on "syncretism"
Mar. 21st, 2012 09:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrienmundi(Originally posted on my G+, even though I intend to make LJ my space for "spiritual" concerns)
I'm not a syncretist. More and more,syncretism just pisses me off. Not only does it seem incredibly disrepectful to locality, it also seems incredibly presumptuous and lazy. I encounter this most in (largely white, privileged)“alternative spirituality” or “New Age” contexts, which is why I suspect I've had such an approach/retreat history with what's packaged as spirituality.
I mean to include monism, “all is one/god/source” attempts to absorb local experience. It's one thing to say, “I see it as all of a piece that manifests differently at different times/places, and for different people” but quite another to say “your experience is subordinate to my ordering of theworld/universe”. To describe the subjective with a definitive is comes across as a form of ideological violence if delivered without qualifications.
I experience the world as being full of local presences/personalities and subjective feelings, and I'm very OK with that. In fact, one of the joys of even local travel, or differing time/climate/context, is feeling out the differences in those points of contact. For me, this is a key part of mindfulness and immmediacy (I find this can carry over into many aspects of mylife, and it's refreshing and illuminating, in a Heraclitian way).
That's not to say I'm against tracing lineages of spirituality, gods, practices, etc. Hell, tracing lineages (of ideas, music, etc.) is one of my favorite pastimes. It's entirely possible to be aware of movements or migrations and still engage with the local. For example, one can talk all day about the lineage of punk rock and still acknowledge the differences between London, NY and West Coast styles. Why this isn't done in “spiritual”circles, when curmudgeonly music critics and fans can still manage to, only adds to my irritation.
I'm not a syncretist. More and more,syncretism just pisses me off. Not only does it seem incredibly disrepectful to locality, it also seems incredibly presumptuous and lazy. I encounter this most in (largely white, privileged)“alternative spirituality” or “New Age” contexts, which is why I suspect I've had such an approach/retreat history with what's packaged as spirituality.
I mean to include monism, “all is one/god/source” attempts to absorb local experience. It's one thing to say, “I see it as all of a piece that manifests differently at different times/places, and for different people” but quite another to say “your experience is subordinate to my ordering of theworld/universe”. To describe the subjective with a definitive is comes across as a form of ideological violence if delivered without qualifications.
I experience the world as being full of local presences/personalities and subjective feelings, and I'm very OK with that. In fact, one of the joys of even local travel, or differing time/climate/context, is feeling out the differences in those points of contact. For me, this is a key part of mindfulness and immmediacy (I find this can carry over into many aspects of mylife, and it's refreshing and illuminating, in a Heraclitian way).
That's not to say I'm against tracing lineages of spirituality, gods, practices, etc. Hell, tracing lineages (of ideas, music, etc.) is one of my favorite pastimes. It's entirely possible to be aware of movements or migrations and still engage with the local. For example, one can talk all day about the lineage of punk rock and still acknowledge the differences between London, NY and West Coast styles. Why this isn't done in “spiritual”circles, when curmudgeonly music critics and fans can still manage to, only adds to my irritation.
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no subject
Date: 2012-03-21 02:03 pm (UTC)*Chuckle*
So... is Pantheism a la Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (19th century CE) or D. H. Lawrence, Albert Einstein, Frank Lloyd Wright and Arnold Toynbee (20th century CE) a valid or invalid spiritual choice? (These gentlemen weren't New Age at all, but they were indeed Caucasian males of Western cultures, though even that broad distinction hides persecutions like those of Einstein as a Jew hounded from his native soil).
A similar issue rages in cultural anthropology circles. Some see any attempt to track "big picture" trends as "politically incorrect" (I LURVE shibboleths like "politically incorrect" and "dog whistle," they reveal so much about ourselves!). This is in response to 19th and 20th century people like James Fraser, Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade, who some saw as broadly generalizing at the expense of individual differences.
And of course similar issues create great turmoil when accusations of (inappropriate) cultural appropriation fly. Is trubaci brass band music Romani or Serbian?
Some would call my answer a cop-out: all things in moderation.
I love to get outraged at the same thing you're talking about, whenever someone says that a distinction that I think is important (say, between Fir Bolg and Tuatha de Danaan) isn't important because their paradigm says that it's all the same. But I also have to temper myself, because it is easy to lose sight of the need for moderation. ^_^