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Kill Your Idols!
[Continued from yesterday’s article, Jesus: “Don’t write this down!”]
You may not be a fan of five dollar words, but I am. They are one of my idols, but I try not to worship them as much as I try to put them to good use. “Iconoclasm” is a pretty interesting five dollar word that means “the destruction of religious icons and other symbols or monuments, usually for religious or political motives.” Iconoclastic periods often occur when religious sects vie for dominance, or when one nation or people overthrow another. The winner tends to topple the statues and scratch out the paintings of the loser in an effort to re-write history through destruction.
In the past, I’ve looked at idols as a sort of “failure of imagination” which spring from our inability to contemplate successfully raw infinity. It’s usually a lot easier for us to boil infinity down into a specific representation, which we can much more easily wrap our minds around. But the piece I wrote yesterday about Jesus not wanting his teachings to be written down has made me look at iconoclasm in a whole new way.
The premise I am exploring at the moment is that religions are best understood as a cultural adaptation to a specific set of circumstances: historical, social & environmental. From that viewpoint, they represent a niche solution to a question of human ecosystems. And to really understand a religion, you must look at the circumstances which surrounded it’s foundings, as its teachings speak to those circumstances moreso than they do to us hundreds or perhaps thousands of years later.
Iconoclasm starts to make a lot more sense from this perspective, I think. Because what is it: it is the destruction of religious forms. The purpose of these forms isn’t simply to concretize the divine, but to reify memory. Representation in any format is an attempt to transmit the values and ideas of the past forward into the future. It is an attempt to trans-locate across time and space. In other words, it is an attempt to take a specific cultural adaptation to a set of specific circumstances (religion, ideology, etc) and apply it outside of its original context.
There may of course be a great deal of value to this “time-binding” tendencies of human cultures. But it may also be that iconoclasts are, in some sense, ecological preservationists. What I mean by that is that by smashing statues and slashing paintings, you are repudiating not so much the past, but the solutions which the unique circumstances of the past required. You are, in effect, saying: “What worked then won’t work again, because things are different now.” And you are encouraging the creation of a new set of solutions to your new set of circumstances. Or as Thomas Jefferson so aptly put it, “Every generation needs a new revolution.”
The problem with a revolution every generation though, and with iconoclasm itself is that the present moment is inevitably created out of the collection of moments we call the past. While it seems a very good idea to recognize that solutions which worked in the past may not work now, it seems foolish to throw them out entirely. If religions and ideologies always sprang up in relation to the specific historical, social and environmental circumstances of the day, then it’s important for us to recognize that our current circumstances represent a coming together of all these various shards, these idols which we have smashed from generations past. And it may be that our destiny is to forge from them a new one which meets our needs, today, right now.
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October 24th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
I read somewhere that monotheistic religions with sky gods came out of arid areas without alot of vegatation, while animistic religions came out of jungle/forest areas that were dense with vegatation and animal life. It would make sense moving into one of these areas from another how the religion/beliefs would have to be retooled.
October 24th, 2006 at 7:56 pm
you are proposing no less than a brand new religion and also an ideology to boot?
LAWS YES!! Uh, wait a minute. Nah. Do we really need more of those?
Doesn’t the mass media in all it’s forms always being discussed here already do what you are suggesting in a big way? Furiously starting new religions 30 mins at a time, pulling in the past, until the ratings drop to start again.
October 24th, 2006 at 10:21 pm
No, I’m not proposing that whatsoever. I don’t know what I’m proposing, but I’m looking at the idea that your belief system and religion etc ought to reflect YOUR LIFE, instead of somebody else’s life. Maybe that’s not especially revolutionary…
Not really. Because it foists someone else’s proposed solutions onto you, rather than you cultivating your own solutions.
October 25th, 2006 at 12:13 am
Tell me, what’s the difference between an iconoclast and a cynic?
October 25th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
I think the root of the matter is whether or not we admit that truth, in order to be truth, must be timeless. At different times and under different circumstances, we might have different perspectives on that truth, but it is what it is, regardless of what we think about it.
Another aspect of this is an idea I’ve encountered in many spiritual traditions: the need for a spiritual guide, and for submitting to the authority of his teaching. Usually, insisting that your belief system, religion, etc. must reflect YOUR LIFE is exactly the kind of egocentricism that you need to overcome in order to make any spiritual progress.
NB: it is YOU who is doing the progressing or regressing, YOU whose ideas about the truth are evolving and changing in the current of the times. The truth is what it is, always has been and always will be.
Why, after all, do we care whether an idea is new or revolutionary? Is that supposed to be a mark of greater truth? Isn’t it possible, and even likely, given that truth doesn’t change, that some truths were discovered long ago? Perhaps our fathers and grandfathers, and their grandfathers before them, were right about some of the things they tried to tell us, but we, in our arrogance and belief in “progress”, refused to listen?
Icons and other symbols are like the finger pointing at the moon in that old Zen anecdote. As long as we still understand their purpose and the direction they are pointing, they’re valuable tools. But when we begin to pay more attention to the tool and lose sight of its purpose, it’s time to put it down. And when people have come to think of the tool itself as the point, it’s time to smash it and rediscover real values.
Here’s one traditional way to approach that question of real values and timeless truth:
Leibniz famously asked “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and placed this mystery of existence at the heart of metaphysics. How, out of nothingness, can things come into being? Creation is the original miracle, and the prototype of all the others. It’s a miracle that only God can produce. It is the ur-revelation, a sign or symbol pointing back to Him…
October 25th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
I would venture something like: a cynic picks apart images because he thinks there is nothing there. An iconoclast destroys them because he thinks they limit us from what is really there
October 26th, 2006 at 5:33 am
Fair enough. However, whether there is anything ‘really there’ or not is a function of the icon, not of the destroyer.
Isn’t it possible that (for a given icon) the results could well be the same regardless of the intentions of the destroyer?
When I was a kid, my friends and I would build cubby houses in the woods. Sometimes older kids would come and smash them and we’d have to rebuild. It resulted in a stronger design. Eventually we got into the habit of trying to destroy them ourselves as soon as we’d built them, just to ascertain their strengths and weaknesses. We were performing destructive testing whereas the older kids were just being mean. Either way, the results were the same: tougher and tougher cubby houses. While destruction is necessary for evolution to occur, it’s what one builds out of the rubble that’s really important.
I’m also reminded of the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Bagdhad, which was a widely televised event. Within days photos emerged showing that the statue-toppling ceremony was a typical stage-managed psyop with a rent-a-crowd, not a spontaneous celebration of freedom as it was originally portrayed. Now, between the government ‘dog-waggers’ and the blogging ‘truth-seekers’, who are the iconoclasts and who are the cynics?
Anyways, I like this series of posts so please don’t think I’m being snarky, but sometimes it’s these little things that attract most of my attention.
October 26th, 2006 at 9:41 pm
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by that…
Yeah I think that’s a really good question. And I didn’t think you were being snarky…
October 27th, 2006 at 12:14 am
All I mean is this:
1) Iconoclasts think icons obscure what is really there.
2) Cynics think there is nothing really there at all.
3) Unless you’re talking about some kind of Schrodinger’s (sp?) Cat, then what they think has nothing to do with the underlying reality.
Therefore it doesn’t matter who destroys the icon or why. The truth (or lack thereof) is revealed.
My main point is that it’s what we do next that’s important. (And also that cynicism has a potential utility beyond its purpose, so it may not be wise to dismiss cynicism out of hand as being completely pointless.)
October 27th, 2006 at 2:43 am
I would say that they think it’s more of a dangerous distraction, not that it obscures anything. It doesn’t *hide* it per se….
Explain, without the Schrodinger cat reference…
I don’t get how this necessarily follows from what you’re saying. I’m missing something.
Well what is it that we do next and why is that important?
What do you mean by utility beyond purpose? What is its purpose?
I don’t think its completely pointless. I do think it is a defensive measure and that it helps people build their powers of discernment…
October 27th, 2006 at 6:12 am
That’s OK. Sometimes I pursue strange notions and the more I try to explain them the less clear they become. My bad. Or maybe there’s some kind of astrological impediment to communication this week. Wires are getting crossed all over the place. I’m giving up on this one. Haveagoodweekend.