Dispirited: How Contemporary Spirituality Makes Us Stupid, Selfish and Unhappy by David Webster

Author:David Webster [Webster, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Religion, Atheism, Skepticism, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781780994895
Google: QddaruD-BnAC
Amazon: B008H3W6GS
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2012-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

The post-ideological world view and the turn to the Self

Alongside post-modernism’s suspicion of the grand narratives of ideology, another discourse conspires in contemporary culture, in a strange kinship with much contemporary spirituality, to turn us away from the political, the messy human world of living together in diversity and commonality, towards an ever greater solipsistic self-regard. This is the discourse of the end of history. Famously articulated by Francis Fukuyama in his 1989 essay ‘The End of History’ and in his later writings, the notion asserts that we have gone beyond competing ideological positions to a time of consensus about politics. It claims that liberal democracy is obviously the superior form of civil organisation, and that what remains now is how to best manage this world, how to manage competing special interests, and facilitate economic growth. That world events since 1989 have demonstrated just how stubbornly history refuses to die has not prevented certain parts of Fukuyama’s thinking from penetrating our culture very deeply. We might see a key part of this being the cultural suspicion we have of those deeply committed to ideological positions. The fervent believer (be it in religion, or a political commitment) can seem somewhat antiquated to many. This might be seen to lie at the heart of the ‘spiritual, but not religious’ pose: “I am deep, but don’t worry I am not one of those people who actually believe things so strongly that it leads me to challenge others about life choices, or social structures more widely”. If we have a widely distributed social discomfort with the idea of commitment to belief, and prefer an, albeit mythic60, pragmatic inclusivity, it is worth noting that this pressure to disengage is further exacerbated by key features of spirituality, leading ever inwards, on our self-regarding ‘inner journey’,

So further to a general sense of party politics as passé and all rather ‘twentieth century’, what are these other factors? The connection with spirituality is two-fold. Firstly, there is a strong strand of fatalism in much ‘spiritual’ thinking, which encourages us not to resist, not to be the grit in the machine, but to go with the flow. To move with the cosmic energy, and find the path it would flow us down.

A second factor here is the persistent denial of the reality, or substantiality, of the material world, or its existence in a way consistent with the apparent conclusions of everyday perception. If the world of appearances is just a set of illusions, is just māyā then its problems do not really matter – furthermore it is unlikely to be the place to find meaning, purpose or satisfaction for your life. In his critique of Western Buddhism, Žižek notes that:

if the external reality is ultimately just an ephemeral appearance, even the most horrifying crimes eventually DO NOT MATTER. 61

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