Progressive Spirituality

A summary of:
Lynch, G. (2007). New Spirituality: An Introduction to Belief Beyond Religion. I.B.Tauris: London.
Introduction
& Chapter 1 – The Roots of the New, Progressive Spirituality

There is a problem with the idea of taking traditional spiritual practices – like Buddhism, Sufism, Christianity, etc. – and extracting implications for modern technology, namely that they are results of entirely different worldviews, and thus don’t ‘speak’ particularly well to one another. This is not to say that traditional spirituality is irrelevant when we consider contemporary human values and how they are realized in our technology; but it makes a great deal more sense to contextualize modern technology within a modern spirituality.

I can predict objections to this approach: Modern spirituality is influenced by – perhaps corrupted by – modern technology, and if we’re trying to get more spiritual technology, we ought to decouple them in order to then create something new. To think that we could ever step outside our worldview like this, however, is naïve. We should seek to understand contemporary human values that have arisen alongside the development of technology, and aim to vault these values to the top of our priorities when developing technology. And in the words of Szerszynski (quoted in an earlier post), “So the task of technology critique cannot be to escape historical conditioning; this indeed would be once again to reproduce the promise of modern technology to overcome finitude. Instead, the very embracing of our historical conditionedness, and ultimately of our embeddedness in the ongoing transformation of the sacred, can itself be seen as an anti-technological move, a negation of the negation of finitude. Such an embracing must involve a greater awareness of the way we are constituted by our past. And the point of such awareness cannot be to overcome our conditionedness, to refuse what is handed us by the past; such is the impossible dream of Enlightenment. Instead, the task must be to receive that past more consciously and responsibly” (174). In other words, we should neither seek to return to earlier forms of spirituality – this makes no sense and is not possible – nor forcibly drag it into the future, into our technologies; rather we should understand how this spirituality has changed over time, how it is now, and apply that understanding to a critique of our current technologies.

This brings us to Lynch and his notion of Progressive Spirituality. Lynch argues that history has produced a contemporary spirituality, “the emergence of a particular ideology, a progressive spirituality, which is forming the basis for these new forms of religious identities, a diffuse sentiment of tolerance and openness amongst religious liberals but arises out of particular concerns and is organized around a common set of clearly identifiable values and beliefs. Progressive spirituality is a particular way of understanding the world shared (20) by individuals and groups across and beyond a range of religious traditions, who seek to understand their particular tradition and commitments through the lens of progressive spirituality’s basic assumptions” (21).

What are these basic assumptions? “Firstly, it normally indicates a commitment to understanding and practicing religion in the light of modern knowledge and cultural norms…. A second defining feature of ‘progressive’ religion is a sympathy with, and often active engagement in, green and left-of-center political concerns” (19). And further, the notion of God has morphed now into what Lynch calls ‘Moralistic therapeutic deism’: “This perspective can be summarized as the credo which asserts that there is a God who watches over the Earth, that God wants people to be good to each other (as each world religion teaches), that the point of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself, that God does not need to be involved in one’s life unless one has a problem and that good people go to heaven when they die” (5).

And how did this new spirituality develop? What are the roots of Progressive Spirituality?

“…it has emerged out of four key concerns: the desire for an approach to religion and spirituality that is appropriate for modern, liberal societies, the rejection of patriarchal forms of religion and the search for religious forms that are authentic and liberating for women, the move to re-sacralize science (particularly quantum physics) and contemporary theories of cosmology), and the search for a nature-based spirituality that will motivate us to try to avert the impending ecological catastrophe” (10).

I am particularly intrigued by the third of these, because it relates to Wertheim’s assertion that the soul has been squeezed out of our world by modern science. Lynch echoes this, referencing Bishop John Robinson who argued that whereas people used to think that God was, if not ‘up there’, at least ‘out there’, but, “Such a concept, Robinson argued, was no longer tenable in an age of scientific and psychological discovery, in which no home for God could be found in the universe and the suspicion grew that the God ‘out there’ was as much a projection of the human mind as a metaphysical reality” (29). But it seems the soul seems to be leaking through, adapting by changing shape. (This is the phenomenon described by Szerszynski, too, as ‘new sacralizations’.)

Some might dismiss new sacralization of science as little more than a semantic shift, a poetic interpretation (not helped by the language invoked in works such as Capra’s The Tao of Physics). But scientific discovery is in many respects validating traditional spiritual wisdom, making spirituality relevant again, if understood now in scientific terms (e.g. ‘energy’). Quantum physics, for example, affirms the notion of interconnectedness of the universe, from which we can draw moral and spiritual implications. For example,

“In 1980, the quantum theorist David Bohm published Wholeness and the Implicate Order, in which he argued for the need for a new scientific and cultural world view which emphasized the harmony and interdependence of all reality. Such a world view, Bohm suggested, could emerge out of the recognition of the common ground of reality – a higher-dimensional implicate order which organizes the enfolding and unfolding cosmos – a grounding reality that draws together and sustains all that exists” (31).

Another unintended consequence of progress in science is that, according to Catholic eco-theologian, Thomas Berry, “contemporary science is beginning to offer a new story of the universe as an emerging, meaningful, creative process that can serve as the basis of an ecologically oriented moral and spiritual life” (31). If we are co-creators, we have responsibility; it is up to us to create a heaven on earth. Thus, the “perilous choice currently facing humanity between a Technozoic era of self-destructive environmental exploitation for the sake of economic gain or an Ecozoic era based on conscious management of relations within the ecosystem for the (31) benefit of the whole” (32).

And furthermore, scientific discovery is now, ironically, weakening materiality and reinforcing subjectivity (making Heelas et al’s ‘subjective turn’ a sensible cultural shift). “As Fritjof Capra states, ‘whatever we call a part is merely a pattern that has some stability and therefore captures attention’. What we perceive as real, stable objects are, to use Capra’s phrase, multiple manifestations of the dynamic and unfolding dance of cosmic energy in which forms emerge, disintegrate and then shift into other forms” (33). The lesson in this is that there is flexibility in our designs, precisely because, as Lanier said, computers don’t really exist, so we can make them whatever we want. We should realize that we are not victims, because we are at least partly responsible for our world…. so let’s make it better!

The roots of Lynch’s Progressive Spirituality certainly implies that older spiritual / religious traditions are increasingly irrelevant to modern living: “The data of contemporary life no longer fits the paradigm of traditional religion, and this creates pressure for a new spiritual paradigm to be developed which takes better account of contemporary experiences, values and concerns” (24). In that case, it hardly makes sense to force old spirituality on modern technology. But there is a possible pathway between Progressive Spirituality and more spiritual technology.

The irony, of course, is that changing technology, making it more spiritual (i.e. incorporating Progressive Spirituality into its design), will inevitably change the nature of this contemporary spirituality. These two variables are intertwined, and in flux, which means that the job of making technology ‘spiritual’ will never be done. But we can commit to keeping attuned to changes in the spiritual milieu and adapting technology to suit this environment.