11.23.08

Fourth instinct, secularism and religion

Posted in New Age, Science & Religion, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 3:19 pm by nemo

Arianna Huffington at EnlightenNext, audio

In our highly polarized political climate, it is rare to find an individual who is as familiar with both sides of the aisle as Arianna Huffington is. A bestselling author, a nationally syndicated columnist, and named by Time magazine as one of the one hundred most influential people in 2006, Huffington’s eclectic career has always defied convention—and partisan categorization. She was once married to a Republican congressman. She ran for governor of California as an independent. And her popular internet newspaper, The Huffington Post, has a decidedly liberal bent. But while we’ve long admired Huffington’s broad political perspective as well as the passionate dedication to political and cultural change that has defined her career, it is her interest in the relationship between spirituality and politics, articulated in her book The Fourth Instinct, that compelled us to take a closer look.

Being interviewed at Andrew Cohen’s rag is a dubious opportunity. Cohen is constantly trying to snare celebrities in his ‘postmodern’ project (for world domination, I guess).
The combination of politics and ‘spirituality’ is a big debate, one might mention here only that the attempt to get ‘beyond left and right’ smacks of the ‘non-dual verbiage’ peddled in the name of Vedanta by Cohen and Ken Wilbur.
A. Huffington’s ideas of a ‘fourth instinct’ (I doubt if there is such an instinct) are reasonable enough (I haven’t read the book), but the problem these days is that a massive movement, or set of such, to organize the ‘impulse to transcendence’ is now bombing out in the long list of burnt out gurus, since the seventies.
The Integral movement with Wilbur voluminous hot air texts is the next effort to organize everyone’ s fourth instincts, and the result isn’t going to go anywhere, as far as I can tell.
One needs to ask what is going wrong with these movements.
Actually a study of the eonic effect, and what we mean by evolution for man, will suggest why these movements are so often unable to achieve lift.
The rise of the modern was itself a great evolutionary transformation, and these confused efforts by postmodernists to negate the rise of modernity in the name of a new spiritual age can’t succeed against its momentum.

It is simply a smear against modernity to call it somehow devoid of spiritual potential. In fact, we can see that the rise of the modern world is just as much a ‘spiritual’ age (in its secularism) as any other. The idea of freedom, and its realization, is as spiritual, if we are still using this term, as anything in religion.

In any case these New Age movements, while they can plow the field, seem unable to sow the seeds of future religion.
A look at the eonic effect shows why: as with Karen Armstrong trying to prophecy a second ‘Axial Age’ (and also interviewed at Cohen’s mag on just this topic), the predictions of a postmodern spiritual renewal appear at the moment when the impulse of modernity might deviate from its initial point, and the result will be a degradation of culture, not an advance. There is no possibility of aping the Axial Age. Noone can seem to understand it. It was not a spiritual age, but a point of global transformation over a whole spectrum of cultures. The result gave birth to two religions, one theist, one atheist, and to secularism and science, in Axial Greece.
Those who peddel non-dual felicities might consider that breadth of the Axial spectrum’
The modern age will simply not replicate that moment, having moved on to something different. That does not mean that modern scientism triumphant will rule the future either. On the contrary, the attempt to create a future of religion is the great open question of secularism (which is often defined falsely as ‘anti-religion’, a viewpoint hard to fathom since the trigger of modernity was the Protestant Reformation).
It needs to be done in a secular fashion! We need hype-free religion-free guru-free non-propagandistic ‘manuals of human software’ (what used to be called ‘spiritual psychologies’, Ken Wilbur having gone into overdrive trying in vain to produce one) that can map out, on the basis of human autonomy, man’s potential as an evolutionary being.
Not a sinlge effort in this direction has suceeded in modern times. The ancient efforts of the Buddhists put current commercialized New Age texts to shame. The so-called ‘traditionalists’ are no better.

One who came close, the writer J.G. Bennett, with his The Dramatic Universe, significantly based his immense system on the ancient Samkhya, but his whole effort got hijacked by the attempt to remould this ancient ‘spiritual materialism’ with a wrapper of Christian theology, wrecking the whole job, and probably making the classic Samkhya unusuable.
I have often had a notion to rewrite Bennett’s Samkhya portion without this grotestque addon factro.
In any case, the debate over materialism and the spiritual is too useless to serve the times. Scientism is simply out in left field. The New Age movements have become private delicatessens for vampire gurus. Result: there is nothing in the modern cultural zone, left, right or middle, scientific or traditionalist that can do the job.
Meanwhile the New Age appropriation of the idea of evolution shows how hard it is to blend the ancient and the modern, and this instant fallacy is a sign that even advanced yogis are no better at it than anyone else.
So the future of religion remains so far an abortive initiative.

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