Elements of the Conservative and Revolutionary in Religion & Civilization, pt. 2
Features of the Fault Line
Imagine a light switch with two positions. Or air conditioning on a sultry day. The air is too hot and humid, so you turn on the unit. And eventually, it gets too chilly, so you turn it off, and enjoy the gradual transition back into the optimal temperature before it gets too hot again.
This “off-switch” represents the revolutionary destruction of the bodhisattva. It represents his (or her) last resort amid a new climate—wherein a civilization’s waste product has come to overwhelm its principal product. And the chicken to the egg of this institutional waste is the breakdown of belief—belief in the salability of its mythology.
I find Joseph Campbell often irritating and grossly overrated; his fame rests principally on the fact that there are so serious thinkers about philosophy as philosophy, rather than as sociological stamp-collectors. His “many functions of myth” explains mythology from the outside-in; describing a situation without really understanding it on its own terms. A religious myth has only one function, to answer the question “why bother”, “why obey”. Life is a game that the human being uniquely among the animals knows he will necessarily lose, which is to say, knows that he will die. The essence, the uniqueness of any living thing is the manner in which it attempts to perpetuate its own existence—what Spinoza called the “conatus”—but the manner scarcely matters if you know you are destined to fail.
The mythology thus reconciles the broader game that makes the effort at (continued) existence not vanity, not a waste of time, despite the fact that in the initial sense you have no possibility of success. The second-derivative (self) consciousness of the human being provides tactical advantages, but equally burdens it with a question of why bothering in the first place. A mythological system imputes significance to this striving after existence—yokes it to something which doesn’t die like the individual mortal, and is greater than the sum of the mortal parts which comprise it. Metaphysical and social/political questions are thus attached at the hip in mythology: the question “why participate” is inseparable from the question “to what in the transcendental/non-material/non-observable reality does it contribute”.
Each conservative religion thus, like Hinduism, answers the question not only of how to leave the jungle but why bother leaving it in the first place—it responds to the default switch of “off” by turning life “on”—giving it meaning, as well as substantive activities in excess of mere survival and replication.
It is senseless thus to compare religions across this on/off divide. Ancient priestly (distinct from Rabbinic) Judaism is somewhat unique alongside Hinduism for doing this most completely—the only religions whose canonical literature wants for no single article of worldly wisdom. Nothing “new” about practical life has been discovered since they were written down. (The ancient Greek religion, as well as Confucianism, are largely conservative, but bear marks of acquiring their full self-consciousness and formulation after the slide into the “second jungle” calling for a switch-flip had already begun).
Conservative religions integrate an entire community into a single religious system, including everyone from the ditch-diggers to the priests. They are thus inegalitarian, hierarchical, anti-individualistic, hardy, worldly, and practical. They prefer myth, narrative, and story to philosophy, theology, and (proper, “naked”) metaphysics. They consciously decline to distinguish between their manner of presenting reality and the reality they present: it’s taken for granted it is their way or the highway.
“Children and old people tell stories. The former because their intellect has not yet taken control of their imaginations, the latter because it has lost it.” —Eisenbach
The epistemology of “fiction”, “literature” is a topic for another day. But the key is that it is not less “true” than non-fiction; in fact, it is much more true, but requires much more artistry to be correctly re-applied back to reality.
It is no exaggeration to say the solitary problem of modern times is that people do not understand the difference between fiction and non-fiction, both vital enterprises being permanently poisoned by the Occidental fixation on “truth.” Facts have no meaning outside of their interpretation, just as watching Oz will better inform you about the American prison system than all the case studies and briefs ever written. A map is only useful if it comes with a legend. Even regular “history” is a fantasy: as the endlessly brilliant Egon Friedell put it, “All history is legend.” Therefore the question of whether it is “really the case” that the Hindu triumvirate created and regulates the universe as indicated by Indian mythology is incoherent to ancient Indian ears. It is only because the imperial epistemological triumph of the West has so thoroughly followed its geopolitical one that all fiction is now viewed through the lens of non-fiction and neither is understood.
The following is a greatly simplified, rough sketch of what is entailed in this dialectical tension, of what the revolutionary is obliged to do when the switch needs (re) flipping. The key thing to understand is that the apparent opposites are only provisional: it is nearer the truth to say the original manner is able to be revived only by apparently repudiating them. The revolutionary moment occurs when, paradoxically, like the sequence in the film Inception, the only way out of a bind is to envelop deeper into it. As you will hear me say again (if you continue subscribing), in the words of William Blake “The fool who persists in his folly becomes wise.” Every revolutionary attempts to “expedite” a folly—to take a negation to its conclusion so as to re-arrive at the original affirmation.
It appears to many—conservative Hindus vis-a-vis Buddhism, Pharisiac Jews vis-a-vis Jesus, conservative Confucianists vis-a-vis Daoism, conservative Song Dynasty Chinese vis-a-vis Chinese Buddhism (which contaminated native Chinese philosophy with Buddhist elements), Nietzsche vis-a-vis literally everybody—that this new importation is ipso facto evil, nihilistic, saying “no” to life, literally declining its self-evident value proposition. So how could this wholesale slander of the observable, material world which every revolutionary religion necessarily entails possibly be something beatific?