[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Religion and the Survival of Culture

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (June 04 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


Among the more interesting things I've had occasion to notice, during
the time The Archdruid Report has been online, is a common assumption
shared by the two popular viewpoints about the future of industrial
societythe belief in a future of perpetual progress and the belief in a
future of sudden collapse. Despite their disagreements, both viewpoints
embrace the claim that there is nothing to be learned from the past; our
present situation, both insist, is unlike anything else in history, and
therefore history cannot be used as a yardstick to measure the possible
shapes of the future ahead of us.

It will not come as an unbearable surprise to readers of this blog that
I find this claim unconvincing. It's true, of course, that the current
predicament of industrial civilization differs in some ways from the
equivalent challenges that faced, and overwhelmed, civilizations of the
past. It's equally true that historical patterns never repeat themselves
precisely. Still, it's worth suggesting that despite the differences,
our predicament is analogous to those earlier examples, and the
experiences of the past thus may turn out to be useful as we face our
own future.

One pattern found very commonly in the decline and fall of
civilizations, as I pointed out in last week's post, is the transmission
of cultural heritage from one civilization to its successors through the
medium of a newly established religious movement. The classic example,
which has seen a certain amount of discussion in futurist circles since
Roberto Vacca's The Coming Dark Age (1973) introduced it to contemporary
culture, is the role played by monasteries in Europe in preserving Greek
and Roman literature, philosophy, and scientific knowledge through the
worst years of the Dark Ages.

The same thing has happened often enough elsewhere that Arnold Toynbee
made the concept a key theme in the later volumes of his massive A Study
of History (1943 - 1961). In Toynbee's view, the fading years of every
civilization form a seedbed for new religious movements; one or more of
these movements break free of the others as decline continues, to become
a major cultural force; as the civilization that nurtured it collapses
completely, the new religious movement fills the vacuum, salvaging what
remains of the old civilization's heritage, and the concepts central to
that religion become the framework on which a new civilization begins to
take shape.

Toynbee's account of this process, like so much of his historical
vision, derives primarily from Roman history, and some of his details do
not wear well when applied to other historical examples. In his view,
for example, the religions that rise from one civilization to pass on
cultural heritage to another are newly minted or recently imported
missionary religions with a sense of universal mission, and this is by
no means always true.

The Jewish and Zoroastrian religions provide persuasive counterexamples.
Both were old religions that underwent major retooling after the
collapse of their national communities, the Roman depopulation of Israel
after 70 CE and the Muslim conquest of Persia in the seventh century
respectively. Both abandoned universalizing ambitions to become ethnic
religions, holding outsiders at arm's length through a formidable body
of custom and taboo. Both nonetheless played a significant role in
passing on the cultural heritage of the classical Middle East to rising
cultures in Europe and the Arabic world, in the case of the Jews, and
India, in the case of the Parsis.

Broaden Toynbee's insight to embrace a wider range of religious
phenomena, though, and his basic claim - that religion very often serves
as the conduit by which the cultural treasures of one civilization reach
the waiting hands of the next - is true much more often than not. It's
easy enough to see why this should be so. In a time of social
disintegration, when institutions collapse and long-accepted values lose
their meaning, only the most powerful human motives can ensure that the
economically unproductive activities needed to maintain cultural
heritage will be carried out in the teeth of the difficulties. Religion
is the only cultural force that consistently provides motivation strong
enough for the job; the same sense of transcendent value that leads
martyrs to sing hymns as they are burnt alive can just as easily inspire
scholars and scribes to preserve and transmit knowledge to a future they
will never see.

Nor was Toynbee wrong to point out that the religions that accomplish
this function are rarely identical to the established faiths of the old
civilizations. Both Rabbinic Judaism and the Zoroastrian faith of the
medieval and modern Parsis differ in significant ways from the forms the
same faiths took in the ancient world; the forms of Buddhism that
enabled classical Japanese culture to survive the breakup of the Heian
period were not the forms that thrived under the patronage of the Nara
and Heian courts; even in imperial China, where a cult of cultural
continuity persisted for some five thousand years, the end of a dynasty
generally meant the rise of a new form of Buddhist or Taoist spirituality.

Here again, the reasons behind this changing of the guard are
straightforward enough, though certain features of a civilization in
decline have to be taken into account. In Toynbee's view, as a
civilization moves into its imperial phase, it suffers a schism between
the dominant minority, which benefits from the imperial project, and the
bulk of the population of the imperial state, which does not. As this
schism in the body politic widens, the bulk of the population - the
internal proletariat, in Toynbee's terms - becomes alienated from the
values of their own culture, which becomes identified with the interests
of the dominant elite.

Religion is among the things most affected by this sense of alienation,
and so one of the classic signs of a society on its way to collapse is a
widening religious schism along class lines. America offers an
interesting example of this process in motion. As it entered its
imperial phase around 1900, a significant minority of Americans began
breaking away from the religious consensus of their culture - a
consensus that used the forms of mainstream Protestantism but, in the
name of the "social gospel", transformed that faith into an
anthropolatrous worship of progress.

The vehicle for the countering schism was Christian fundamentalism.
Twice, however - in the 1920s and then again in the 1980s and 1990s -
fundamentalist leaders proved all too eager to cash in their ideals in
exchange for crumbs of political power from the tables of the dominant
minority; the result in the first case was a near-total implosion of the
fundamentalist movement, and a repeat of that process seems increasingly
likely today as fundamentalist churches move further away from their
once-challenging role as social critics to embrace unthinking partisan
loyalties nicely calibrated to support the status quo.

The failure of fundamentalism to establish itself as an alternative to
the values of the dominant minority left the field open to other new
religious movements. Some of those have proven just as willing to sell
out as their fundamentalist equivalents; others never did veer far
enough from the values of the mainstream to attract a following outside
the privileged classes.

At the same time, the mainstream Protestant-progressive religiosity of
the elite has widened into a consensus shared by most varieties of
American Judaism, much of the English-speaking wing of the American
Catholic church, and several forms of Americanized Buddhism, not to
mention a very large number of people who would insist they follow no
religion at all. What is often portrayed as a rising tide of tolerance
among these traditions actually marks the widespread embrace of a common
ideology of social progress unrelated to the central historic
commitments of the faiths in question, but easy to insert into the shell
of any religious (or irreligious) tradition once awkward questions about
transcendent values are quietly put on the shelf.

Thus it's hard to name a religious movement in contemporary America, or
for that matter most other parts of the industrial world, that is well
placed just now to rise to the occasion as industrial civilization
begins the long slow process of its decline and fall. At the same time,
it's crucial to remember that we are still in a very early stage of that
process. A Roman scholar of 150 CE, say, who tried to guess at the
religious forms that would rise to prominence during the empire's
decline, would have faced a ferocious challenge in sorting through the
contenders; his world was awash in new religious movements, some
homegrown and many others from elsewhere in the Mediterranean world;
nothing special marked out the destinies of Christianity and Judaism
from those of their many competitors, and the religion that arguably
played the largest role in passing classical culture to the medieval
world, Islam, didn't even exist yet.

Thus one of the religious movements that will pick up the remnants of
modern culture and pass them on to the future might well, at the present
time, consist of a few dozen people gathered around a charismatic
teacher in a commune in Kentucky. Another might have been founded fifty
years ago in Brazil or Bangladesh, and still awaits the brilliant
missionary who will bring it to Europe or America and transform it into
a mass movement. A third might still be an inchoate current of ideas
that will not find its prophet for another two hundred years. The one
thing that can be predicted in advance is that those movements will draw
on the religious heritage of contemporary culture, but reshape it in
unexpected ways that will inevitably be at odds with the conventional
wisdom of our age.

Yet new religious movements there will be, and it's far more likely than
not that they will attract a growing number of followers as the
industrial age stumbles toward its end. It's often said that there are
no atheists in foxholes, and there tend to be very few in times of
social decay and collapse. In every age in which people believe that
their own efforts can bring them the material goals their culture sets
before them, it's common for them to stop worrying about the
transcendent dimension of life; it's only when those goals become too
obviously unreachable that the majority will raise their eyes to other
possibilities and, as Augustine of Hippo phrased it, perceive a
difference between the City of Man and the City of God.

Efforts to turn this religious impulse to foster the survival of today's
cultural heritage will succeed or fail, I think, on their willingness to
let go of the assumptions of contemporary culture, and to make peace
with religious forms that offend modern sensibilities. Thus, for
example, there seems to be little hope in the suggestion made now and
then that today's scientific thought ought to redefine itself as a
religion for this purpose. The raw material of religion certainly exists
in modern science, or rather scientism, the belief system that has grown
up around the simple but powerful logic of the scientific method; Carl
Sagan, who did more than any other recent thinker to cast that belief
system in religious terms, is arguably one of the significant
theologians of the 20th century.

Yet scientism as it exists today, certainly, embodies the attitudes and
values of the dominant minority at least as well as any of the more
obviously religious forms mentioned above. From its long struggle to
seize intellectual authority from religious institutions, too, the
culture of contemporary scientism embraces a bitter hostility to more
explicitly religious belief systems. This no man's land of the Western
mind forms perhaps the single most troublesome barrier to the survival
of science in the deindustrial world of the future. The prospects of
crossing it, and transmitting the modern world's greatest intellectual
adventure to the future, will be the focus of next week's post.
_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/06/religion-and-survival-of-culture.html#links


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