The Case for Contamination - Essay Example

Analyze and discuss the article “The Case for Contamination” by Kwame Anthony Appiah (from a religious perspective). What roles do religions play in Appiah’s analysis? How is your approach similar to or different from his? “The Case for Contamination” by Kwame Anthony Appiah makes an excellent point about information sharing in the multicultural environment, and the importance in engaging in relationships that transcend the social borders of religion, ethnicity, and race in healing the world of hatred. While this thesis is valid and important, it should also be analyzed from the perspective of religion as to how it is consistent with the goals of spirituality and traditional dogmatic belief. For example, it is common in contemporary society to hear people say that “all religions are one” or “all religions are the same,” yet this may betray a type of unwillingness to actually look at the differences that define organized religions uniquely, on their own philosophical terms. In this regard, I believe it is important to understand the differences between religious and cultural beliefs, rather than to quickly gloss them over in favor of a unitarian belief that ignores the actual teachings of the religions themselves. For example, by learning the specific characteristics of Islam - submission, prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, etc. – and understanding them historically as they relate to the development of unique schools of thought, ritual, and practice, we can understand the religion in a way that truly appreciates it as a cultural value system. What may appear as uniting in post-modern society can result in a further weakening of religion. This can be viewed as a modernization of religious belief, but it also illustrates the way that secular values can dilute and destroy religious diversity by posing all ideas in a supermarket of choices where all philosophies are packaged and sold equally, to anybody, but nobody really cares what is on the inside of the box. Thus, this essay will review the position of Kwame Anthony Appiah in the NYT article “The Case for Contamination,” analyzing the author’s call for multicultural unity, while searching for ways that this process can lead to greater understanding of religious diversity and uniqueness, rather than a dilution of religious belief into a secular paradigm dominated by the values of the marketplace. “In the past couple of years, Unescos members have spent a great deal of time trying to hammer out a convention on the ‘protection and promotion’ of cultural diversity. (It was finally approved at the Unesco General Conference in October 2005.) The drafters worried that ‘the processes of globalization. . .represent a challenge for cultural diversity, namely in view of risks of imbalances between rich and poor countries.’ The fear is that the values and images of Western mass culture, like some invasive weed, are threatening to choke out the worlds native flora.” (Appiah, 2006) Appiah defines the position that he is reacting to as related to the UNESCO goal of the protection and promotion of cultural diversity. Appiah chides UNESCO, as if there really is no threat to indigenous culture, as if we were really not losing our cultural diversity globally in a manner similar to and driven by the same modern economic forces that has caused us to lose our natural biodiversity. The protection of endangered species and biodiversity is an extension and continuation of the protection of cultural diversity through multiculturalism. These two are joined in activism and in sharing a philosophical foundation. What Appiah posits as his ideal in contrast to traditional values is Cosmopolitanism, and in doing so I am afraid that he elevates the superficial aspects of the modern economic and social system to an undeserved place as an ideal. Traditional religious belief systems contain feudal, primitive, and even pre-historic aspects of our cultural heritage, with Buddhist teachings, the Vedas, and the Bible going back to the earliest days of recorded history. Our modern lifestyle is revolutionary with mass-transportation, information technology, and all of the progress associated with Western society and economic development. Our religious beliefs come from a different era in time, they have a different speed, they relate to a different form of cultural expression, but they are also intended to instruct and perfect the essential truths of the human being. The great wisdom masters of our religious traditions wherever they appeared historically as saints, prophets, yogis, bodhisattvas, imams, and teachers – these gurus attained a realization of truth and states of consciousness that are reported along with the stories of mythology, gods, and goddesses in the religious tradition. For the cosmopolitan, these appear a something like the Santa Claus story and ritual, or references to Greek mythology, in that they are regarded as quaint, accepted, and practiced culturally and used to express individuality, as Appiah notes centrally. Yet, one can question whether or not this cosmopolitan view of religion really does justice to the ideas that were taught by its greatest teachers like Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, etc. as paths to ultimate truth. Appiah writes: “The preservationists often make their case by invoking the evil of ‘cultural imperialism.’ Their underlying picture, in broad strokes, is this: There is a world system of capitalism. It has a center and a periphery. At the center - in Europe and the United States - is a set of multinational corporations. Some of these are in the media business. The products they sell around the world promote the creation of desires that can be fulfilled only by the purchase and use of their products. They do this explicitly through advertising, but more insidiously, they also do so through the messages implicit in movies and in television drama.” (Appiah, 2006) Again, Appiah dismisses the view of those who invoke “cultural imperialism’ as an evil, and this is the foundation of his argument in “The Case for Contamination”. These fears are false he says, globalization brings good things as well as bad to all people worldwide. Who are we to judge patronizingly what people are to believe, how they are to act, or how can we even presume to govern cultural evolution, Appiah wonders. Modernization is important to Appiah and the cosmopolitan individual is presented as the ideal of this form of global culture. Yet, the cosmpopolitan encourages us to view religion as mere kitsch, quirky toys or objects we buy in the marketplace and play with sometimes when we are bored. Cosmopolitanism never enters into religion on its own terms, as a participant, but rather maintains a central allegiance to the liberal values of the marketplace and secular democracy. My main criticism of this is that cosmopolitanism enshrines the superficial as the ideal. Consider spiritual awareness as expressed in the realization of consciousness, can we but wonder about the mysteries of religion that the ancients must have experienced in the time of the Vedas, or the Buddhas, or the living prophets themselves? If we are to understand that religion has power, we can see it in a realized yogi, saint, or shaman when they attain higher states of consciousness and wisdom, true insight into the nature of mind and the universe. For the cosmopolitan, this is: “fine, but I have an appointment at 2PM and I can meet you at Starbucks afterwards to discuss it, or you can just text me.” The superficiality of cosmopolitanism suggests that it might not even be aware that deeper states of consciousness exist, or that it is important to pursue them. We are after all, modern, and it is all on TV. Enlightenment? Ho hum... sounds like another marketing gimmick. The cosmopolitan views religion as part of the “supermarket of ideas,” and they are all relative, some perhaps more quaint than others. I think Appiah’s idealization of cosmopolitanism is mistaken in this regard because I believe in the “deep truths” of old religions and I am interested in a concept of the soul or mind-stream that is as old as the universe itself. I personally fear we have lost the insights of the old religious traditions, and in this regard I view cosmopolitanism as one of the main reasons we have little insight into religion in modern culture – or the actual states of mind, being, and awareness that the truth of the religions point to in their teachings. “To say what, in principle, distinguishes the cosmopolitan from competing universalisms, we plainly need to go beyond talk of truth and tolerance. One distinctively cosmopolitan commitment is to pluralism. Cosmopolitans think that there are many values worth living by and that you cannot live by all of them. So we hope and expect that different people and different societies will embody different values. Another aspect of cosmopolitanism is what philosophers call fallibilism - the sense that our knowledge is imperfect, provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence.” (Appiah, 2006) This is frankly a “weak” view of human nature and an embracing of the imperfections of individual life and experience rather than the striving with all one’s heart, soul, and mind for the truth of existence as the great religions posit. One aspect of cosmopolitanism is that it would prefer to produce mall clerks and retail sales over the great heroes of the mind and soul that religion creates. The cosmopolitan merely watches these stories of heroes in movies and TV or reads about them in condensed form in literature, never really going beyond the superficial aspects of sign recognition in the plurality of ideas that is marketplace driven. To engage a religion on its own terms and pursue that path to its highest goals, enlightenment, heaven, unity with all creation, the experience of universal love – these are the highest experiences we can hope and achieve in life. For the cosmopolitan, it is really awesome when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play these roles on the screen, the make-up and costume design are world class. For Appiah, the historical traditions of religion are related to “mullahs,” Osama Bin Laden, the KKK, and other fundamentalists that display the fear of the cosmopolitan of terrorism in New York in 2006, the media-driven and dominant TV messages of the day. One assumes Appiah is widely read in the traditions of multicultural religious expression, but it is questionable how much he has ever approached the teachings of religion from the perspective of belief or authentic practice, on the terms defined by the great prophets, saints, yogis, and shamen of the past. This is characteristic of the cosmopolitan, for the cosmopolitan individual is generally a hedonist, interested in personal pleasure, wealth, career, social status, and other aspects of ego-consciousness that is regarded as immature spiritually in religion. Appiah’s use of the negative examples to define religious fundamentalism with intolerance, hatred, backwardness, etc. is not only an unjust and unbalanced portrayal, but also one that shows no understanding of the positive message of religion when considered from the experience of one who actually believes in and practices a deep religious tradition. Appiah writes: “The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa ‘celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world.’” This relationship of Salman Rushdie as an archetypal example of the cosmopolitan intellectual is fine, but it is extremely biased and absurd to use the values of Rushdie to define the experience of what it is to actually believe in and base one’s life on Islam. The cosmopolitan includes the vital defense of the right to disparage religion, but it has no awareness of understanding of the path of religious mysticism as it is engaged in and practiced by individuals within the religious tradition. Because of this, I distrust implicitly the superficial aspects of cosmopolitanism, even while sharing the goals of tolerance and non-violence in society and the respect for difference in diversity that Appiah posits. As a final example, I would like to contrast Satyagraha or “Soul Force” as Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. taught it in the modern context, and the way that it viewed the unity of all religions as intrinsic, not in a superficial way, but as experienced through the path of unitive mysticism. Gandhi and MLK showed how a multi-cultural study of religion could actually lead to the realization of universal truth in the individual, and how that realization could drive reform, and also be used as a basis for governance. “What is Gandhian philosophy? ...Understanding the universe to be an organic whole, the philosophy exists on several planes - the spiritual or religious, moral, political, economic, social, individual and collective. The spiritual or religious element, and God, is at its core. Human nature is regarded as fundamentally virtuous. All individuals are believed to be capable of high moral development, and of reform.” (Murphy, 1991) Gandhi’s followers share the multicultural values and interest in promoting tolerance in society that Appiah writes of in “The Case for Contamination.” Yet, in the examples of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. we see positive examples of the self-realization of the individual in the context of practicing a religion on its own terms, as well as the heroic aspects of that, something that is lost in the superficiality of the cosmopolitan. This is an example of a morally and spiritually “strong” conception of human nature, worthy of us as humans, rather than the “weak” or limited idea of human nature expressed in cosmopolitanism. Sources Cited: Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Case For Cosmopolitanism. The New York Times January 1, 2006. Web. 12 April 2011. Murphy, Stephen. Brief Outline of Gandhis Philosophy. From: “Why Gandhi is Relevant in Modern India: A Western Gandhians Personal Discovery”, Gandhi Peace Foundation, New Delhi; Academy of Gandhian Studies, Hyderabad, 1991. Web. 12 April 2011. Read More