The vault

Written by

August 22, 2026

A thing yesterday evening that made me laugh a lot. I’ve been slowly but not steadily going through an impressive collection of Stuff in order to get rid of at least some of it, and in a stack of old magazines there was an issue of New Humanist from January/February 2011. I put it aside to leaf through later, and yesterday was later so I leafed through it and paused at a review of a book about compassion by Karen Armstrong. “Oh interesting,” I thought. “I wouldn’t mind writing a review of that myself.”

So I read past the headline and discovered that I had written it.

I don’t exactly know why that was so funny, but it was.

It’s here in case you want to read it (also if you don’t).

Comments

4 responses to “The vault”

twiliter

Aug 22, 2026 3:36 PM

An outstanding review. I think that people find easy answers, or non-answers to be a kind of linament, while simply not knowing is treated as unacceptable. It’s okay to not know. Atheism is the rejection of spritual or supernatural “knowledge” or in the colloquial, “belief.” Some of us find that unsatisfying as well.
Artymorty

Aug 22, 2026 4:27 PM

Impeccable. You had me at “churlish” — perfect little word — and then it was successive waves of “YES — that’s it! That’s the thing! I feel that.”

It’s that you have the whole field of argument in view — you can grasp just as easily those who are lulled by Karen Armstrong and those who aren’t, and you’ve sussed out her own blind spots with psychological precision. That’s what hits me. This is wide-angle critical thinking at full steam.

I’d all but forgotten about Karen Armstrong until just now. Ah, the heady days of New Atheism… before the culture wars really came on, before trans mania and woke extremism turned the internet to mush…

I miss when this kind of thinking and arguing had more room to breathe online, before everything got flattened into culture-war positioning, collapsed into opposing camps.

It’s been a ride, that’s for sure.

Thank goodness we’ve still got B&W. Thank you!
Artymorty

Aug 22, 2026 4:50 PM

Also: this may be a bit of a topic swerve (better suited to the Miscellany Room perhaps?) but I can’t not notice that this —

I had thought I was going to be able to confound my own expectations, if no one else’s, by saying that Karen Armstrong’s self-help guide to compassion was a benign and well-meaning advice book, even though not to my taste – but when I got to the Seventh Step, “How Little We Know”, I had to give it up.

— echoes so much of my irritation with Jordan Peterson and his kooky little self-help demi-cult. Peterson’s guides to manhood or whatever are, if I’m being honest, far more egregious than “not to my taste”, though I tried hard to slot my deep irritation with them into that category. No, I’m afraid, after reading your skewering of Karen Armstrong, I must come forward and confess: I don’t think Peterson is merely “not to my taste”, I think he’s a flaming nut job and either a charlatan or a deluded wack job. Same category as Karen Armstrong. Maybe she really believes, or maybe she’s just driven by the market — saying whatever sells, and maybe starting to believe it on some level — and maybe it’s kind of a mix of both.

You called Armstrong’s book “twelve steps to cherry picking” and that’s not far from Peterson’s “12 rules or life”.

There, I said it! Sorry, not sorry, Peterson-heads!

*phew!*
maddog1129

Aug 22, 2026 5:00 PM

I read Karen Armstrong’s popular book, “The History of God,” because I thought it was going to be a genuine history of ideas about religions and monotheism. And then she wrote as if the encounter with “the burning bush” were real. Needless to say, I was profoundly disappointed.