This interview between Bill Moyers and religion writer Karen Armstrong is extremely interesting and provides some fascinating insights into all of the big questions and conflicts we have in the world today: science and religon, Christianity and Islam, politics and theology, etc.
Her key point regarding the Golden Rule is not just that it's a good idea (and wouldn't it be nice if we all followed it) but that it provides an excellent spring board for actively and creatively engaging with those ego-centric attitudes that separate peoples and cultures. Indeed, the very notion of compassion informs our sense of tragedy, terror and pity going back to Aristotle and all the way up through and including the Modernism of James Joyce. More importantly, she touches on our sense of woundedness and separateness; how our resentments lead to the manic logic of apocalyptic thinking.
Kierkegaard wrote that despair was the sickness unto death and that the self resting transparently in the spirit that gives it rise can transform and heal itself. What Armstrong seems to describe is the fact that the fundamentalist strains of the world's religions do not serve the spirit but are in fact in despair, and their doctrines only serve to reinforce those parts of scripture which are fanciful and dysfunctional -- and which she argues should always be read allegorically in spite of the fact that religion as practiced almost never leaves anything open to interpretation.
But instead of following through on this idea, she loses her way (or loses her nerve) and chooses to place the blame for dysfunctional religious extremists at the feet of the secular scientific west going back to the 18th century. Rather than looking at how secularism has integrated the golden rule into democratic processes and its quest for social justice, egalitarianism, etc., etc., she projects an activist extremism on the secular left that doesn't really exist beyond the fantasies of the right and the writerly contrarianism of folks like Richard Dawkins (who represent no political power beyond that of debate and persuasion).
What she argues for is not for a Golden Rule that heals the woundedness of our fragmented world, but one that legitimizes each groups individual grievances and resentments.
(It should also be said that she completely ignores the religions of the east including Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as the rapid secularism of places like Japan which did not collapse into religious dysfunction)
I happen to agree with Bill Moyers's old friend Joseph Campbell who argued that the power of religion stemmed from its myth and storytelling, and that in the modern secular world that spirit is not lost but transferred to art, music, and literature. It would be interesting to see her engage with that tradition rather than projecting a nostalgia for an edenic pre-modern religious understanding of allegory and empathy that never really existed.
[Via Andrew Sullivan]
