I saw this article this morning by Derek Thompson today in the Atlantic. I thought it was a fitting follow up to my posting of the third Cathedral lecture yesterday --
And America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his new book, The Anxious Generation, to stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to float placelessly in a content cosmos, to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. The internet is timeless in the best and worst of ways—an everything store with no opening or closing times. “In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things,” Haidt writes. In other words, digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.
Religious rituals are the opposite in almost every respect. They put us in our body, Haidt writes, many of them requiring “some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional.” Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate, and Jews daven. Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. (It’s no surprise that people describe a scheduled break from their digital devices as a “Sabbath.”) Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people, whether in a church, mosque, synagogue, or over a dinner-table prayer. In other words, the religious ritual is typically embodied, synchronous, deep, andcollective.
I’m not advocating that every atheist and agnostic in America immediately choose a world religion and commit themselves to weekly church (or synagogue, or mosque) attendance. But I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it. Making friends as an adult can be hard; it’s especially hard without a scheduled weekly reunion of congregants. Finding meaning in the world is hard too; it’s especially difficult if the oldest systems of meaning-making hold less and less appeal. It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what we lost.
I agree with Thompson when he says "the oldest systems of meaning-making hold less and less appeal", and my Cathedral Talks were an attempt to explain why, which is that they cannot flourish in the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. That does not mean that the truth claims of these religions are wrong, but that we've become so alienated from Reality, particularly in the ways that it disembodies us, that those claims can no longer make any sense to us.
The larger argument I'm making in those lectures is that the TCM is the culmination of a profoundly unbalanced project that began in the early 1600s. It has brought us many material benefits, but at the price of lost Wisdom. The future of humanity depends on whether or not we can recover that Wisdom in such a way that it plays a role in how we deal with the threats posed by climate change and a technological singularity--not to mention the immiseration of the wretched of the earth. All these threats come from an underlying that rejects any attempt to impose constraints on greed and will to power. We've got away with it so far, but the chickens are coming home.
We need to recover that Wisdom because the human future depends on more and more of us finding a way to get a foothold outside of the TCM. Taking a religious tradition--its beliefs and practices--seriously on its own terms is one way to do that. It could be a path toward the recovery of Wisdom if it's done in a healthful way.
I said in one of the lectures that while you don't have to be religious to have some experience of the Transcendent Good, many people who have such experiences become religious. That sense of the Transcendent Good is a place to put one's foot. So start there. Start with that spark of an intuition that despite everything that seems to contradict the truth of it, that at the heart of things there is something deeply good and benevolent, and start acting as if it was the most important thing rather than everything else that life in the TCM would have you believe is important. Be a sign of contradiction, and be skeptical about almost everything that the TCM tells you is important—but reject solutions that are born out of fanaticism.
All genuine religion has to be experience-based, and as the above quote by Thompson makes clear, it has to be enacted by the body. That kind of bodily enactment in itself is a sign of contradiction to life in the TCM. Such a gesture, if it is nothing else, is a path of resistance. So adopt daily practices that are a sign of contradiction to the logic of the TCM. Start small and see where it takes you. Baby steps. Let your conscience--not your Superego--guide you.
The biggest mistake is to approach a religious tradition by trying to evaluate the believability of its doctrines. Since the Reformation, religious practice in the West has been too intellectualized and too much about a trying to reduce the 'symbolic' language of a book into language that has 'semiotic' clarity and certainty. That's just not how religious language works, and when people semioticize religion, they create idols, and idolatry is the worst form of religious alienation.
So for instance, start with what you know from your experience of the Good, then adopt some of the practices of a religious tradition that seem most inspired by the recognition of that Good. First comes the practice, then later comes the understanding. See it as your way of individual resistance to something that feels real because it's the consensus reality but that deep down you know is fundamentally delusional.
We have to navigate in that world everyday because it is the consensus reality, but we don't have to accept it as the really Real. Developing a sense of alienation from that which is most deeply alienating is a sign of health. The goal at first is to find ways to resist all the ways that it seeks to seduce us, to subsume us into its totalizing, nihilistic logic, and then eventually to find sure footing in a place that is outside of it. Reject nihilism no matter how seductive.
But the bottom line is that the "the oldest systems of meaning making" to which Thompson refers provide an infrastructure and a tradition that provides a place to start. They have not become obsolete because they still work effectively for many. The challenge is to find something that works for you, and hopefully in a way that helps you to find some level of communion with others to share that with.
When people who share a transcendental perspective get together, talk about their experience, organize their lives together, find ways of celebrating and ritualizing what is most important and sacred to them, they are behaving religiously. If there is another solution to the profound alienation the TCM produces, I am open to learn about it, but I doubt it could ever be as effective as becoming part of a healthy religious community, that is a community with a robust grounding in the Transcendent Good.
The problem, of course, is to find such a community. On the one hand, too many are semioticized and as such have little vitality, and, on the one hand, too many are suffused by fanaticism. Neither has anything to do with the health of the soul or spirit. They are just other forms of toxic alienation. By their fruits you will know them.