17 12 / 2007
Monasticism as a Semaphore
While I don’t necessarily advocate traditional monasticism, there are hidden advantages to certain types of asceticism.
For example, the vow of poverty. The religious doctrine that circumscribes this practice varies broadly on rationale and implementation of this vow. It seems that the most prominent reasons come down to fairness, avoiding waste, and modest living. There is also the sense that an over-accumulation of material wealth can insulate you from experiencing the broader world. In the end, I think the way most come to balance is to discourage accumulation of and hoarding money, not to discourage the use of it.
If we apply this principle more globally, in some sense, we can envision this vow as foregoing material goods in hope that people who need them will be able to get to them. In this way, poverty can be charitable. The obstacle to this, unfortunately, is that many people are more than happy to take your surplus from you, and they are rarely the most needy.
This problem applies to society as a whole. If we assume that our society would fare better as a whole if it were more cooperative, what keeps us from cooperating perpetually?
The simple answer is that many entities in our society are willing to sacrifice augmenting society’s welfare by 10% if it means they can augment their own welfare by 50%. Even a child knows this kind of selfishness in himself and those around him.
In order to detect the selfishly motived wolf in sheep’s clothing, we have established what must be thousands publicly-recognized semaphores to transmit the pledges of cooperation, either in a limited sense, like within one’s own ethnic or social group, or more globally. Masonic handshakes, flag badges, fezzes, and yarmulkes, or the sign of the fish in a shop’s yellow pages ad.
Of course, the problem here is that the semaphores can be easily falsified. Worse, once we had implicit deceit where cooperation was assumed, but now that these explicit semaphores have been violated, our society has become fundamentally inoculated. We all have a deep-seated mistrust of a person who smiles and says, “trust me”.
So, in a world where actions must be believed over words, the only valid response seems to be to use monasticism as a semaphore. In many senses, the values of monasticism are not community-oriented. In many respects the feel like a shunning of traditional community. By contrast, if monasticism is used reliably as a semaphore, it manifests as a persistent public statement, a public example, and ideally, a competitive force against the entropic effects of individualism.
By a persistent public statement, I mean, in its most drastic sense, that I should publicize my monasticism clearly and explicitly. This means not only materialistic modesty, but, optimally, perhaps, keeping public your financial information and seeking a central verification authority that certifies, in effect, that your talk talking is genuinely accompanied by walk walking.
It’s not difficult to see how this might serve as public example of your willingness to participate in a cooperative lifestyle, and by being such, create an entity which people might universally once-and-for all “sign up” for an equitable cooperative lifestyle instead of one that, at its heart, requires inequity for its drive.
This idea comes to me because of two distinct problems in our society:First, that religion makes monasticism easy for people to write off. My own feeling about monasticism is that one almost uniformly needs to participate in a dogmatic spiritual experience which, in my view, by virtue of the growing unacceptability of dogmatic philosophies, will cause it to be rejected time and time again.
That is not to say monasticism cannot be modularized and connected to dogma on a personal level. Instead, monks, nuns and lamas of every stripe should come to some harmony about the practical process of monastic living so that the benefits that are universally recognized can be explicated in coordination by each sect, as well as those with no sect but their own intimate spirituality.
The second problem is that monastic, commune-style communities have continually and detrimentally found themselves isolated from society and participating in a very “we-they” kind of lifestyle. Inevitably, many children who are brought up in this environment soon seek the outside world.
I can’t believe that this kind of separation from society is going to encourage spread of the cooperative ideals. It seems as though only a coordinated, and institutionalized monasticism with clear, accessible purposes rather than a spiritual rationale at its heart can accomplish the change necessary within the society. We are a fiat-based society, not a trust based society, and as such, demonstrating unequivocally each member’s willingness to make sacrifices for global welfare is the only way we can accumulate enough credence for cooperative theory to reach its critical, beneficial mass.
