What does this mean, and how could we test it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Religion, defined anthropologically, is something like a system of symbols<\/em> — encompassing creed<\/em> (beliefs, tenets, and ideas about humans and the larger universe), code<\/em> (deeply held values, ethical and behavioral norms), and cult<\/em> (practices, rituals, and actions regularized into observable and repeatable patterns) — by which people<\/em>, in a more or less structured community, actively locate<\/em> themselves in a world of power, meaning, and value that transcends <\/em>yet includes them. For simplicity’s sake, let’s consider these five things essential to “religion”: creed, code, cult, community, and transcendence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n If that’s the case, then history encompasses a spectrum between social situations that were (and are) more<\/em> religious — meaning, more unified within and around such systems of symbols and practices — and those that were (and are) less<\/em> religious. At times of stability, it tends to be more of the first, but as those times never last forever, they are always marked by the “chaos” that is imagined to lurk outside the sacred canopy<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More interestingly, for our purposes, is what happens when a social order gets complex. In the ancient Hellenistic world, through much of the Roman Empire, and in our world today, the social order takes on characteristics of secularity<\/em>, which we might take to mean something like “unity encompassing religious particularity.” The secular emerges in order<\/em> to constitute a unified social space when one or more of the features of religion (creed, code, cult, community, transcendence) is lacking, at least in any socially unifying form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The world today is both (poly-)religious and (poly-)secular: it is rife with religion and religiosity, in both local and global forms, but it is also globally disunified. What unity it thinks<\/em> it has is not actual unity, but projected or imagined unity. The liberal, secular world order — as it is lived and experienced by people who feel themselves to be part of it — thinks<\/em> it speaks for humanity, but it doesn’t fairly encompass all of those it (thinks it) speaks for. Neither does any other “common world<\/a>.” As a result, we have secularism, pluralism, and religiosity in multiple forms and varying degrees, and the project of achieving an actually unified world order is an always unfinished one, and right now quite a challenging one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There is nothing inherently wrong with this situation. In fact, I think it’s a good, healthy state of affairs, all things considered. But the climatic and ecological challenges that face us — which amount to an existential and civilizational crisis — call for responses that may not ultimately be effective without some further crystallization in the terrain of the religious (as defined here). Those challenges require super-<\/em>responses, which can only come about on a mass scale through the emergence of a global, diffuse, but more or less unified religiosity. At least that’s the premise implied by my hypothesis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If this is true, then the emergent (in Raymond Williams’ sense of that term<\/a>) religion or “religiosity” could well be a civic <\/em>religiosity — that is, the religious equivalent of what civic<\/em> nationalism is to ethnic<\/em> nationalism — a contractual agreement based in common experiences, but with the “transcendent” reference points being left somewhat vague and the specific “cult practices” being limited and open-ended. But it will require the kind of combination of creed, code, cult, community, and transcendence that is best embodied in the kind of thing called “religion.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n (If that doesn’t sound like “religion” to you, it’s probably because it’s not similar enough to your particular idea of religion, in which case feel free to stop reading now. Or not.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n What would make this religion, or this religiosity, ecological<\/em>? Primarily, it is those “transcendent” reference points, which would have something to do with the Earth and the cosmos as we have come to know them in and through the scientific enterprise (at its best), supplemented by poetry, art, mythology, and all the rest. Cosmos, we have hardly come to know you. But we know our planet floats in your amniotic belly, and that there are things we can do to dignify and honor our presence in it, and things that would do the opposite. Every thing learned about our place in the universe is a thing unlearned — about our self-importance, or about the things we thought we knew from having heard them repeated or read from a book. Genuine transcendence is an opening up both to how little<\/em> we truly know and to how entangled<\/em> we are with everything else around us. That is ecology, and it is dependent upon the dispensation of a certain humility in our attitude to the universe. If scientific humanism had a bit of collective arrogance to it (as David Ehrenfeld<\/a> and many others have argued), ecology teaches the opposite. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Secondly, it is the sense of community<\/em> that would make this religion ecological. Members of this global community would more or less agree that maintenance of the relationship between humans and the Earth, in all its living complexity and integrity — floral and faunal, local and global — is morally and functionally central to our existence as humans. More specifically, the science of ecology, as well as its applications in conservation and ecological management and, where applicable, its cognates in local forms of traditional ecological knowledge<\/a> (with their animistic<\/a> sensibilities), might become integral to some of the “cult practices” of the emergent religion. How we engage with the others we live with (whatever physical forms they take) would (once again) come to matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For some people today, that doesn’t sound too dramatic a shift from where we already stand, at least intellectually. But viscerally, in our creeds, our deeply held moral codes, and our actions, most of us are far from it. Our ritualized and sanctified practices are not there. And the global community is certainly lacking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alright, then, if that’s the hypothesis, then how could we test it? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, one cannot test something in advance of it happening. So it isn’t a testable hypothesis, which means it is not (technically) scientific. But it could still be pragmatically useful, in which case we could still look for support<\/em> for it. That will come in asking questions like these:<\/p>\n\n\n\n How have radical cultural changes occurred in the past? What role has religion played in them?<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n If indeed its role has been central more often than not, then it is viable to suppose it will be this time around, too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n How do religions emerge, grow, spread, and become dominant? <\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n The bulk of evidence here suggests that the “successful” ones spread fairly organically (rather than artificially), but with help from powerful interest groups within the social milieus in which they become established. For instance, Christianity and Buddhism both spread more “organically,” unlike say Scientology, but both benefited from their appeals to significant social classes and occasionally to power wielders, such as Constantine the Great (Roman Christianity) and Mauryan emperor Ashoka (Buddhism). Ultimately, they spread through multiple appeals to different social groups and classes until they presented the kind of “common front” that Antonio Gramsci termed “hegemony.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n What is happening with religion today, and are there elements that might contribute to forging a new constellation, a new “hegemony,” that could appeal to the moral and elemental bases of what makes us human? What is happening in general in the world today that could contribute to the coalescence of a quasi-religious community around matters of ecology, humanity, and globality? What trends in media, economics, and global culture facilitate such a coalescence, and which ones do the opposite? What are their risks and how are they best overcome? <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Plenty is happening, of course, as has been documented in the fields of religious studies, including sociology and anthropology of religion, religion and ecology (or religion and nature), and others. But plenty is happening elsewise, too, to counter any trends we might think are moving in the eco-globalist direction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I have argued before<\/a> that “the global” is becoming a terrain of struggle between emerging religio-cultural forms — “attractors,” you might say — that include (1) the secular liberalism that first defined globality but that is now under serious (perhaps even fatal?) threat, (2) a globalizing social traditionalism (represented by many global forms of religious conservatism alongside the movements toward alliance by Steve Bannon-style conservatives, Putinism’s more imperial ambitions, and so on), and (3) an eco-ecumenism<\/em> of some sort (paralleling the “eco-egalitarianism” that William Connolly writes about<\/a> in the U.S. context). (See here<\/a> for the published version of the paper linked to above, and here<\/a> for my concluding assessment from a volume on the anthropology of environmental religiosities.). I’ve also argued<\/a> that politics today is in part a “politics of meaning” in which cultural and religious identity plays a central role. These arguments parallel what a lot of other people have said (including Bruno Latour in his recent Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime<\/a><\/em>, which I reviewed here<\/a>.) Mapping out what is happening in global culture (and global religion) is, in any case, an open question that requires much more analysis of much more data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But there — the hypothesis is out there. To the extent that it might guide not only research but also action, it can be both hypothetico-deductive and abductive<\/em>, in the Peircian sense<\/a> of a kind of creative reaching forth toward hypothesizing out of a fog of data that provides no solid ground, but that responds to one’s reaching. For those who like to combine their observational fieldwork with participatory action, it’s a possible way of laying down a path in walking<\/a>. To assume that we aren’t already doing that is, in the end, a way of already taking sides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2019\/10\/Crop-Circle-Jellyfish-Oxfordshire-298x400.jpg?resize=168%2C225&ssl=1\")
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