Bhante, thank you for gifting us with this essay.
Many people who are deeply spiritual or religious may start reading this and say, Well, of course. I’m not a secular materialist. And I agree with everything you say.
But isn’t that another way industrialized culture has conditioned us to reflect on things?
For me, it begs the question of communal reflection and morality. Or putting on that lens and re-reading the essay.
Before the triumph of industry, people saw the earth as sacred. They would worship the gods, make a sacrifice, and pray for the abundance of this year’s crop. They believed that if they lived well, and their leaders were righteous, they would flourish…
Much of this was in community – you paint several moving allusions to this.
Could it be that the ancient traditions of the world did, in fact, hold a precious wisdom, one through which humanity was able to find its balance in nature? Could it be that the arrogant, reductive elimination of myth and meaning, of the divinity in the stars, is leading to the exact result foretold in the ancient wisdom?..
But I’m not debating philosophical possibilities here. I’m pointing to the historical reality that the ascendancy of industrialized materialism has been accompanied by the rejection of the sacredness of all things and the embrace of materialist secularism…
Industrialization and modernity (secular materialism) ushered in whole generations of people who stopped reflecting on myth and meaning together. People stopped learning to be with others this way. They didn’t have the time or the energy after long days of trying to keep pace with the hockey stick GDP.
Instead, people became individually responsible for engaging in this wholly communal project. In the process, I feel people also stopped learning to reflect each other’s goodness to one another.
White culture is particularly susceptible because of ingrained habits of excluding people from their communities. They isolate within well-groomed neighborhoods with little exposure to other, diverse communities which are more fluent in ways of being together.
Unsurprisingly, in our sanitized communities people increasingly take to social media for glimpses of their own goodness and value. They look for mirrors that tell them how valuable and loved they are. (AI’s great for that.)
The great sin of our time, the great sin of all time, has been aided and abetted by religious leaders—weak in faith, backwards in knowledge, secret devotees of matter—who, rather than recognizing madness and evil for what it is, choose to ally themselves with the great lie of industrialized materialism: that you can have whatever you want and never have to pay the price.
I was recently thinking about the preponderance of sacrifice in the Bible’s Old Testament. It wasn’t because people felt personally responsible for somehow falling short. It’s because the community felt responsible for falling short. The prophets famously point out just how misaligned the community is with Yahweh’s ideals and the demands of his character.
The physical earth is now the prophet trying to wake up the community.
Modern advocates of Buddhism often present their vision as an essentially rational one that seems little different from a materialist account. Yet in the early Buddhist texts we find nature is imbued with all manner of divinity.
Yeah, they’re all online charging people for staring at them through a computer or mobile screen. Backgrounds are blurred out to reduce potential distractions. No signs of earth life, dusty cabinets, the chaos of life lived together. Just consume my content and go practice on your own. It’s really great.
No, we’re not secular materialists. Of course not.
By the way, once everyone gets to Mars, what will be doing together? Because we won’t know how to be together. So maybe the SpaceX project can include this in the project plan. We’re going to get soooo bored…
Or is the project really To Serve Man? (You only need to watch the first five minutes.)
