In a Roman Catholic Church in Antwerp, a number of people sat on yoga mats; supposedly, in the same church, no one can offer a traditional Latin Mass. Now, on the surface, both inviting Hindu practitioners into the church and banning an old form of the Mass seem to be great for the brotherhood of Man (or, to be politically correct, the humanhood of Humanity). Doesn’t the priest’s and bishop’s permission to remove some pews to afford the yoga mindfulness participants some room for meditating on the floor seem so…ecumenical? And isn’t the dismissal of the traditional Latin Mass an acknowledgement of an ineluctable modernist movement, that is, a movement to welcome all into the folds of a religion that was stuck in a medievalism? Wasn’t that the object of changing Latin wording to vernacular phraseology? Look around. You would be hard pressed to find a school that teaches Latin, which was, during the first half of the twentieth century offered in almost every high school in America. (Who wants to learn all those conjugations and declensions of a dead language?)
Anyway, the inclusion of a mindfulness session in a Flemish cathedral bespeaks a decades-long trend to homogenize cultures, to stress similarities rather than differences. The problem, of course, is that homogenizing conflicts with peculiarity. The specific nature of one religion or culture isn’t the specific nature of another though all humans share to some degree certain ethical values. A defense of homogenizing lies in the argument that those values held in common are pathways to peaceful coexistence and--dare I say, also politically correctly--equity. The argument against such homogenizing is that in incorporating all in the hope of unifying people, those who introduce practices and ideas from other belief systems affect their own, water it down, so to speak. Why even bother to call belief a particular name like Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam? Why not just say "Religionism"? Isn't today's ideal a completely homogenized humanity, a species with no recognizable individuals--except for self-proclaimed leaders? Isn't today's ideal an analog of the Mississippi and its tributaries as confluences of human thought discharge into one large river of sameness (everyone, for example, dressed in a Mao suit and thinking one thought)?
The traditionalist who favors heterogeneity struggles when mergers of any kind occur, first for psychological reasons and second for theological ones. As we all know, changing a tradition of any kind, like changing a habit, throws the wrench of insecurity into the gears of daily life. We become comfortable with what we do, and we don’t like the discomfort that comes with adapting to something different. Theologically, anyone who subscribes to a belief system usually sees a link between it and a philosophy of life. In being “mindful” as a Hindu might define the process, a “Christian” might find a secularization of “meditative prayer.” And if Hindu mindfulness differs from Christian prayer, does practicing it lead a christian to a worship of Shiva or some other Hindu god in defiance of the First Commandment? It’s easy to see how the Antwerp church service aimed at reaching out ecumenically, might be taken as an affront to traditional Christian values and to the traditionalists themselves. Some traditionalists might even see the yoga on the floor before the altar as a desecration and not as a gesture of unification of humankind.
But this is neither a defense of such ecumenism nor traditionalism in a specific religion. I believe that Flemish incident encapsulates a different problem that an interconnected world faces. Should we canalize all human behavior and thinking in some grand effort to unify the members of our species? Or, rather should we emphasize our differences to be able to preserve our individual integrity? On a grand political scale, the problem can be expressed as the choice between socialism and capitalism or between an Orwellian world under control of a few and a more chaotic individualized and free one under no or limited control. Yet, there are probably contradictions in most human social (and religious) endeavors, and that principle of contradiction applies to philosophical and social homogeneity and heterogeneity, also. The unity in any traditionalist differentiated system could in itself be taken as Orwellian.
In education, the problem can be expressed as the choice between a traditional education and one that ascribes no special value to any body of knowledge, e.g., a choice between learning the “classics and heralded books” and learning about the folk tales of a remote Brazilian tribe based on the argument that, say, a fable from the rainforest bears the same intellectual value as Darwin’s Origin of Species, Newton’s Principia, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet even though the reach of its influence might be no greater than a radius of a few kilometers of selva.
In the turmoil of the American 1970s, I witnessed a battle in the war between tradition and anti-traditionalism. One faction at my university argued that there was no inherent value in any knowledge system and that no traditional body of literature or aesthetics was “more important” than any other body of literature and no culture derived from Greek, Roman, and the Judeo-Christian heritage had any value that distinguished it from the heritage of even the remotest tribe—even though the historical influence of one was greater than the other. And no skill set was fundamental according to those opposed to traditional education. That someone knew how to pen a paper with unity, coherence, and emphasis, was irrelevant because free-wheeling expression was—in those times of LSD and under the influence of experimental poets like e. e. cummings and dramatists like Eugene Ionesco—just as valuable as any structured prose or poetry. Representative art, some might argue, ends up like the happy little trees of Bob Ross or worse, like number paintings of a retiree. Take "abstract art" for example. Was the art of Jackson Pollock an attempt to undermine traditional art and break up a tired old tradition of painting recognizable characters and forms—though he was later interpreted as having painted stationary fractals (unlike your moving screen saver). The movement away from tradition seemed to be the Beat Generation on steroids—thank you, Jack Kerouac. And such an anti-traditional educational movement led to a couple of decades during which classical education and cultural bodies of knowledge fell from grace until they largely disappeared from curricula. Even traditional skills suffered a declining importance: Memorization—rote learning—was condemned as rather useless because one could simply look something up in a library (and later online). Access to dictionaries and encyclopedias on smart devices put another nail in memorization’s coffin and helped convince people that they need not fill their heads with knowledge. The ideals of a Renaissance Man and of a polymath both died in the last half of the twentieth century. The tradition of acquiring knowledge for knowledge's sake also fell by the wayside. The final nail in the coffin will be hammered in by AI.
The preceding probably seems to be off the rails of a subject that began with the story of a Flemish cathedral’s hosting a Hindu yoga session, but consider that principle of canalizing represented by the yoga event. Do we funnel or channel all human experience into a river of categories of equal value for the sake of unity while risking the loss of individuality? Are some human endeavors and historical facts more significant than others? Do the ancient Greeks deserve attention because they shaped intellectual endeavors and explanations of Everything for a couple of millennia? Or should we simply cast them aside as tired old thinking or rank them as no more important than the Shawnee Prophet Tenskwatawa's explanation of the Cosmos under the control of Mishe Moneto, the Great Spirit? Is the Great Spirit the same Being as Yahweh under a different and speakable name? Yet, we know that the Shawnee never cast their influence over world history as the Greeks did. (Of course, one could counter this by saying that someone promulgating makeup with millions of social media followers casts influence on more people than, say, a bishop in charge of a single diocese or a philosopher in a classroom lecturing students on Neoplatonism; the counter argument would then be that just because someone or some culture cast a widespread influence doesn't mean the person or group should be emulated, studied, and promulgated) The Shawnee had a limited geographical reach. To echo the words of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber in Jesus Christ, Superstar, "If you'd come today/ You could have reached a whole nation/ Israel in 4 BC/ Had no mass communication." If only the Shawnee had that two-millennia of spread under a unifying empire the way Christianity had under the Western, Eastern, and Holy Roman empires, everyone today would rank worship of the Great Spirit with the other world religions. If only Tenskwatawa had had a social media account...If you'd come today
You could have reached a whole nation
That yoga event in the Flemish church symbolizes the struggle we have with unity and disunity, with similarity and difference, and with tradition and avant-grade freeform culture. We have a dilemma. Do we channel as much as we can into a river of similarities or branch the flow of human endeavors into distributaries running through a delta and emptying into the wide sea of diversity?
At the foot of the Christian altar, the crucifix, and an image of the Creator people meditated not on kneelers but on yoga mats in a Hindu tradition. One wonders whether or not their meditation focused at all on Shiva, the “Destroyer.”
Anyway, the inclusion of a mindfulness session in a Flemish cathedral bespeaks a decades-long trend to homogenize cultures, to stress similarities rather than differences. The problem, of course, is that homogenizing conflicts with peculiarity. The specific nature of one religion or culture isn’t the specific nature of another though all humans share to some degree certain ethical values. A defense of homogenizing lies in the argument that those values held in common are pathways to peaceful coexistence and--dare I say, also politically correctly--equity. The argument against such homogenizing is that in incorporating all in the hope of unifying people, those who introduce practices and ideas from other belief systems affect their own, water it down, so to speak. Why even bother to call belief a particular name like Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam? Why not just say "Religionism"? Isn't today's ideal a completely homogenized humanity, a species with no recognizable individuals--except for self-proclaimed leaders? Isn't today's ideal an analog of the Mississippi and its tributaries as confluences of human thought discharge into one large river of sameness (everyone, for example, dressed in a Mao suit and thinking one thought)?
The traditionalist who favors heterogeneity struggles when mergers of any kind occur, first for psychological reasons and second for theological ones. As we all know, changing a tradition of any kind, like changing a habit, throws the wrench of insecurity into the gears of daily life. We become comfortable with what we do, and we don’t like the discomfort that comes with adapting to something different. Theologically, anyone who subscribes to a belief system usually sees a link between it and a philosophy of life. In being “mindful” as a Hindu might define the process, a “Christian” might find a secularization of “meditative prayer.” And if Hindu mindfulness differs from Christian prayer, does practicing it lead a christian to a worship of Shiva or some other Hindu god in defiance of the First Commandment? It’s easy to see how the Antwerp church service aimed at reaching out ecumenically, might be taken as an affront to traditional Christian values and to the traditionalists themselves. Some traditionalists might even see the yoga on the floor before the altar as a desecration and not as a gesture of unification of humankind.
But this is neither a defense of such ecumenism nor traditionalism in a specific religion. I believe that Flemish incident encapsulates a different problem that an interconnected world faces. Should we canalize all human behavior and thinking in some grand effort to unify the members of our species? Or, rather should we emphasize our differences to be able to preserve our individual integrity? On a grand political scale, the problem can be expressed as the choice between socialism and capitalism or between an Orwellian world under control of a few and a more chaotic individualized and free one under no or limited control. Yet, there are probably contradictions in most human social (and religious) endeavors, and that principle of contradiction applies to philosophical and social homogeneity and heterogeneity, also. The unity in any traditionalist differentiated system could in itself be taken as Orwellian.
In education, the problem can be expressed as the choice between a traditional education and one that ascribes no special value to any body of knowledge, e.g., a choice between learning the “classics and heralded books” and learning about the folk tales of a remote Brazilian tribe based on the argument that, say, a fable from the rainforest bears the same intellectual value as Darwin’s Origin of Species, Newton’s Principia, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet even though the reach of its influence might be no greater than a radius of a few kilometers of selva.
In the turmoil of the American 1970s, I witnessed a battle in the war between tradition and anti-traditionalism. One faction at my university argued that there was no inherent value in any knowledge system and that no traditional body of literature or aesthetics was “more important” than any other body of literature and no culture derived from Greek, Roman, and the Judeo-Christian heritage had any value that distinguished it from the heritage of even the remotest tribe—even though the historical influence of one was greater than the other. And no skill set was fundamental according to those opposed to traditional education. That someone knew how to pen a paper with unity, coherence, and emphasis, was irrelevant because free-wheeling expression was—in those times of LSD and under the influence of experimental poets like e. e. cummings and dramatists like Eugene Ionesco—just as valuable as any structured prose or poetry. Representative art, some might argue, ends up like the happy little trees of Bob Ross or worse, like number paintings of a retiree. Take "abstract art" for example. Was the art of Jackson Pollock an attempt to undermine traditional art and break up a tired old tradition of painting recognizable characters and forms—though he was later interpreted as having painted stationary fractals (unlike your moving screen saver). The movement away from tradition seemed to be the Beat Generation on steroids—thank you, Jack Kerouac. And such an anti-traditional educational movement led to a couple of decades during which classical education and cultural bodies of knowledge fell from grace until they largely disappeared from curricula. Even traditional skills suffered a declining importance: Memorization—rote learning—was condemned as rather useless because one could simply look something up in a library (and later online). Access to dictionaries and encyclopedias on smart devices put another nail in memorization’s coffin and helped convince people that they need not fill their heads with knowledge. The ideals of a Renaissance Man and of a polymath both died in the last half of the twentieth century. The tradition of acquiring knowledge for knowledge's sake also fell by the wayside. The final nail in the coffin will be hammered in by AI.
The preceding probably seems to be off the rails of a subject that began with the story of a Flemish cathedral’s hosting a Hindu yoga session, but consider that principle of canalizing represented by the yoga event. Do we funnel or channel all human experience into a river of categories of equal value for the sake of unity while risking the loss of individuality? Are some human endeavors and historical facts more significant than others? Do the ancient Greeks deserve attention because they shaped intellectual endeavors and explanations of Everything for a couple of millennia? Or should we simply cast them aside as tired old thinking or rank them as no more important than the Shawnee Prophet Tenskwatawa's explanation of the Cosmos under the control of Mishe Moneto, the Great Spirit? Is the Great Spirit the same Being as Yahweh under a different and speakable name? Yet, we know that the Shawnee never cast their influence over world history as the Greeks did. (Of course, one could counter this by saying that someone promulgating makeup with millions of social media followers casts influence on more people than, say, a bishop in charge of a single diocese or a philosopher in a classroom lecturing students on Neoplatonism; the counter argument would then be that just because someone or some culture cast a widespread influence doesn't mean the person or group should be emulated, studied, and promulgated) The Shawnee had a limited geographical reach. To echo the words of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber in Jesus Christ, Superstar, "If you'd come today/ You could have reached a whole nation/ Israel in 4 BC/ Had no mass communication." If only the Shawnee had that two-millennia of spread under a unifying empire the way Christianity had under the Western, Eastern, and Holy Roman empires, everyone today would rank worship of the Great Spirit with the other world religions. If only Tenskwatawa had had a social media account...If you'd come today
You could have reached a whole nation
That yoga event in the Flemish church symbolizes the struggle we have with unity and disunity, with similarity and difference, and with tradition and avant-grade freeform culture. We have a dilemma. Do we channel as much as we can into a river of similarities or branch the flow of human endeavors into distributaries running through a delta and emptying into the wide sea of diversity?
At the foot of the Christian altar, the crucifix, and an image of the Creator people meditated not on kneelers but on yoga mats in a Hindu tradition. One wonders whether or not their meditation focused at all on Shiva, the “Destroyer.”
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