Dreaming the Future Closer

I’m thinking of this as a ‘throat-clearing’ post.   There’s a lot that I have been thinking about, but it seems to be all running together in my head.  What I want to do is think through the issues that define the blockage and untangle them a bit.  If you, dear readers, come away with a clearer picture of my goals, all the better.  It will probably take more than one post.  First. before I forget, the cut.

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[Brief Preface: I do feel lately like my soul is moving up and down the axis of things, jumping from things humble and profane to things lofty and almost too abstract for sense to come of them.  My posting seems to reflect that well, though perhaps a touch schizophrenic from the outside.  I'm not sure what to make of it, just observing.]

Emerson’s essay “On Friendship” serves as an intellectual touchstone for me.  In saying that, I don’t mean to suggest that I accept its contents as given and unadulterated truth.  Rather, I mean the term ‘touchstone’ quite literally.  I return to it, read it, contemplate it, and find myself diverging from portions of it.  Yet I never feel like I’m moving beyond it.  Quite like a good conversation, it inspires and inspiration doesn’t settle well with straightforward right or wrong, settled or unsettled.

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This post has been brewing in my head for a while.  I keep meaning to sit down and let it out, but until now that hasn’t happened.  For all the time brewing, I’ve not had tons of time or energy to rework the underlying ideas, so take it for the rough piece of work it is.  It ends up a good deal more vague than I would prefer.

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I’ve been dipping in and out of this book, The God Who May Be.  It’s a good book, though perhaps over-steeped in deconstruction for my personal tastes.  Still, I won’t be too critical of a book that tries to conceive of how religions can develop a sense of the future that is full of possibility rather than apocalypse.

Still, this post isn’t about that book, but reading it triggered that part of my mind where all my Biblical images live.  When another issue came up, I found myself thinking through it by way of the Burning Bush image.

Like much imagistic thinking, it has its limits and I probably go a little too far in pursuing it.  But it’s meaningful still in its excess.

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The more I think about it, the less I feel like the world has qualitatively changed in the so-called digital revolution.  More than anything else, I feel like the rapid development of technologies just reveals more clearly the fundamental character of the world of social production. 

It seems that as soon as you zoom in on some feature of digital production (say the reproducibility of the photograph, the ease with which it can be manipulated, its separation, even, from an ‘original’ negative or print from which all others derive), that feature ends up being a more basic feature that has always been present just not so clearly seen. 

It feels sort of like the technological changes reveal properties of social ‘matter’ akin to the way a particle accelerator reveals properties of physical matter.  There’s a real change, but it’s a matter of degree rather than kind.

So, this is something that has been brewing in the back of my mind.  It’s hardly a novel insight, but perhaps there may be some novelty in how I bring the insight to fruition.  The premise is simple enough: there is no one reason for someone to engage with a religion.  Quite the opposite, there are a great many different reasons, though one or more may play a greater role than others.

This suggests that we might be able to sketch, in outline, a sort of typology of the different sorts of religious devotee, based around their central concerns.  As a typology, this should come with all the appropriate qualifications, namely that they are not about labeling a person into perpetuity, but about addressing the given space they occupy presently.  So, while I will talk about kinds of people, what I am really talking about are kinds of motivations, which a given person may change.

This is a quick post, so it’s not meant to be anywhere near exhaustive, just suggestive.  Right now, there are three major types of engagement that leap to mind.

Problem solver: These sorts come to a religion seeking from it solutions to their problems.  I think this group catches most flack for having an insincere faith, though sometimes unjustly.  Just as the problems a person may face can vary, so will the exact reasons for a problem solver’s approach to religion. 

Perhaps they seek a material benefits.  They may have a sick mother they hope to make better through prayer, a crime they hope to elude punishment by promises of reform to a higher power, or just be pleading for a break that would change their life.  These folks are often the most maligned, though, in truth, there are few religions that do not hold out some hope of just these miracles.  There are also few within a religion who do not hold out hope to, at least, see evidence of just these sorts of explicit benefits. 

Perhaps they seek out moral justification.  More than a few people embrace religion for the clear road map it provides them in terms of moral behavior.  They turn to spiritual authorities for moral certitude.  We tend to demean these people less within our own religion, though we often mock them when we encounter them in another religion, ascribing to them (and sometimes their religion in general) a sort of zealotry.

Perhaps they seek out intellectual satisfaction.  Religions often have elaborately complex metaphysical and ontological systems, which appeal to those whose restless minds need to find some fundamental order in the world.  There is a tendency to lump these folks with the moral folks, but they may appear separately.

Traditionalist: They come to a religion either because it provides them with a feeling of community.  While it may revolve around the same axes as problem solving (material, moral, intellectual), it may just as well be about a more basic commonality of shared stories and history.  The oft-discussed ‘ethnically Jewish’ individual well exemplifies that latter type. 

They may not have an investment in the religion as a problem solving mechanism in any way, they may find the community it supports comfortable in a very deep sense.  The sorts of jokes and stories and behaviors are comforting almost in and of themselves, for the way they embody a being with others.

Grappler with god(s): These folks have had an experience that suggests to them a spiritual dimension of experience that is not satisfied by ‘mundane’ or ‘profane’ life.  The experience need not be mystical in the most high-falutin’ sense of the term, with being ravished by G-D or what have you.  It could just as well be a nagging sense that the world as lived isn’t quite all there is.

These folks come to the religion in order to find a way to access that ‘more.’  They often seek some way to sustain a fleeting experience of divine intimacy.  They may feel that their experience indicates that they must do something, that they owe a debt to the divine that they hope religion will help them fulfill.

Now, while I think the latter motivation is the most uniquely religious, I have some concern that an over-emphasis of it makes it too easy to think of those without it as falsely religious.  It seems a bit like the old discussion of learning styles–those who end up teaching tend to have a very particular learnign style that is statistically abnormal.  If they don’t realize this, they don’t actually do a good job of teaching, because they channel their realizations to others in ways that make it difficult for them to absorb.

Those with the latter motivation have a nasty tendency to think of themselves as properly religious whereas others are not, merely going through the motions.  This strong distinction is inimical to a religious community, through which the latter type may, in fact, fulfill their sense of calling.  They are, ironically, inimical to the community.

Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor may have had a point in this regard, but only to the extent that the sincerely ‘holy’ mistake their experience of religion as the only proper way of experiencing religion.  When they are doing their part to nurture the community, to ground themselves out within it, they may become the soul of their worlds. 

Okay, so I usually don’t do the commenting on the news thing, but I’m making a special exception in this case.  Maybe it’s that I have just seen this, too.  But I want to dissect this one for a moment.  This won’t make a lot of sense if you don’t follow that first link. 

Maybe it’s just my general despair at how politicians so easily mouth ideas of republican and democratic virtues without the hard choices that would back them up when it includes treating people different than you according to those values.

First, let’s bracket the most obvious question which has not been quite entirely settled, namely as to whether this is, in fact, actual santeria ritual or something else.

Now, let’s follow out the logic of the situation a little.  The Supreme Court has established that animal sacrifice is legal and protected like other forms of religious action.  Which means that Mr. Valdez has no real legal footing here.  So, what he’s doing suggests he’s making a political statement, relying on the fact that nothing will likely come of the investigation into who left the remains. 

He gets to take a stand about “how things are in Texas” (i.e. not like everywhere else), which is a favorite posture for Texan politicians.  Score.  He gets to satisfy the conservative-ish Christians (we don’t tolerate those heathens here).  Score.  He even, if he plays his cards right, gets to satisfy the meat squeamish and vegetarian.  Score.

Hmm.  Interesting.  Now, let’s place some bets.  Will he broaden his concern about animal cruelty to target the meat production industry?  Will he make moves to put an end to it entirely?  Because if the sacrifice of chickens constitutes animal cruelty, wow, he is going to be a busy, busy man dealing with the far more inhumane situations that arise in the meat industry. 

I wonder, does he support the Texas cattle ranchers?  They slaughter animals, too.* 

What all this talk obscures is that sacrifice in general occurs humanely, with an eye to the animal suffering as little distress as possible.  Sacrifice is an inherently small-scale production with the participants putting a lot more attention on the individual animal, so it’s far easier to be humane than it is in large-scale meat production. 

If it’s the waste of those particular chickens that constitutes cruelty, well, again, Mr. Valdez will be terribly busy dealing with the waste of the meat industry.

What’s frustrating, then, is it starts to look like Mr. Valdez isn’t really concerned about the animals, but about a political opportunity out of the event.  Politicians have to do that from time to time, sure, but he’s doing so at the expense of those santeria practitioners, who are also part of his constituency. 

He’s making implied threats to them, discouraging them from the practice of their religion.  He is also, thereby, implying that they are to certain extent outside his protection, suggesting they might be more free to ridicule than others, or worse.  He has an obligation to his constituency, not just to those he imagined voted for him or who will vote for him.  He has a civic duty in which he is failing. 

I’m not saying he’s not in a hard place, but that’s why politicians used to be admired, because they stood up and did their duty even when it was hard.  They took hold of their civic duty and bore it as nobly as they could, even when that meant taking some flack from those around them.

I really don’t want this to come across as sarcastic, because this story raises some very important issues about how we treat the animals that compose our food chain.  It raises questions about how we relate to them and the obligations that we owe them.  I don’t want that to disappear beneath my frustration for how this case is being handled.

At the same time, it just feels like a knee-jerk accusation of animal cruelty is just plain wrong-headed.  The treatment of these chickens was likely significantly better than the treatment of many other chickens before slaughter. 

The accusation conceals the real problems with our (non) relation to the animals that become our food by shifting the focus away from that toward these rituals.  It projects the real ethical challenges with our food consumption onto them, merely because we have had to see these animals while we can safely ignore the other animals we eat. 

*And, to be clear here, too, I don’t think Texas cattle ranchers deserve blanket criticism, either.  While there are problems with the meat industry as a whole, blanket criticisms won’t really get us that far in making it better.  It accuses the innocent with the guilty, allows us to forget that people who raise livestock can (and often do) actually care a good deal for those animals.

This is brief, a half-formed thought that I want to start meditating on.  I intend it more tentatively than I make it sound.  I just want to hear it out loud.

One of the defining characteristics of a lived religion is the internal debates that structure it.  Even when they fall short of leading to outright schism, they provide a sort of rubric for those practicing the religion to determine what is important.  In other words, if you are willing to fight over this, it’s a sign that there may be something key to the ideas motivating the scuffle.

One of the dangers of recon work is that you overlook those oh-so-important tensions in favor of something else.  It may be statistical majority (more people practiced like this, so it’s the way to go), status of certain people (well, kings practiced like this, so it’s the way to go), or what have you.  (Easily, it can be a combination of things.)  But, regardless, the tension disappears, replaced by ‘reclaimed’ dogma. 

You get, in short, the body of the religion without its heart.  Which makes me think that it makes sense to talk of religion as defined by three inter-related things: body, heart, and spirit.

Body includes all the concrete practices, rituals, ceremonies, that compose the religion.  The spirit includes the connection of the religion to spiritual forces, the divine.  The heart is defined by the ethical struggles that define the religion.  Missing any one of those elements, you do not have religion proper.

I just finished working my way through Simone Weil’s Letter to a Priest. It, like so much of that writing at the end in which she seems to be desperately racing against her own mortality, glows with insight and honesty.  It does not erase her shortcomings, but quite the opposite throws them up into clear relief.

Her account of Judaism, her distrust of it, is nowhere more elaborated.  It’s even understandable, but it’s shot through with ignorance.  She has no understanding of the complex apparatus of commentary in which the Tanakh is situated, no awareness of the mystical dimension of the Jewish religion that is not so far from her own, that is not a mere expression of ethnic nationalism.

I think of another soul swallowed up by that war, Walter Benjamin, and wish so much that they could have crossed paths.  His personal approach to the Jewish notion of the messiah, his Marxism, is different from Weil’s republican leftism, her Christian charity, in just the right way.  They both might have thrown light upon each other.

This is one of those things that drives me forward intellectually, the hope that through my own intellectual work I might be able to foster the encounter between the ideas of great thinkers that were not to be in their life.  There’s optimism there but it’s tinged with melancholy because any staged encounter I can manage is only the play of ideas, not of their persons. 

I’ve been reading Jacques Soustelle’s Daily Life of the Aztecs.  Besides making me sorely miss the days when scholars wrote with an easy, thorough learnedness, it provides a fascinating snapshot “of a civilization in in full progression,” of a city that was not “one of those rich, sophisticated and ossified cities which are the elegant tombs in which their own civilization stiffens as it dies” (33-34). 

It’s vibrant, but tangled, the unsettled problems of its ascension visible in its social structure.  What Soustelle details is not a unitary society joined by common interest, but a patchwork slowly being sewn together with conquest.  Of greatest interest to me at the moment, is the religious dimension of it. 

There’s a powerful war machine driving the empire, no doubt, with Uitzilopochtli, “solar god of war” (52-53), at its heart.  Like a proper war machine, though, it does not just serve the Mexica tribe at the center of the empire. It serves to bring in new blood (literally and figuratively) by granting any man within the expanding empire an opportunity for wealth and honor by serving the empire in war, by bringing captives for sacrifice. 

But then there Tlaloc, “the old rain-god and god of the farmer’s plenty” (53), who serves as the center of the agricultural world on which the military one depends.  Tlaloc is, symbolically at least, Uitzilopochtli’s equal, a second center around which the empire organized.  We see in Tlaloc’s presence the shape of the early empire, of the truce between soldier and peasant, even if at times that may have been a truce in the heart of a man who was both soldier and peasant.

More fascinating still, though, is the religious diversity that exists outside these two poles, in traditions that were maintained through lineage rather than warrior prowess.  The pochteca, the traders affliliated with largest corporate commercial ventures, “had their own gods, their own feasts, and they worshipped in their own manner, for during their long journeys they had no priests but themselves” (61).

The craftspeople, from diverse and sometimes recently conquered cities, in turn held their own traditions.  The goldsmiths had “Xipe Totec” with his own temple, “Yapico” (67).  The featherworkers, too, “held their own feast…of their local god and of the four other gods and two goddesses of their guild” (68). 

The spiritual diversity reflected a cultural diversity, the relative independence of different ritual practitioners from each other a sign of the relative degree of integration of the group within the empire.  But what I find most interesting is that the most intensely imperial face of Aztec religion was also the most open, the most permeable, the most ‘democratic.’

The imperial religion, embodied most clearly in Uitzilopochtli and Tlaloc were democratic, open and appealing to the citizenry as a whole.  A commoner, dedicated to the flowery war of Uitzilopochtli, could rise up in the society.  Tlaloc’s worship, for those who did not gain military fame and wealth, supported their basic life’s work: working the land. 

They also served as two centers around which the worship of other gods and goddesses became imperial.  The temple quarter of Tenochtitlan saw the two temple overseeing a much larger network of worship that was, through its association with the growing administrative complexity of the city, more ‘democratic.’  The imperial religion, like the society as a whole, became less about a shared blood lineage than about a shared investment in the success of the empire.

I suspect, in contrast, the less integrated, less imperial, aspects of religion, the lineage-centric faiths of the traders, of the craftsman, were not thereby static by comparison.  But they could only grow through an extension of kinship, of marriage and adoption (and the many variations of fictive kinship).

And yet, in the wake of the Aztec Empire’s rapid demise, it is not the imperial faith that survives.  It’s the local faiths, the faiths of isolated tribes never conquered by the Aztecs, and the faith of the lineage lines, that remain and survive. 

The dwindling traditionalism described by Stanzione in Rituals of Sacrifice has clear ties to the sort of religion Soustelle describes among the pochteca.  Because it is smaller, because it depends less on the success of an empire, it endures beyond it.  Many such traditionalisms did just die out, like the Aztec’s imperial faith, but, still, some did not.  Some survived and adapted.  And yet, the empire’s existence provided an important, perhaps essential, medium through which to proliferate.

There’s something really interesting there, though I’m not quite ready to make sense of what that is.  I just want to flag that, set the bookmark to come back to this.