The Good Book: A Humanist Bible, the new ‘secular alternative to the Bible’ by the philosopher A.C. Grayling, is exactly what one might expect a book explicitly conceived of and written as a ‘secular alternative to the Bible’ to be like: Inoffensive, generic, and completely uninspired.
There is a lot to dislike about Grayling, a professor at the University of London and fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, both for religious people and for irreligious people who have cultural or artistic interest in religion. With somebody like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens it is relatively easy to point to their relative (though not as extreme as sometimes made out) bitterness and rancour as reasons to, if nothing else, critique their motivations for behaving as they do while advancing their beliefs. This goes doubly for Sam ‘If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion’ Harris. Grayling, on the other hand, is a lot harder to pin down. He is maddeningly vague about his opinions at some times and unexpectedly and inexcusably nasty at others, and when he is nasty he adopts a condescending attitude that makes one long for Dawkins and his ability to act as if he thinks that religious people are basically intelligent and normal people whether or not he actually does. I do not know why he decided to write The Good Book. I want to believe that he was acting in some form of good faith, however defined, but the contents of the book make this a little more problematic than one would like.
The first problem with The Good Book, and one of the worse ones, is its style. Grayling writes in that very special form of imitation of the style of the 1611 King James Authorised Version of the Protestant Bible that so often crops up among writers who want to use a magisterial style but have no incentive to do the work required to get it right. Imitating a specific text’s style requires respect and affection for that text and/or some sort of expertise in the language and culture that that text originated in or else it will come across as mean-spirited, half-assed, or both. The Good Book comes across as both. The style also affects the content, both in the obvious sense and in that most of The Good Book is taken or paraphrased from other writings, basically every remotely appealing idea or Great Thought® that Grayling could cram in without allowing any religious sentiment to creep in. Grayling’s employment of the faux-Biblical style thus leads to such oddities as the first few sentences (or ‘verses’, since, yes, Grayling goes down that road too): ‘In the garden stands a tree. In the springtime it bears flowers; in the autumn, fruit. Its fruit is knowledge, teaching the good gardener how to understand the world. From it he learns how the tree grows from seed to sapling, from sapling to maturity, at last ready to offer more life; and from maturity to age and sleep, whence it returns to the elements of things’. The content is roughly that of some sort of high-school biology textbook (albeit better, judging by what survives Grayling’s King-Jamesifier, than the one that I had), and the fact that the Bible generally prefers metaphors involving mass agriculture to those involving small-scale gardening means that what comes out seems, if anything, like a bastardisation of the Qur’anic style, and an even worse one than what he is trying to inflict upon the Biblical.
For another example of this problem, but also leading into the second problem, take this golden nugget of timeless wisdom from the portion that Grayling calls ‘The Lawgiver’: ‘The more perfect the admixture of the political elements, the more stable and lasting will the constitution be’. I’m not entirely sure what in the world Grayling or whatever political theorist he King-Jamesified this quote from are trying to say here, but as far as I can figure, the sentence roughly translates to ‘A political superstructure works roughly proportionately to the amount of time, effort, and foresight, and number of escape and release mechanisms, put into that superstructure at its creation’. In ‘The Proverbs’ we have ‘What is on the sober person’s heart is on the drunkard’s tongue’. These statements are, indeed, roughly the general sort of sentiments that appear in the actual Bible, at least in the less spiritual and/or grisly parts of the Old Testament, but basically the entire wisdomesque portion or portions of The Good Book is like this. There are parts of the Bible that could not possibly lead any sane person to any sort of great epiphany about life, but I honestly do not know if any of the remotely original (i.e. folded, spindled, and mutilated beyond the bounds of whatever Grayling took it from) portions of The Good Book possibly could (Among the other things that Grayling wants us to know: ‘The first step of the good life is to seek wisdom and give up fear’, entirely contrary to everything else that thinkers in ethics have said, totally!).
This leads us to the uncomfortable question of what exactly Grayling intends for this book to be or do. Its bizarre style and complete lack of useful citations preclude the possibility of its being an introductory guide to humanism or secular thought for an outsider in the manner of Dwight Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible. The only paratext other than the table of contents is a two-page ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (I really wish I was making this up), in which Grayling says that his ‘aspiration and aim [is] the good of humanity and the good of the world’. Very helpful and specific, especially in contrast to all of those other philosophers who wanted to blight humanity and let the world die in a fire. I am not generally a stickler for finding an identifiable ‘audience’ in the way that some publishing-industry hacks are, but with a work like this it is good to at least figure out why the author went out of his way to write it. An interview in the Grauniad is more helpful than anything in the book itself: When asked specifically about who he sees his audience as, Grayling replies ‘Well, I'm hoping absolutely every human being on the planet’, and then says that ‘on Monty Pythonesque grounds there’s a good likelihood that in five centuries’ time I will be [worshipped as a god], as a result of this’.
I am unfortunately forced to conclude that Grayling seems to sincerely believe that this work, with its unintentionally-hilarious-at-best writing style, trite proverbs, lack of anything resembling a coherent thrust (even the Bible, which is slapdash and ideologically muddled as religious texts go, has a fairly consistent running theme of God’s promises with and to His people and His creation), and completely unhelpful list of sources at the back (there is no way to check sources to what was sourced from them, and the list is arranged in a totally dispassionate approximation of conventional bibliographical format, with, for instance, ‘folklore’ as a source appearing alphabetically in the Fs and ‘traditional’ in the Ts), will find its home among irreligious people who will literally use it as Christians would use a Bible. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, absolute bullshit. I can certainly see this book gaining some traction at services that would otherwise call for religious readings but that the people involved do not want to sully with icky faith, or among certain types of Unitarian Universalists and other such sects who do not believe much in particular. But if Grayling sincerely wants to vault into the firmament of such figures as Moses, the Evangelists, Muhammad, Nichiren, and Guru Gobind Singh, then this is something that he wants despite secularism by its very nature having vanishingly few of the traits that make religions last, such as history, a preceding religion in whose cultural context it emerged, liturgy or ritual founded on a mystical or cenobitic tradition, specific enthusiasm among adherents, or a set of defined beliefs beyond a lack of belief in what the other people believe. Ascribing these things to secularism misses the point of what is it to not be religious for a great many of those who are not. The Good Book is an incredibly bizarre attempt at something resembling a religious equivalent to entryism, deliberately released on the four hundredth anniversary of the unveiling of the work whose style it desperately sucks up to like a mob stooge to the most compassionate (or least sadistic) made man in town, lacking in any original literary or cultural merit of its own, and penned according to the individual beliefs of somebody who is openly sort of like Miyo Takano and who, more so than most philosophers, represents a literal army of one. The Good Book is not a good book, I cannot believe that it was even written in good faith, and I am going to spend the rest of the evening watching Canadian election results and campy anime before I put myself in an uncharitable mood.
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