Tapestries-41 | A seismic shift in perspective
How a focus on the "self" has led to our current moment of decay, and how we might create a new focus on the "other."
I’ve had a manic few weeks here in New York. Tali left WeWork to start her own company, we got married, work has been consuming, and we were preparing to leave the city for a few months to visit family in Australia. But despite our best efforts at delicately lining up the logistical dominos, our flight home was cancelled (to be rebooked for the next available flight in January), and we were forced to scramble.
Yom Kippur arrived during the crescendo of this logistical mess. Yom Kippur is Judaism’s holiest day, and traditionally involves a 25-hour fast, during which we are asked to atone for our sins. On reflection, the fact that the day fell in the middle of this chaotic period actually added to the strength and relevance of its experience. It helped focus my attention on a question that's been on my mind for some time: where does faith sit, if anywhere, in the mosaic of my life? This is therefore a piece that explores the concept of faith, and its place in all our lives today.
It is clear we are all searching—individually and collectively—for something to fill our spiritual voids and to mend our crumbling institutions. But I think we're looking in the wrong places for things to elevate us out of our current cultural gridlock. Faith is not the most fashionable starting point, but that doesn't make it any less important or relevant. I want to explore the importance or value of faith, both because it's something I've been thinking a lot about personally, and because the signals around us clearly suggest we are grappling with faith by many other names.
Yom Kippur gave me something very useful and productive in what's been a challenging personal time. And I want to see if there's something in that experience worthy of generalizing more broadly to our current moment. I hope you read along to explore some important questions with me.
Setting the scene
Much ink and blood has been spilled over thousands of years in pursuit of articulating what constitutes "faith." I don't wish to add to the debate about its definition. Instead, I want to approach it from a personal perspective, and in doing so, consider why it’s something we should potentially give greater credence and legitimacy to, at a time when it's become increasingly unfashionable.
I view "faith" as the belief that there is something in this world that is larger, more important, more exquisite, more powerful and more consequential than ourselves. This has traditionally been interpreted as implying the existence of a god, or deity, or supernatural being within a religious or religious-like framework. I don't have an issue with others believing in the existence of an all-powerful being. However, "god" doesn't feature prominently in my personal conception of faith (at least not at the moment).
If I had to articulate what "faith" represents to me, it's the belief that we exist within a system—whether spiritual, moral or religious—that incentivizes us to subordinate the individual for the benefit of the collective. My sense is I'm gravitating towards an expansive concept of "faith" because the alternative—the certitude that the "self" is the center of the universe—scares the shit out of me. This forms a core part of my personal thesis, and is important color for what follows in the rest of this piece.
It's also important to state that what's to come in the following sections is simply my exploration of faith. It is absolutely not a comprehensive assessment of the subject, and is entirely relative to my background and current stage of life. So with this qualifier, let's jump in.
Why now is an important time to re-visit the concept of faith
There are a few reasons why I'm re-acquainting myself with the concept of faith. The first is that I'm living through a pretty introspective moment in my own life; I'm asking myself where I want to be, where I should focus my attention, and critically, what legacy I ultimately want to leave behind when my time is up. The second is that in a time where we've never been richer in connectivity, we have never been poorer in terms of shared experience; we are algorithmically grouped and imperially alone. The third is the primacy our secular culture places on rationality, and the way this undermines anything of potential value that cannot be easily intellectualized or explained (something I'll return to later).
And the fourth, and arguably the most important and relevant to this piece, is that we are living through a period of such drastic change that we must re-affirm and reconsider what it is that binds and grounds us. To quote Martin Gurri, "we are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually and spiritually, maybe even materially, and a new world that has not yet been born." I want to focus on this fourth point as the launching pad for the discussion at the core of this piece.
How to coordinate trust in a changing world
The way we commune and interact digitally has arguably reached a point where we now have a fundamentally different texture of reality to that of even ten years ago, with a radically different future around the corner. David Rudnick has articulated the core implications of this shift better than anyone I've come across, where he posits that a portion of the conflict and confusion we are living through is driven by some people living real-world prime, and some living digitally-prime; we therefore have two camps of people who emphasize two different realms as their primary reality, and the net effect is a paradigm-shift in nothing less than the fabric of our civilization. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has argued that a different type of upheaval—the advent of agriculture—was a catalyst for the birth of organized religion itself thousands of years ago (emphasis mine):
"The basic problem that had to be solved in order for complex civilizations to emerge was how to organize cooperation and establish relationships of trust on a large scale. Reciprocity is fine for small groups whose members know one another, but not for larger associations. The difficulty arose when, with the development of agriculture, people were then able to live in large numbers in close proximity. The creation of the first cities brought with it the question: How do you build trust between strangers? That is when the first great religions were born—not spirituality, which can be dated much earlier, but fully articulated systems of religion, with priests, temples, myths, rituals, holy times, places, and people."
I think this explanation of religion's genesis (pun intended) reinforces why the current moment is a logical time to reconsider the concept of faith; per the thesis above, religion bound us as the distance between us grew, and it’s clear we are now reinstating that distance, albeit in a novel form. The digital restructuring of reality is as consequential a change as the birth of agriculture and its accompanying civilizations, and we must address our moment with upheaval front of mind. In addition to increasing distance between us and our neighbors, this upheaval is also causing a system-wide breakdown of trust: between fellow citizens, countries, states and ultimately, trust in institutions. The implications and signals of this change are clear. Critical race theory ("CRT") and blockchain technology—two relatively new developments—are partially a response to this breakdown in trust and provide useful datapoints to support the view that we are seeking new ways to trust and interact with each other.
CRT expresses the view that systemic racism is present in the structure of western societies (especially the US), and that we need to re-organize our societies to reverse historical injustices, because our long-standing institutions can't be trusted. Blockchain proponents, especially those in the Bitcoin community, espouse the view that the only system design that can facilitate trust is one based on code and cryptography, instead of people, institutions and relationships. If you spend any time online, you will appreciate that CRT adherents and Bitcoin maximalists project and enforce these views with a religious fervor that would make the Crusaders proud. And critically, they are both inherently nihilistic worldviews; they are seeking to tear down existing orders, with versions of the future that I believe only push us further down a dystopian path. At the same time that we are looking to tear things down, we are turning to our employers, celebrities, brands and influence-peddlers to be our moral torchbearers; suffice to say I think this is a bad idea, and supports the view that we’re effectively lost.
The signals are therefore very clear to me: we are living through a moment where upheaval is once again creating a practical imperative to address what it is that a sufficiently large portion of the population shares, and to use this shared sense of something as the foundation of a functioning and healthy society. This piece is intended to explore what role, if any, faith has in addressing this moment. And to answer this question, let's consider what the loss of faith, especially in the form of religion, has done to the way we live.
The impact of sidelining religion
As we have moved towards a more technocratic, hyper-rationalist and utility-focused society, we've simultaneously moved away from religion; we view it as a remnant of a more primitive world. It is viewed as an artefact of the past, with outdated rules and norms that rub against the grain of an enlightened, secular society, and we generally believe it has nothing more to add to our forward-charging future.
I understand the shift, because it's one I've made myself. I grew up an observant Jew, and decided at the age of 15 (with my parents' blessing), that observance was no longer for me; the sacrifices I was making seemed asymmetrical to the benefits I was receiving, so I decided to stop. But as I get older, I find myself asking whether in discarding part of my faith—in my case, observant Judaism—I had misunderstood its potential value; that perhaps I hadn’t appreciated its wisdom and utility when viewing it through a superficial lens. I am in effect repeating the same mistake evident in the way we condescendingly treat some of the world's beautiful and ancient yet disappearing cultures. To quote Wade Davis in Wayfinders:
"the myriad of cultures of the world are not failed attempts at modernity, let alone failed attempts to be us. They are unique expressions of the human imagination and heart, unique answers to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive?”
Nowhere is this condescension more evident than in my home country, where “in place of technological wizardry, our great achievement, the Aboriginal people of Australia invented a matrix of connectivity. In doing so, they generated a protective shell as daunting, comforting, and complete as the city walls we erect with similar motivation to insulate our lives from the vicissitudes of nature.” This beautiful tradition is now a shell of its former self, obliterated by an Australian history with little regard for its richness, vitality and importance.
Ancient cultures—whether centered by faith, religion, spirituality, mythology or a connection to the land—include thousands of years of practice and refinement, and represent incredibly valid commentaries on what it means to be a conscious agent in the world, big or small. Faith in, reverence for, and fear of something can be very useful tools to compel productive behaviors, but with the loss of faith-based traditions, these tools have fallen by the wayside. Modernity and the individual rule.
The emphasis we place on rationality and the individual
Faith’s waning relevance is a result of the primacy of rationality. We have developed a perspective that implies our science-first, technocratic approach represents the only logical path forward. Everything is sacrificed at the altar of efficiency and utility, which have become core virtues in the products we use and the brands we aspire to wear. It’s no surprise that today on the streets of New York, Hoka shoes and Arc’teryx jackets—ultramarathon and technical climbing gear respectively—have become the most in-vogue clothing accessory adorning the city’s fearless explorers (disclaimer: I own both a pair of Hoka shoes and an Arc’teryx jacket). We more and more seek out things that are efficient or effective, and in turn use those things to say something about ourselves. One only has to look around to assess what it is we value today.
The emphasis on rationality and utility compels a worldview that centers the “self.” With these as our primary virtues, the questions we walk around with are “how does what I’m seeing or hearing make sense to me?” or “how does this policy or product make my life better or easier?” Our current approach therefore elevates individual concerns, and results in the subordination of collective systems; we prioritize individual consumption over the environment, capital over labor, and the individual over the community, in ways that generate meaningful imbalances.
And while the experiment has been largely successful and generally well-intentioned, it hasn't been without some ugly side-effects. When I look around and in the mirror, I can't help but realize that the subordination of the "other" or the collective has coincided with the elevation of the "self" to the point where our heads are so far up our own asses, it's no surprise half the time we open our mouths (or more appropriately today, our phones) we send forth a mouthful of shit.
The costs we are sustaining as a result of this approach
We are not just self-obsessed. We are also unhappy. And I don't think it's incredibly difficult to understand why. I don't think societies or groups evolved to place such a large emphasis on the “self” at the expense of the “other.” I understand that intuitively we all care about others, but in practice, the incentive frameworks we live in compel a version of ourselves that prioritizes self-aggrandizement and self-actualization, at the expense of genuine care and sacrifice for the other. And perhaps one reason for our current state is that while we have never been more connected, we've also never been more alone.
Between 1960 and 2014, the share of single-person households in the US doubled to almost 27%. I think this is an incredibly under-appreciated datapoint, and is one that could do more than most to explain our current moment. Our worlds have become bigger and boundary-less, while the number of people we actually touch on a regular basis has shrunk. At the same time as we are living a more atomized, solitary existence, to quote Wade Davis again, "[we] live in an age of disintegration...[a]t the beginning of the twentieth century there were 60 nation-states. Today there are 190, most of them poor and highly unstable."
A key story of the last 100 years is therefore the splintering and fracturing of our existence, both in the way we live and how we organize nations. We have replaced local communities—which are built on a shared sense of reciprocity—with abstract global communities built on often bizarre senses of identity; and we often interact with these communities from the solitude of our own homes. For the purpose of this piece, I believe that faith in something larger can form an effective starting point for a sense of cohesion, through acting as a counterweight to an approach to existence focused on the “self.” At least that's what I'm starting to see in my own experience.
What I've been thinking around Yom Kippur
My starting point for thinking about faith has been a discomfort with an internal monologue that too often is focused on me; what I want, what I should be doing, and what the ultimate story of Daniel will look like. It’s tiring, and unbecoming, and the trends and impulses I described earlier in the piece are ones I very much see in myself. And perhaps I’ve started to look back at Judaism, not because it’s the best system, but simply because it’s there and visible in my life already as a potential candidate for quieting myself.
When I consider my interaction with Judaism since my observance waned, it’s clear I've been living “a religion-less Judaism—a Judaism without God, faith, or belief,” to quote Joshua Abraham Heschel. I’ve remained culturally engaged with its traditions and practices, but I’m not sure it’s been “religious,” and I haven't placed much emphasis on "faith." But now, 16 years from my earlier decision to step back from certain observances, I have started to more deliberately consider my own faith.
I discussed the question of faith and observance last week on Yom Kippur at the breaking of the traditional fast with Jewish friends, and again the following evening with non-Jewish friends (it’s also an ongoing topic of discussion with Tali). I was asked what it is I find special about Judaism, and why it is we continue to persist with its practices. My first answer was that it's genuinely useful and valuable. Yom Kippur is a fantastic opportunity to truly pause for a moment of reflection and honest accounting; weekly Sabbath meals on Friday night with family or friends are one of my essential reference points in a life that's otherwise pretty untethered to anything else; and the other annual festivals or celebrations bring a rhythm and cadence that help ground me in time and space with each passing year.
But more importantly, I think I've realized (especially with the benefit of these discussions with friends), that Judaism places a responsibility on me to show-up. It's a layer of accountability that compels me to connect with family and friends on a regular basis, to reach out to elderly relatives, to attend the homes of mourners, and to gather around odd festival rituals that may seem outdated, but actually serve to ensure that I remain grounded in a group of real people to whom I owe certain obligations, which they in turn owe to me.
If I don't attend a Shabbat meal, or don't observe the fast on Yom Kippur, I feel like I'd need to explain why to friends and family; it makes my world small, where I can more effectively be held accountable. And while I can't always articulate why it is that I'm observing some of these practices, that's partially the point: ultimately there are some things in life that are beyond our comprehension, and I believe that assuming everything we do requires a rational explanation is a feature of our own ego, not of objective reality itself. That’s why it’s called faith.
We’re all worshippers, just of a different kind
Religious practice is an interesting thing to consider today, because it rubs against the grain of everything we generally seek out. We have been conditioned to believe that everything we interact with must be engaging or stimulating or per above, of clear practical value; this is a trap, and is simply a symptom of a society obsessed with constant and incessant performing. Faith means investing in and contributing to a system that is neither entertaining nor instantly gratifying, in the belief that the outcomes you will indirectly generate will serve as a net positive to your community or those around you. Choice has become a primary virtue, placing the individual at the center of the world. We need to re-center the humble acknowledgement that despite growing up with Google at our fingertips, not everything is knowable. It's a leap, but it's a necessary one. To quote the great Rabbi Sacks again:
"...when science is worshipped and everything spiritual dethroned, then a certain decision has been made to set aside human feelings for the sake of something seemingly higher, nobler, larger. That is how idolatry begins."
When you look around it's impossible to deny that despite our move to a secular society, we've never stopped the practice of worshipping; we've just changed the idols. I am no different to anyone else, and as I look around, I've begun asking what it is that I worship or hold true. As I've explored my own faith, it's clear to me it has little to do with god. Judaism's central beliefs—which absolutely include a belief in an omnipotent, omnipresent god—act as a thing that helps Jewish people recognize each other as being in the same group. My faith therefore isn't in a god, but instead in the power, resilience, utility and value of this thing called Judaism; a thing that through cultivating a framework for collective action and accountability—one that is hard to describe and rationally justify at times—has allowed me to sit here as a contemplative Jew in 2021 despite every attempt to wipe us off the planet for thousands of years.
And while Judaism is where I derive my faith from, it clearly has no monopoly on faith or morality itself. In these discussions my friends challenged me as to why we need faith or religion; many of the moral behaviors the religions or faiths describe are intuitive and universal enough that we can live by them without religion or faith in something larger. And to an extent, I agree, but I also know from my own experience that good intent is insufficient to actually compel these behaviors on a consistent basis. My sense is that faith traditions have persisted because they add a systematic approach, or layer of accountability to the intent.
Faith and religion exist in the marketplace of ideas just like everything else, and if they didn’t work, they would have died out long ago. But they’re still here, and the only basis on which one could say they’re on the way out for good, is if one believes we’re at the end of history. And as a student of history, that’s not a bet I’m willing to make, irrespective of how unfashionable faith or religion seem today.
The elevation of transcendent experiences, and the contradiction this entails
While religion may now be uncool, the same cannot be said for the search for transcendent experiences. The rise of meditation, psychedelics, and yoga is unmistakable. My sense is we are looking to fill a spiritual hole left by religion's retreat and we are now looking to answer the question "what is the meaning of all of this" by channeling our exploration into these ancient practices. The search for these meaningful experiences therefore sits alongside the emergence of CRT and certain cryptocurrencies as another important datapoint suggesting we are seeking new or different systems to chart a course out of our current malaise.
When I reflect on this recent trend of searching for the transcendent and meaningful (one I partake in myself), my concern is that the search won't ultimately deliver what it is we're looking for, because the pursuits ultimately remain individual in nature. Seneca describes the following 2,000 years ago:
“The story is told that someone complained to Socrates that travelling abroad had never done him any good and received the reply: ‘What else can you expect, seeing that you always take yourself along with you when you go abroad?’”
The same logic holds true here. If we adopt practices designed to reduce the self, but still place the self at the center of the experience, what can we genuinely hope to change or achieve? We’re turning back and interacting with healthy practices, but we're doing so from a self-centered starting point, one designed to address our individual aspirations: transcendence, joy, release, enlightenment, de-stressing etc. In their ancient forms, these practices were very much communal, and existed within larger comprehensive frameworks. Shamanism’s use of psychedelics often occurred in a communal framework that prioritized a connection to the land and biosphere; meditation (especially in the Hindu tradition) exists amongst a dazzling array of philosophies and rituals. The moving, awe-inspiring, transcendent elements of these traditions existed at the pinnacle of what I assume was a much more mundane and practical set of responsibilities, expectations and accountabilities.
The flattening of experience
We are seemingly cherry-picking these practices for what they can deliver us in terms of experiences and tangible benefits. And to be clear, with the right level of respect and reverence, there's nothing inherently wrong with this approach, especially if we emerge from them (at least temporarily) as better neighbors, sons, granddaughters or colleagues. But my contention is that we're seeking to fill a spiritual hole as transcendence-tourists, and that we are unlikely to truly fill that hole without a commitment, even a small one, to the broader practices and philosophies that have generally attached to them. If we simply pop in when in need of a "hit," we're just perpetuating the thing that's making us miserable: a myopic sense of ourselves at the center of the universe.
My meditation app sits alongside Uber Eats and Twitter; we have flattened the experience into the same mode of frictionless delivery that we expect of all our other self-centered pursuits. Sitting in church or synagogue can be mind-numbing and boring, but the sense of topography it gives to an otherwise flat, frictionless life is part of the point. Andrew Sullivan describes the benefit of his religious practice this way:
“It is good to get out of the addled brain for a while, to live in the soul and the body alone. And I wish I were better able to convey how life-giving this is. Maybe it’s primarily a relief for those of us who live in our heads too much, who live very online lives, or who use words of our own all the time. But I see the calm it gives others too: the repetition of little acts, the recitation of the same words, the unity that such rituals can give a life over the decades.”
We spend all day thinking about ourselves. When we do seek something to break the monotony and exhaustion of living our own internal monologues, the boredom or discomfort or pain-in-the-ass element is central to the experience; perhaps removing ourselves from ourselves requires friction. I think the beauty and value these ancient practices convey is the reduction and removal of the self, through the practice of operating as a member of a community. Annoying and seemingly illogical traditions may actually work to extricate ourselves from a daily grind optimized for frictionless experience.
The universality of the questions we ask
I appreciated something new about Judaism this Yom Kippur. I was aware that subordinating the ego was an important part of certain ancient traditions. Buddhist meditation often aims at achieving a dissolution of the "self"; shamanic psychedelic experiences often result in the breaking down of the boundary between the "self" and the rest of the world we inhabit, creating a cosmic feeling of "one-ness" with all that's around us; and the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece and Rome were designed to help attendees "die before they die," by facilitating the death of the ego. On Yom Kippur, with the help of one of the Rabbi's sermons I heard, I was able to contextualize Judaism's approach to ego and death, in a way that helped me place its approach alongside these other ancient traditions.
The Rabbi described Yom Kippur in his sermon as a dress rehearsal for death. According to Jewish tradition, Yom Kippur is the date on which your name is either inscribed in the book of life, or in the book of death. It is a day of reckoning and atonement, where we are meant to seek forgiveness for our sins. My personal take is that it's a highly deliberate moment of introspection, where I ask myself who do I want to be, and am I living up to the ideals I have set for myself? The Rabbi's description of this process as a dress rehearsal for death resonated. This description sharpens the question for me: if you were to end up in the book of death and die this year, how would you assess what you've given to the world and those around you? Are you proud of the person you are? What could you have changed, and what would you change if you were lucky enough to take another spin round the sun?
This is a question I’ve been asking myself in a completely individual, secular manner for the last year or so. Seeing it posed as the most important question on Judaism’s most important day universalized it for me, and helped put me in my place. This tradition that I hold so dear, for reasons I’m still trying to understand, realized and codified this supremely important question two thousand years ago. It’s humbling and comforting in a way to see that the question it’s taken me 31 years to land on, is the one that my faith tradition has known is the most important one all along.
Bringing it together
Faith is becoming more important to me because it facilitates addressing these central questions. Would I ask them anyway without religion? Maybe. Would I do so like clockwork every year, while fasting, alongside other members of my community (however defined)? Probably not. We are well-intentioned, morally-leaning people, irrespective of our religion, background or creed. But we are also flawed, selfish animals that need help navigating the increasingly lonely and fractured existence being thrust upon us. Religion is far from perfect, and remains the justification for many historical and ongoing atrocities. But I’m learning to recognize the expansive faith-element that sits at the center of its practice.
I genuinely want to be believe that something grander and more exquisite exists than simply the dreams and anxieties of my monkey brain. I see in myself the ugly, self-centered impulses that rule my thoughts and actions when I don't have an effective mechanism for thinking outside of myself. I am not a religious person, and I don’t know that I will become one, but I see the tangible benefits of maintaining a belief in something larger than myself, which for my purposes, is the investment in practices that may seem outdated, but arguably still work. There is nothing specific to Judaism in the moral framework I carry to ultimately make me a better neighbor. But maybe faith provides me with the infrastructure to ensure I remain accountable to the system, and that it doesn’t simply blur into, or become outsourced to, another app.
We cannot solve the world's problems alone. In a time of conflict, confusion, and uncertainty, we must find something small to commit to that has some hope of improving the lives of those near us. For me, reducing the importance of the self is the most logical starting point. And to begin, we need to stop asking "what's in it for me," because at the end of the long day, it's not about you. Faith in the other, or the existence of something larger than us, may be the path to elevating outside of ourselves.
We are clearly searching for practices to address our spiritual poverty, and systems to address our malfunctioning society. But I think we're looking in the wrong places. This piece is the very beginning of an exploration, not the end. If it feels open-ended, or even contradictory in parts, that's because it is, and the journey is not one I want to go on alone. So as always, I'd love to hear your views. We got into this mess by sliding into solitude, and we'll get out of it by truly connecting with one another again.
A number of books have been influential and helpful for me in approaching the questions posed in this piece. I list some of them here in case you’re interested in reading further:
Morality by Jonathan Sacks
The Wayfinders by Wade Davis
Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri
The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel
Lonely Man of Faith by Joseph Soloveithchik
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Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash