Religiously Flavored Therapy, Therapeutically Flavored Morality Peter Heinegg Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. By Robert Wright, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2017. xii + 321 pp. $27. There is no one quite like Robert Wright on the American literary scene today, an ex‐Baptist secular humanist (agnostic, not atheistic), intellectual journalist (in print and Web videos), popular philosopher, and amateur expert on religion. In books like Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (1999) and The Evolution of God (2009), Wright offers a melioristic vision of history where the development and refinement of thinking about God, like the dramatically speedy improvement of communication media, provide enthralling new possibilities for a more cooperative and peaceful world. Note that this is not Intelligent Design. As Yale psychologist Paul Bloom puts it, reviewing Wright: “The bad news is that your God was born imperfect. The good news is that he doesn't really exist.” So, the disjecta membra of traditional religion can be used as building material for the new City of Man, if only people can learn from them and work to realize the positive possibilities of this uniquely promising moment in time. Wright does not shy away from making over‐the‐top claims in the same vein as “Buddhism is true.” By Buddhism, he basically means Vipassana meditation. He dismisses all supernatural elements in other forms of Buddhism: reincarnation, karma, and any of the various theistic outgrowths (Amitabha, etc.). He promotes a secular, pragmatic, non‐dogmatic system (which he admits is not technically Buddhism, any more than he himself is, strictly speaking, a Buddhist). It is a classic American do‐it‐yourself course, full of personal testimonies from the author that it paved the way to both valuable insights and (at least somewhat) more moral behavior. Is this religion? Perhaps, if, like Wright, one invokes the William Jamesian notion of religion as “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting thereto.” But Wright is not a stickler for details; all he wants to do is show that his streamlined, simplified brand of Buddhism can help you here and now (and, by implication, far more so than the more familiar Abrahamic religions). In his enthusiastic accounts of mostly week‐long (sometimes more) mindfulness sessions, Wright tells us how he experienced the illusory nature of Self and saw that feelings like anxiety, despair, and greed are steeped in folly and unreality, that mental concentration can diminish pain and distraction, along with pointless hostility to others and all sorts of egoistic clamoring, and that it can also sharpen and deepen our perception of physical reality. Having the time and money to go off on such guided soul tours sounds like a bourgeois privilege, but Wright insists that they are necessary and that daily half‐hour or even one‐hour meditations are not enough to keep him on an even keel. Perhaps, as with psychoanalysis, financial sacrifice is an important part of the process. But what part does science play in this? For starters, psychological research has gone a long way toward demolishing naïve ideas of the ego as the supremely powerful CEO of everything that goes on in our minds. Synaptic “decisions” are made before we become conscious of them. The self, which must exist in some existential sense, is not a pyramid, but is formed by the interaction between a group of evolutionarily constructed “modules,” which size up and react to the vast panoply of situations we find ourselves in, where they interact and compete with other modules (self‐preservation, say, vs. helping those we are bonded to). This is a complex dynamism. The modules, Wright says, cannot be simplistically equated to physical compartments of the brain, blades on a Swiss Army knife, or departments of a company. In any case, this theory thoroughly demythologizes all naïve concepts of identity—and casts a rather dark shadow over freedom of the will as casually understood. It also links up with natural selection, which has programmed us in all sorts of ways to pass on our genes, regardless of whether we are aware of it. The drive to perpetuate...