Spiritualities—the ways in which we go about being human—are made up of related values, practices, and world-views.
In the previous post on the emerging spirituality , I outlined an authoritarian world-view that was imposed upon the citizens of ancient nation-states by their kings and priests.
"We just took a twelve-thousand year detour."
According to that world-view, a god like Marduk or Yahweh, modeled on the idea of a king, rules the universe. The leader of whichever country you are in is his ordained representative, as are the priests of the state religion in that country. They tell you what to believe, what to value, and how to act.
But a more traditional world-view, one that harks back, past the beginning of civilization, to our hunter-gatherer forbears, before they were enslaved by kings and priests, has continued to emerge through the same period.
It can be found even in the Bible. For a very long time it had to disguise itself, using the language of kings and priests in order to survive. But recently, certainly since the eighteenth century, it has managed to come out of the closet.
This emerging worldview was, and is still, attacked by those who hold to the worldview of the early kingdoms. It differs from that world-view in several ways:
- It uses evidence rather than authority as its basis for truth. Can weight exist in a vacuum? Don't consult the Bible, or the Pope, or Aristotle. Pump the air out of a container, and see if beads will float or fall.
- It isn't rooted in politics. Truth, insofar as we know it, is what it is. If condoms help stop aids, then they do. If they don't, they don't. The determining of fact is completely divorced from the realm of political and religious agendas.
- It does not project human nature on every phenomenon. It does not insist that the United States is identical to the president (the other model regularly confused the king with the country), and it doesn't insist that ultimate reality take the form of a human-like (and king-like) person who exists in some supernatural realm.
There are other differences, of course.
But the main point is that the world we live in is owed, largely, to that emerging world-view.
It's responsible for most of the scientific advances we have made (and often has had to fight the kings and priests in the process). It's responsible for the introduction of democracy in the place of kingdoms in the modern world. It was largely responsible for the abolition of slavery.
Every day we all come to live, more and more, within this emerging world-view, whether we're secular or religious, whether we're poor or rich. We affirm it every time we use a telephone or a computer, every time we go to a doctor.
There's still a backlash of sorts—the fight against research, the fight to get the old god-saga taught in science classes instead of science—but it appears to be a losing battle: a battle that is mostly political.
Because that, in the end, is the difference between the two. The king-priest world-view was about politics. The emerging world-view is about understanding, just as it was back when we were figuring out how to make fire, or a spear.
We just took a twelve-thousand year detour.
That detour was aimed at changing our behavior, making us more subservient to our masters. And the easiest way to do that is to mess with someone's values.
We'll take that up next time...
