Too Much Baggage

To reach a future, travel light.

Humanity is trying to move into the future dragging whole traditions behind it. Each of those is rooted in times and places long past, adapted to vanished natural and social ecologies. They are inextricably mixed bags of wisdom and superstition (and stirring ritual and magnificent art). And at least as well as they channel our faith, they divert it from its true and nameless aim to our own elaborate edifices of thought. We fall into worship—idolatry—of our own systems of ideas. And it sets us against each other.

An alternative: raid them all for their wisdom and beauty and wriggle out of the superstition and dogma like so many chrysalises. We need wisdom. We crave it like a vital nutrient without which you die or become deformed. We recognize wisdom like iron filings recognize a magnet—it orders us. It doesn’t matter where, in the magnificent ruins of past cultures, you find it. You know it when you are in its presence, from the Sermon on the Mount to what somebody says to you on the street. And it is often characterized by brevity. You can carry it on your person.

This is not a popular viewpoint. It will be mocked.