The simplest method for humans to achieve power is through use of force. Battering your opponent, regardless of laws or rules, will give you a temporary power over them. But force itself is brute and limits one’s strength to the abilities of the body. Mysticism multiplies strength. A single exercise of force, accompanied by the mysticism of power, can resonate in distant, unaffected observers as if they themselves were the actor or the victim.
In its primitive form, we describe this as sympathetic magic. By sticking pins into a voodoo doll, the superstitious believe that they can cause injury to an unknowing victim. Its civilized form is more complex, but no less mystical: by sticking planes into the World Trade Center, a handful of individuals caused hundreds of millions of people to feel pain and sorrow; by assassinating Osama bin Laden, we felt a thrill as if we ourselves had punched the enemy in his turbaned face.
Should these feelings be denounced as irrational? It is in fact crucial that we feel them. For millions of people to live in close society, the bonds of mysticism must be exercised constantly. When we come into dispute, we must rely upon our shared faith in the value of communication, heritage, religion, money, and so forth. These things are all mystical ideas, which are only able to prevent injury if both sides well and truly believe in them. If those fail, we must fervently believe that the law will resolve our problem, for without society or law, we have no method of resolving our dispute but brute force.
Mysticism is the world’s most dangerous weapon. It is the belief that a policeman can be summoned or that a missile can be launched, a belief which is more present in our everyday lives than the policemen or missiles themselves. Its form gives the weak superhuman strength, even life after death. Its ruin renders nobles savage and heroes villainous.
A society without mystical ties cannot exist. Aiming to build a society of unbelievers is not a “rational” idea because it does not account for human nature; it is antithetical to how human beings operate. In fact, those who reject the ties of society are detrimental to its function, until the point when they find something in society that they can appreciate.
Posted: July 16th, 2011 | Secular-Religious | 3 Comments »
The bourgeoise disdain tidings of salvation, not because we are clever enough to see through all delusions, but because we have an unbreaking faith that we are already saved. Evidence of our soteriological accomplishment lies all around us, in the stores that carry our material needs, in the machines that provide us with companionship and entertainment. We are aware, perhaps, that we ourselves are deeply flawed individuals. But something, somewhere, must have gone right for this world to be the way it is; that is the bourgeoise credo.
Often enough, from this state of things both discomfort and curiosity emerge. This way of life does not, after all, make sense. We begin to understand that our lives are made safe and happy by civilization; that civilization has effects we cannot see, and that it is created by forces we cannot see; that its continued existence is by no means guaranteed. We may begin to study in books, to better understand how this time and place came to exist. And for the less historically aware, mysticism takes hold. Perhaps civilization is in danger. Perhaps it must be destroyed and replaced with a better one. Either way, a new path to salvation is laid out in the minds of the faithful, a series of stations ranging from practical, to obscure, to downright strange. A new object of devotion is found in the future state of humanity itself.
With enough history on hand to know how these movements work, though, a true intellectual cannot become a mystic. Disillusioned by the universality of error throughout human history, we are forced to stand on the sidelines and observe the forces at work, occasionally calling foul when they make an obvious error. Being treated to this game in and out every month of the year, we often become trainspotters. A particular movement will take over our interest, and we will become better acquainted with its inner workings than the mystics themselves. In America, the “leftist trainspotters” catalog the splits and merges of Trotskyist groups; in Japan, the “kyosan shumi” do the same. In Japan, the “Aumers” gain an encyclopedic knowledge of the once vast and murderous occult group Aum Shinrikyo; in America, unfortunately, this job is divided between atheists pushing their ideology and religious scholars pushing theirs, with neither group recognizing the exciting possibilities of a trainspotter’s life.
Trainspotters of the mystics always seem to be split between derision, curiosity, and sympathy. The last of these feelings may be the most profound. Mystics aim for nothing less than the creation of a new world in their image– and sometimes they are successful. For even though the mystics are often drawn to futile or dangerous activities, there is a creative power in their world that the trainspotters lack. For as we sit in our bourgeoise palaces, the concepts of laws, money, rights, government, society that we employ are nothing more than the unleashed and structured form of a latent mystical energy, the ability to believe in these unseen things and thereby determine how humans will behave. And to create a concept for tomorrow that does not exist today, we must again harness that power inherent in our minds.
Mystics are the enemy of the individual and the bourgeoise, but perhaps they are a friend to humanity.
Posted: June 11th, 2011 | Politics, Secular-Religious | 1 Comment »
アマテラス様
All facts from 「日本神話とギリシア神話」 Japanese and Greek Myth by 大脇由紀子 Ōwaki Yukiko （明治書院、２０１０）. All opinions are mine.
- Fact: Japanese did not have a word for “myth” until Basil Hall Chamberlain invented one in 1887. What they instead had was an official history that ranged from cosmic to national in nature. Not even those skeptical of that history borrowed the word “myth” from English; it took a foreigner to do that.
- Opinion: It is thus only natural to wonder, what is the meaning-function of the word “myth”, and why was it not invented in Japanese? In this book, one of the figures mentioned is Empress Consort Iwanohime, simply because she is mentioned in the official histories Nihonshoki and Kojiki. Her life has no supernatural aspect to it.
- Opinion: Japanese Wikipedia suggests the word 神語（り） kangatari was used to refer to myths in the Middle Ages, but a check of academic literature shows that it actually referred to recited poetry, five examples of which can be found here. Also, the true reading appears to be kamugatari. In ancient Greece, indeed, “mythos” was a term used for any recitation. Perhaps our use of the word “myth” is at its very heart a misunderstanding.
- Fact: The author makes a fascinating comparison between Iwanohime and Hera: both individuals were said to have intense jealousy directed not only at their closest relations but at other individuals who associated with them.
- Opinion: Certainly Iwanohime’s jealousy could have served as a cultural standard in the same way that Hera’s jealousy did in Greece. It is fascinating to imagine in this way the world that the writers of Nihonshoki and Kojiki may have lived in. But does that mean Iwanohime was a “mythical” figure, or a god, in the same way that Amaterasu’s story can be pigeonholed as myth? Perhaps it is better to view these figures in the same way the Japanese did: as characters in the official history.
- Fact: The exiled hero Yamatotakeru is shown as wandering all over Japan, much like Odysseus, except that the Odyssey doesn’t fall into the category of “myth” in this book for some reason…
- Opinion: In this book kami is defined as “a word encompassing beings with incorporeal power beyond human knowledge.” Aliens??
- Opinion: I bought this book to learn the full extent of parallels between Japanese and Greek mythology, but it seems like most elements can be dismissed as coincidence. The most confounding parallel is the one any student of mythology should know: the Greek story of the rape of Persephone is extremely similar to the Japanese story of Izanami’s death.
- Fact: When discussing this, the book quotes from Spirited Away (remember Chihiro starting to disappear and eating the food?). Mayhaps Ghibli movies are a better re-presentation of Japanese mythology than anything I could hope to write myself.
- Fact: But the book references Naruto as well…
Posted: April 6th, 2011 | Japan, Secular-Religious | 2 Comments »
I think David Barton is a pretty cool guy. He researches the mainstream of American religious history, and doesn’t afraid of anyone.
Barton specializing in discovering facts that make atheists angry. It is misleading to respond to him with other, unrelated facts. Obviously any atheist knows that the influential Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, was anti-Christian; and furthermore, that weird sectarians were openly tolerated from America’s earliest days, although they were sometimes driven out of mixed communities. However, that doesn’t disprove anything Barton says.
Here is is Capitol Tour video. My friend did some Snopes style fact checking, and I’ll add commentary.
His preface: “My intention isn’t to do war with the video or the message thereof, but merely to ensure that the truth is accurately portrayed. I have no idea if my sources, which include such questionable references as Wikipedia, are at all accurate. It is plain as day that the United States is a Christian country on account of the overwhelming majority of her citizens who profess that faith. The attempt to baptize the largely Masonic founding fathers is misguided nevertheless, and the attempt to appeal to the original intent of the framers represents the most appalling tendencies in American politics.”
Claim 1: Congress printed a bible for school use. (0:41)
Fact: The Aitken Bible was endorsed by Congress, but printed by Robert Aitken, a Philadelphia-based Scots printer in response to the embargo on the colonies during the Revolutionary War. There is no mention of it being for school use, although it was common for the Bible to be used in schools at the time. (Source: Wikipedia)
Avery’s analysis: At this time in Western history, printing a Bible was such a major undertaking that securing assistance from one’s government was standard, if not necessary. On the other hand, Congress was expressing approval and affirmation of the Bible, and George Washington added: “It would have pleased me well, if Congress had been pleased to make such an important present to the brave fellows [veterans of the Revolutionary War], who have done so much for the security of their Country’s rights and establishment.” So I’ll rank this one Mostly True
Claim 2: Capitol rotunda paintings “recapture Christian history of the United States.” (1:27)
Fact: “Christian” means something closer “European” in this context. It is true that the paintings depict religious scenes. The term “Christian history” is only provided for contrast with the Native history. (Source: common sense)
Avery’s analysis: I’m going to have to say, though, that the baptism of Pocahontas wasn’t exactly a seminal moment in American history. It’s good to draw attention to the link between Christianity and civilization in these paintings. Ranking: True
Claim 3: The U.S. Capitol was used as a church building under the orders of Vice-President Thomas Jefferson. External churches were permitted to hold services in the old House room and the Marine Corps band was used for some of them. Thomas Jefferson regularly attended church in the Capitol. (2:26)
Fact: This is actually 100% factually accurate, but T.J.’s sentiments on such basic articles of Christian faith like the divinity of Christ and the importance of the Bible are well known. Most of the founding fathers only externally presented themselves as Protestants and in fact hewed to the Masonic religion privately. (Source: Library of Congress website)
Avery’s analysis: T.J.’s church attendance despite this only emphasizes the role of Christianity in the early 19th c. Ranking: True
Claim 4: President Garfield used to be a minister, and furthermore one quarter of the statues in the rotunda are ministers. (5:02)
Fact: James A. Garfield had an eclectic career before he went into politics, including a stint as a minister, which he reportedly disliked. According to the Capitol Architect website, the rotunda contains statues of Presidents Lincoln, Eisenhower, Garfield, Grant, Jackson, Jefferson, Reagan, and Washington, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Secretary Alexander Hamilton, nine statues in all. King and Garfield were ministers— one-quarter of nine is two and one-quarter. (Source: Wikipedia, Architect of the Capitol Website)
Avery’s analysis: Barton supporters will be hard pressed to show me the extra 1/4 of a person. This is stretching the facts. Ranking: Barely True
Claim 5: Thomas Jefferson authorized federal funds for missionaries and church construction as part of a treaty with the Kaskasia. (6:56)
Fact: Actual text is “Whereas, The greater part of the said tribe have been baptised and received into the Catholic church to which they are much attached, the United States will give annually for seven years one hundred dollars towards the support of a priest of that religion, who will engage to perform for the said tribe the duties of his office and also to instruct as many of their children as possible in the rudiments of literature. And the United States will further give the sum of three hundred dollars to assist the said tribe in the erection of a church.” (Source: Oklahoma State Digital Library, Treaty with the Kaskaskia, 1803, Article 3)
Avery’s analysis: Here, again, Christianity is synonymous with civilization. It is often forgotten that this is so. Even 20th century Japan, hardly a Christian state, funded Christian missionaries in the South Pacific. Ranking: Mostly True
Claim 6: Twenty-nine of the fifty-six signers of the declaration of independence held seminary or “bible school” degrees. (7:12)
Fact: All colleges at the time were what we would consider today seminaries. (Source: my 7th grade history teacher)
Avery’s analysis: Indeed. Harvard Divinity School is hardly Bob Jones. This is only Half True
Posted: February 26th, 2011 | Secular-Religious | No Comments »
Tenrikyo and Christian Science are both faith healing religions founded by women in the late 19th century on the basis of direct revelation from God. Both lived in an age where the powerful concept of faith healing was being crowded out or suppressed by more controllable, institutional behaviors, these being “Churchianity” in America and “non-religious Shinto” in Japan. Both attracted highly intelligent individuals from outside the mainstream, who eventually gave both groups unexpected relevance in 20th century society. Here is a brief sketch of their development from someone who is only somewhat acquainted with the church histories.
Splinter groups
It was expected that Tenrikyo Shrine of God and foundress Oyasama would live to 115 years per her own prediction. When this did not happen there was confusion in the movement. Many believed in the 天啓待望論 (tenkei taibou-ron), the doctrine that a new Shrine of God would be appointed at the end of Oyasama’s 115-year era. At least two splinter groups formed when the 115 years were up in 1913: Oonishi Ajirou’s Honmichi, and a group called 茨木一派 (Ippa Daidou). I think there were others, but this is not clear to me. Individual Tenrikyoists, dissatisfied with the direction of the church, also founded basically unrelated groups like Moralogy.
Christian Science also splintered after its founder’s death. The Christian Science Parent Church was founded in England in 1912, two years after Mary Baker Eddy’s death, and gained a small following in America as well. Like Honmichi, the Parent Church emphasized its leader’s position as the next inheritor of revelation. In this case, leader Annie C. Bill wrote a book called Science, Evolution, and Immortality which supplemented Science and Health. Unlike Honmichi, this group is now completely extinct. This information comes from a fascinating 1926 encyclopedia of religious bodies issued by the U.S. Census, which also includes an early official recognition of non-Christian “religious groups”.
Making faith healing relevant
The paths taken by both organizations in the 20th century are fascinating as stories of how marginal spiritual groups plant themselves in their home societies. Christian Science, of course, is known through the United States for two things: its reading rooms, which dot main streets throughout the country, and the Pulitzer-winning Christian Science Monitor, propped up entirely on Christian Scientist donations for many years with scarcely a mention of religion in the paper itself. Tenrikyo has worked the same way: in Japan they are known throughout the country for Tenri University, which has a famous judo team, and on a lesser scale for the excellent Tenri Hospital and Tenri City in which both organizations are located. If you ask an American about a Christian Science Reading Room, they will often be familiar with its existence as a neighborhood staple even if they don’t know exactly what it means; Tenri University has the same associations in Japan.
More to come as I research more.
Posted: October 10th, 2010 | Secular-Religious | 1 Comment »
I was surprised to see my town in the national news today. Even though I’m in Japan and don’t read the Globe, while I was looking through my Twitter updates I learned that Wellesley Middle School students participated in a visit to a mosque as part of a social studies program, and some of them engaged in “prayer” during the visit. This sparked tired, fake outrage from an anti-Muslim rightist group absurdly named “Americans for Peace and Tolerance”, which claimed that their ”Inside Video Captures Kids Bowing to Allah“. Of course, there was no cover-up performed, and the video of five unnamed children was released without permission from any of the families involved, solely to stir up controversy. The insinuation the group was making was that naive liberal Wellesleyites allowed their children to be converted to a pagan cult of genocide during a 30 minute visit to a mosque, which makes sense only in the alternate universe that the right wing lives in.
No, I’m not interested in the fear-mongering, nor do I think anyone is at fault for allowing kids to imitate a religious service during a field trip. What interests me is why these students decided to “pray” and what background they might be coming from. See, reading this report takes me back to my days at Wellesley Middle School. I was pretty much an outcast then, but I loved learning about other cultures, and a trip to a mosque would have been the ultimate cool thing. If I had gone, would I have imitated the prayer?
Consider the mental life of an average American middle schooler. Middle school is social hell in every country on Earth– I’m typing this from a Japanese middle school and you can feel the social pressure in the classrooms. Kids are much more likely to make decisions based on their status as an insider or outsider than what their parents or teachers are telling them. Furthermore, if there is such a thing as an ideal Democrat or Republican, middle school is where you will find such a person. Just think back to how you thought about politics in middle school– America is all about civil rights and liberal ideals! No liberal project could go wrong! Actually, I’m finding it hard to distinguish between middle school and what passes for political commentary in America. Anyway, this could be a dangerous naivete outside of Wellesley, but in that town it’s just kind of cute, and in this case inspiring.
There were five boys praying in the anti-Muslim group’s video; all of them had voluntarily left the rows of students and joined the rows of the congregation. To cover all the possible bases, let’s say that one of the kids was Muslim, two of them were his friends, and two more simply joined in because they wanted to. (I’m not claiming this is actually the case.) It is bizarre to claim that a devout Muslim cannot pray at noon, as he would probably do anyway every day at school, just because he is on a field trip; I will ignore that altogether. If that Muslim had two close friends, under the power laws of middle school they would be strongly compelled to join in just so that he wouldn’t be alone in his choice to pray. This choice would have nothing to do with their understanding of Islam. Can you really claim that supporting a friend by imitating religious ritual violates the separation of church and state? What if the imitation was meant to mock a religion– does that violate that separation? Really, this would be a strange area for the face of secularism to intervene.
The final case, and most likely, is that the kids were imitating without much of a thought whatsoever. This reminds me of a story told by a professor named Tomoko Masuzawa about her study abroad program in America. Her host family was Catholic, and took her to Mass, the meaning of which she did not understand; comparing it to activities in Japan, she might have thought it was a festival or something like that. At Mass she received the Eucharist. She barely gave it a second thought. But later, she went on to study religion, and only then learned that receiving the Eucharist is not something that everyone in America does, but rather signifies that one is a member of the Catholic Church in good standing, and opposes Protestants and so forth. Isn’t what she did an honest mistake, not knowing symbolism? Regardless of whether she accidentally engaged in something “religious”, did she actually become a Catholic by following the patterns of her host family? I don’t think so.
I think it’s just as likely that, having just heard a lecture about Islam, the boys understood that their actions were part of a larger fabric called Islam, but simply didn’t care. They’re only kids, and if there’s any time to blamelessly try out the activities of foreign cultures it would be on a middle school field trip (which makes the covert recording of the video just that more cruel). It could have all sorts of unrelated, secular meanings for them: maybe it made them feel sort of rebellious, or separated them from their hated peers, or made them feel in touch with this cool thing called “Islam” that all the evil Republicans hate. If four people around me had been doing that on my field trip, I wouldn’t have felt any qualms with joining in. After all, it’s not something you get to do every day.
All I’m trying to say is the least likely thing for a middle schooler to do is to spontaneously convert to a new religion on a field trip; I have not read any reports of such a thing happening in Wellesley. It is, however, incredibly likely that kids were imitating prayer for the same damn reasons that kids do anything in middle school, and that their action sparked a rabid right-wing video and an apology from the principal is a clear symptom of a poisonous political climate.
(P.S. In the antiquated cosmology of Christianism, of course, a whole different thing is going on: Christian children are being tempted to worship at idols, which, regardless of their own understanding of their actions, will deliver them to Hell. Let us hope that nobody outside the walls of “Americans for Peace and Tolerance” actually propagates such a medieval belief. Here in real life, participating in a culture without knowing what it means does not change your attitude whatsoever; being told that you are a bad person for doing so just might.)
Posted: September 24th, 2010 | Secular-Religious | 3 Comments »
I am tired of hearing about religion and evolution. I have read about the subject since I was 13. So, let’s look at a much more fascinating subject: religion and archaeology. Actually, this subject is written about far too little. Anyone can give you a long list of reasons why students must learn evolutionary biology properly and not buy into old myths instead. But who has discussed why archaeologists are so interested in old artifacts?
In 2001, the Taliban destroyed some gorgeous Buddha statues in Bamyan, Afghanistan. This evoked outrage all over the Western world; through our international media, soon the whole world had heard the story. What provoked such universal condemnation? Obviously there wasn’t some secret Buddhist lobby behind the scenes. Their purely scientific value was minimal, as they had already been examined. Was it because they were such beautiful statues, or so big? I’m sure there was someone who would try to argue this, but it is easy to disprove. Later the same year, the French government destroyed an enormous statue of a cult leader in Castellane, France. This elicited precisely no outrage from anyone, even though a cult spokeswoman made an explicit comparison between her group’s statue and the Bamyan Buddhas.
The Islamic ideal that provoked the destruction of the Buddhas is easy to identify. In Islam, as in humanism, the story of humanity is a path from darkness to light. But the Islamic message, especially in its modern and unstudied forms (c.f. the Kitab al-Asnam for a medieval counterexample), is much simpler than the humanist. In the past Age of Darkness, the story goes, people worshiped idols and killed each other for stupid and barbaric reasons. In the current age, people move away from profane habits and towards purer and more divine activities, and treat each other with dignity and justice. There is no need for doubt about social aims or cross-cultural dialogue, because the only message that is needed is all contained in the Qu’ran.
The Western ideal that led people to condemn the destruction of the Buddhas while ignoring the cult statue is somewhat harder to define. Looking at both these cases betrays the actual interest we have in these Buddhas, which none of us had ever seen before. They were important because they were relics of an ancient culture, and were a significant marker of human achievement from that age. We can’t name one specific faith that leads us to treasure these relics, because secularism specifically denies assigning names to its ideals. But in the legally encoded humanist language of the United Nations, it is easy to identify the parallel term: “World Heritage”. We believe that everyone should have knowledge of and access to the historical artifacts which tell us about our shared humanity.
Looking from the outside in at these two cases, I do feel a little conflicted. Personally, although I am Buddhist, I think the cult statue was much more interesting, a veritable monument to the unstoppable creative force in humanity. Given the resources of the modern age, a small cult was able to build a ridiculous tribute to an individual nobody else cared about. The Bamyan statues, on the other hand, were just a few Buddhas among many, and we all know what Buddha looks like. I can understand why the Taliban decided to blow them up; they must have represented to those clerics a history of outside domination, and were physically two big idols towering above them in a position of authority. Sure, it was an arrogant show of personal insecurity, but haven’t we all felt insecure at one point or another?
I think the proper response to events like this is not to unilaterally condemn one group and praise the other, but to understand where humanist beliefs like “World Heritage” come from, and why they are necessary for the future of humanity. Too often, shared sentiments like these go unanalyzed in the West, or even ignored entirely; even recognizing the simplest things, like “nobody wants war”, can stir something in people’s hearts, as it did in the case of Samantha Smith. By explaining where we come from, we can invite other people to understand us.
Posted: July 12th, 2010 | Secular-Religious | 2 Comments »
The British Discovery of Buddhism by Philip C. Almond
Cambridge University Press, 1988. BQ162.G7
This book could better be titled “The British Invention of Buddhism”, since Almond demonstrates how the British were tying together a multitude of traditions dispersed throughout Asia. As he writes: “The religion having been ‘created’, there came the ensuing realization that its adherents outnumbered those of Christianity.” (12) Rather than putting scare quotes around the world “created”, I think they would be better placed around the words “religion” and “adherents”, since the Chinese being labeled by the British did not think of themselves as “adherents” of anything endorsed in Thailand, and vice versa.
In terms of religious-secular discussions, it is also extremely interesting to see the British nation as a religious icon in this period, pitted against the falsehoods of the pagans. One jeremiad bewails that as the British flag “is displayed over the mountain capital of Ceylon, it tells us of principle sacrificed, of religion dishonoured, of atheism perpetuated, of idolatry countenanced, and of a false and wide-spread superstition protected and maintained.” (134) Parallels might be drawn with the modern British anxiety about protecting the Muslims in their midst, or the use of “secular” American symbols in the evangelical community–do we not hear similar complaints emanating from that group, even today?
There are all sorts of treats to be found in this text, such as Francis Wilford’s quest to identify Mount Caucasus with Britain, the theory that Buddha was really African or Mongolian, the identification of Buddha with Odin (!), or the fact that these inquiries proliferated for decades before a single examination was done of any Buddhist teaching, probably out of disinterest–Christianity, after all, had superior knowledge!
When the dhamma begins to leak into the narrative, I feel an intense annoyance with how the conservative Christians responded to this new and unusual culture. Although they were a minority, they approached the topic with an insistence on superiority and domination, an demeaning attitude towards those interested in foreign things, constant comparison of “Orientals” to children, and so forth. Consider how John F. Davis described Buddhist monks: “They have, nearly all of them, an expression approaching to idiotcy [sic], which is probably acquired by that dreamy state in which one of their most famous professors is said to have passed nine years with his eyes fixed upon a wall!” Almond simply says that these writers were overwhelmed by a monastic simplicity that “contrasted so much with their more active, ‘muscular’ vision of the Christian life.” (122)
We can be indebted to Almond for his cool, neutral exposition of these poor excuses for debate; today’s evangelical movement can only hope for such an undeservedly fair treatment a century from now. But at the same time, even the positive Victorian image of the Buddha, exemplified by The Light of Asia, is clouded in Oriental fantasy and British inventions. This is where Edward Said comes into play, as the creation of the Orient, even in a positive light, constructs a West that is necessarily in opposition to “Oriental” ideals. I am very glad that I was not alive at that time!
Posted: March 17th, 2010 | Book Reviews, Secular-Religious | No Comments »
On a shrine's wish board: "Chihiro and Tomoko, together forever!" Is this religion? Does it even matter? (Peter Held)
A century ago Sigmund Freud proclaimed the end of religion as an influence on humanity. He defined an illusion as something which people want to believe but can be neither proved nor disproved, and combined it with the concept of religion, which he either perceived or defined as a collection of childish ideas people used to hold about the world. The real illusion, invisible to Freud’s eyes, was his imposition of that idea onto the entire world. He claimed without proof to perceive a single concept which has existed in all times and places, but religion is a Western word, developed in a Christian society. As religious scholars, we hasten to equate it to concepts in other language: dharma, tao, bhakti, or even islam. We draw our anthropology from The Golden Bough, assuming in some way or another that the coincidental practices of strange or incompletely developed peoples echo pan-human themes. Although we in fact find that the language worlds of other cultures have created quite different societies, we insist that they are expressing a form of our permanent entity, “religion”. This is unacceptable.
The field of religious studies has spent over a century building up scholarship based on this falsely presumed universality. What is the benefit of a comparison between medieval Japanese and Arab mystics, when you don’t understand either language? Such pursuits do not lead us closer to an understanding of either Japan or the Islamic caliphate, but are in fact an exercise in finding new meanings for tired English words such as “insight”, “ecstasy”, or “ineffable”. This is not a work of cultural exchange, but of ecumenical theology. Historical examples from faraway places are transformed through our work into precedents for our more complete understanding, mere ingredients to enrich these Western categories. One would think, after decades of this work, that we would have developed sufficiently rich language to enlighten the entire world.
Instead, by attributing a wealth of practices to the Western construct which was already enraging intellectuals like Freud a century ago, we have succeeded in alienating ourselves from our human siblings in the global south, and undoing the careful work of anthropologists and sociologists. Today, “religion” is a bogeyman: popular speakers or bloggers will frighten audiences with the specter of Islamic extremism, or “religious delusion” in general, as a worldwide phenomenon responsible for keeping faraway cultures in the Dark Ages or threatening the very basis of civilization. We must ask ourselves: what has the importance given to the Western religious category added to our discourse on Middle Eastern politics, if not to mystify discussions of the subcontinent with claims of widespread brainwashing by some vaguely imagined, church-like institution, the pan-regional “Religion”? If we dropped our pretenses of “sacredness” and the “transcendent” and moved to interpret lowercase-I islam as just one pattern of life among many in the diverse cultures of the Middle East, wouldn’t Western readers be less guarded and more open to understanding these different but altogether human conceptions?
Meanwhile, those communities whose cultural property we have appropriated and transformed for our own theological quests are not always happy with their exploitation, as we have seen from the backlash by Indians against the Wendy Doniger school of “Hindu studies”. When these groups deny the validity of Western analysis, the academic response has been to fall back on mean-spirited Orientalist rhetoric, and what seemed like a friendly, inclusive ecumenicism quickly becomes a harsh verbal battle. Consider the response of Morris J. Augustine to Timothy Fitzgerald’s point that most Japanese people do not self-identify as religious:
It is not surprising to me that Japanese students and/or professors never really think about what they are doing [during family ceremonies] … this is a typical example of the “nihonjinron” or conscious or unconscious feeling that their own race and culture is in a class by itself and cannot simply be compared to others.
We see here the dark side of religious studies: if the subject people does not want to be included in our peculiar Weltgeist, they’re either too ignorant to understand their own culture, or they think they’re better than us! Both these claims are clearly based directly on a belief in “religion” as an immutable, universal, and sacred category. Augustine is not the first religious scholar to make condescending generalizations about Japanese self-identity; D.C. Holtom shrugged off Japanese complaints in a similar way in the 1930s, leading to the invention of the term “State Shinto” to describe Japanese fascism religiously and the pronouncement of a “Shinto Directive” during the Allied Occupation which imposed Western secularism by force.
One could argue that interfaith dialogue, drawing distinctions between religions and explaining them, has deepened understanding between Christians and Jews as well as other “faith communities”, but has “religion” really done any work here that “culture” could not? In fact, is it even proper to describe Judaism as “religion” when it is practiced culturally by a large number of atheists? Meanwhile, the sanctity of the religious category has served to create a perception in India of an irreconcilable divide between Hindus and Muslims. To claim despite all this that religious studies is a net benefactor on our perception of current events, you must first confess your faith in its theological tenets—for example, Augustine’s belief “that the mysterious Source-Ground from which all religions have emerged has fired the inspiration of very different charismatic leaders in hundreds of different societies in every age”. (No wonder he so vehemently denies Japanese non-religiosity.)
For the rest of us, it is well past time to open up the discourse. Not only questions of “religious” and “secular”, but also constantly changing categories like “state”, “politics”, “civility”, “barbarity”, and so forth, must be examined in a way that does not hold any of these words to be endowed with any permanent and unchanging meaning throughout the centuries. If this approach is bad-mouthed as postmodernism, I deny the accusation: this is Buddhism, and the philosophy I here employ is emptiness. If critics insist on relying on some particular definition for any of these words, that will allow them to examine Japanese society from the perspective of the Religion and the Church, then they are relying on a different perspective in which some concepts are written in the sky, unchanging now and forever. To those people, I leave the job of repairing religious studies. They can write whatever they like—just don’t assume that anyone will automatically consider it relevant.
There is much work to be done, to present the worlds of non-Western societies in a comprehensible way that does not diminish the value they give to insiders. To the prospective scholar, I ask: are you willing to take on the challenge?
Posted: March 11th, 2010 | Japan, Postcolonialism, Secular-Religious | No Comments »
