Managing Encounter with Spiritual Genius: creating religious experience
I've just begun reading The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James for the second time in my life. Now that I have a few years of experience as an adult, it has been a goal to re-read a few books first encountered in my teens and early twenties. This book was not selected for that project: I cannot compare the two experiences of reading it because on the first exposure the book held no meaning for me. I picked it up now because I'm feeling a great deal of clarity about philosophy and, after some various religious experiences of my own, not so much clarity about my relations with spirituality and religion. This time it is proving much more engaging. And timely:
There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammadan. His religious has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-settings to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather. But such individuals are "geniuses" in the religious line... They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious authority and influence. (pp. 8 - 9)
James then goes on to give as an example George Fox, founder of the Quaker religion and very odd duck. Martin Luther King, Jr., who has been canonized in American culture and will be of special note next week on the fortieth anniversary of his murder, and Malcolm X, ignored with diligence in the same culture, are examples that I spent more time pondering in my early college days. Today the focus is on Rev. Jeremiah Wright and whether his rhetorical fervor has tainted the politician Barack Obama.
Genius of all kind has always been suspect because of its destabilizing aspect. The canonization of Martin Luther King, Jr. is troubling where the intent seems to be to tame his message into bland tradition. We know that this was President Lyndon Johnson's outright goal. Canonization is a more civilized means than whipping to turn King into a trophy in the sitting room,with the bonus that he's no longer around to open his mouth and get himself sent back outside. Christ, Mohammad and most anyone else that really matters have suffered the same civilizing indignity.
On the King holiday, when I will sometimes make it my civic duty to suggest reading Malcolm X instead, the response can be ferocious and insane- occasionally someone will suggest it is racist. Appearing to speak against Dr. King or elevating any other leader near him is Bad. Mentioning King's personal failings can be met with the same ferocity, although they are discussed evenhandedly in the landmark Parting the Waters, a three-book series discussing all aspects of King's life and influence and which is intellectual bedrock for the King canonization. (Malcolm X has many biographies, but no similar book of such substance and therefore I simply suggest reading his Autobiography.)
Is there such a thing as spiritual genius? Can spiritual leaders impart a special kind of wisdom, despite their inability to live balanced, measured, lives? In most of the world, the answer to the first question is seen as "yes." Europeans of the modern era, with their post-totalitarian wariness of all extreme ideas, are the only culture that leans toward a "no." When America is labeled backwards in relation to Europe, the issue almost always comes down to America's continued willingness to grapple with contrasts in ethical extremes. In less-developed nations it isn't about willingness; the factors of limited means make it an absolute requirement. The European slant sidesteps ethical decisions by declaring an underlying balance and unity of ethics which is still stuck on a form of the idealism that feeds totalitarianism.
America at large, long freed from philosophical idealism, nonetheless turns ideas into cartoons ("tradition", as referenced by James above). Literally: the canonization of King means that all good school children learn all good things about him, including in their cartoon books. The cartoon is that King was Good (and Malcolm was Bad). Somewhere, there is probably a cartoon that he went potty when his Mommy told him to. No one wants their children to imitate King literally: tilting at windmills in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, selected specifically because he was young and didn't know any better, copying someone else's homework. We Americans tend to sidestep the question of how wisdom comes from the unbalanced, attempting to isolate out wisdom while burying the questions of ethical difference and ethical failure. This leads to the absurdities of snake-oil televangelists and their followings. If you saw a flash of genius, the next step is to bury your head in the sand about the snake-oil. Sometimes it means you end a racist institution. Sometimes it means you pay for someone else's castle and vat of mascara.
My own thinking has been to view spiritual leadership with suspicion. Prior to my encounter with James' argument that the role is different from the role of citizen or philosopher, or politician, I considered the role dangerous to the individual. The way I saw it a good person (a good citizen, a sound philosopher, given to being a good theologian) sometimes found himself called to spiritual leadership. Accepting the call did bad things to people; it made them bad citizens. A person who took the role outside of an established religious institutional structure was in even more grave danger. James suggests that the person will find themself in the role because they are already unbalanced. My error was one of philosophical idealism- that all existential roles are fundamentally the same.
Given these common errors, Obama's speech on race was not just sane, but remarkably sane. He starts by asserting the argument for political genius, as bland as that may be: unity, unity, unity. The politician has a different job, and ethical challenge is not it. Think of Roosevelt's fireside chats. Balance. Stability. Obama, as a civilian in the world of spiritual genius and as a politician, is required to divide Wright's statements into good/bad and this he does. Here he fails somewhat- he isn't clear about the existential divide between his own locus of judgment and that of Wright, but this is a political speech and not a philosophical treatise.
His sanity is that he refuse to label Wright as Good or Bad. Wright is familiar to him, and in that familiarity Obama has been spiritually inspired. But he also places Wright's excesses at a distance. He judges, not as the European disdainer of religious genius judges and not as the American snake-oil viewer judges, but with honest judgment rooted in the reality of his experience.
Without intending to, Obama's speech draws focus on the absurdity of the spiritual leader gone politician. These are two separate roles. Obama speaks of Wright's sermon in terms of "mistake" and it would be mistake- if he were a politician. But in terms of evangelism and a call to repentance in the tradition of the Old Testament and the words of John the Baptist in the New, Wright was spot on. This is what Obama said:
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society were static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country... is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know-- what we have seen-- is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation [sic]. What we have already achieved gives us hope-- the audacity to hope-- for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
Obama is a politician. Repentance is not his game; the future is. Wright is part of the meaningful discourse that has influenced Obama, but Obama must make different judgments.
Back to the question of whether these odd ducks can impart any wisdom. I think the answer is: not directly. We make a mistake when we expect them directly feed wisdom into our minds and our hearts. Across America this morning, legions of Christians have walked into their churches, notebooks at the ready, expecting to get direct advice on how to live. Run-of-the-mill preachers, imparting tradition and providing solid leadership, are going to step up to the pulpit and give it. That is a valuable continuation of social norms and stability, but it is not spiritual genius.
Spiritual geniuses do not impart wisdom by direction, but rather by inspiration. Where they provide direction, they create tradition. Fox with his Quakers, Wesley with his Methodists, Smith with his Mormons. These men purposefully created institutions, but institutions pass on tradition rather than genius. Spiritual genius is not passed on, but rather interacted with. At best, the institutions create a environment where the spark of genius may survive from generation to generation. Obama is not meant to model his forward-facing politics on his Rev. Wright, but rather have it informed by Wright's calls to repentance.
Human growth requires an input from outside the models that we have already nurtured and established. I already have an idea what my ethics are and what my ideals are for most humane lifestyle. Continuing to interact only with what I see as balanced approaches to ethics and lifestyle isn't going to change anything. As James wrote, "It will profit us little..." I may not go in for the instability, I certainly don't want the crowd-at-large to turn to instability (really the number one reason some would like to duct-tape Wright's mouth shut- "It isn't that I'm too stupid to be allowed to hear him, but you might be."), but institutions are going to teach us nothing.
When Obama portrays Wright as the sometimes embarrassing uncle, I think he has made the correct judgment about how you or I should interact with the spiritual genius that we encounter. Close, but not too close. In the interaction with instability I will shift my stability. James would say that I continue to create my own individual interaction with divinity, an interaction which must be made and not copied.
P.S.
Where the topic is prejudice and complexity, I always have to bring up The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon Allport. My opinion is that this book should be required-reading for every high school student. I just learned today that both King and Malcolm X were also fans of the book.
Barry Saunders, a Raleigh News & Observer columnist who frequently comments on race and what I shall call (with absurd formality given the context of his columns) "the Black experience," had an excellent column on the flap over Wright.
To see how intellectually vacant, morally flat-footed, and in some cases utterly failing in courage the cartoon response to this question is, you can unfortunately do no worse than today's Sunday Forum (a kind of expanded letters-to-the-editor) "What to make of Obama and his pastor" in the Raleigh News & Observer.
While wandering Barnes & Noble to pick up Notes from Underground (previously 
