Asia Times Online's most interesting and at the same time, most controversial author, Spengler, has written something thought-provoking after quite some time now.
Among the things he discusses, he returns to a theme which is like a key motif of his writings:
Just what is paganism? It is the social order that underlies idolatry: the primacy of the animal ties of ancestry, in which the family is a small clan, the clan is a small tribe, and the tribe is a small nation. Pagans worship their own blood and soil at the altar of their nation. The attraction of self-worship is so strong that ancient Israel again and again fell back into pagan practices, while the self-styled "new Israel" of the Church was gutted in its home continent of Europe. America, a new people composed of people who abandoned ethnic allegiance, survived as the last home of Christianity in the industrial world.
There are some things I agree with and some I feel are baseless. Firstly, I can agree that attachment to clan and tribe at the expense of a wider nation, can definitely be called the starting point and anti-thesis to the Christian social agenda. In the historical sense, this was what was called 'paganism'. But this paganism has nothing to do with idolatry per se, because Christianity presents its own idolatry as well: Christ on the Crucifix, the Holy Virgin etc.It is just that while the pagan has idols which embody the psyche of his own limited clan or tribe, Christianity presents idols embodying the psyche of a vaster collection of mankind, encompassing nations. Basically, Christianity is only a vaster and radical paganism, where you exchange your limited clan,tribal, national loyalties, for a larger supra-national loyalty. Of course, it is a very lofty ideal, one that does offer the potential of uniting peoples, one which calls upon people to dissolve their narrow national psyches into a larger psyche.
Further, for reasons that could wholly be unintentional since Spengler's sole focus are the Abrahamic faiths, his discourse would make it seem that only Christianity and Judaism offer this possibility of a supra-national paganism or are even perfect in such an offer. On the contrary, in the East that we find this noble ideal, of the promise of clans, tribes, nations, merging their psyches into a vast supra-national psyche under the aegis of a Loving God or a Loving Principle, was not only offered, but developed with far less bloodshed and violence than the Judeo-Christian attempt. The Buddha was the first historical personage who offered this message and under his impulse, nations joined hands and melted into a community of monks and laypersons. The Orthodox Hindu reform movements that followed, developed this further under the head of different loving personifications of an almighty loving principle.
The shift from local, tribal psyches emerging into supra-national psyches happened in such a smooth series of steps, that it never led to the kinds of pogroms and persecutions of pagans at the hands of Christians, that happened in Europe. The horrible massacres of pagans and desecrations of pagan shrines by Christian zealots that was witnessed in Europe, was because the shift from the tribal psyche to the supra-national psyche was enforced in swell-swoop, a radical conversion. No wonder then, they would revert back to their national psyches as Spengler bemoaned. Pysches of human societies cannot be changed overnight and this process was well-understood by the thinkers of the East. Those who accepted the Buddha and therefore rejected their tribal identities did not go about butchering their fellow kinsmen if they still were 'pagan'. Nor did the peoples who came together under different Bhakti saints and thus rejected narrow caste affiliations then go about killing their caste-sectarians after acquiring political power.
