Secular Spirituality

This pair of related essays does a good job at times capturing an idea that I've been mulling around for awhile: how secularists pick and choose aspects of religion that are mostly aimed at becoming more effective managers of their time and emotions, so they can grab small snippets of quiet in between the extended bouts of productivity and consumerism that dominate their lives.  When compared to the collective nature of historical religious traditions, this individualistic effort leaves people alone and isolated in their spiritual journey, and usually lacking the peace they seek.

"This plundering reflex — where the secular raids the spiritual for booty — has been noted before. In Susan Sontag’s essay Piety without Content, the great critic derides the tendency of intellectuals to vaguely pick and choose spiritual and religious ideas without actually committing to any of them:

This is piety without content, a religiosity without either faith or observance….for the modern post religious man the religious museum..is without walls; he can pick and choose as he likes, and be committed to nothing except his own reverent spectatorship.

- Susan Sontag

Still, living in the largely non-religious west, I have sympathy for those who will take sources of meaning and belonging wherever they can get them. There are riches in religious traditions that can be life-giving elsewhere, and striving to be healthy and productive are laudable goals. But Sam Byers’ book made me realise that at worst the use of ‘spirituality-lite’ in service of this goal is a kind of cultural appropriation which severs fruits from roots and leaves you with an armful of dead flowers.

Spirituality which just equips us to be better foot soldiers in a market society characterised by desperate consumption and expressive individualism is not spirituality at all."
https://unherd.com/thepost/wellness-is-no-replacement-for-religion/

"To see at work the contradictory impulses and injunctions we’re daily expected to reconcile, you might begin by immersing yourself, as Maya does, in our collective online existence. Here, through a kaleidoscope of inspirational Instagram quotes, revolutionary praxis, artfully prepared food and effortless-seeming yoga poses, profound contradictions are reconfigured as a series of seductive adjacencies. The language of rebellion and anarchy merges seamlessly with the language of self-help. We are encouraged to challenge power, punch up, resist. And yet at the same time we are exhorted to grow and glow, strive, achieve, become. The result is an excruciating double bind. Only through a more robust sense of self, we believe, can we muster the rebellious energy by which the unjust world around us might be changed. And yet, deep down, we know the truth: that our unjust world depends for its survival on the very project of selfhood in which we’re all so desperately over-invested.

Many of these tensions collide most spectacularly in the world of wellness, where disciplines such as yoga and meditation, which once took as their goal the dissolution of the self, are pressed into the service of a bolstered ego and enhanced productivity. In this telling, freedom, like the equally mythologised idea of “happiness”, is no longer a collective goal but a small and fiercely defended box of personal space, accessed through a crushing regimen of self-improvement, in which we are free to be our best imaginable selves"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/29/we-will-have-to-choose-our-apocalypse-the-cost-of-freedom-after-the-pandemic