Morality and Spirituality: How Communication Technologies Define the Dialogue
When moral and spiritual ideas were handed down via oral tradition, they could evolve with the cultural and technological context in which they existed. Some stories were repeated often around the fire while others, less favored, eventually faded into the hazy past. Uninteresting details might be omitted by a storyteller, others elaborated. New implications might be extracted—rules, roles, and ideas about the natural world--depending on the needs of the era. The gods themselves matured.
The advent of writing changed this. On the one hand, writing was one of humanity’s most powerful inventions. It allowed information to be transmitted directly between people who didn’t know each other. It allowed knowledge to accumulate. But it also allowed ideas –especially those that couldn’t be tested—to stagnate. Written words are frozen in time, a snapshot of the mind of the writer at a specific point in history. Allegiance to a set of civic, moral or spiritual writings allows a person or a group of people to become developmentally arrested, bound to the insights and limitations of the authors.
Canonization, the process by which an authoritative body designates a specific set of writings as complete, perfect, or more holy than all others, makes this worse. Prior to canonization, a single fragment of text may be static but the mix can evolve, with some documents moving to the fore and others falling out of favor, perhaps being lost altogether. Canonization freezes the mix, giving priority not only to the written word, but to a specific set of written words that have received the blessing of a specific human hierarchy.
Ironically, the invention of the printing press, a world changing wonder insomuch as it accelerated the growth and spread of human knowledge, made even worse the opportunities for developmental arrest. By making a static set of sacred texts widely available, it removed yet another form of flexibility and spiritual/moral growth. Clergy could no longer selectively emphasize those canonical texts that fit the moral consciousness of a given time period (omitting the rest), without losing their authority in the minds of many adherents. Some scholars have suggested that fundamentalism had its birth in the invention of the printing press, and that its spread across the planet region by region, religion by religion, has paralleled the growth of literacy.
This leads to two conclusions:
1: Religious fundamentalism, a phenomenon that many consider one of the top current threats to our longevity as a species, can be thought of as problem of communication technology. Specifically, it may be thought of as book worship or, in religious terms, bibliolatry. Recall that an idol is an object (shaped by human minds and hands) that attempts to represent and communicate the essence of divinity. For pre-literate people, statues, images, icons, and sacred spaces filled this role. In an age of mobility and literacy, what better idol than a book? And what more likely idolatry than bibliolatry?
2: As a problem that originated in communications technology, the nuclear standoff of tribal fundamentalisms in which we live may be transcended also by communications technology. Problems introduced by technological evolution frequently are solved by further technological evolution. In fact, I might argue that they are rarely solved otherwise.
In this light it is tremendously exciting that now, for the first time in human history, we have communication technologies that combine the best of oral tradition and the written word. For the first time, utter strangers thousands of miles apart can exchange ideas and information via living documents that evolve continuously.
A book, they say, is out of date the day it is in print. Not so with the Web. Web 2.0 allows an individual text to evolve the way that oral instruction once did. Wikipedia articles change daily as new information becomes available. The Web also re-opens evolution at the level of the collection—a rich, indexed, ever-changing library replaces a canonical list of authoritative texts.
Savvy, entrepreneurial fundamentalists have latched onto new web technologies as a means of dispersing the words and world view of our Bronze Age ancestors, just as their ideological forebears did with the printing press. But in their devotion to this world view they miss the stunning opportunity we have been given.
Now as never before we have the means to honor not the answers of our spiritual ancestors but their questions: What is Real? What is Good? How can we live in moral community with each other? Because we have moved beyond the age of the book and of sacred books, we have the means to make this a conversation, not of a priestly class nor of a single culture, but of scholars and seekers and life lovers from every part of this precious planet. Together we can take the conversation from where it got stuck and set it free once more to flow forward on the currents of human need and knowledge.
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.--Basho
Valerie Tarico, Ph.D.
Seattle, 2008
www.wisdomcommons.org
The advent of writing changed this. On the one hand, writing was one of humanity’s most powerful inventions. It allowed information to be transmitted directly between people who didn’t know each other. It allowed knowledge to accumulate. But it also allowed ideas –especially those that couldn’t be tested—to stagnate. Written words are frozen in time, a snapshot of the mind of the writer at a specific point in history. Allegiance to a set of civic, moral or spiritual writings allows a person or a group of people to become developmentally arrested, bound to the insights and limitations of the authors.
Canonization, the process by which an authoritative body designates a specific set of writings as complete, perfect, or more holy than all others, makes this worse. Prior to canonization, a single fragment of text may be static but the mix can evolve, with some documents moving to the fore and others falling out of favor, perhaps being lost altogether. Canonization freezes the mix, giving priority not only to the written word, but to a specific set of written words that have received the blessing of a specific human hierarchy.
Ironically, the invention of the printing press, a world changing wonder insomuch as it accelerated the growth and spread of human knowledge, made even worse the opportunities for developmental arrest. By making a static set of sacred texts widely available, it removed yet another form of flexibility and spiritual/moral growth. Clergy could no longer selectively emphasize those canonical texts that fit the moral consciousness of a given time period (omitting the rest), without losing their authority in the minds of many adherents. Some scholars have suggested that fundamentalism had its birth in the invention of the printing press, and that its spread across the planet region by region, religion by religion, has paralleled the growth of literacy.
This leads to two conclusions:
1: Religious fundamentalism, a phenomenon that many consider one of the top current threats to our longevity as a species, can be thought of as problem of communication technology. Specifically, it may be thought of as book worship or, in religious terms, bibliolatry. Recall that an idol is an object (shaped by human minds and hands) that attempts to represent and communicate the essence of divinity. For pre-literate people, statues, images, icons, and sacred spaces filled this role. In an age of mobility and literacy, what better idol than a book? And what more likely idolatry than bibliolatry?
2: As a problem that originated in communications technology, the nuclear standoff of tribal fundamentalisms in which we live may be transcended also by communications technology. Problems introduced by technological evolution frequently are solved by further technological evolution. In fact, I might argue that they are rarely solved otherwise.
In this light it is tremendously exciting that now, for the first time in human history, we have communication technologies that combine the best of oral tradition and the written word. For the first time, utter strangers thousands of miles apart can exchange ideas and information via living documents that evolve continuously.
A book, they say, is out of date the day it is in print. Not so with the Web. Web 2.0 allows an individual text to evolve the way that oral instruction once did. Wikipedia articles change daily as new information becomes available. The Web also re-opens evolution at the level of the collection—a rich, indexed, ever-changing library replaces a canonical list of authoritative texts.
Savvy, entrepreneurial fundamentalists have latched onto new web technologies as a means of dispersing the words and world view of our Bronze Age ancestors, just as their ideological forebears did with the printing press. But in their devotion to this world view they miss the stunning opportunity we have been given.
Now as never before we have the means to honor not the answers of our spiritual ancestors but their questions: What is Real? What is Good? How can we live in moral community with each other? Because we have moved beyond the age of the book and of sacred books, we have the means to make this a conversation, not of a priestly class nor of a single culture, but of scholars and seekers and life lovers from every part of this precious planet. Together we can take the conversation from where it got stuck and set it free once more to flow forward on the currents of human need and knowledge.
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.--Basho
Valerie Tarico, Ph.D.
Seattle, 2008
www.wisdomcommons.org
7 comments:
Great post Valerie.
There is lots of food for thought here.
As I haul away the last of the concrete from the old foundational beliefs of my old life as a Christian, I now find myself at a new beginning. I am wondering how to define & understand morality at a personal & societal level in a way that make sense & does not need to reference some higher feudal lord for its authority or power.
I have just started reading "The Secular Conscience" by Austin Dacey (in old-fashioned hard cover - it seems very good) but I am impressed by how the web allows us to engage these sorts of issues in a much more dynamic & real-time way.
Although I have plowed through many books in the last year and a half, my de-conversion owes a lot to the ready access to the many alternate opinions & views of reality I find on the web. The print media would have never given me this sort of dynamic resource in the same time frame.
Thanks for pointing this out.
-evan
Thanks, Evan.
For the past couple of years I've been wrestling with the question of how to put the conversation back in motion. I don't want to spend my life energy simply debunking falsehood, though that is important. I also want to be building positive alternatives.
My sense is that many of the moral mandates of the world's great religions actually served human well-being at the time they emerged. But now their consequences are mixed, at best. A focus on personal chastity, for example, or tribal loyalty, distracts from the enormous moral questions we face together: Is species extinction a moral issue? How about human cloning? How about climate justice? How about specific weapons technologies or population growth?
The old sacred texts and orthodox dictates simply fail to provide relevant answers. And yet, many of the moral principles derived by our ancestors are still sound. As someone said, tradition should be a guidepost, not a hitching post.
www.Wisdomcommons.org, where I originally posted this article, has been my 9 month project--an attempt to give people tools so that they can sift through our many moral traditions --both secular and religious-- keeping the timeles nuggets of insight and leaving aside the rubble of tribalism and superstition.
What I love about the web is that this can be a collective endeavour, rather than a matter of one reformer putting forth his or her answers.
You don't have to be an atheist to debunk Christi(in)anity. My book 'Adam & Evil: the god who hates sex, women and human bodies' shows both the insanity of male-dominated religion and the pre-religious shamanic cultures' way of understanding that god and existence are synonymous. The real God is All Creation - it is what we live in.
Valerie,
This post reminds me of a quote by Bono:
"We thought that we had the answers---it was the questions we had wrong."
And this quote you added:
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.--Basho
is truly transcendent. I think this is the single, most profound difference between spirituality and religion...the one copies the copies while the other seeks the original.
I enjoyed reading your perspective on the fluidity of liberal information through conversation. Language is a living thing. It's a wonderful thing in so many ways to be at this point in the human story - looking back on such a rich and varied past from which to draw from.
It is so humbling an refreshing to see a post like this. I just wish more people would read this and understand it's implications, truth's and facts.
One of the doubts I had that led me to atheism was the realization that this book, the bible, was really just a book, written just by man. I just could not understand the NT writers saying it's the Holy Spirit speaking through them. And I always wondered how they know that, and why didn't they give us a description if they really wanted people to believe them.
Even the idea that God gave Moses ten commandments we all must follow wasn't making much sense to me either. A thorough read and analysis of the ten, makes it obvious this seriously couldn't be from the almighty. On top of that, it was written on a stone that was later destroyed, which we could have use as evidence. But we are suppose to believe that all these happenings were to one day end up in a book.
To me, the bible is just a book, no different than any other book. A book is man's invention, just any other human invention, yet we treat it like it's more than this, an invention. We can all agree that men wrote the bible, then why can't we agree it is also the word of man, and not God?
Once again, great post, very educational.
Thanks, Andre. I agree that once you look at the Bible from the outside -- meaning where it came from, what the precursor religions and stories were, what the cultural context was, how it got assembled, etc. it is essentially impossible to put yourself back inside the story.
Great post Valerie i agree the web is a great tool for the future.A way to bring many thoughts together.
I also agree with how you suggest spiritual ideas evolved.Within most if not every tribe of people we can see these things have happened.
I also feel there is evidence within the written bible that it evolved itself.For instance in the old testament people were stoned to death, in the new this practice stopped.
By use of much rhetoric and use of scriptures within the book ,some would try to find divine reason to explain this away.
I suggest its more likely human thoughts and morals evolving.Some might ask what good reason might i like to suggest for this change to come about.I would look towards likely logic and say with regards to the stoning`s that stopped ,that maybe its likely many were at a later date found to have been wrongfully accused and stoned to death.And as this wrongful death could not be reversed ,the families of those would not have been to happy.Their belief in this faith that allowed for this to happen would have begun to falter and even disappear.So change was inevitable that it had to happen and so were any stories made up as covers for reasons for this change ,to keep the divine outlook alive .
Not with a lot of difference with how those of today with such rhetoric still try their best to explain and cover matters up ,except people of today have more knowledge and should know better .
I agree with andre "To me, the bible is just a book, no different than any other book. A book is man's invention "
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