Never Mind Disorder

Those nostalgic for religious ages—in which Faith tends to dominate the cultural realm—just don’t know their history well. Times are always in upheaval. Wars and rumors of wars? They’re a perennial. Take the eleventh century, close to the peak of Christendom. In that century, just within Christendom itself, twenty-six wars took place. One famine, due to climate change, plagued southern France. And the First Crusade was launched. It’s not as if people practice the prevailing ideology—ever. It’s always a mixed bag. And at the highest level greed and lust for power rule behavior.

Religious times are hard on people who want to follow the lead of their own minds and conscience—unless they are narrowly conformant to approved institutional means of doing so. In irreligious times, people who want to cultivate an inner life are blessedly left alone. The culture does not even recognize that such a life exists.

The Sufis say that seeking the highest values in no way depends on order in society. The search takes place in another dimension than the one “the world” inhabits, no matter labels the world favors currently. Which of course is nothing more than saying that (1) disorder is always present and (2) no socially wide-spread ideology actually captures reality in the full.

I’ve had the good luck to live my youth in regions where the religious ethos was dominant, but stripped of all power to compel—and to live my adult life in an age that denies the soul’s very existence. The best of both worlds, you might say.