The Secular Fundamentalist

Aspirants-Redemptories and Practical Salvation

Post-moderns may well draw on some of what is left of their sense of the sacred and powerfully reject modern institutions and lifestyles in ways that emphasize collectivity over individuals, simplicity of life over conspicuous consumption and discipline over impulse; will attempt to resuscitate rural life, turn ecological recapitalizaton and repair into a key industry and be uncompromising about living within their biological means; will explore entertaining and energizing rituals, ceremonies and group dreamings, for every imaginable occasion; and establish a social and existential commons that everyone is on board with, that has regulatory clout and is prepared to deal with wayward souls who think it is OK to trash it if they feel like it.

The post-modern sense of the redemptive and sacred will not come out of some ideological abstraction.  It will be intensely practical and focused on rebuilding ‘software’ wealth for both individuals and communities; i.e., switching the human effort from toys and games to recapitalizing the processes of character formation, securitizing and interpersonal and inter group effectiveness and affectiveness.
 
It will draw pragmatically on many traditions of meditative reflection and group mobilization.  It will attempt to codify beliefs about the nature and purposes of life and the part in it that humans should play.  It will evolve a literature, a musicality and dance to celebrate the struggle to evolve the collective sensibility.  It will have its own ritual architecture which will reflect the aspirations and hopes of those who use this space to give structure to their lives; births, comings of age, marriages, deaths and all things and events significant on the road of life that should be celebrated and exercised in a community.

It will have its professional celebrants and /or collective leaderships to facilitate and energize the raising of consciousness.  It will gradually become more gravitationally inclusive and difficult to avoid for the doubters and skeptics, as it takes over the culture.

There were some things everyone agreed on when it came to building ‘Redemptories’.

Whatever the design, the acoustics had to make the voice of a crow sound like a nightingale.  The natural light should be reflective, calm and smooth out bodily imperfections.  It had to be a flexible space accommodating everything its aspirants’ hearts could desire.  And finally, it couldn’t just look like a utilitarian community hall with annexes tacked on.  It had to make statements about their dreams and be above all a beautiful place that would bring gladness into the present and hope for the future.

Having thus agreed on everything, the rest was just a matter of funding, which was the difficult bit, because that is what would cause all the messy compromises that everyone didn’t agree on.  The effect of this was for budgets to quickly blow out as communities tried to meet as many expectations as possible.  And the effect of that was much like what is still to be found in central and South American churches; a funneling by quite frugally endowed communities of their limited resources into surprisingly magnificent public buildings.

Of course, what always went unsaid was that they all had to be sited and built to be defensible, with thick reinforced concrete walls, heavy blast proof security doors, firearms embrasures, well cleared fields of fire and guarded 24/7.
 
However, the concrete would have symbolic motifs molded into its structures that proclaimed salvation not only in the face of external enemies, but the ones within, who would deny the value of virtue, the ideal of perfectibility and the necessity to apply standards to the conduct of life, from which no one would be exempted.

The effect of increasing internal chaos and external besiegement of late modern societies by militant religious fundamentalists, who were convinced that they had a divine mandate to purge thoroughly corrupted and self indulgent secular consumer societies, was profound.  When push came to shove, these decadent latter day societies didn’t have either the collective resolution or courage to fight to the finish, or the moral legitimacy and integrity that gives righteousness its power and authority to bend its enemies to its will, before the fighting even begins.

It was the religious fanatics who had that game sewn up, and young, chronically immature, insecure and stupid young men were easy meat for seduction into their ranks. There was nothing seculars could do about it, because they had long done away with the only tools that could have checked this creeping loss of loyalty, or the existential rage that followed it, as the new religious acolytes began to discover just how much secular society had denied and impoverished them.

That the cosmology of the religious fanatics was primitive mumbo jumbo made not one iota of difference, because what was being negotiated was a sales pitch offering existential food to the starving.  Truth becomes hostage to psychological need rather than the dispassionate analysis of evidence.

It was only when secular people were forced by the prospect of defeat to accept the old truism that human beings do not live by bread alone, did they begin to abandon their complacency.  The brutal fact was that modernity was a mortal construct whose horizons did not stretch out into an indefinite future of bigger and brighter things.

Ideological software is in some ways more important than the hardware, because when life starts to get tough, one begins to appreciate just how little one really needs to get by. When the toys, games and diversions are cut off, a whole new world appears.  A primitive computer running robust, simple and user friendly software is in some ways more useful than a very powerful one that is running narrowly conceived and dysfunctional rubbish.

The reduction of mass populations to the absolute basics of production drivers and consumer responders was so narrow and insecure, it left them on existential ledges that would keep crumbling and forcing them into increasingly exhausting activity, just to escape falling.  And it would require enormous efforts of imagination, resourcefulness and will to not only get out of this lock step, but establish new rules of engagement with life, its meanings, its capitalization, its notions of wealth and the kind of ‘industry’ it would generate.

Late modern people had to use the tools at hand to devise strategies that would take them into a much less secure and hazardous world.  If they were to create a new voice that would be able to differentiate itself from those of the ancients that the religious fanatics referenced, it would have to reconstruct the language of modernity and ‘economic’ activity to rebuild existential and social commons ‘services’.

They would create a para ‘economy’ that would try to replicate the familiar industrial structures of capital.  Social reproduction would become an ‘industry’ and treated in exactly the same way as any other , with a ‘free market’ providing a diversity of  high standard and competitive ‘product’ that could be guaranteed replicable generation after generation.
 
It would need to meet certain demonstrable benchmark ‘safety’ and utility standards which would be mentored and accredited through an educational process, enforced by a regulatory system of ‘industry’ governance, and oversighted by an accounting/auditing framework that would mimic ‘profit/loss’ and ‘balance sheet’ performance through agreed methods of production and process quantification.  And people of high net worth in these terms would have a very special place in the hearts of their neighbors.  And bankrupts would rapidly find themselves in ‘receivership’ and being forced into compulsory ‘reconstruction’.

The reproductive ‘industry’ would form an integral and measurable part of ‘the economy’, which would attract capital away from its traditionally monetized notions of wealth.  This new industry would become a central plank in answering the questions as to what wealth is, why any social organism exists, its moral justification for doing so and its ability to get the best out of people most of the time, to save people from undoing themselves and each other, and provide the means to redeem them if they fail or fall down; anything to build, conserve and repair social and existential software ‘capital’.

In the end, all social enterprises have to satisfactorily justify themselves through a values based faith in what they do and a rational assessment of the inherent goodness and virtues of their work.  Answering these questions is just as critical today as it was to Martin Luther, who kicked off The Reformation in 1517.  The cosmology may be different, but the concerns are exactly the same.

For Luther, the process of valuing good works had been so corrupted that only a blind faith in the grace of God would save us.  Finding grace; i.e., the influence which operates in humans to regenerate and sanctify, to inspire virtuous impulses, and to impart strength to endure trial, resist temptation to do the wrong thing, and, failing that, a sense of shame, repentance and willingness to right a wrong, is just as important in saving us now, as it was in Luther’s time.

As Luther would have said, good intentions and well meaning action are no proof against loss of touchstone values and the corrupting influences that undermine the value of these fine instincts.  The conversion of liberal ideas into laissez-faire libertinism by substituting the obligations that underpin rights with a culture of irresponsible and ultimately inconsequential consumer entitlement is a terrible case-in-point.

For Luther, the medieval world and its one great central institution, the church, had lost touch with its fundamental moral and practical bottom lines in ministering to the populations it controlled.  The practice of selling salvation in the afterlife by offering time off from a sinner’s deserved time in purgatory for a fee was emblematic of an institution that had lost its way.  Instead of making the effort to try and persuade the worldly estate to more fervently try to emulate the divine one, the church in effect taxed sin to fill its coffers, and in so doing, defeated the notion of salvation and destroyed the relationship with the divine.
 
While we seculars do not use that language or make assumptions about the hereafter, salvation is just as pressing a problem for us as at any other time in history. Salvation is about justification through joining the relationship of faith and reason, so that we do not flounder with loss of confidence or belief in the integrity of our values or loss of understanding of the difference between reason, rationalizing and excuse making. When one loses that perspective, ‘damnation’ comes to us through our corporate boardrooms, mean streets and even our best intentions, just as surely as the imagined ‘Wrath of God’ was once thought to trample over unrepentant sinners, both in the world, and  the ‘afterlife’.
 
These days we still have an ‘afterlife’, but it is now expressed as the legacy we leave our children to grapple with.

The time is upon us when we have to start dealing with stuff and making decisions which will be just as ‘biblical’ for us as anything that has ever happened in the biblical traditions we seculars have left behind.  We do not require that the hand of God shall bring us down for our sins of omission and commission.  History has a way of taking care of such things without any agency except our own.  And while God may have helped those who helped themselves, we are just going to have to help ourselves.

Anything we can get ourselves into, we can get out of.  The only variable is the price and whether we are prepared or able to pay it.  And it has always been thus.

At the most basic level, these things are self evident.  We have just chosen to ignore them and we are rapidly reaching a point where we just won’t be able to any more.  Nothing lasts forever and neither will modern times, nor the indulgence and self indulgence that it temporarily enabled.

The terrible wars of toleration that followed in the wake of the reformation that heralded the dawn of the modern age, were started by an argument over indulgence.  As it draws to a close, the matter does not seem to have gone away, or the conflict that it can generate. 

Fortified redemptories manned (and womaned) by aspirants who would fight for salvation are the logical endpoint to a history which has too long denied these things and pretended that they did not matter, no matter how costly that would later prove to be.