I Have No Life, and I Must LARP

Are we even capable of religion?

Renaissance man Chad Haag (reporting from southern India) recently referred a lot of us onto Michael Lindsey’s essay ‘A Living Religion’. What follows is a summary and reflection on several points raised in Michael's piece, all of which he covers far more rigorously and plans to explore further in an upcoming book.

Enjoy!

I Have No Life, and I Must LARP

Among those who think critically about our cultural moment there is a thirst for authentic faith tradition which is best exemplified by the flocks of newly minted tradcaths and Orthodox-bros, or the various attempts to resuscitate some form of paganism. The eccentricities of these subcultures — and particularly the zealotry from their newest, loudest, and least sophisticated adherents — conjures in our collective consciousness the archetypal LARPer: a young man desperate to share how perfectly he adheres to the most obscure tenants of a faith that was alien to him until he stumbled across a proselytizing YouTube video several months ago. The LARPer knows his chosen faith well, better in terms of doctrinal particulars than most raised up in it, and yet we all instinctively find something cringe-worthy in his devotion.

But if the LARPer who struggles so wholeheartedly to embody his chosen religion is not a paragon of the faith, then just what is an actual religious adherent? At a concrete level, what do we sense as missing?

I was given a fresh perspective on this mystery while reading Michael Lindsey’s recent essay which asks what makes a religion ‘live’, that is to say, be authentic in its practice and reproduction in future generations. Two challenges we moderns face while finding religion are our lack of direct connection with a religious lineage and a loss of contact with the “elements of life that go beyond the merely quantitative and material to the onslaught of industrial modernity”.

This first point, namely the failure of people to pass religion onto their children, matches my own thoughts on the metastasizing cultural impact of a high energy state “Petroleum Culture” on a society. Modern economic incentives devalue the communal ties that facilitate cultural and religious knowledge transfer; additionally, the immediate economic value of religious knowledge transfer is relatively low for the individual parent. In contrast, the high energy mega-state which dominates the centralized energy flows that define a fossilized energy reliant economy is extremely concerned with inculcating its citizens with an ideology that enables largescale operations and supply lines. Governments have always had an element of shared ideology, but under the influence of the modern economy with its ever-lowering labor valuations (this includes intellectual labor), it is understood intuitively that the remaining utility of a citizen over his potential machine replacement comes increasingly from his ideological conformity to the mega-state’s doctrines.

And yet, even after generations of church decline there are dissidents seeking out traditional faiths. And all the raw information is out there in countless books and Wikipedia pages detailing the doctrinal building blocks of any religion, like so many Legos spilled onto the carpet just waiting to be put together. There are some surviving communities as well, albeit often dwindling, wayward, or geographically distant. So why do all these attempts at living religion stink of LARP?

Naturalism & Religious Origins

Here Michael brings up the naturalist theory on the origin of religion: this school of thought suggests that a living religion is more than the symbols, daily practices, and codified beliefs — but is instead the gestalt of centuries of genuine experiences with the terrifying divine. I imagine these instances as the lone paleolithic hunter cowering under a tree as an intense lightening storm rages above, or a lone shepherd watching every sunrise of his life pass over a distant mountain — unfiltered exposure to the incomprehensible power of the wider universe. The experience creates an awareness of the sacred, that awareness is cyphered through the human mind, and then expressed through language in the form of poetic beauty which animates the experience in the minds of subsequent generations.

In raw economic terms these insights contributed little immediate material advantage even in ancient times, but like most human knowledge was cumulative and communicated through these animating myths. Worth noting also is that these experiences were as ever present in a non-modern’s daily habits as ambient sunlight, but are alien to most moderns who are shuffled at a young age from home to bus to school until they graduate into a beige office or a truck cab. As Michael himself mentions, even attempting such experiential spirituality is now a precious commodity sought out at yoga retreats by those who can afford to vacation far from the industrial hubs, but neutered of any threatening or ‘unmodern’ thinking. The absence of these experiences in our lives, much like sun exposure, is felt not through immediate agony but rather an ever-worsening deficiency.

The Fruit Fly Faith

And so I perceive that our modern dilemma is that we both lack contact with religious tradition and have little opportunity to encounter the divine ourselves. This leaves us, at an individual level, with two rather grim options: ‘seek tradition’ by picking through the wreckage of a dying faith or ‘live modernity’ by embracing either scientific atheism or some perennialist synthesis. LARPing may really be the best choice in this situation, but Michael points out that those who seek the most serviceable religion for themselves are actually reducing bloodlines of human experience into just another consumer behavior — a brand choice between Pepsi and Coke, Greek Orthodox or Low-Fat Confucianism. To summarize from the article: to define a religion as serviceable is to define religion as a tool, an ends, a mechanism to use or dispose of as serves, which is to view the religion as alien to oneself.

But by living modernity I fear we are unconsciously creating a new religion. Not the invented faith of a benevolent AI godhead that technocrats dream of, but a genuine convergence of lived experiences from our modern daily lives. And while the non-moderns formed religion on the abiding truths of “all natural beings, animals, plants, skies and mountains”, it is the modern person’s only available option to interpret meaning out of what they see — the creations of man.

The modern boy who spends every morning with Hanna-Barbera cartoons projected into his eyes sees them as regular and necessary as the rising sun. The journey to his family’s summer vacation rental beside an increasingly dead ocean (after passing through mountains blown apart by dynamite) ends at a beach near to bursting with human bodies and plastic debris — he sees a truth of some kind there, perhaps an ugly one, but something incomprehensibly powerful is imbued onto the land. To him, the unblinking satellite eyes of big brother watch from the sky, the world is divided into highway, city, suburb, and sticks, and the truck is the road’s apex predator.

“Truth abides in that which abides” says Heidegger, but on a human timescale we experience modernity as abiding. The fact this is all ecologically unsustainable at the generational level makes this an ugly and perhaps completely false religion, but in the eyes of a child of 1960, 1990, or 2010 it is no less a genuine one — and one our descendants will have to reconcile their understanding of the divine with, surely the work of generations to come.

A Generation Lost in the Concrete Desert

But what does this ugly lesson leave me with? What hope can I have, a man who chokes up at the sight of a Morrowind skybox but feels nothing stir in his heart while staring at the light polluted night void over his own home? I am the stunted moth described in 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’, born in a Mason jar and whose owner accidentally left it in so long that its wings were unable to unfold and set properly. Now I am set waddling onto the sidewalk with a useless malformed ear-like appendage weighing on my back. Dillard called him “a monster in a Mason jar” that would never fly. We are a generation of monsters in Mason jars.

My only consolation is that we can provide some small value, even as spiritually stunted as I believe us to be, merely by crawling forward. By actively seeking lifestyles that organically create encounters with the divine we may find the sparks of a living religion, and by communicating our experiences to one another — without posturing or seeking ‘serviceability’ — we may be able to collectively learn again.

The spiritual memories we create and communicate may transcend us and benefit future generations either directly or by merely being a cautionary tale of the generation who fell furthest from God and were lost to wander the spiritual desert of modernity, never to see the promised land that their children might know.

Check out Michael’s essay for a more comprehensive examination of this topic.