that her latest volume What Should I Believe? would be of interest to SOF people. I think that, up to a point, it is.
I was distinctly disappointed to find, having obtained my copy by mail order, that much of it had already been published under different titles. In fact this is the third reprinting of much of the material, which had previously appeared in 1989 (The Courage to Live) and 1991 (The Construction of Life and Death). I supposed that I had wasted my money, but revised that opinion somewhat as I read.
In her useful extended preface, which seems to promise much worthwhile to follow, Rowe explains her book as a contribution to the discussion of religion prompted by the militant atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens and the sceptical questioning of John Humphreys. She maintains that our sense of being a person arises out of the meanings we create and proposes that perdition is to lose our sense of being a person; salvation is to be the person we know ourselves to be. Being ourselves takes courage, she argues, and when courage fails, we resort to believing all sorts of impossible things adding we all have fantasies that we treat as truths. Then she points out that neuroscience has shown that our brains create maps of the world rather than showing us what actually exists. We need constantly to check our maps, she insists, against experience – our own and other people's.
The opening chapter, titled Religion in the Twenty-First Century, surveys how religion has been depicted in recent writing, politics and psychology.
These portrayals she inspects through the lens of Karen Armstrong's categories mythos and logos. Rowe is clear that these are not two separate strands of thought. Mythos and logos both use the form of a story, she points out, claiming also we cannot live just with mythos or just with logos. Fundamentalists attempt to see everything in black and white and try not to recognise mythos because it allows shades of grey. The tone of her writing I find somewhat strident, but consider her analysis a useful one.
It is in the following chapter, What it is to be Human, that Rowe begins to illustrate her points using accounts of encounters from her work as a psychotherapist. Later in the book such references, often lengthy and far from contemporary, dominate the content and encouraged this reader to skip ahead repeatedly. Here, however, there is also substantive content. We read about truth and why we cannot know it is absolute (I disliked use of fantasy for unverifiable theory); language and how it creates reality; emotions as meanings we create in response to our personal sense of safety or danger; and the basic nature of ideas about morality and about the cosmos.
At some level of consciousness, she claims, fundamentalists know they are lying to themselves.
What remains of Rowe's thesis is buried in several chapters of recounted conversation and recalled incident. From these she emerges to conclude that religious beliefs held defensively are a sign of inadequacy and that our beliefs should be chosen so as not to create suffering for ourselves and others, but to be a source of personal courage and optimism.
At the time of its publication certain reviewers understood this book as condemning religious belief.
In fact it simply points to the damage that can be done by absolute beliefs, whilst explaining clearly the nature and role of belief. I cannot recommend a typical Sofiareader to buy this book. I suggest you borrow a copy, read until boredom threatens and then skip ahead merrily. Perhaps you should do so ahead of next year's conference?
Helen Bellamy is a SOF trustee. Next year's SOF Annual conference will be on psychology and religion with the working title Brain, Belief and Behaviour.
Helen Bellamy reviews What should I Believe? Why Our Beliefs about the Nature of Death and the Purpose of Life Dominate Our Lives by Dorothy Rowe Routledge (Abingdon 2008). Pbk. 312 pages. £9.99.