Needing New Ideas

Richard Ostrofsky
(Publication Date Unknown)
When things are going wrong, the human mind tends to respond in one of
two ways, completely opposite to one another: To fix our problems, either
we look for new ideas and revolutionary changes or we call for traditional
values and a return to the good old customs and arrangements. Which
direction a given individual takes is largely a matter of temperament, but
there are arguments on both sides: Traditionalists can say that the old is
tried and true, while reform is uncertain and divisive. It is always much
easier to agree that change is needed than to agree on particular changes.
Against them, the radicals can claim that the old ways are now irrelevant,
and that the old attitudes, beliefs and habits are responsible for the present
troubles. The resulting conflict is always fought out on a political level by
self-serving organizations; and what mostly happens is that the problems go
unsolved while neither side has its program properly tried. Thus, history
lurches its way from one disaster to another, while the bickering continues.
To judge by the media, and by conversations with some of my
customers, quite a few people today are hoping for or actively working
toward a revival of old-fashioned Christian ideas and values as a remedy for
the ills of today’s world. I’m on the other side: I see our own age as so
radically different from the world of two thousand years ago that any claim
of “Revealed Truth” must be a source of conflict and further social
disintegration. Here is a list of ways in which my world seems to differ
drastically from that of the ancient religious Teachers; and I invite my
readers’ thoughts on what the Master of their choice would have to say
about these facts of modern life:
• To begin with, science has shown us a world in which Man is not
the measure of all things. Like it or not, we find ourselves in a
cosmos not adjusted to the human scale at all, and with Man not at
its centre.
• We live today in a global society, pressing against its ecological
limits. We can no longer treat the world as given us for immediate,
human advantage. We have done so up until now, and the planet is
 biting back.
• We live in a plural world, too closely knit to afford the luxury of
excluding or marginalizing people we don’t like. The traffic in
goods and ideas is global, and every large city reflects this fact. You
might not want your daughter to marry one of them, but there’s a
fair chance she will do so whether you give your blessing or not.
• In the olden times, change came very slowly. People lived and
labored much as their parents did, and could expect their children to
do the same. Today, change has been institutionalized, with new
technologies every year, and new fashions in world-view every
decade. Granted that the biology of the human animal has not
changed much in the last few thousand years, people are seriously
talking today about “transcending human biology.” The famous line
in Ecclesiastes about “nothing new under the sun” is seriously
misleading today, though largely true when it was written.1
• Again, in the old days, most communities were self-sufficient, or
very nearly so. Today, it is all but impossible to achieve a truly
independent lifestyle. Every individual is closely dependent on a
multitude of others, and on “the system” as a whole. When we try
to love our neighbor, we find that our relationship to him involves
an inseparable mix of conflicting and mutual interests.
• Today, the individual confronts a vast and expanding body of
theoretical knowledge, too big for any individual even to glimpse as
a whole, let alone master.
• Today, Paley’s watchmaker argument (convincing even to skeptical
David Hume as little as two hundred and fifty years ago) no longer
convinces anyone who does not willfully ignore all evidence and
argument to the contrary. At least for theoretical purposes, we no
longer need a designer-God. The Western world has discovered the
self-so (intuited by the Taoists twenty five hundred years ago) as a
principle of autonomous organization. More, we begin to
understand how the self-so works.
• For various reasons, our concept of a human “self” has changed,

1 On the scope and rate of change today, see Ray Kurzweil's book, The
Singularity is Near – or the Science and Technology section in your daily
newspaper.
 Our focus today is on “human rights,”on a goal of “self-
actualization,”and on the necessity of having something valuable to
sell in the global marketplace. Life is longer today, jobs are more
varied, people more highly individuated. People may hunger for
community and tradition, but the pull of the marketplace and the
big city are all against them.
I remain unconvinced that any of the ancient Teachers or traditions has
much to say about the points I've just enumerated. Rather it seems to me
that the encounter of numerous religious and cultural traditions on a
stressed and shrinking planet is itself one of the central difficulties of our
age, regarding which, none of the ancient traditions has much to offer. The
urgent spiritual need, I think, is for a reconciliation of our Western concepts
of individuality with the Eastern emphasis on human embeddedness in the
social and natural world, and for a renewed public commitment to balanced,
loving, critical thought.
But I'm not holding my breath.