A Culture of Possibility Podcast #36, Owen Kelly and Arlene Goldbard on Spirituality and Cultural Democracy
NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 36th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 19 January 2023. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net’s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.
While cohost François Matarasso takes a break, Owen Kelly (miaaw.net cofounder and author of Cultural Democracy Now and other books) joined me for a conversation that had us both feeling just a little wary: spirituality, as it infuses our own understanding of the world and our practices, and as it relates to questions of cultural democracy. I was at home in in Lamy, New Mexico, and Owen was in Kovalam in the Indian state of Kerala, twelve and a half time zones away. Here’s how I described our wariness:
“When Owen and I were preparing for the podcast, we were both a little nervous because it’s kind of controversial. Some people are very committed to defeating the idea that there are any non-material realities that we have to be coping with. And some people don’t like talking about their religions as if they were a matter of choice. So at the risk of offending everybody, we’re going to just dive in and start by talking a little bit about what we mean by spirituality.”
“A number of people,” Owen explained, “have asked me through the years, ‘Are you an atheist?’ And I’ve always replied, ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that.’ From time to time I’ve stepped back from this and just not answered and other times I’ve tried to explain and then people wandered off after 15 minutes. So yes, that sounds complicated. But basically my position is that there is a false duality between rationalism and spirituality. It’s one of the last of the great Cartesian dualisms. Rationality as we’re presented with it strikes me as a very late-19th century phenomenon.” As an example, he cited Esperanto, the ideal of a universal language that would wipe away “all war, all human problems, all scarcities all evil, (which) were to do with miscommunication, and befouled by superstition. And once everybody could speak the same auxiliary language, there’d be no misunderstanding…and we know how that went during the 20th century.”
Owen characterized this belief in the superiority of rationality as “thinking always beats feeling, feeling is a kind of weak, wishy-washy thing that we should be growing out of and logic was where it was at. And we’ve spent the 20th century discovering, for the better and a lot of the time for worse, that simply isn’t the case. So we find ourselves entering the 21st century with an agreement amongst scientists and most other people that there is not a clear reason why the head is better than the heart, there is not a clear duality between body and mind, or between mind and spirit. And that we actually know rather less than we thought we did 50 or 100 years ago about how the world works and how the mind works and how people work. In all of that lies my interest in exploring what people call spirituality.”
I explained that I was coming from a different place:
“My own sense of spirituality is located in a specific set of spiritual practices. I’m Jewish. I was brought up in a quite secular household: first-generation immigrants, progressive politics, observe the holidays but not in any really religious way. Much later in my life, I had an epiphany that made me understand that I wanted to explore that tradition much more deeply to see if there was something for me in it. I read a text at a point when I was pretty desperate in my life. The text said that every human being on the earth has a unique role and we each also had a task to perform, but we weren’t given to know what the task was. So we needed to go through life being prepared to sense the demand and and meet the moment when it arrives. And that the tribulations that we experienced are preparation for that. That changed my life because I understood in that moment that I had been feeling that I was being punished, but I didn’t know what my crimes had been. If I started to look at what I thought of as my punishment as preparation, it cast everything in a different light.
“I’ve been through a lot of different relationships to the study of Jewish texts and spiritual practices. There are people who would say I’m not religious because I don’t keep kosher, don’t obey certain rules like that. But my head is completely equipped with a frame of reference of stories and parables and teachings. Every day, one of them comes to me. I value the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years of thinking about this question: what is life? What is it to live? How shall we live on this planet? I’ll give one example because it leads right to my definition of spirituality. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was a great teacher. He was escaped the Holocaust and moved to the United States. His core concept is ‘radical amazement.’ We human beings, our real condition is we’re on a giant rock spinning through space. Science can tell us everything about how it works, but we have no idea in the world why we are here. That puts us in a natural condition of wonder or radical amazement, where we’re facing the world going, ‘Wow, what is this?’ That question arises every second, but we have a tendency to supplant that with what he calls notions, conventional ideas.
“So to answer the question, when I look at the ultra-rationalists — atheists, for example, who are totally convinced there’s nothing going on here but chemicals and forces, I think, ‘Wow, I envy your certainty, but sadly, I have to put you in the same category as zealous religious fundamentalists who only know one story and don’t ask any questions either. In both cases, I think you’re radically overconfident.’ For me, spirituality is the acknowledgement that we live within a mystery, and living into the mystery, keeping our our hearts and minds open to the mystery and paying attention and staying amazed.”
Whew! Once we got that out of the way, we got into some enduring questions, like why atheists generally imagine the divine as an old-fashion idea of God in a long white robe and beard, rather than, as Owen put it, “a collective noun…to describe absolutely everything.” That brought us into connection with what Owen called “the human project, which is the creation of culture…the overarching human project that we’ve been unable to stop ever since we started learning how to talk, learning how to propagate memes, and fill our minds with ideas to the point where there are many different spiritual traditions that specialize in helping you calm internal dialogue.”
We went on to explore notions of the sacred and rituals as they intersect with culture-making and artmaking, how working with music is a form of magic that builds and sustains communities, and how cultural policy debates mirror religious ones. When Roy Shaw, then Secretary-General of the Arts Council of Great Britain, criticized Owen’s writing in the 80s for taking issue with the hypothesis that there is one best in culture that ought to be prescribed for everyone, he was very much attempting to make the Arts Council into a state religion, the cultural equivalent of the Church of England, while Owen and others were advocating true religious freedom.
Owen had been reading Why I Am a Hindu, a book by Shashi Tharoor, a member of the Indian parliament for Trivandrum (where Owen was calling from), who described the nondual perspective of Advaita Vedanta, which recognizes many paths to pursue the highest universal reality, thereby obviating religious disputes, as all paths can be respected.
In the end, Owen and I agreed: “Let’s get out of this too-tight suit of clothes that’s the remnant of the rationalist tradition and understand that in our collective work of making culture, many things are true at the same time. Many realities are converging. Many mysteries are making themselves evident.” We really enjoyed the conversation and hope you will too.
Playing for Change, “Higher Ground.”
