Social Spirituality

[In memory of Martin Luther King, Jr]

The social web has a profound effect on everything it has touched, and its impacts have a tendency to work in similar ways on what seem to be very different spheres of human interaction, like media, politics, marketing, entertainment, and, yes, even religion.

Religion can be considered as having two parts: a gross over simplification, but perhaps a helpful one.

We will put aside the dusty parchments that ancient migrants carried, we will drop what excludes, and forget the unforgiving rules of sin and grievance. We will turn to ourselves, and share the communion of all people, confronted by the wheeling stars, the ocean’s tides, and the deepest songs in our bones.

On one side are the organizations that exist to manage the possessions and processes of a specific religion. For example, the Catholic Church has tens of thousands of buildings, cars, trucks, pots and pans, and pews. Likewise, the Catholic Church supports a set of beliefs: an interpretation of the meaning derived from the Bible and other religious works, and the fabric of arguments reaching back to the founding of the Church. This body of collective knowledge is Catholic dogma, and its meaning and application is the sole prerogative of the Church fathers. And, to a greater or lesser extent, the same holds with many other established religions, like the Anglican Church, Jainism, the various branches of Islam, The Church Of Latter Day Christian Saints (Mormonism), Judaism, and so on.

(There are some religions that are profoundly disorganized, like Taoism, that fall outside of this nickel-dime analysis, which is one of the major reasons that I consider myself a Taoist.)

On the other side from the religious organization is personal spiritual experience. For many, this is regularly attending services, reciting the litany, listening to sermons, saying a few prayers. Much of the experience, for most, is grounded in the sharing of ritual, and the sense of belonging to a group with deeply held and shared beliefs. For a few, a more intense and perhaps solitary sort of mysticism becomes the basis of their religious experience, but this too is grounded in a shared awareness of certain principles, which can vary wildly across different religions, even when the rituals are similar.

As with most aspects of human sociality, the sense of being part of a group with shared beliefs leads to in-group identity. And it is inherently exclusionary, on a cognitive level, no matter what words exist in the religion’s dogma about kindness to strangers.

Historically, all human social systems are bounded: there is a known end, and on the other side are people that are outsiders, heathens, or enemies of the faith.

The web is fostering a new basis for human identity. Since we are so obviously connected in a huge social network online — where we can interact with thousands of people from all over the world in a way that was unimaginable only a few years ago — it is a natural result that people will come to see the entire world as a huge and all-encompasing social network, one that excludes no one, and in which all have a place. This does not mean the end of conflict, but a realization of our fundamental connection, sharing — or squabbling over — the Earth.

As I wrote the other day at Quora, the web is likely to lead to a transformation of the organization side of the world’s religions:

In the long run, the web will favor decentralization of spirituality, away from dogmatic and exclusionary creeds. And just as the web allows — and supports — the dynamism of many views on any sphere of human interaction, we will see the reemergence of enigmatic spirituality — where we confront the unknowable and transcendent — and the decline of dogmatic and formal religions.

More specifically, the rate of defection from organized religions will increase, but people will still have the in-built predilection for spiritual experience.

The unknowable and the transcendent includes us, too, not  just the huge questions of ‘what does it all mean?’ and ‘why are we here?’ We — people — are unknowable individually and collectively, in a way that parallels the ineluctable universe. We can sense the movement of the planets in our blood, and we know that the lover’s hand that touches us is made of the stuff of stars.

The core of our connection to each other and the cosmos is the unknowable. We call this God, the spirits, or the Tao.

My feeling is that we will increasingly look to ourselves — to the center of our communion, our shared experience of life — and to the startling and familiar universe that we cannot encompass as the two poles of our spirituality.

We will put aside the dusty parchments that ancient migrants carried, we will drop what excludes, and forget the unforgiving rules of sin and grievance. We will turn to ourselves, and share the communion of all people, confronted by the wheeling stars, the ocean’s tides, and the deepest songs in our bones.