09/09/2006: "Religion & Magic"

It's a little early, Parishioners,

to be working on this kinda stuff,

but I had a dream!




I was arguing with someone
that, in the works of Mr Phillip Roth,

if you replaced each reference to Judaism

with one to Catholicism, or being Swahili,

he would be just as great an artist.


My friend denied this,

insisting that Roth's constant reference to Judaism
is what makes the work great.

My final remark,
before I awoke,

was "that's phenomenology -

you're saying that every thing he did is great

only because it is precisely what it is."


I am great in my dreams, Iidren!



So I bring to your attention this article
entitled Return of the Tribes:

it wanders a lot,
& is vulnerable to attack on many fronts,
& you might skip the first couple of pages,

but raises some interesting points...


A few choice quotes:

The confident may welcome freedom, but the rest want rules. The conviction that a new man freed of archaic identities and primitive loyalties can be created by human contrivance is an old illusion. Rome believed that the new identity it offered not only to its citizens, but also to its remote subjects, must be irresistible. Yet imperial Rome faced no end of revolts from subject tribes, from Britain to Gaul to Palestine. In the end human collectives with stronger, undiluted identities conquered the empire. From the brief, bloody egalitarianism of the French revolution, through socialist visions that promised us the brotherhood of man and an end to war (a conviction especially strong in 1913), to the grisly attempt to create Homo Sovieticus and export him to the world, there has been no shortage of visions of globalization.

Even the most powerful attempts to unite humanity failed: the monotheist campaigns to impose one god.

One God, one way, one world

Monotheism replaced Rome's law codes with the law of God. The first near-success of globalization was the bewildering survival and spread of Christianity, the transitional faith between the exclusive tribal monotheism of Judaism and the universal aspirations of Islam. Beginning as a cult uncertain of the legitimacy of proselytizing among those of different inheritances, Christianity quickly developed a taste for salesmanship, adapting its message from one of local destiny to one of universal possibility. Furthermore, its message to the poor (a constituency contemporary globalization ignores) had as exemplary an appeal among the less-fortunate of the bygone Mediterranean world as it does today in sub-Saharan Africa. Christianity was an outsider's religion co-opted by rulers, while Islam meant to rule - and include - all social classes from the years of its foundation.

Globalization really got moving with the advent of Islam. Open to converts from its earliest days, Islam moved rapidly, in just a few centuries, from voluntary through coerced to forced conversions. While the latter were never universally demanded, they were frequent (as were forced conversions to Christianity elsewhere). The immediate and enduring conflict between Christianity and Islam involved different visions of globalization, a competition of quality, design, and power (think of it as Toyota vs. Ford in a battle for souls). Those Christian and Muslim visions continue to experience drastic mutations in the battle for new and local loyalties, having now reached every habitable continent. Their success has blinded us to their weakness: Neither religion has been able to subdue their old antiglobalist nemesis: Magic.



There's an enormous difference between Big Religions - Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and the others - and the local cults that endure long beyond their predicted disappearance. This distinction is critical, not only in itself, but also because it is emblematic of the obstacles that local identities present to globalization as we imagine it.

Big Religion interests itself in a world beyond this world, while the emphasis of local faiths has always been on Magic (bending aspects of the natural world to the will of the practitioner of hermetic knowledge).

Magic affects daily life in the here and now, and its force and appeal can be far more potent than our rationalist worldview accepts: What we cannot explain, we mock. (An advantage Christianity enjoys among the poor of the developing world is the image of Jesus the Conjure-Man, turning water into wine and walking on water - he's a more-promising shaman than Muhammad.)

Built on bones, local religions are cumulative, rather than anticipatory. While both Big Religions and local belief systems proffer creation myths, universal faiths are far more concerned with an end-of-times apocalypse (in the Hindu faith, with recurring apocalypses), while local cults rarely see beyond the next harvest. The great faiths lift the native's heart on one day of the week, while local beliefs guide him through the other six.

Even as they change their names, the old Gods live, and our attempts to export Western ideas and behaviors are destined to end in similar mutations.

Javanese and Sumatran Muslims go on the hajj with great enthusiasm (on government-organized tours), but continue to revere the spirits of local trees, Sufi saints, and the occasional rock.

The spread of Islam into Europe and Africa struck very different, but equally potent, barriers in the north and south. In Europe, it could not overcome a rival monotheist faith with its own universalist vision. In West Africa, Islam stopped, roughly five centuries ago, when it left the deserts and grasslands to enter the African forest, that potent domain of Magic.

Forests are the abodes of Magic. Look to forested areas for resistance to innovation. Even European fairy tales insist on the forest's mystery.

The forest, with its Magic, is the opponent of globalization.

Far from monolithic, both the Muslim and Christian faiths are splintering, with radical strains emerging that reject the globalization of God and insist that His Love is narrow, specific, and highly conditional. The great faiths are becoming tribal religions again.

Religions are like businesses in the sense that they must provide products that work with sufficient regularity to keep customers coming back. Results matter. The psychological comfort and beyond-the-grave promises of Christianity and Islam function transcendently, but leave immediate needs unanswered.

& now I'ma listnan to a capella gospel

- a genre riddled with disastrous failures -

but these guys are goo


& I'ma feelan alright!

Oh, now it's chillun's music!

Oh, now it's Lucinda Williams - pretender!

I love The Music Show!


God Bless Andrew Ford!




lerevdr on Sat 09-Sep-2006 @ 15:18 e.s.t [permalink]
[2 Comments]