I wasn’t raised with any religious practice and it was almost never referenced and religious language or symbolism often has an alienating effect on me. But I started writing this from Paris where I went to play guitar in the premier of Glenn Branca’s new orchestral piece for 100 guitars at the Philharmonie de Paris on February 20th. Glenn’s music, for me, has something of the sacred in it and I often use language tinged with mystical (or oddly mathematical) flavor to describe what it feels like to play it. So maybe there is an analogue to religious “spirituality” in my relationship to aesthetic experiences, natural, poetic, or musical; Lorca’s duende, or what my immeasurably dear friend Sandy Pearlman might refer to as “frisson” in the second movement or Dies Iras section of the Berlioz Requiem.
I think that the foundation of the spiritual experiences probably lies in what Damasio has called “the genomic unconscious” more than in any single class of stimuli. Certainly I am extracting “transcendent” experiences that are of considerable significance to me through art (although maybe these are best described as experiences of Spinoza-ish immanence, “Deus sive Natura”). One might argue here that these experiences aren’t linked to an organized belief system or identity group for which I am willing to kill or die which is true… but I’m not sure that it always was. The experience of transcendence/spirituality and the vehicles that reproduce and legitimate that experience can become tightly interwoven; my years in a rock band can only be described as a mission with high existential stakes, and my commitment to it was of a genuine life or death nature. In fact as I have learned more about the dynamics, community value, induction, unique group morality structures, the reinforcement of extreme tendencies and symbolic behaviors that one finds in insurgent and even terror groups, the more I recognize my own experience in the “outlaw poet” and rock and roll communities.
But others will recognize these systems easily in their sports teams, or even their fan associations related to sports teams, in high finance, or political cause associations… or whatever. You may protest, “but we don’t commit violence” (although “militant” footballer clubs exist and finance can be linked to all kinds of violence) but the same is true of most religious associations as well. Mary Clarke wrote that “What Hobbes failed to realize – and many still do today – is that humans evolved with a desire to belong, not to compete. Biologically, we are obligatory social animals, wholly dependent on a supportive social structure; and it is in the absence of such a support system that destructive, ‘inhuman’ behaviors occur.” But as Vivienne Jabri has noted, that sense of belonging is also a highly effective medium for the mobilization of violence.
Nationalism has probably surpassed religion in terms of organizing, deploying, and institutionalizing violence but religion remains the older, more familiar, and perhaps more agile political organization and continues to be highly successful in adapting to diverse cultures and creating some degree of unification and co-feeling across entrenched geographical and economic boundaries as well as the old tribal, clan, and caste systems that monotheisms might have emerged as a response to. But while the monotheistic religions are probably most often associated with religiously based violence, they aren’t unique, recent Hindu and Buddhist militancy in India and Myanmar, respectively, can attest to this. In fact the most common predictors in acts of violence seem to me to first and foremost be gender and age, but who knows, we might be seeing a change even there as women in some regions slowly begin to see themselves not just as the inevitable victims of but as legitimate wielders of force.
More recently of course we’ve seen 20th century political Islam, or “Islamism,” effectively invoked not just as a vehicle of identity consolidation but as a redefining of the enemy (near and far), and it is maybe the most potent threat to the dominant economics of transnational capital and corporatism and western liberal values since the “demise” of communism, and promotes itself as a challenge to the legitimacy of the nation state itself (or at least the borders as drawn by colonial powers). But then the world’s great religions are “great” precisely because they challenged and then established their own monopolies of power, meaning monopoly of force and/or wealth: Empires. Like waves, they rise, they fall, they are universally hated by those they drown, and exalted by those they carry.