Religion, Dogma, and Metamodernity

2025-09-23

Elsewhere on this capsule you will find a brief overview of my religious journey so far. I am still somewhat uneasy with the label of Buddhist and I never expected to be one, or indeed any kind of religious person. I think this has more to do with the shortcomings of that word, religion, than it does with me being all that peculiar.

Religion is a famously difficult concept to define, so I won't. Some scholars explicitly gave up on hope of defining it. It's very much a tacit, intuitive, implicit type of knowing, to know what religion is. And I think many are far too reductive in their personal definitions.

One thing about religion that many are shocked to find out, is that it's a modern idea. The ancients did not have a concept of it and most words we translate to that now (e.g., dharma) were more commonly translated as law. It is a Western invention, though I don't particularly put much stock in that. Many things labeled Western by today's academics are universal, it's just not in fashion to say so at the moment. But it is rather new, historically speaking. It's funny that so many people today identify as "spiritual but not religious" because for a long time in a lot of places, there was no distinction between the two (nor with other concepts like magic). Likewise, today's self-avowed atheists put a lot of stock in that label, but I don't think it's anywhere near as descriptive or useful as they might think.

I grew up in a household that was not dogmatic about its religion. At least, that's how I used to think about it. Rather, I was raised against dogma in general. The last line of my "baseline" addresses this because it's something I felt itching at me after listing my basic beliefs. Even young, I saw that atheists were capable of hitting one target, against religion, while missing that dogma one altogether. In my time since then, I've seen more and more examples. I'm now convinced it's closer to the mark on what ails society. But even as I write that, I feel the itch, that "convinced" is an example of exactly what I'm talking about. Therein lies the postmodern.

Postmodernism is a famously difficult concept to define, so I won't. At least this time, that appears to be intentional by its internal logic? In any event, I would ascribe things like Trump worship or wokeness to postmodern religions. There is an academic argument about the history of ideas with postmodernism and critical theory forming the basis for the latter. A few people have made it publicly, but my efforts to get even a single person who holds that dogma to even understand it, let alone change their mind, have been utterly fruitless. I'm tired of trying, so I won't. In the former case it's mostly prototype-matching and the extreme opposition to facts. For a long time, I worried about both, extensively. Lately, I find myself just watching the metamodern pendulum swing. Metamodern? Extremely esoteric but still difficult concept to define, and an exercise left to the reader. Or maybe...

I'm just sittin' here watchin' the wheels go 'round and 'round

I really love to watch them roll

No longer ridin' on the merry-go-round

I just had to let it go

It is an interesting postscript, I think, to mention that there is art that I find not the greatest, but delightfully endearing, that the most artsy types I know seem to hate or just not know about. Examples would be Everything Everywhere All At Once or the TV show Kidding by Michel Gondry, respectively.