Ever since mothers carried children and the inventions of rafts and carts, or the domestication of pack animals that can hold a person, we have had the experience of moving while, relative to our mode of transportation, remaining still. Today, though we still use mothers, rafts, and horses for transport, we move in comfortable cars, ships, trains, and planes while remaining, again with respect to the means of travel, motionless. We can seemingly stay in place while changing places.
And that’s what we do philosophically when we cling to ideas that subtly change while we accept them as truths. Here’s a model: You have a philosophy that you expound. Some people like it, and they carry around your books and papers on the subject. You get followers. They, in turn, get followers, now twice removed from you. All the followers exchange thoughts on your basic ideas, and then they argue and “adjust” what you said in an effort to relate it to their personal experiences, learning, and insights. Let’s say your “philosophy” is called “Christianity,” or “Buddhism,” or “Islam,” or “Hinduism.” Do you truly believe that “once-removed,” “twice-removed,” “1,000th-removed,” or “even-more-removed” followers actually hold an unchanged version of the original?
Why do you think that every so-often there’s a turn toward fundamentalism or toward a “revival” of the earliest forms of a religion? In the United States, for example, the Second Great Awakening was a revivalist movement that occurred more or less intensely over a 50-year period. Led by Charles Grandison Finney, who preached Christian perfectionism, this mostly nineteenth-century movement followed, after a gap of about half a century, the “Great Awakening.” In the eighteenth century Jonathan Edwards was a forerunner of Finney and largely responsible for the “first” widespread revival that he preached ironically among “Puritans.”
Ideas evolve like means of transportation. Just as rafts gave way to ships and horses to horseless carriages, ideas change, sometimes subtly, sometimes openly. And just as this year’s car model differs ever-so-slightly from last year’s model, so philosophies and religions also differ over time. Then, someone notices the vehicle is changing nature and advocates a return to a “pure” version. The advocate might even attempt to inspire a bit raucously as in Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” during which the minister proclaimed, “God…holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire….” That approach can scare people and make them look at their ideological means of transportation. Revival movements, regardless of the religion, often bring the moving “complacent” and subtly-changing vehicle of religious ennui to a screeching halt like bad brakes. As attempts to recapture both the spirit and practice of the earliest form of an ideology or religion, revivals are often highly disruptive to the status quo, and they inspire conversions, especially among those who can be convinced that riding on a raft is better than riding in a ship and that riding a horse is better than riding in a car.
Told that the vehicle that carries them isn’t “pure” like its earliest versions, those who jump on the revival vehicle do so without recognizing that the very “machine” that carries them will, too, undergo both subtle and obvious changes. You can ask your mother to carry you around as she did when you were in your infancy, but you might find her arms too weak to bear all the changes in your own development. You might seek to build a raft to recapture that pure floating experience along the river of life, but you will find discomfort in the rain and danger in rapid currents. You might even forego all technological advancement in favor of a horse, but animals, even the most domesticated, can be unpredictable. Nary a rider has escaped being thrown. The “pure experience” is a myth.
The reality is that every vehicle of idea undergoes change, holds its antithesis within, and frustrates those twice or more removed from the original version. Those who sit motionless with respect to that vehicle at some time come to the realization that regardless of the ostensible stillness, they are moving and are in a different place from the point of departure.
And that’s what we do philosophically when we cling to ideas that subtly change while we accept them as truths. Here’s a model: You have a philosophy that you expound. Some people like it, and they carry around your books and papers on the subject. You get followers. They, in turn, get followers, now twice removed from you. All the followers exchange thoughts on your basic ideas, and then they argue and “adjust” what you said in an effort to relate it to their personal experiences, learning, and insights. Let’s say your “philosophy” is called “Christianity,” or “Buddhism,” or “Islam,” or “Hinduism.” Do you truly believe that “once-removed,” “twice-removed,” “1,000th-removed,” or “even-more-removed” followers actually hold an unchanged version of the original?
Why do you think that every so-often there’s a turn toward fundamentalism or toward a “revival” of the earliest forms of a religion? In the United States, for example, the Second Great Awakening was a revivalist movement that occurred more or less intensely over a 50-year period. Led by Charles Grandison Finney, who preached Christian perfectionism, this mostly nineteenth-century movement followed, after a gap of about half a century, the “Great Awakening.” In the eighteenth century Jonathan Edwards was a forerunner of Finney and largely responsible for the “first” widespread revival that he preached ironically among “Puritans.”
Ideas evolve like means of transportation. Just as rafts gave way to ships and horses to horseless carriages, ideas change, sometimes subtly, sometimes openly. And just as this year’s car model differs ever-so-slightly from last year’s model, so philosophies and religions also differ over time. Then, someone notices the vehicle is changing nature and advocates a return to a “pure” version. The advocate might even attempt to inspire a bit raucously as in Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” during which the minister proclaimed, “God…holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire….” That approach can scare people and make them look at their ideological means of transportation. Revival movements, regardless of the religion, often bring the moving “complacent” and subtly-changing vehicle of religious ennui to a screeching halt like bad brakes. As attempts to recapture both the spirit and practice of the earliest form of an ideology or religion, revivals are often highly disruptive to the status quo, and they inspire conversions, especially among those who can be convinced that riding on a raft is better than riding in a ship and that riding a horse is better than riding in a car.
Told that the vehicle that carries them isn’t “pure” like its earliest versions, those who jump on the revival vehicle do so without recognizing that the very “machine” that carries them will, too, undergo both subtle and obvious changes. You can ask your mother to carry you around as she did when you were in your infancy, but you might find her arms too weak to bear all the changes in your own development. You might seek to build a raft to recapture that pure floating experience along the river of life, but you will find discomfort in the rain and danger in rapid currents. You might even forego all technological advancement in favor of a horse, but animals, even the most domesticated, can be unpredictable. Nary a rider has escaped being thrown. The “pure experience” is a myth.
The reality is that every vehicle of idea undergoes change, holds its antithesis within, and frustrates those twice or more removed from the original version. Those who sit motionless with respect to that vehicle at some time come to the realization that regardless of the ostensible stillness, they are moving and are in a different place from the point of departure.
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