A hundred fifty years ago almost everyone knew - and had memorized big chunks of - the Bible. Raised in a Fundy household, I was encouraged to do the same. Our Sunday school gave prizes to those who could recite the most scripture.
Me? I was a goof-off who preferred reading Hardy Boys mysteries.
Fundamentalism is hard work. You can't do what you want; you must always do what you should. That's not a problem in a society where 90% of the population does backbreaking manual labor just to grow enough food. Laziness can't exist in such conditions.
Science, technology, and industrialization gave us the gift of leisure. We read about the horrible working conditions in 19th century textile mills, but grueling mill-work was still better than subsistence farming.
Secularism can exist in pre-industrial societies. But it's a totalitarian secularism: Stalinism, Maoism, or North Korea's Juche. As Russia and China modernize, the "isms" loose their power. The Chinese aren't lazy, yet; give them time.
Fundamentalism does one thing well: it charges ordinary life with meaning. "Mundane" things - eating, dressing, grooming - are not just chores. Doing these things in a certain way is carrying out the Divine Will. It is a sort of transubstantiation.
"What will make me happy?" is the most dangerous question of all. One way to avoid it is to avoid having the personal space that permits such questions to flower. This is the Totalitarian paradox: freedom - from existential dread - can come from slavery.
Riff man, riff ! Some say blogging is dead: I tend to agree. But this is more like a book in the making: you could really have something here.
ReplyDeleteIf you liked this post, check out "Spengler" at the Asia Times On-line; wide - ranging historical / cultural stuff, with a splash of Demographic Winter: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/others/spengler.html
ReplyDeleteStudying classics also used to involve memorization, not just of noun declensions and verb conjugations, but also chucks of classical texts: the first 100 lines of the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, etc. These days, that's deprecated in favor of "understanding." But if you don't have the data ready at hand from your memory, what's there to understand?
ReplyDeleteI attended St John's College in Annnapoli MD, the "Great Books" school where classical Greek was a required course.
ReplyDeleteTell me about it....