Our historical moment is, irreparably, post-Mass Politics. This condition not only spells the end of group struggle, but also diminishes our internal capacity as individuals: we are completely adaptive to anything external, porous to the point of self-effacement. Under these circumstances, we are left to the whim of one or another consumer identity, each one identical to the last (although we couldn’t possibly admit this about our own set of identity-markers). Averse to change, mired in flux, we have no prospects of forming a positive notion of the future nor a positive image of our own identity.
Casting aside the infographic and any cultural analysis clouded by contemporary bitterness, let us consider two prototypical cases of American assimilation from the past century: the Armenians and the Jews. (Before you start to throw accusations, let me be clear that we are all Armenians and Jews here, both you and I.) The two groups didn’t simply assimilate to the American way, but opened themselves up to consumerism. The difference is key.
Today, Armenians and Jews living in the United States understand their group and individual identities through two pillars:
1) The modern states of Armenia and Israel, respectively.
2) Twin historical oppressions each culminating in genocide during the first half of the 20th century.
These are the modes through which an American of Armenian or Jewish ancestry navigates their life. And despite these very real distinctions, Armenians and Jews belonging to the west share a broadly global psyche with the rest of the consumption-oriented world. In fact, it is due to their cultural difference apropos that they so thoroughly stand for the archetypal consumer.
Consumer identity allows us, as individuals, to distinguish and cohere ourselves within the wider pool of global Americans. The particular shape of that consumer identity looks different with each mask (an Armenian-American high school student might eat different food than their WASP-ier counterparts), but the general form of consumer identity more or less flattens us into one capitalist experience. We are all the same: we are all allowed to construct our own sense of the world and our own notion of our difference within that world. This is the essence of the global American experience, the true freedom offered by the American system.
Only through a vast Emersonian project can we transcend this blurred drift between individual and cultural experience in the secularized world (it is, at least initially, an individual escape–there is no way around it): religious experience.
There was once a third pillar of Armenian and Jewish identity, now-forgotten among fully-Americanized subjects–Religion. The first nation to adopt Christianity, the Church has determined the nature of Armenia’s conflicts and oppression for nearly two millennia. Although the dynamics at play between Armenians and Turks developed via non-religious social antagonisms specific to the Ottoman world, it was the Armenian Church which originally set them apart, and which maintained their particular cultural identity within the greater region. Armenians understood themselves through Christianity, much more so than their relationship to the state-entity which presided over their lives at any given time; and much more so than their sense of historical oppression, since one’s own Armenian Christianity was inextricably bound to, and was understood to be the origin of that oppression.
Named for their faith, the religious “pillar” is even more self-evident when considering the Jews’ perception of themselves. The early Zionist Ahad Ha’am famously remarked, “More than Jews have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews.”
And yet, with both Armenian-Americans and American Jews, religious practice has drastically diminished. This is hardly surprising, as identity has shifted from a dynamic site of practice to an unavoidable, inevitable scar: this is who I am. Worse still, the shift from dynamic to stable self-identification has also prevented us from experiencing life to its richest capacity. Instead, we interpret life as-it-comes-at-us according to the rigid notions of 'who I am' already. Cultural identity today simply acts as a mode of describing oneself in a psychically marketized environment–there is no room for personal experience in this world, since regaining wonder in our own perception of the world would render unnecessary our impulse to occupy ourselves with ‘content.’ We need this content because, were we to stand alone with our thoughts, we would realize that we have been voided of the possibility for wonder on our own terms–the ability to experience wonder alone. We all intuitively understand that the basis of our human experience relies on this wonder, and our deadening has been so traumatic that we would rather stave off that confrontation until our deathbeds than meet our hollowed selves today with the prospect of rejuvenation. Among Americans of a certain class, fully assimilated to the capitalist psyche, deeply distressed at their assimilation, and harboring a crippling reflexiveness about the whole business, the cultural identities with which they ascribe to themselves simply act as yet another form of content which separates themselves from personal experience. There is no need–it is actually impossible–to really taste the sabich sandwich, since I am instead focusing on my cultural relation to it.
Religion alone will not rehabilitate our wonder, since it may still fall prey to market forces inhabiting our person and distancing ourselves from ourselves. Religious experience, however, accessed only through the particular institutions of Religion, can achieve this feat. (This is because feeling–love, grief–is the only refuge of man impervious to the complete appropriation of market forces. The market will always capitalize on our feeling, but our ability to love is resilient.)
It is true that things like LSD can also trigger genuine spiritual feeling. On a mass cultural level, however, the reactivation of Religion is the only way to induce a spiritual coming-to-terms with ourselves and with the marketized world. LSD and Religion both facilitate revelations about oneself and about the world, but the former is again severely limited by market forces–we are encouraged to drop acid on TV to have fun, not to experience wonder. There is a reason that mass culture (to which Megachurches belong, true, but it is undeniable that HBO is in the ascendancy) unequivocally disregards spiritual experience and, in the broadest sense, wonder, considering it fundamentally antiquated.
The spiritual experience of our ancestors is carried by the religious institutions still with us–communion, havdalah: Ritual in the abstract, but imbued with generations of personhood from each Mass or Shabbat, from each locale that witnessed the ceremony, and from each ancestor’s relationship to it. Will our grandchildren take any wonder from the Bass Pro Shops hat that you wore in your 20s? Perhaps it will scratch an itch of religious nostalgia inherited from past generations, but nothing more. Although it is fashionable to say otherwise today, it must be concluded that commercialism is not a religion: what social or personal obligations are confirmed and ritualized through its practice? Commercialism is in fact the stripping away of obligation to others and to oneself through ritual; and in this meek, out-of-body state, we are just miserable enough to wait for death while still lacking the courage to get it over with.