Pilgrimages to Nowhere?
Pilgrimages to Nowhere?
by Thomas Harrington at Brownstone Institute
In one of my trips back home after college, I remember my mother telling me, between half-embarrassed chuckles, how in high school she had caught herself genuflecting as she entered the row leading to her seat at the movie theater. My father, who was also there, confessed sheepishly to having had the same experience on a date at the same age.
To my knowledge, neither of my parents suffered from any sort of cognitive impairment in their youth. But what they did have in common was the experience of arriving at church each Sunday and having a neatly attired usher direct them and their family members down the aisle of the central nave into pews on one side or another with enough space for their group.
That, and going to movie theaters where a similarly attired usher, with flashlight in hand, would beckon them to descend the central aisle of the theater and take their seat in row on either side of that pathway.
Was their shared experience just a matter of slightly confused motor memory, akin to how I have occasionally caught myself putting a milk carton into the cabinet where I store glasses instead of in the refrigerator?
Surely that has something to do with it.
But in the case the church-theater dynamic I think that another factor was also at play: the fact that both church and the cinema were broadly recognized at that time as places where one went in a spirit of reverence, to become quiet and attentive in the face of something greater and presumably more interesting and instructive than one’s own, often repetitive, internal monologues.
In his memoir Ways of Escape, Graham Greene describes how, by sharpening his senses to take in the new, the beautiful, and the dangerous, travel became for him a way of holding off the always encroaching monotony of his daily existence.
It has played a similar role in my life.
When engaging in the voluntary estrangement of solo travel my sense of time expands, and with it, my attention to both the visual and aural details around me, along with the flow of my own thoughts and reflections.
In this second mode I often find myself pondering the mysteries and wonders of my own life trajectory, trying to remember who I was and what I thought was important in earlier moments of my life, and what realities came along to transform, or not, those previous ways of understanding myself and the world around me.
And if I am traveling together with my wife in foreign countries, especially in ones where we do not speak the language, we instinctively lower our voices when we speak to each other, not because we are afraid of being seen as Americans, but simply to demonstrate our deference, as visitors, to the ways of culture around us.
We go to such places to try and know something about their historical and social realities and know that by making ourselves “small” in this way, by signaling that we have made a conscious choice to momentarily put what we are think is important and what we are about to the side, we are in a much better psychological position to connect with others and to perhaps have an unexpected encounter with an interesting person or a new source of beauty.
While I wish I could portray the travel philosophy outlined above as being in some way original, it is not.
The idea of travel for reasons other than the conduct of commerce has a very long history in almost every culture, one that is indissolubly linked in most realms to the idea of pilgrimage, something Doris Donnelly eloquently describes in the following passage:
Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of roots and in the kingdom of motion. Although a high level of comfort enjoins us to keep two feet on the ground near home, friends and familiar surroundings, the truth is that we are also occasionally grasped by an intense desire to forsake the security of home-base and to travel across uncharted and sometimes hazardous terrain. The kingdom of motion beckons us every so often to pack an overnight bag, to call United or Amtrak, or to ready our own cars in order to make an outward journey which responds to our interior quest toward the center we lose in the clutter of everyday living. It seems necessary to go away from the ordinary and to break ties, even if temporarily, for the recovery to happen. Only then can we be “jerked clean out of the habitual,” as Thomas Merton wrote during his Asian journey, so that we might see what we need to see and find what needs to be found (Berton, Hart and Laughlin 233)…When the outward molds the inward, we become pilgrims.”
It seems, however, that this millenary ethos, which presumes a relationship between observation and motion on one hand, and reflection and spiritual growth on the other, is in danger of extinction and is being replaced by one which people travel not so much to learn about others—and therefore the self—but rather to play out an exhibitionist fantasy on their own terms, and in their own tongues against foreign places that function as far-flung versions of the proverbial Hollywood sound stage.
The selfie is the emblematic gesture of this new culture.
If only John Berger were still with us to explain, in a new chapter of his essential Ways of Seeing, what this still new art form tells us about the culture and the times in which we are living.
But since he is not, I’ll give it a try.
The selfie speaks to a contemporary culture of people raised on exaggerated legends of human mastery delivered to them in historically and thematically disconnected, micro-installments so as to short-circuit in them the natural human tendencies to seek organicity of thought, and to try and place the mystery of the self and one’s circumstance in the broader context of space and time.
It is thus a culture where wonder and the concept of the sacred play ever-diminishing roles.
Shorn of these once essential mental habits and subjected to the constant drumbeat of advertising—the materialist substitute of the village church bells that once reminded us of the passage of time and the advisability of occasionally pondering the realms of mystery above or beyond the line of the horizon—a person can truly come to believe that he or she is the measure of all things, and to see other human beings as, at best, meaningless abstractions, and at worst, competitive threats to his or her ability to “be all that they can be.” In this narcissistic context, it is only natural that they should make themselves the favorite subject of their not-so-roving eyes.
Yet, we still have this thing called travel in our culture, an institution that is still broadly viewed in positive terms, and is, in fact, more available to the non-rich than at any time in history.
It thus could be argued that we are on the verge of a revolution of consciousness where the practice of travel, carried out in the long-standing spirit of pilgrimage, will engender new and unforeseen levels of empathy and spiritual growth in our cultures. This was long my hope and was the reason I spent more than two decades running a study program for American college students in Spain.
What I did not understand until the very end of my time in that role was just how disrespectful of transcendental thinking consumer culture is, and how, if we engage with it in the absence of a spiritual game plan, it can turn the search for human and esthetic discoveries into an endless series of economic transactions framed by what Dean MacCannell calls “staged authenticity,” in which both traveler and native “provider” faintly pretend that a human encounter of genuine human significance is taking place.
But, of course, MacCannell coined that memorable phrase and concept just over 50 years ago, a time when, owing to the continued vitality of religious practice in the West, most citizens there still presumed that life existed on two planes, one comprised of material things that are immediately knowable through the senses, and another made up of certain hidden realities or truths that only emerge from behind that screen of the immediate when and if we quite willfully set out to find them.
In short, he could assume that most of us out there were in some way looking for the authentic even as hucksters were busy plying us with ersatz versions of the same.
Can we still assume that in today’s world? It seems that we cannot.
Observing things here in heavily touristed Barcelona, I see masses of visitors who are seemingly quite content to seek out and consume the very food products they could find in any corner of the so-called developed world. And who treat those with whom they interact in stores and restaurants with the same studied indifference most Americans have come to display with the beleaguered and ill-paid employees at their local McDonald’s.
And then there is the behavior of the crowds that gather for hours daily in front of places like the famous Block of Discord on the Passeig de Gràcia. Here, crowds mill around at all hours of the day taking varieties of the same snapshot of the buildings before them that hundreds of others are taking at the very same moment. This, while many more turn their backs to the spectacular modernist buildings and take multiple selfies to send back to someone somewhere else.
A scene of personal growth rooted in dialogue with something new and strange? A sense of reverence before the creations of the three architectural geniuses (Domènech i Montaner, Puig i Cadafalch, and Antoni Gaudí) and an interest in the extraordinary moment of Catalan cultural vitality (1870-1920) from which their creations sprang?
No, what hangs over this space is the unmistakable air of people who’ve been told that there is something important or worthwhile to be seen here, but that owing to the systematic suppression of the sojourning spirit in their cultural training, don’t have the inner resources to begin the process of finding out what, in fact, it might be.
And rather than admit the reality of their functional inertness before the new and different, they seek refuge in empty imitation and the faux security and banality of electronic renditions of their own mugs.
Why did they come? Probably because, as in the case of the lockdowns, the masks, and the vaccines, someone, or a bunch of people, told them it was a good thing to do, and to have on their talking resumé as they “advance” through the linear and materially conformed “race” of life.
Quite far from the picture, it seems, is any notion that coming here might have anything to do with being “jerked clean from the habitual” in order to “find what needs to be found” in the sacred cosmos of their inner lives.
Pilgrimages to Nowhere?
by Thomas Harrington at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society