Stephen Prothero

America’s first modern cremation took place in a cigar box of a building in Washington, Pa., in 1876. The star of that day, who according to a prescient New York Times reporter was destined to be “principally famous as a corpse,” was a would-be baron from Bavaria with more bluster than means. For roughly the next century, cremation was reserved for theosophists, socialists and other crackpots.

But in the last two decades cremation has boomed, and not just among Timothy Leary types. According to Jack Springer, president of the Cremation Association of North America, the national cremation rate is now 21 percent.

Along with the boom in cremation has come a bewildering array of choices. Independent Urn Sales of Holly Hill, Fla., offers a “Star of David” urn for Jews, “Calvary” for Christians (in a “Crucifix” version for sick souls and “Risen Christ” for the healthy-minded), “Pink Triangle” urns for gays and the unadorned and oddly titled “Cube Large” (for overweight cheapskates?). You can display an urn on your mantel, tuck it in a columbarium niche or squirrel it away alongside savings bonds in a safe deposit box. Or you can skip the urn altogether and scatter the ashes on the warning track at Shea Stadium or Candlestick Park — assuming you don’t get caught. “Cremation Keepsake Pendants” are available from any self-respecting death-care provider.

In a college course I teach, called “Death and Immortality,” students often fantasize about going out with a bang: incineration on an open pyre in Washington Square in Greenwich Village, or a post-cremation bash complete with acid jazz and hemp brownies sprinkled with ashes. Hiring the Neptune Society to scatter your ashes at sea just isn’t hip anymore.

But shooting your remains into space — now that’s style, especially if, as Celestis president Chan Tysor promises, you are guaranteed after a few years to keel back toward Earth and burn up “like a shooting star.” (Your space burial, the Celestis Web site promises, will not leave behind any unsightly “orbital debris.” What could be hipper than a green reincineration?)

The “Celestis Earthview Commemorative Spaceflight Service” does not come cheap. Rocketing in an environmentally friendly manner to the front lines of our “spacefaring civilization” will set you or your heirs back $4,800. A 10 percent discount is available for members of the Celestis Associates Program (cost: $35 a year; students: $25). If the launch, as my students say, “pulls a Challenger,” Celestis will either refund your money or collect another seven grams of your loved one’s ashes and try real hard to be more careful next time.

Leary appears to have escaped such humiliation. His seven grams of pulverized bone, mixed with trace elements of C20H25N3O, are now safely in orbit, passing over your head and mine roughly every 90 minutes. In a few years, they will tilt back to earth, accelerating, burning, burning, burning out, surfing a hissing wave of smoke and light, vaporizing in the black, empty silence of space. “I’ll be a space pioneer,” Leary told longtime friend Carol Rosin after viewing the Celestis video puff piece that sold him on space burial two days before he died. “I will be the light.”

Like Do and his Heaven’s Gate followers, Leary — the man who wrote the ad copy for both the ’60s (“turn on, tune in, and drop out”) and the ’90s (“to immortalize, digitize!”) — dreamed a quintessentially American dream: to light out for new territories, using the powers of spirit, mind and controlled substances to, in his words, “form higher units in neurological (and physical) Outer Space.” But he knew better than to trust his scheduled ascension to a UFO and the clockwork of comets. Instead, he waited for death to come to him, then put his trust in the thrust of a Pegasus rocket. If the Heaven’s Gaters were, as I’ve heard it said, “killed by kitsch,” Leary was memorialized by it, presumably with the requisite ironic wink.

Yes, the Celestis service is a crass, commercial venture, and Leary is now its pitch man. But give the guy credit. At the end of the millennium, Leary is out in front once again, reminding us this time of fallen Viking warriors launched into the sea on ships of fire, riding light into darkness, challenging everyone over 30 to live recklessly and then to die without shame.

James William Coleman is not a major brand, and his “The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition” is not destined for the bestseller list. It does shed light, however, on today’s oddly bookish Buddhist vogue. Coleman is a sociologist and a Buddhist, so it’s not surprising that he supports his sympathy for American Buddhism with a survey. His book focuses on a small minority of American-born converts and sympathizers rather than the immigrants and their children who make up three-quarters of American Buddhists.

These “new Buddhists,” as he calls them, patronize four types of Buddhist groups: Zen centers, Tibetan Buddhist centers, vipassana (“insight meditation”) centers and unaffiliated, nonsectarian centers. Most are baby boomers, almost all are white and all practice meditation, which sets them apart from the members of Sokka Gakkai International-USA (a group that prefers chanting to meditation), the largest Buddhist organization in the United States and the only Buddhist group that attracts significant numbers of blacks and Hispanics.

Coleman identifies some key tendencies among boomer Buddhists, including efforts to make Buddhism more egalitarian, more feminist and more socially conscious. The most audacious of these trends is a drift toward a secularized Buddhism that author Stephen Batchelor calls “Buddhism Without Beliefs” and Coleman dubs “bare-bones Buddhism.”

This supposedly revolutionary concept is actually rather old, even hackneyed. The idea is this: Strip Buddhism of what Coleman describes as its “traditional religious trappings — robed priests, elaborate rituals, sacred images of supermundane figures, devotional practices.” What remains is a demythologized practice that is both new and (supposedly) improved: no chanting, no incense, no monks and certainly no bowing. This stealth approach leaves Buddhists with little to do except meditate and read books like “The New Buddhism.”

Coleman’s book concludes that the new Buddhism is “a profoundly subversive force” in contemporary American society. But what exactly is this kind of Buddhism subverting? Is “Zen and the Art of Poker” subverting American obsessions with money? Is “Zen Sex” subverting American obsessions with sexuality?

Recently critics have suggested that the “new Buddhism” is subverting Buddhism itself. In Time magazine’s 1997 cover story on “America’s Fascination With Buddhism,” Robert Thurman (friend of the Dalai Lama, father of Uma and Buddhist studies professor at Columbia — in that order) derided Batchelor and his ilk as “non-Buddhists” preaching humanism but marketing it as Buddhism. In “Ignore the Man Behind the Curtain,” Ngakpa Traktung Yeshe Dorje and A’dzom Rinpoche blasted Lama Surya Das as a faker in an American Buddhist Oz. “Mr. Surya Das is therefore a Buddhist with ‘no Buddhist beliefs’ in a world where there is ‘really no Buddhism,’” they wrote. “This should perhaps cause anyone who would learn Buddhism from Mr. Surya Das to stop and ponder.”

I am not a Buddhist myself, but I have taught American Buddhism for about a decade, and I must admit I share a certain disquiet about the direction boomer Buddhism is going. I teach religious studies because I believe that studying religion is a truly liberal art. All of the world’s great religions provide profound challenges to the unexamined life. At their best, they offer devastating diagnoses of human sickness and radical remedies for it. They demand crazy things — that we love our enemies, that we deny our selves or that we vow to liberate all sentient beings. At their best, religions are difficult, confusing and mysterious. They don’t pat us on the back, assuring us that, in the words of a Buddhist bestseller by Sylvia Boorstein, “It’s Easier Than You Think.” In fact, they remind us that it’s harder than we think, much harder. Like a Zen master stalking his students with a stick, they whack us back to attention when we fall asleep.

Boomer Buddhism, by contrast, is all too often shallow and small. It soothes rather than upsets, smoothing out the palpable friction between Buddhist practice and the banalities of contemporary American life, cajoling even the Dalai Lama to direct his great mind to small American preoccupations like “The Art of Happiness.”

Almost four centuries ago, the Puritans came to New England intent on uplifting and improving Protestantism. By stripping Protestantism of all the last vestiges of Catholic superstition, by relying on the authority of the biblical book alone, they would craft a new and improved Christianity. Boomer Buddhists are modern-day Puritans. They too are suspicious of priests and rituals and other “traditional religious trappings.” They too believe that America is a sacred place destined to perfect the religious tradition they hold dear. Virtually every “new Buddhist,” including Coleman himself, seems to be carrying around a laundry list of the ways America is making Buddhism better. To take just one example, Lama Surya Das — who, despite the name, is a white guy — has a list of “Ten Emerging Trends” in American Buddhism. In the United States, he brags, Buddhism is “nonsectarian,” “psychologically astute” and “simplified.” Each of these trends is, in his view, an improvement.

What seems to be lost on the new Buddhists who populate Coleman’s book is the possibility that it may be America’s destiny not to make Buddhism perfect but to make it banal. It is, of course, far too early to determine what America’s effects on Buddhism will be. The religion has been in Asia for two-and-a-half millenniums; it has been a force in the United States for only a century or so. So far, however, things do not look good. Philosopher George Santayana once observed that “American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native goodwill, complacency, thoughtlessness and optimism.” Instead of preserving Buddhism, Americans seem intent on co-opting and commercializing it, dissolving a religion deeply suspicious of the self into an engine of self-absorption.

A few months ago I visited the headquarters of the Buddhist Churches of America in San Francisco. In its gift shop (yes, almost all American Buddhist centers have gift shops) sat a rock carved with the words “What Would Buddha Do?” If the Buddha were alive today, would he be a “new Buddhist”? Would he write bestsellers for Doubleday? Direct films?

Call me old-fashioned, but I think the Buddha would march his ass (mindfully of course) to an American Buddhist monastery. Like immigrants and chanters, monks are almost entirely ignored in Coleman’s book, but they are now dug in all across America, doing decidedly old Buddhist things like wearing robes, conducting rituals and even chanting. At places from the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association and Shasta Abbey in California to Zen Mountain Monastery and Dai Bosatsu Monastery in New York, ordained monks devote themselves full time not to improving Buddhism but to preserving it. Some of these monasteries focus on translating and publishing ancient Buddhist texts. Most host laypeople for intensive retreats. But many also shutter their doors for long periods to allow monks to pursue the hard work of what the Buddha described as waking up from a long, bad dream.

Many of the monks at these monasteries are foreign born, but a surprising number are people born in America who have, for one reason or another, decided to scuttle the easy answers of boomer Buddhism for something closer to the real thing. Thanissaro Bhikkhu began life as Geoffrey DeGraff. After graduating from Oberlin, he went to Thailand, where he studied in the Thai forest tradition under a Thai teacher for more than a decade. In 1991, he joined with another Thai teacher to found Metta Forest Monastery in the mountains north of San Diego. Thanissaro, who became abbot of that monastery in 1993, describes the “new Buddhism” as a grand game of telephone in which “things get passed on from person to person, from one generation of teachers to the next, until the message gets garbled beyond recognition.” One of the key Buddhist ideas lost in that grand game of telephone is sacrifice (“renunciation” in sutra-speak), which he calls the “huge blind spot in American Buddhism.”

Thanks to Thanissaro Bhikkhu and hundreds of monks like him, an authentically Buddhist form of American monasticism is alive and well. These monks are not above adapting Buddhism to American circumstances. They struggle with questions like whether to wear winter coats instead of cotton robes in Chicago, and whether to drive cars in Los Angeles. But they adopt American ways grudgingly rather than gleefully. Unfortunately, as “The New Buddhism” indicates, boomer Buddhists now have the stage. Lama Surya Das sells his books by the gross. Thanissaro Bhikkhu sells his by the unit. Only he doesn’t actually sell them. They are available for free on the Web — a gift from the old Buddhism to the new.

His latest hit, “Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869,” is, like most of Ambrose’s work, primarily an exercise in storytelling. And Ambrose tells a good story, describing the job of building America’s grand iron highway as a nip-and-tuck race between the Central Pacific (CP) in the West and the Union Pacific (UP) in the East.

Running that race were the great white men who made the railroad possible: financiers such as Leland Stanford and Collis Huntington, politicians such as Abraham Lincoln, generals such as Ulysses Grant and William Sherman and even religious leaders such as the Mormon patriarch Brigham Young. The key characters in Ambrose’s drama, however, are not those power brokers but, as his subtitle suggests, the tens of thousands of Chinese, Irish and Mormon laborers who graded the track, laid the ties and drove the spikes.

These men encountered all sorts of obstacles. Weather was one. They fought desert heat and mountain snowstorms. In fact, snow came down so hard in the Sierra Nevada that Central Pacific workers built nearly 50 miles of snowsheds to shield themselves and their work. Indians were another obstacle, conducting what Ambrose calls a guerrilla war against the onslaught of modern America and its steam-driven dynamo. Between 1863 when the railroad building began and 1869 when it ended, laborers were also killed by avalanches, nitroglycerin blasts, exploding engines and runaway trains.

But those who survived triumphed. They drilled tunnels through granite with nothing more than black powder. They laid track at over 8,000 feet. In the spring of 1869, Central Pacific workers built 10 miles of track in just one day. On May 10 of that year, Southerners and Northerners, Easterners and Westerners came together to witness the driving of the famous Golden Spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, that linked the eastern and western lines.

In the past, historians of the transcontinental railroad have been inspired more by Ralph Nader than Walt Whitman. They focused on the greed and corruption of the Gilded Age railroad barons. They spun morality tales, cautioning liberal readers against the evils not just of monopolies but of capitalism itself. Ambrose’s story is different. While he criticizes the capitalists, he praises them, too — as “men ready to take great risks and to accept great profits” (as if the latter were a difficult chore). He also defends the key role the government played in financing the railroad, arguing that some enterprises are just too grand to be left entirely to the private sector.

The theme of “Nothing Like It in the World” is not greed but greatness. Here the United States appears as a daring nation populated by courageous capitalists, politicians and laborers willing to do great things. Among the greatest of those things was the construction of the transcontinental railroad, which in Ambrose’s telling did nothing less than make modern America. While the victory of the Union in the Civil War kept the country from flying apart, he argues, the transcontinental railroad bound it together.

“Exaggeration is endemic to railroad historians,” Ambrose admits, and he has certainly caught the bug. The challenges facing the CP builders were, in his words, “unique in engineering annals,” while a UP bridge was “one of the greatest engineering feats of the nineteenth century.” The financing controversy that swirled around the project was “the largest scandal in America’s nineteenth-century history.” The day the CP laid 10 miles of track “will be remembered as long as this Republic lasts.” As for the railroad itself, well, there was “nothing like it in the world.”

What you think about this book, which reads in places more like a State of the Union address than a work of history, depends almost entirely on what you make of America. Most American studies professors I know would applaud Ambrose’s decision to emphasize the achievements of Irish and Chinese immigrants, but they would sneer at his exceptionalism — his smug assurance that America is the best and brightest of nations.

“Only in America,” Ambrose sings in a concluding Whitmanesque chapter, was there enough space, enough labor, enough government support and enough “energy and imagination” to make a transcontinental railroad a reality: “The railroad was the longest ribbon of iron ever built by man. It was a stupendous achievement. It spanned a continent, opened new lands for settlement, opened the mountains with their minerals. It had crossed a frontier of immense possibilities. It had inaugurated a new age” with a “nationwide stock market” and a “continent-wide culture.”

That is the sort of triumphalist rhetoric that makes many professional historians retch. But history isn’t written just for professionals. If Walt Whitman were alive today he would be singing Stephen Ambrose’s praises — and riding what remains of the rails.

Much has been made of the Texas governor’s “youthful indiscretions” and of his gentleman’s C’s at Yale. But membership in Bones shaped George W. Bush far more than road trips or college courses. In the wake of the Clinton-Lewinsky mess, character has emerged as a leading theme in presidential politics. An examination of the culture of Skull and Bones should shed some light on the character of the latest Bush who would be president.

Though a seniors-only society, Skull and Bones is more than a tad sophomoric. Each May on “Tap Day,” senior Bonesmen troll around Yale’s campus, selecting, or “tapping,” 15 juniors for membership in the upcoming class. The initiation rites that follow sound like something out of Fred Flintstone’s Water Buffalo Lodge or a Robert Bly retreat. Each knight, as neophytes are called, reportedly regales his fellow initiates with his sexual exploits. (He may or may not be naked and may or may not be lying in a coffin.) During initiation, he endures some sort of physical challenge (mud wrestling? diving into a dung pile?) before being born again with a new name and a new identity. In the outside world, members are never to speak about their society. If outsiders raise the topic, Bonesmen are supposed to leave the room.

Members take their secrecy oath seriously — no insider has ever published an exposi — so it is impossible to separate the realities from the rumors that swirl around the society. One rumor has each new member receiving a $15,000 payout. Another says the interior of the “Tomb” (the eerie Gothic headquarters where twice-a-week meetings are held) is decorated with human remains, including the skulls and bones of notables such as Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and Apache warrior Geronimo.

Are the rumors true? Certainly not all of them; the society is probably not the fountainhead of a vast international conspiracy to spread Hegel’s dialectic via the drug trade. But Bush is not helping to clear the air. Like his father, who has consistently refused to discuss Skull and Bones, he isn’t talking. And members of his 1968 Skull and Bones class whom I contacted either neglected to return my calls or refused to comment on what goes on inside the Tomb. “We don’t discuss those things,” said Roy Leslie Austin, now a sociology professor at Penn State. “We just don’t.”

Skull and Bones was founded by William H. Russell in 1832, more than a decade before Texas joined the union. At the time, men’s fraternal organizations were so popular that politicians like former President John Quincy Adams were denouncing their secret oaths as cancers on the body of the republic. When Phi Beta Kappa responded to the anti-masonry in the air by abolishing its oath of secrecy, Russell (who later become Yale’s valedictorian) founded “The Scull and Bones” as an alternative. For the next century and a half, Skull and Bones, as Russell’s society came to be known, guarded its secrecy with the zeal of Howard Hughes and the nuttiness of J.D. Salinger.

In 1856, Bones incorporated as the Russell Trust Association and members built the grim sandstone mausoleum that is still used as society headquarters. In 1876, pranksters broke into that crypt through a window and investigated its interior. Bonesmen responded by bricking up all the windows, which remain sealed today. Supporters describe Skull and Bones as a meritocracy that, by rewarding excellence in academics, athletics and the arts, has fostered achievement at Yale and beyond. From this perspective, the society’s rites, however secretive or sophomoric, promote fading virtues such as friendship and loyalty. And the society does have an astonishing record when it comes to turning out leaders.

Russell saw the society as a way to promote and reward academic excellence. But Bones gradually expanded its mission, tapping not only outstanding scholars but also football captains, Yale Daily News editors and members of the a cappella group the Whiffenpoofs. Eventually, the society also began selecting Bonesmen not for what they had accomplished in life but for who they were by birth.

George Herbert Walker Bush was no doubt selected in part because his father, Prescott S. Bush, was a U.S. senator and a Bonesman. But the president-to-be was also a decorated World War II pilot and captain of the Yale baseball team. George W. Bush, who had a less illustrious youth than his father, is more plainly a legacy member, tapped because of his genes and not his deeds.

From its inception, Skull and Bones has been a bastion of privilege — an ideal steppingstone from a preppie past to an establishment future. And so the society has been regularly denounced for its elitism as well as its secrecy. In 1878, the Yale Courant ripped Bonesmen as “vampires of darkness.” Bones, it wrote, was a “a curse to the college” that promoted “royal and stylish living” and divided the undergraduate classes into “castes.” That same year, the Yale Daily News called the society’s mummeries “supremely silly.” During the 1960s, critics claimed Skull and Bones and other Yale-only secret societies rewarded conformity rather than achievement. Today, denouncing those societies as anti-democratic cults is almost as routine at Yale as Tap Day itself.

Bones waited about a century to respond to the criticism. After World War II, it began admitting blacks and Jews. In 1991, the outgoing Bones delegation tried to tap the first Boneswomen. Patriarchs, as Bones alumni are called, literally barred the doors to the Tomb. Led by conservative William F. Buckley Jr., they obtained a court order temporarily blocking non-male members. In the society-wide vote that followed, however, the conservative blue bloods were defeated and a few women were admitted to the rolls.

There are likely many things this society does well. I would love to have been a skull on the wall in a private debate between, say, Sen. David Boren and Sen. John Kerry or authors Archibald MacLeish and John Hersey (all Bonesmen). But I doubt the Tomb fosters the sort of character necessary for leadership in multicultural America and the new global economy. And I am certain it is an unsuitable incubator for the presidency in the 21st century. This is true for Bonesmen tapped for their accomplishments in rowing or debating. But it is doubly true of those who, like Bush, were tapped primarily for the accomplishments of their forebears.

Since our country’s inception, Americans have been profoundly ambivalent about power and wealth. That is why Horatio Alger is as much a part of the American mythos as is the Titanic. We like to worship the high and the mighty, but we love to see them go under. True, the rich are different from the rest of us. So are the powerful. But both are supposed to live, at least in this country, by some rules. The rich are expected to earn their money through hard work or cunning. And the powerful are to earn their power in public elections, not private clubs. Just as many years ago George W. Bush was suddenly tapped for an exclusive society, critics today might charge that he similarly coasted into becoming an odds-on favorite for the White House before a single ballot had been cast.

The Beecher-Tilton scandal is by no means undiscovered territory for
historians, who have made sport of trashing the not-so-reverend
Beecher for over a century. It is now common knowledge that Beecher
and Tilton had sex (whatever that means). But beating up the dead for
adultery is passi. So historians accuse Beecher instead of the
high crime (or is it a misdemeanor?) of hypocrisy. And they blame the
sentimental Protestantism he championed for paving the way for the
noxious self-absorption of New Age navel-gazing.

Given all that has been written about this scandal, it’s hard to
imagine anyone having something new to say about it. But Richard
Wightman Fox does find a new angle: agnosticism. After scouring
thousands of pages of trial testimony and private correspondence, Fox
concludes that there is no way for any honest observer to know for
sure what Tilton and Beecher did together. All we know, he argues, is
that the principals in the scandal told stories wrapped in stories,
and that those tales contradicted each other and changed dramatically
over time.

Fox’s method shows both modesty and restraint. He begins by allowing
his characters to tell their own versions of what happened. He then offers a variety of plausible
interpretations of what this “kaleidoscope of stories” might have
meant at the time. In the process, Fox gives the lie to the conceit
that a careful historian can peel back layer after layer of
conflicting testimony to reveal the kernel of truth underneath. In
this telling, it’s just stories all the way down.

Although there are elements here of a faddish postmodernism, “Trials
of Intimacy” is really a brief for old-fashioned history in which
evidence matters and the historian’s job is to judge that evidence
critically. On at least one occasion, Fox stands up and bangs his
gavel. About the emerging consensus (floated in “Other Powers,”
Barbara Goldsmith’s recent biography of suffragist Victoria
Woodhull) that Tilton and Beecher conceived an aborted or miscarried
love child, Fox says bunk, noting that the fetus would have been a
hoary 10-and-a-half months old when it was lost.

Fox has argued before that history is “a factual and a moral
inquiry.” And the moral here is that historians should allow the past
to be the past. By insisting that figures like Beecher have something
to say about the New Age (or, for that matter, the Clinton-Lewinsky
mess), Fox says, we rob ourselves of the lessons that real history
has to teach, among them the fact that there are “other ways of being
human” that might actually be preferable to our own.

If the past is a foreign country, then the historian’s job is to turn
characters like Tilton and Beecher into foreigners. Fox does just
that by allowing his characters both to “live and breathe in their
historical moment” and to “speak a language strangely different from
our own.” But he also makes Tilton and Beecher accessible to us by
translating their Romantic pieties, their Republican politics and
their Victorian social conventions into language we can understand.
That is a tricky task — making the past familiar enough to be
understood but foreign enough to be itself — but Fox executes it expertly, whether he is parsing what sentimental
Protestantism has to say about sin or explaining why a straight
gentleman would sit on his equally straight pastor’s lap and seal his
profession of devotion with a kiss.

Given his convictions, Fox does not tease out the obvious parallels between Beecher and Clinton, Tilton and Lewinsky. But he does offer this intriguing observation: that in this 1875 scandal we see the gestation of a new America in which “the private infiltrated and colonized the public” and “public discourse … became increasingly dominated by sensational disclosures or
inventions about private life.” To those sensational disclosures Fox adds not a whit. But his beautifully written book adds much to our understanding of love and loss not only in Victorian America but also in our own time.

Thurman is a Buddhist Studies professor at Columbia University and, if we are to believe Time magazine, one of the 25 most influential people in America. But his real job is playing James Carville to the Dalai Lama’s President Clinton. “Inner Revolution” is one part autobiography, two parts philosophy, three parts history and four parts spin. Here readers learn that Thurman was the first Westerner ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk, that the Buddha was great in bed, that selflessness is the key to real happiness and that Tibet is “a mandala of the peaceful, perfected universe.” But Thurman’s aim is not to portray Tibet as Shangri-la. It is to portray Buddhism as deeply ethical and political — “a coup of the spirit.”

Like John Dominic Crossan, who has argued that Jesus was a revolutionary, Thurman portrays the Buddha as a liberator — a “cool hero” who initiated a “cool revolution” that radically transformed society by changing individuals first. His “politics of enlightenment” was countercultural at first, but it eventually went mainstream, finding its highest manifestation in “buddhocratic” (not theocratic!) Tibet.

As the world modernized, Thurman argues, Tibet modernized too. But while the West’s modernity was “outer,” Tibet’s modernity was “inner.” It explored inner rather than outer space, championed the spiritual over the material, sacralized rather than secularized the world, and put its trust in individuals over bureaucracies. Nonviolent and tolerant, it achieved its apogee in the monasteries of the “psychonauts” of Tibet. Militaristic modernity, Thurman concludes, has brought us to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Our challenge is to marry inner and outer modernity — to create a global society (a “United Nations of Earth”) that is both spiritually and technologically advanced.

In keeping with its manifesto style, “Inner Revolution” is replete with lists. There are five principles of the politics of enlightenment and four grounds for hope in the 21st century. An appendix, the book’s most controversial section, propounds 10 planks in what amounts to a political platform. Here Thurman gets down to business, blasting Newt Gingrich-style Republicans (though not by name) on taxes, crime, race, religious freedom, defense spending and the environment, and endorsing abortion rights, medicinal pot-smoking, universal voter registration and higher salaries for college professors.

Although Thurman presents his book as an antidote to the materialistic modernity of the West, it is also a welcome corrective to the pop Buddhism of Madison Avenue and Hollywood. Say what you want about his specific political proposals, Thurman’s vision of a kinder, gentler America merits a hearing. If nothing else, the book demonstrates that not every Tibetan lama is busy shilling something on TV. Robert Thurman may be no Jack Kennedy, but he isn’t Stephen Seagal either. His manifesto deserves a thoughtful read.