Delphic Maxim 115: Exercise (religious) silence
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
115. Exercise (religious) silence
Last night my flatmate was asking me a series of questions from some online list called ‘101 philosophical questions to provoke conversation’ (or something along those lines). Some are super easy, yes/no affairs, others are a little more complicated. But a few of them went along the lines of “if you could eliminate one thing from human society which you think would improve it, what would it be?”
I thought about this for a while, and then answered “social media”. Tough call, right? I see a lot of benefits to social media, but increasingly of late I think that the negatives are out-weighing the good that it does (at least in its current configuration). People are coarser with one another, more polarised, faster to react to things, a little more unthinking, a little too opinionated without basis. Maybe that has always been the case, but social media has enabled the propagation of bad ideas and false information and that’s generating a whole bunch of really dodgy side effects.
(I do want to stress, there are massive benefits to social media as well — I just wish there was a way to realise them without the downside. It might be that we aren’t mature enough as a social animal to cope with the things that social media do to us.)
Anyway, my flatmate responded very quickly, and I think this is because he’d answered the questions previously: “religion”.
I immediately disagreed.
We live in a time where the problems of institutionalised religion are really, really obvious. Churches have been guilty of large scale cover up of systematic child abuse and pedophilia by clergy. Religious organisations continue to try to impose their own dogma and systems of belief on people with different faiths (or no faith) by shaping public policy (eg. marriage laws, freedoms to discriminate, favourable tax treatment, etc). And more conservative and extreme religious groups are violent, murderous, intolerant and bigoted. So it seems pretty counter-intuitive for me to say eliminating religion wouldn’t be the quickest improvement to our society.
But so much good has flowed from the religions of the world: architecture, poetry, philosophy, intellectual pursuits, learning, science, music and art. It was Islamic scholars who preserved the work of Aristotle when Christian Europe descended into the dark ages. It was Christian monks who first institutionalised education practices. This isn’t an unimpeded enlightenment by the way — religion obviously got in the way of science and progress (and continues to, in some areas). It’s important to separate the actions and activities of institutions from the broader umbrella of ‘religion’.
In a sense though, both of these responses tie in nicely to this maxim. Half the problem with social media is that we feel compelled to make noise, but not to say anything. We have things to talk about, but often nothing particularly worth saying (you might even find the same thing with these sometimes repetitive maxims! Who writes unstructured thoughts for 15 minutes a day? Isn’t that just blasting words into the void?)
So we could benefit from a bit of silence on social media I think.
But the same goes for big religious institutions and their political and dogmatic approach to the world today. The inane debate we’re having in Australia about ‘religious freedom’ is actually about religious privilege (the right to discriminate, to say horrible things, to govern other people’s lives). I think many of the people lining up for a kick in the religious freedom debate — chief among them the never silent Australian Christian Lobby — could take a lesson from the monks and monastic lifestyle and embrace a bit of silence and inward-looking reflection.
Exercise is important. Before clapping back in yet another culture war (or just your daily life), engage in the spiritual practice of silence.
