Apparently, I am not alone. Number two on the list of Stuff White People Like is “Religions their parents don’t belong to.” More specifically, “White people will often say they are ‘spiritual’ but not religious. Which usually means that they will believe in any religion that doesn’t involve Jesus. Popular choices include Buddhism, Hinduism, Kabbalah, and, to a lesser extent, Scientology. A few even dip into Islam, but it’s much more rare since you have to give up stuff and actually go to Mosque. Mostly they are into religion that fits really well into their homes or wardrobe and doesn’t require them to do very much.” (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/18/2-religions-that-their-parents-dont-belong-to/) The folks at Stuff White People Like are, on the surface, rather critical of the educated secular white folks they are satirizing. We seem to be nothing more than lazy, vain consumerists caught up in a perpetual adolescent rebellion against our parent’s core beliefs. On one level all that can be said is that the truth hurts.
But an alternate reading destabilizes the satire, recasting our throwaway “spirituality” as something of a cry for help. This reading hinges on the last, most damning words of the critique. Our search for meaning may occur on our tasteful living room couch not because we are so damn shallow, but because we lack the time and energy for absolutely anything else. Like dogs, #53 on the list of Stuff White People Like, our tasteful sofas cater to our needs and ask nothing in return. (Since men are nothing if not selfish, just ask any woman, it is no wonder that dogs are officially Man’s Best Friend. Sofas are a close second.) And, each day spent laboring in late capitalism like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up a hill, when we return home to our fashionable apartments we know the boulder is already rolling back down, leaving us disinclined to give up stuff and go to Mosque (or Church). Because a) why give up stuff when everything is already lost and will be lost afresh again tomorrow, and b) our sofas are much more comfortable than church pews and we at least deserve a break before rolling the boulder back up the hill again tomorrow.
If all this sounds rather maudlin and indulgent of a generational weakness of character, e.g. it wasn’t that fun living through the Great Depression and they didn’t have any paying jobs or fancy apartments to retire to at the end of the day, then we should close the book and let the satirists at Stuff White People Like have the last word: two generations removed from “The Greatest Generation,” we are their complete opposite. They survived the Great Depression and then saved Western Civilization, while we overpay for coffee and are, essentially, decorators. I would only point out that America responded to the Great Depression and WWII with, respectively, the New Deal’s sundry Tennessee Valley Authorities and Rosie the Riveter. Confronting two existential crises, Western Civilization built stuff. Whereas now, Western Civilization is full of Stuff White People Like, none of which we built. We all have jobs making nothing. The verb decorate is defined as “to make something look more attractive by adding extra items or images to it.” Just so, we spend our lives making nothing look more attractive by adding extra items or images to it.
Note that the fruit of Sisyphus’ efforts is also always nothing. This nothingness at the center of our productive lives has its doppelganger in our spiritual lives in the form of Buddhism and its concept of no-self. As Pema Chodron explains, “’Examine the nature of unborn awareness.’ Who is this ‘I’? Where did it come from? Who is it that’s aware? The slogan points to the transparency of everything, including our beloved identity, this precious M-E. Who is this ME?” (http://lojongmindtraining.com/Commentary.aspx?author=3&proverb=3) While Chodron wants nothing but our liberation, in dissolving the self she has unwittingly cemented a connection as rigid and troubling as the vice grip on our beloved identities. Minus the self, our outward material condition is matched by our deepest inner truth: “there is no there there.” That Chodron would substitute the open space of big mind for the missing identity is completely beside the point; Western Buddhists have already filled that space with discriminating home furnishings.
That is, if they still have a job making nothing (but money). Which is where the second key element of Western Buddhism, groundlessness, comes into play. Again per Chodron, with groundlessness “we are moving further and further away from concretizing and making things so solid and always trying to get some ground underneath our feet. This moving away from comfort and security, the stepping out into the unknown, uncharted, and shaky- that’s called enlightenment, liberation.” It’s also called Neoliberalism, which is defined as “a (supposedly) moderate form of liberalism that modifies its traditional government policies, as on labor unions and taxes.” (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Neo+liberal) This supposed form of moderation is actually spectacularly radical and explicitly does away with taxes for the wealthy and labor unions for the workers, who find themselves moving away from comfort and security while stepping out into the unknown, uncharted, and shaky. And that’s called freedom. (See the Right to Work Acts, which “guarantee” workers the freedom to benefit directly from collective bargaining without contributing to the collective, which taking without giving is the perverse, and, ultimately, mysoginistic fantasy at the core of Neoliberal capitalism. This Freudian reading is that Neoliberals treat their workers like they treat their women, i.e. as means to their own satisfaction, which is exactly why Miley Cyrus is waltzing around semi-nude and exactly why every post-pubescent girl at the summer camp I visited this summer wore jean-shorts that were little more than thongs. With Neoliberal capitalism, workers don’t get to have unions, and women don’t get to wear clothes.)
Slavoj Zizek has noted the congruence between Western Buddhism and neoliberal ideology, describing it thusly in his work On Belief:
“Although ‘Western Buddhism’ presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of the capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain an inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement….Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of technological progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination- one should, instead, ‘let oneself go,’ drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the mad dance of this accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being…. One is almost tempted to resuscitate here the old infamous Marxist cliché of religion as the ‘opium of the people,’ as the imaginary supplement of the terrestrial misery: the ‘Western Buddhist’ meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way, for us, to fully participate in the capitalist dynamic while maintaining the appearance of mental sanity.”
So, granting all that, if I am after more than just the appearance of mental sanity why don’t I take after my wife and return to my own religious spawning ground? The answer is found in the second most important line from Stuff White People Like: “they will believe in any religion that doesn’t involve Jesus.” When exactly the religiously moderate form of Christianity died is open to debate, but I have my suspicions that it died on the same night that truly moderate forms of liberalism died, the night that Ronald Reagan was elected, which was the self-same night that Neoliberalism and evangelical Christianity were born again. Moreover, the death of religiously moderate Christianity spelled the death of religiously moderate religion. For fun, check the rolls of those bastions of religious moderation, the Episcopal Church and the Jewish Conservative Movement, which if you are inclined to religious moderation will either make you wonder what the religious version of threatening to move to Canada is, or leave you mouthing the delusion that “these things go in cycles.” Because the moderates who would have been in the pews or sitting next to their spouse at synagogue are now busy not meditating, i.e. busy not really practicing a religion (Western Buddhism) that isn’t really a religion.
That redemption takes the form of struggle. We don’t know whether our efforts to finally cut the one constant thread of human history, the war of the powerful few against the huddled masses, will amount to anything whatsoever. There are at least as many reasons for pessimism as there are for optimism. It is a struggle. And, if I may be permitted in a paragraph about groundlessness to reach back over the gap between myself and my faith, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” The gap reasserts itself in the shifting ground beneath our feet. No matter how hard we wrestle, we may lose this struggle. And yet we may win. And still we may lose. The gap of groundlessness, for me, is the gap between a victory already won, in an empty tomb, and a battle that yet teeters on the brink.
If the victory is already won, we are on firm ground. In the last speech before his assassination, a speech explicit in its condemnation of economic injustice and its call for unified struggle, Martin Luther King attempts to plant us in that ground:
He was shot dead the very next day.
Where is this mountain, this protrusion of solid ground? Down here in the lowlands of Western Buddhism, it’s all groundlessness. I hope we win. I will try my very best. I pray that my best, our best, is better than nothing.
No comments:
Post a Comment