ARA Review by elaine6 of In It Together
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elaine6
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ARA Review by elaine6 of In It Together
[Following is an OnlineBookClub.org ARA Review of the book, In It Together.]
One of the commandments towards the end of this book is that we should love everyone and everything. It sounds a decent aspiration but I am failing at the first hurdle, as I did not love this book.
Hughes argues that we live in a world of suffering and pain, because it is the human condition never to be satisfied but always to be striving for what we can’t have, or what won’t make us any happier when we achieve it. Fortunately, there is a way out: the realisation that we are not, in fact, human. Our real selves aren’t our human bodies, but our spirits, floating around in there like ghosts in the machine, and our spirits can learn to break with those human patterns.
As a materialist, I was never going to get on with a philosophy so firmly based in Cartesian dualism. I believe that the cultural tendency to view our bodies as fleshy prisons rather than as ourselves can be harmful in many different ways. Conversely, I have always found the understanding that we are truly our bodies, there is no separation between body and mind, rather liberating. We literally form the pathways of our brains by thinking. How cool is that?
Given the argument that our bodies are just the clothes our spirits are wearing and we must learn to see past them, I found the frequent references to morbid obesity and people eating themselves to death rather inconsistent. If my body is unimportant, why does it matter what size it is? By the end of the book, it began to come over as a form of ‘negging’, which I am sure was unintentional, but which I found uncomfortable. The comment that we could and should learn to disregard ‘the pains of hunger’ was also a disturbing one and one surely which could be seen as encouraging disordered eating in people looking for guidance and help.
I am not usually a reader of the self-help genre and find the general underlying assumption that we can fix the problems of the world through fixing ourselves pernicious. The systemic problems to which Hughes refers in the beginning of the book, such as children starving to death, are not caused by his readers in the West being unhappy, undeveloped spiritually or eating the ‘wrong’ things. The implication that they are feels to me like a version of the well-known workplace dodge where workers become responsible for being stressed rather than management being responsible for imposing impossible workloads and poor working conditions. Blaming ourselves for systemic problems disarms us rather than equipping us to fight to overcome them.
The book has already received an impressive number of rave reviews and I am genuinely happy for those who have found it useful. I, however, disagreed with almost everything it said and found it so uncongenial that I admit I was only skimming the last half so that I could get it over with. For this reason, I can really only give it 1 out of 5 stars, but this isn’t a reflection on its quality. I am sure others will continue to rate it much more highly.
***
View In It Together on Bookshelves
One of the commandments towards the end of this book is that we should love everyone and everything. It sounds a decent aspiration but I am failing at the first hurdle, as I did not love this book.
Hughes argues that we live in a world of suffering and pain, because it is the human condition never to be satisfied but always to be striving for what we can’t have, or what won’t make us any happier when we achieve it. Fortunately, there is a way out: the realisation that we are not, in fact, human. Our real selves aren’t our human bodies, but our spirits, floating around in there like ghosts in the machine, and our spirits can learn to break with those human patterns.
As a materialist, I was never going to get on with a philosophy so firmly based in Cartesian dualism. I believe that the cultural tendency to view our bodies as fleshy prisons rather than as ourselves can be harmful in many different ways. Conversely, I have always found the understanding that we are truly our bodies, there is no separation between body and mind, rather liberating. We literally form the pathways of our brains by thinking. How cool is that?
Given the argument that our bodies are just the clothes our spirits are wearing and we must learn to see past them, I found the frequent references to morbid obesity and people eating themselves to death rather inconsistent. If my body is unimportant, why does it matter what size it is? By the end of the book, it began to come over as a form of ‘negging’, which I am sure was unintentional, but which I found uncomfortable. The comment that we could and should learn to disregard ‘the pains of hunger’ was also a disturbing one and one surely which could be seen as encouraging disordered eating in people looking for guidance and help.
I am not usually a reader of the self-help genre and find the general underlying assumption that we can fix the problems of the world through fixing ourselves pernicious. The systemic problems to which Hughes refers in the beginning of the book, such as children starving to death, are not caused by his readers in the West being unhappy, undeveloped spiritually or eating the ‘wrong’ things. The implication that they are feels to me like a version of the well-known workplace dodge where workers become responsible for being stressed rather than management being responsible for imposing impossible workloads and poor working conditions. Blaming ourselves for systemic problems disarms us rather than equipping us to fight to overcome them.
The book has already received an impressive number of rave reviews and I am genuinely happy for those who have found it useful. I, however, disagreed with almost everything it said and found it so uncongenial that I admit I was only skimming the last half so that I could get it over with. For this reason, I can really only give it 1 out of 5 stars, but this isn’t a reflection on its quality. I am sure others will continue to rate it much more highly.
***
View In It Together on Bookshelves
