Old Lahore

I am neither Hindu nor Turk, my identity lies neither in the wilderness of Arabia nor within the walls of Lahore.
--Bulleh. 

The ability and the desire to 'not say' is, of course, also a way. But it's the kind of feeling and way of living that would be completely lost on someone whose identity has been made over by the nation state and whose contours have been shaped by the engineered desires of the market (which is to say: all of us!). Or maybe not. There is always a chink in the armour, a brief moment when you look back on your life and think: the meaning of it all couldn't have been reduced to the fact that I had some asparagus on my plate, that I flitted away a third of my life away in front of the box or intoxicated, pursuing a happiness that was always around the corner.

What, then?

~

Haven't read Olivier Roy's Holy Ignorance (mentioned in the Shatz article) but the thesis does look very appealing. It seems to be something like this: 

Secularization and modernization haven't lead to the retreat of religion, as was hoped. The Enlightenment hasn't ushered in a great wave of rationality or reasonableness (one has to remember the Camps to underscore this point).This isn't just the traditional story of urbanization and alienation, the disjunction between the values of the (traditional/rural) family and the young man who grows up speaking a different language. Perhaps there's also something more specific going on?

Is this just a variation of a point that Gibbon made a long time ago? That religion, tempered by worldly concerns, answerable to a constituency, influenced by eclectic local cultures and practices and embodied in certain practices, institutions, orthodoxies (a "language") would be less fanatical than one that is free from all constraints? 

A version of the Protestant thesis, I suppose., except here individualization and the breaking of the institutional hold doesn't lead to "piety" or "conscience", a 'religion of the heart' (C. Hill) but to a kind of extreme individualization which finds its 'home' in a gang, a cult rather than in the family or the norms of wider society. 

Separate yourself from society because society is filth, corruption, Babylon. Culture is an "innovation" (doubly so because modern forms of it have nothing to with "us"). 

So, modernity (capitalism) breaks up any sense of continuity, durability, any link with the past or the matrix of terrestrial life. This is the abstract Man with his abstract desires, the Man without any qualities (of course, relatively benign when we think of most people). This is the 'missing person' Mary Douglas writes about, the modern Gnosticism that Jonas writes about: the great separation between the 'I' and the world, between me and you, the true believers and the damned. 

Ratzinger, intriguingly, made precisely this point with regards (extreme?) Protestantism and Islam: they posits a leap of faith, are blind, depend on a God whose will cannot be known (or is arbitrary), a God that is utterly transcendent, remote. This is not the place to contest that, but if applied to the extremes it obviously makes a lot of sense: Gnosticism, Nihilism and Existentialism.

This also resonates with Gellner's notion that modern Islam would be scriptualistic, urban, 'Protestant'. That means that the older rural and syncretic traditions would be bypassed but, eventually, so would the traditions of scholarship and community understandings (Levinas) that bound a community. The end of the book and the rise of the internet also has surely something to do with this "quick thinking" and the emergence of virtual communities? 

Now-and this may be specific to Sunni Islam-everyone's an imam. (Roger, a friend and Protestant missionary, once told you: "Everyone's a saint, I'm a saint").    

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Will read it and see what he actually says.

But here's the thing, the supposed freedom from inherited structures of feeling and ways of being doesn't necessarily produce more freedom (in fact, it can lead to quite the opposite. That's the daring thesis). Freedom from other people can go hand in hand with a hatred of other people. The notion that we should all be footloose, "nomadic," disrupt the hierarchies of control now sounds woefully outdated (more applicable to an older formation of capitalism). In an age of 'liquid modernity' it is precisely that kind of disjointedness that is required. Nothing must be allowed to settle.

This, you're afraid, sounds like a hymn to the petit bourgeois-and indeed it is! The small scale life that values friendship, belonging, cinnamon rolls, art and music, your "favourite things" is not to be sneered at. Simone: without bridges many drown. The Catholic Church has always realized that. Conservatism, in that sense, is not about a narrow-minded and parochial justification of the way things are (because that includes all kinds of injustice) but is, instead, a recognition that you can know who or what you are without having to define yourself. Not this, not that, the Hindus would say...

Old Lahore has lost so much without their presence...

{The book, Holy Ignorance, is available online. if you would like a copy drop me a line}