The "cultural heritage" group neurosis 3: the religion substitute (all of the taste but none of the calories)

Thousands of Muslims praying during the
Eid festival at a mosque in Delhi, 1942

"But once Mother Church and her motherly Eros fall into abeyance, the individual is at the mercy of any passing collectivism and the attendant mass psyche. He succumbs to social or national inflation, and the tragedy is that he does so with the same psychic attitude which had once bound him to a church. ...

"It seems as if man were destined to play a decisive role in solving this uncertainty, and to solve it moreover by virtue of his consciousness, which once started up like a light in the murk of the primeval world. Nowhere do we know for sure about these matters, but least of all where “isms” flourish, for they are only a sophisticated substitute for the lost link with psychic reality. The mass psyche that infallibly results destroys the meaning of the individual and of culture generally."

C. G. Jung, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 8: Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche: On the Nature of the Psyche (p. 221f). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

I used the image of Muslims praying to convey the idea that while Jung refers to Christianity in the above quote with his reference to "Mother Church", the mechanics involved are the same with regard to any religion, with or without a central deity. Buddha, for example, is not a god, but Buddhism is a religion. The etymology for religion is:

Middle English (originally in the sense ‘life under monastic vows’): from Old French, or from Latin religio(n-) ‘obligation, bond, reverence,’ perhaps based on Latin religare ‘to bind.’

This etymology, functionally, could also include any non-religious (in a literal meaning) bond such as a life-long adherence to a particular political belief. however, when it comes to mental energy, the mechanics are quite different because much of the (common usage) religious feelings have the unconscious as their root. Hence we have faith instead of logic as its true source. These two poles are also Mythos and Logos. Being "well balanced" would signify a mental position somewhere in the central area of these poles. Anyone at either extreme end would be considered psychotic: delusional and pathologically introverted at the Mythos end and sociopathic and pathologically extraverted at the Logos end. Various neuroses can be expressed once this central area is left. For example, the sociopathic killer does not recognize the value of any life but the person with a faith that depends on the materiality unconsciously inherent in religious historicism (the dependence on a literal meaning for anything in a religious canon) does not believe that an individual is responsible for any talent or virtue and that everything is a gift from God, or that it is God who should be thanked for good work or deeds and not the individual. This is actually contrary to orthodox Christian belief which recognizes the free will (and responsibility) of the human being.

I can think of no better support for my ideas on the necessity of being in this central area between Mythos and Logos than to use the thoughts of a Nobel laureate physicist who is also an avowed atheist, Steven Weinberg:

"...This feeling of anxiety is expressed well by Steven Weinberg (note: Weinberg, Les Trois Premières Minutes, 179.), when he writes “It is almost impossible for human beings to believe that there is no special relationship between themselves and the universe, that life is not just the grotesque result of a series of accidents that go back in the past to the very first three minutes and that we have been specifically designed from the beginning. … It is even harder to understand that this universe has evolved from such unfamiliar starting conditions that we can hardly imagine them and that it should end up by extinction, either in endless cold or infernal heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more absurd it also seems.”

Basarab Nicolescu, From Modernity to Cosmodernity: Science, Culture, and Spirituality (SUNY series in Western Esoteric Traditions) (pp. 110-111). State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition.

The religious fervor that Raimund Karl noted in his paper Every sherd is sacred: Compulsive Hoarding in Archaeology is not some sort of literary device but the recognition of a legitimate psychological phenomenon: the hoarding, itself reveals an overly materialistic consciousness that the unconscious attempts to balance through a religious attitude (Mythos). It is thus roughly the opposite of the "God does/is responsible everything" neurosis I mentioned above where the unconscious tries to compensate the overly non-materialistic religious outlook with the materialistic historicism.

Our current western society is unbalanced and is moving at an alarming rate toward the materialistic Logos end of the spectrum. We see this not only in the religious/moral attitudes that define "Cultural Heritage" but also in the destruction of cultural monuments By ISIS. The only difference between the two is that ISIS, being overtly religious is destroying the material and the "cultural heritage" fanatics being overtly materialistic are destroying the processes of culture, itself, which creates such monuments in the first place. The following Ngram gives an indication of how the English-speaking world is experiencing a decline of Mythos; any Ngram (if possible to create) of the ISIS outlook would reveal an opposite direction toward Mythos.


The global collective consciousness with its, as Jung says, "wretched isms" is trying in its typically unintelligent way to regain a balance by having both sides fight it out to the death. The problem of course is that death. also, is  a cessation of culture. Clearly, a saner balance needs to be established.
I will be back with more on Monday. Have a well-balanced weekend.


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