killing religion, tolerating culture

Apparently, China’s State Administration of Religious Affairs has instituted Order No. 5, a law announcing: “the management measures for the reincarnation of living Buddhas in Tibetan Buddhism.” This “important move to institutionalize management on reincarnation” basically prohibits Buddhist monks from returning from the dead without government permission”

Slavoj Zizek in a New York Times op-ed piece, responds:

It is all too easy to laugh at the idea of an atheist power regulating something that, in its eyes, doesn’t exist. However, do we believe in it? When in 2001 the Taliban in Afghanistan destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, many Westerners were outraged — but how many of them actually believed in the divinity of the Buddha? Rather, we were angered because the Taliban did not show appropriate respect for the “cultural heritage” of their country. Unlike us sophisticates, they really believed in their own religion, and thus had no great respect for the cultural value of the monuments of other religions.

The significant issue for the West here is not Buddhas and lamas, but what we mean when we refer to “culture.” All human sciences are turning into a branch of cultural studies. While there are of course many religious believers in the West, especially in the United States, vast numbers of our societal elite follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores of our tradition only out of respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong: Christmas trees in shopping centers every December; neighborhood Easter egg hunts; Passover dinners celebrated by nonbelieving Jews.**

“Culture” has commonly become the name for all those things we practice without really taking seriously. And this is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians” with a “medieval mindset”: they dare to take their beliefs seriously. Today, we seem to see the ultimate threat to culture as coming from those who live immediately in their culture, who lack the proper distance.**

Perhaps we find China’s reincarnation laws so outrageous not because they are alien to our sensibility, but because they spill the secret of what we have done for so long: respectfully tolerating what we don’t take quite seriously, and trying to contain its political consequences through the law.

~

On a side note, Zizek also points out that these government measures may pale in comparison to other economic transformation—Lhasa now is also home to karaoke bars and Disney-like Buddhist theme parks:

“In short, the media image of brutal Chinese soldiers terrorizing Buddhist monks conceals a much more effective American-style socioeconomic transformation: in a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the status of the Native Americans in the United States. Beijing finally learned the lesson: what is the oppressive power of secret police forces, camps and Red Guards destroying ancient monuments compared to the power of unbridled capitalism to undermine all traditional social relations?”

Better than all the crusades and genocides and laws, what better killer of religion than the promise of material comfort?


* Except that for all I know, there’s nothing ACTUALLY Christian about Christmas trees and Easter egg hunts. I guess I owe my thanks to Hallmark, but I can’t be too critical, I use their e-cards.
** As a counterpoint, Meic Pearse argues in his book Why the Rest hates the West: "By their constant, mindlessly inaccurate resort to the “f-word” – fundamentalism – to describe the upsurge of religious fervor in much of the non-West, Western secularists are employing a boo-word that long ago lost its original meaning and has come to signify “more-religious-than-I-happen-to-like”—and thus to say more about the speaker than about the persons, things or phenomena described. It is one more signifier that Western self-styles “multiculturalists” are, in fact, refusing to take seriously any culture but their own