Religion’s Coverups of Civilization’s Spiritual Purpose

Did you know that so-called spirituality, the search for an existential purpose and profound answers to life’s deepest questions, is for outsiders?

Put bluntly, if you have those longings, you’re on a path to great loss. There’s no such thing as the civilized practice of spiritual excellence. This is because civilization is politically compromised, so if you’re interested in being “spiritually” grounded, you must circumvent certain social conventions. You must work around what society expects you to be, because those expectations typically favour the super-villainous psychopaths and their courtiers (kings, politicians, CEOs, spoiled consumers) who manage to control key institutions.

This means that if you specialize in the occupations that keep society afloat in its war against nature’s wildness, you can only kid yourself with toy spirituality, such as the kind promoted in the self-help or happiness industries. Fake spirituality is as politically compromised as the mainstream games you find in developed societies.

Eastern religions and philosophies, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Neo-Confucianism, have confronted this clash of expectations head-on. These traditions often eschew apocalyptic ecstasy and high-flying prophetic idealism, preferring a pragmatic kind of therapy that’s consistent with civility and the goal of preserving the collective welfare.

Hinduism coopted some Jain principles, for instance, but not the wholesale repudiation of egoism or the civilized project of domesticating nature. Jains are so preoccupied with “spirituality,” an idealistic vision of how things ought to be, that they go out of their way to avoid harming even insects, let alone animals or people. Could there conceivably be a Jain how-to manual for getting ahead in cutthroat business? Of course not. Jains don’t sell out like that.

Yet, Hindus say: to each their own. If you want to excel in business, worship, family life, or scholarship, there are moral, reverential ways of doing so. There are paths and stages in life that all lead to moksha, deep self-realization, so no one need be left out. The assumption is that civilization isn’t inherently unspiritual, since everything that exists flows from the same underlying divine reality, Brahman.

Hindu eclecticism fueled Western enthusiasm for spirituality and self-improvement in the 1960s. The promise was that you could have it both ways. You needn’t choose between acquiring an enlightened perspective and fulfilling your familial or occupational duties. You could be a sage at inner peace, and also a plumber, a parent, or even a politician.

Similarly, Neo-Confucianism integrated Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism into a grand synthesis in China. The idea was that we could cultivate ourselves without losing our spiritual perspective, provided that our social excellence “harmonizes” with natural processes. Nature and society both undergo processes, so some standards apply to each sphere. Again, we needn’t feel alienated from either nature or society by losing ourselves in some prophetic vision. Instead, we could excel by playing our part in the universe that’s inherently elevated.

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Yet those compromises are cover-ups that rationalize the upshot of the civilized endeavour, which is that people are at war with nature’s wildness. We haven’t been part of nature since we became “behaviourally modern” with our fascination with symbols tens of thousands of years ago. The sentient beings that are part of nature we call “animals,” and we enslave and extinguish them because we see further than they do — too far to be content with a naturally selected lifestyle. We usurped our Maker’s power over us by retreating to artificial refuges that run on cultural ideals that mean nothing to atoms, stars, or oceans.

If civilization has a spiritual purpose, it’s what early Christians would have called the Satanic one of dethroning our ultimate source by domesticating every trace of nature’s absurd incivility and impersonality. Nature isn’t a unified “cosmos” since it’s split into countless worlds, divided by a deadly, horrifically vast void, and nature consists of emergent levels and systems that labour under autonomous, incommensurate principles. Nature swallows itself in black holes, nullifies itself in quantum fluctuations, and extinguishes itself at the end of time. Oh, and nature evolves people who seek to impose their godlike will on everything.

We fool ourselves indeed if we think we can be both spiritual and socially useful. From a civilized standpoint, traditional spirituality is useless because it’s antithetical to economic growth and the utilitarian businesses of feeding the masses and keeping the lights on and the trains running on time.

Still, that doesn’t mean that those who excel in socially acceptable ways must be brutes. What’s needed, in short, is “spirituality” or existential growth that’s based on realistic dualism.

We should appreciate the audacity of so-called profane endeavours. Polite society is a tragically heroic gamble that intelligent mammals can improve their living conditions by exploiting nature’s mindlessness. Will we destroy ourselves in the process, or will we be able to keep innovating solutions to technical problems? For how long can the civilized oasis last, when the vast majority of species on Earth have gone extinct? Are we just preparing our kind to turn into something else, so that our vaunted elite ways of life are likely doomed?

Traditional spirituality is useless because it posits a supernatural alternative to nature, inviting us to speculate about the rigamaroles we must surmount to pass the gatekeepers to paradise in an afterlife. With so much historical hindsight, we should be able to see by now that the issue all along wasn’t supernature but anti-nature, as in civility, artificiality, the intelligent designs that are by-products of evolved personhood.

If you’re a plumber, you should be awestruck by your professional contribution to the anomaly of our implicit war on nature. The noble way of plumbing isn’t to lose yourself in the nitty-gritty routines, or forget the existential stakes in even this humble line of work. Enlightened plumbing would be based on realistic dualism, the understanding that undeluded spirituality is about building a better world, one that conforms to our prophetic visions. Idealism should meet with realism in that commonplace repudiation of our monstrous maker, which is the wild cosmos.

Where the politically correct Western spirituality goes wrong is its avoidance of the realistic side of secular humanism. By “realistic,” I mean that we should be cosmicists. We should understand the existential stakes of civilized progress: again, we’re at war with our monstrous, impersonal maker. It’s the Promethean, Satanic revolt. Of course, there’s no such perspective in the self-help and happiness industries.

No, spirituality for upper-class professionals is a saccharine endeavour of mouthing platitudes that amount to neoliberal propaganda for the social injustices that arise in this civilized war against nature. For example, one of the foundational books of this industry, How to Win Friends and Influence People, is written from a business perspective to streamline work-life by learning to manipulate your coworkers. Instead of oppressing them with your personal biases, learn to adopt your coworker’s perspective and use that insider information to get what you want out of the interaction.

That’s not exactly an evil lesson, but it misses the existential, “spiritual” point of friendship. Real friendships are antithetical to business interests, so that self-help book’s title should have been How to Win Acquaintances and Manipulate People. Friends are strangers whom you treat as family, based on mind-melds or heart-to-heart conversations with them. You don’t manipulate or double-cross family members, and therefore you don’t do so with friends. Yet business hierarchies don’t recognize friendships.

Businesspeople model themselves on the neoclassical concept of Homo economicus, the self-interested, rational calculator of utility who’s supposed to make capitalist competition work in the long run, preventing a descent into neofeudal inequalities governed by monopolies. If everyone can sometimes be as sociopathic as the actual sociopaths who tend to excel in politics and business, we’ll boycott companies that acquire too much power (because we’ll also be as omniscient as the robber barons of old), and we’ll reward entrepreneurs, ensuring that a capitalist marketplace regulates itself and heads towards a fair equilibrium in which everyone gets what they want.

Again, though, sociopaths don’t have friends. Homo economicus doesn’t recognize the importance of friends, or of quasi-family members who journey with you like soldiers who share your burden, bonded by camaraderie. Machiavellianism works in business and thus in mainstream Western societies, which is why all great fortunes are unethically amassed.

But my point is that the neoliberal propaganda you find in the self-help industry will confuse friends with acquaintances, muddying the waters and ignoring the existential context in which friendship arises. We want friends because we prefer not to be lonely. Why? Because when we’re alone, we must face our deepest fears and come to terms with our existential condition of being people in a godless, inhuman, cosmic wilderness. It’s easier to face that condition with friends.

So noble spirituality would be based on the kind of realism that still alienates much of mainstream society. Realistic dualism, which is to say secular humanism, properly understood, would drive us to clean up much of our act, so this standpoint would be bad for business as usual. Western societies are based on the early modern ethos of secular humanism, which gave rise to the institutions of science, capitalism, democracy, and free-thinking arts, but we’ve forgotten the realism that motivated that progress.

After the Black Death and the religious wars in medieval Europe, we had to establish a civilization that solves its problems without relying on archaic Church dogmas. We had to do so because, even if individuals have friends, our species is alone and lonely. Our species has no divine protector or life manual that guarantees its members’ everlasting happiness. People are alone and anomalous in the greater wilderness, the one that includes countless star systems.

Real spirituality is about confronting that existential predicament with honour, courage, and ingenuity.