I Am GingerMan

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Dogma Aversion Syndrome

On the one hand, the higher levels of religiosity present in America (compared to Europe) are often attributed to the lack of an established state-sponsored church in the US. Religions compete in an open marketplace for followers and this competition improves the products and services available, or so the capitalist thinking goes.

However, as with my recent post on economic dynamism driving us towards cultural individualism, there seems to be an inherent conflict of interest at work here. If religions are competing for *customers* then the power of the moral injunctions (thou shall nots) religions are supposed to be instilling in believers runs counter to the customer-is-always-right ethos that pervades all other kinds of *consumer* interaction we participate in.

Burger King doesn't tell me what to do, they let me have it my way. It's hard to see the Pope embracing quite the same attitude on things. But maybe he just needs to hire some better PR staff.

From USA Today:

For the past two years, I have asked students in my introductory religion courses at Boston University to get together in groups and invent their own religions. They present their religious creations to their classmates, and then everyone votes (with fake money in a makeshift offering plate) for the new religions they like best.

This assignment encourages students to reflect on what separates "winners" and "losers" in America's freewheeling spiritual marketplace. It also yields intriguing data regarding what sort of religious beliefs and practices young people love and hate.

[snip]

What strikes me most about my students' religions, however, is how similar they are. Almost invariably, they mix fun with faith. (Facebookismianity anyone?) But they do not mix faith with dogma. My students are careful — exceedingly careful — not to tell one another what to believe, or even what to do. Above all, they want to be tolerant and non-judgmental.

[snip]

During the 1930s, the neoorthodox theologian H. Richard Niebuhr skewered liberal Protestants for preaching "a God without wrath (who) brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

But my students' "dogma aversion" (as one put it) goes liberal Protestantism one further. These young people aren't just allergic to dogma. They are allergic to divinity and even heaven. In the religions of their imagining, God is an afterthought at best. And the afterlife is, as one of my students told me, "on the back burner."

[snip]

In their final exam this past semester, I asked my students to reflect on whether young Americans are the canaries in the mines of more traditional religions. Study after study has shown that American college students are fleeing from organized religion to mix-and-match spirituality.

So what will happen to what one of my students referred to as the "religions of discipline" when this millennial generation (born in the late 1970s through the 1990s) grows up? What will today's youth do with religions whose ethical injunctions arrive as strict commandments rather than friendly suggestions? Will they be able to abide religions that divide the human family into the saved and the damned, that present as absolute truth what they suspect is mere speculation?

My students' projects suggest that traditional religions are in trouble.

[snip]

One of my students, Carrie-Anne Solana, told me that the religions her colleagues presented in class amounted to nothing more than "organized atheism." "They took normal human impulses," such as eating, drinking, sleeping, having sex and socializing, she said, "and justified them under the title of religion while not offering any form of explanation into why we are here, where we came from or where we go when we die."

I am not saying this is a good thing. Clearly any faith so thoroughly vacated of its moral strictures isn't much of one. But it seems that the cultivation of moral virtue needs to be presented as having more value to young people in the here and now. Adhering to doctrine needs to lead to a *good life* in this life.

Now *good* can be defined in many different ways, not merely as simple hedonistic happiness. But if all the benefit to following dogma accrues only in the after-life, well that's a recipe for declining market share.

And I'm not quite sure this type of thing is going to make up for that:

On the nature of the GingerBrain

I don't know that I am cut out for blogging per se. Often I find things on the Internet that I think I might like to blog about and I bookmark them (rather than post them) because I need to figure out what I would like to say about the subject and don't want to "waste" the content until my thoughts on the matter congeal.

As one might expect, it can take a considerable amount of effort in order to shape one's thoughts into a moderately long post of at least minimal cogency. Therefore, the pace of my blog posting can slow to a crawl when I don't have time to dedicate myself to content generation.

Obviously, this writing process is the anti-thesis of the way blogs work naturally as a publishing form, which is to favor short, rapid-fire, off-the-cuff reactions with excerpts and links to the associated content if readers want the whole story.

To that end, I am going to try to release the reins a bit moving forward, while still dropping in from time to time with my "big think" commentary that I know you are all waiting on pins and needles for each day. In the land of the blind...

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Quote of the Day: "How do you feel? Bloody fantastic."

Monday, April 13, 2009

The Age of Abundance

Brink Lindsay's new book, The Age of Abundance, captures some themes I have touched on previously here, here and here. Namely that a lot of the cultural upheaval we are dealing with in our politics today is a by-product of the economic upheaval that has radically transformed our society and the world over the past 100 years.

Lindsay summarizes the point in a podcast overview of his book [paraphrased]:

It was in the post-war boom in the 1950’s that America represented something fundamentally new under the sun. By the 50's, this was a country where the vast majority of people were well insulated from the edge of subsistence where most human beings had lived for all of history.

Most people lived with a fair degree of material comfort, in fact an extravagant degree of material comfort by historical standards. Only a minority of people were considered in poverty. This is something without precedent.

Not only were they insulated from want, but they were insulated from nature. America had always been a prosperous country by world standards, but it was one where most people made a living as farmers, directly exposed to vagaries of nature for their well being.

Whereas by the 50s, most people lived in cities and began working in offices. Most people lived in a human created world, a world of human institutions and inventions, and didn’t face nature except for recreation. This is a fundamental change in the human condition. [em: mine]

I believe it is hard for us to imagine how radical this change is, since the society we live in is the one we have always known. But it seems that the change in our everyday conditions from one that is highly limited by the natural world (constraints on our existence are imposed from without) to one that is removed from nature and self-consciously constructed for our use (where limits are not imposed, but are overcome) has sweeping implications for our perceptions on human agency and freedom.

And given this far-reaching material change to the very nature of human existence, Lindsay argues that cultural change almost inevitably had to follow...

The end of scarcity pushes us towards cultural individualism. When people are poor, they don’t have a lot of choices. They don’t have a lot of stuff, they don’t have a lot of choice about what to consume, and they don’t have a lot of choice about where to live. So things are very simple: you do this or you die.

Likewise everybody is more or less alike. When people are poor, it means the division of labor is very underdeveloped. 90% of all people are subsistence farmers and so there isn’t a lot of variety in human experience.

And then finally, everything is the same from generation to generation. Without economic growth, one generation is just like the next. If your dad is a farmer you’ll be a farmer. If your dad is a cobbler, then more than likely you’ll be a cobbler too.

In this world of uniformity and changelessness and lack of choice, it makes sense that the kinds of cultural values that held sway were one-size-fits-all. People belonged to a group, they owed loyalty to that group, they had to do what that group says or else, because when there is no margin for error you can’t have a lot of freelancing.

Our traditional moralities that evolved during the agrarian era tended to be absolutist and didn’t give great scope for people to go their own way simply because the material conditions for them to go their own way weren’t there. But when those conditions changed, I think you see the inevitability of the culture opening up to accommodate that change.

And so by nature, when we change things, especially things that have been guiding society, relationships and human behavior over a long period of time, we don't quite know what we are going to get. And it is this uncertainty that seems to underlie much of the cultural angst that emanates from the socially conservative segments of our society.

I can understand the angst. There is a tension in facing the unknown. The thing that I can never fully appreciate is why cultural conservatives are so CERTAIN that any such change is by definition disastrous for humanity.

By contrast, I share much of Lindsay's tempered but hopeful optimism about the possibilities for our collective cultural future:

The rule is: 90% of everything is crap. A lot of [our culture today] is vulgar and base and stupid and trivial and shallow. And in moderation doing vulgar, shallow, stupid things is fine. It’s fun. It’s great to have a couple glasses of wine with dinner, it’s terrible to be wino. It’s great to be able to see world events live on TV, it’s terrible to be a couch potato. You have all these options and there are all kinds of ways to exercise them poorly.

But we have more of everything now. We have more trash and we have more superlative greatness than ever before. The opportunities to live a phenomenally well-lived life have never been more in our grasp. Whether everyone uses freedom wisely is a different matter.

But this is a fundamental faith that libertarians have: The very predictable ways people in which people misuse their freedom are more than compensated by the unpredictable miracles that occur when people are free to be creative. [em: mine]

There is a spark of our humanity that is lost if we snuff out this creativity for the sake of cultural continuity. We gain security but lose part of our essence as well.