A Final Comment on Karen Armstrong's Book

A few days ago I posted a comment on Karen Armstrong's book, The Great Transformation. She calls for the emergence of new spiritual leaders comparable to those who emerged some 2,500 years ago to lead us out of the perils of our tumultuous times. I was skeptical of the likelihood of such a thing occuring.

It occurs to me that we are struggling in the aftermath of the two most terrible wars in human history and in the face of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction to find ways that nations can live together. In our age, that struggle is often political and economic rather than spiritual.

I have also been reading Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's by Frederick Lewis Allen. He points out that religion in America was struggling in the face of scientific revelations. It still is. Many religions require belief in things which science seems to be demonstrating to be untrue.

If we succeed in getting people to practice the golden rule, at least to the degree to prevent the potential catastrophes that face mankind at this time, I suspect like Armstrong that political and intellectual approaches alone will not work, and that there will have to be complementary ethical and spiritual changes.

We suffer from tempocentrism, regarding the future though our own lenses. It occurs to me that we may not recognize the new institutions that come out of our struggle as religious. But then, the ancestors of Socrates, Elijah, Siddhartha and Confucius may not have recognised the institutions that those great men helped to create as religious since they did not worship their ancestors gods nor continue their religious rituals.

I am not suggesting that our age should abandon our religious institutions. Those institutions represent a huge cultural heritage, the product of millions of person years of analysis, contemplation, effort and devotion. But cultures change, and heritage capital is best appreciated in its modification through use.