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Thanks for that, Suzie. That's a great talk about love. I thought I'd watch a few minutes but ended up watching most of it. His talk on sex was also pretty good.
I've long thought that rawatism embodies a nineteenth century sensibility. I'd never directly associated it with Romaticism but the talk illustrates that the parallels are clearly there. Botton's use of the word "instinctual" to describe the romantic conception of love is not greatly removed from premies' belief in a mysterious and mystical relationship with rawat. The conception of the soulmate, someone whom you magically recognize as "the one" is another foundational idea upon which rawatism rests. And it's probably the notion that an "awe"-some experience is the hallmark of love that keeps premies locked in their secretive obsession (rooted in the secret initiation), like that of an unrequited lover, the quintessential romantic.
Botton's discussion of the Romantics' love of nature and belief in the paramount importance of natural "experience" also had me cringing at my former premie self. The writer of the Wiki entry on Romaticism suggests that [19th century post-Enlightenment German theologians] "took the Romantic approach of rooting religion in the inner world of the human spirit, so that it is a person's feeling or sensibility about spiritual matters that comprises religion." The article goes on to quote philosophers who saw this rejection of rationalism as a foundation for the later rise of nationalism and fascism. Exes don't have to look far to see how excessive concern with spirituality can morph into tyranny.
This more mystical notion of religion was supplemented in the 19th century by the discovery of Hinduism by the West, but as we know to our cost, the influence was two-way. Scholars of the Indian Sant Mat tradition, out of which rawatism stems, point to how this tradition began to elevate the guru from a venerable teacher to be part of the godhead, just as Christianity had made Jesus, as God's Only-begotten Son, part of the Trinity. This was probably a response to the inroads that Christianity was making into India, and an example of how easily even (or maybe especially) spiritual ideas can be perverted for nefarious purposes. I'm fairly sure that this tendency towards syncretism goes back much further than the 19th century, but the combination of elements from the paganism of the Romantics and Hindu religious ideas seems to be common among much New Ageism of this period that continued into the new century through Vivekananda, Yogananda, Huxley, Watts and on down to our own erstwhile cult.
It was a strange juxtaposition on the face of it: the airy-fairyness of Romanticism and the concern for precision typical of the machine age. Yet both provided religion with new rationales. "Liberal" Christians tried to explain Jesus' miracles in naturalistic terms (He didn't really walk on water, there just happened to be a handy sandbar around), while the more fundamentalist varieties began to ape science's obsession with detail as they worked out the precise date when the earth was created and when it would end. Concerns with the latter, along with the same caricature of the scientific method, re-emerged in the 1970s with the publication of Hal Lindsay's Late Great Planet Earth. I can remember (just) a buzz surrounding the title, but I never saw a copy and had no idea what it was about. Another hilarious example can be found a little closer to home in Glen Whittaker's idiotic book about the historical Jesus. It is replete with these materialistic keys to the supernatural. During Jesus' early years, he was "storing up" his "inner power" so that later he could act as a "channel" for "the very essence of existence, the ebbing and flowing of the life current". So his initiation was so much more "effective" than that of the Baptist. Initiations by later generations of Christians were "second-hand" and "less effective" because they had "lost the depth and power of the original transmission", thus the "flow" of Grace was "blocked". Is he describing the decline of spirituality or a leaky sump?
I think it was Pascal Boyer in his book Religion Explained who said that 19th century spirituality could be framed by 2 books: Gurdjieff's Meetings with Remarkable Men, and William James' (Henry's brother) The Varieties of Religious Experience, though both books were published in the 20th century. The latter book posits spirituality as a talent or skill that could be acquired and developed. If you want to become an athlete you need to find an already great one, and see what s/he can teach you. Same with spirituality. The former book is about a group of such great spiritual athletes. It's obviously just a short step from the assumptions of these books to the belief in gurus and spiritual techniques of self realization.
In the modern world our outlook even on matters of spirituality and happiness are founded on a more robust philosophy of science and three very well-established mega-theories of big things (relativity), small things (quantum mechanics) and complicated things (evolution) that weren't available in the 19th century. Looked at in the more rational modern light, religion loses its special mystery (just as Botton argues that love does). While the 19th century inquired into the nature of spirituality and how it might be learned, the modern perspective inquires into its antecedents, its role in the context of human behavior and cognition, and what benefits it might have conferred.
As Botton comments in the video with reference to love, applying this rational perspective become pretty boring pretty quickly, but - again as he says in the video - it's probably the right way to go if you're interested in the truth or at least avoiding the pitfalls of the romantic/spiritual imagination. Anyway, I'm starting to ramble. Great video.
rgj
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