“The medium and the message” of religion?

“Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”

Marshall McLuhan

by Susantha Hewa

Year in and year out we are rejuvenated by a chain of cultural and religious events among which are Deepavali, Ramadan, Vesak, Poson, Maha Shivaratri, Thai Pongal, Easter, Good Friday, and Christmas. Generally, we are interested in celebrating these events but much less so in thinking of religion outside the prescription.

As we grow up, we begin to talk about politics, the economy, diseases, corruption, social issues, health issues, education, crimes, environment, climate, pollution, accidents, drinking, gambling and many other issues that affect our daily lives. And we talk about them without inhibitions or set boundaries, according to our lights, and being informed about the changing views and perspectives. Surely, you aren’t always correct in your views about any of them, but you constantly change and refine them as you become open to different or opposing views. The result is that you become more informed and more flexible. It helps build more fluidity of ideas and thus more democracy. However, we tread more cautiously when we come to terrains like customs, beliefs, traditions, cultural practices, age-old myths, superstitions and religion. Surely, they are part and parcel of daily existence just like the others, but they are shielded by convention. As a result, we generally shun them as taboos. So, the passing years make little difference in our views of them and depending on how insulated or open-minded you are about any of them, you change the distance between you and your ancestors in the relevant area. The more we shy away from them, the closer we get to primitivity. However, there is one silver lining. Whereas you are naturally ill at ease about not being sufficiently updated about the current perspectives of most other issues, you don’t have to be embarrassed about holding your great-grandfather’s views about the ‘protected’ subjects like conventions, customs, cultural practices, religion, etc.

Coming back to the festivities mentioned in the first paragraph for a moment. The celebration of those events contributes to keeping alive what may be called the “spirit of religion” and passing it over to the next generation. As individuals, as well as societies, we take part in many of these events and each time we celebrate them, we get into a religious mood of sorts, which may be different in intensity and character from person to person. And, as a result, we also become more and more benign, humane, compassionate, sensitive, broadminded, intelligent, peace-loving, empathetic, etc. Or do we? Isn’t our engagement in these religious events supposed to make us more and more refined and civilized? Is it unreasonable to expect our commitment to each of these religious experiences to make us a bit better in our sensibilities? Or are they events that stir our ‘religious’ feelings for the moment and leave us no better than we were? Of course, they make us more ardent followers of these rituals year after year, but whether they sensitize us to be more united as humans on a broader canvas is debatable, if the present level of lack of sympathy among people is any indication.

This year, too, while we are routinely energized by the religious events on the calendar, we are getting our regular dose of war news coming from different parts of the world. Some of them make the headlines, others do not. The devastation in Gaza is continuously sending shock waves across the world every now and then. The pace and magnitude of the destruction in Gaza is said to be unparalleled in recent history. As Amnesty International has announced, “Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them.” Equally chilling are the mass killings happening in other places although they may not get enough media cover. However, unless you are sufficiently naïve, you are not likely to wonder why all those recurring events that raises our religiosity haven’t done much to end largescale violence and bring about a saner world. You can ask that question only at the risk of being treated as weird. Surely, many would tell you that ‘religion’, as we have known for donkey’s years, hasn’t ever been able to stop any of the wars that have decimated millions of people at different times in different places and that wars have never shunned religion.

As history may give evidence, it is asking a lot to count on religion to solve our most critical problems like wars, famines, plagues, etc., that have taken their toll on millions of people. Not only in antiquity, even now we resort to religious rituals to get rid of serious problems. For example, during the COVID–19 pandemic, we turned to various religious rituals in addition to superstitious practices in the hope of lessening its virulence, but in vain. On the contrary, the congregation of devotees helped the spread of the virus. Unfortunately, religion has been a direct cause of violence and bloodletting at different times throughout history. As such, you can’t blame those people who are not happy about the antiquated tryst between war and religion, if they yearn for the emergence of a new religion – a philosophy, doctrine, vision, dharma, ethics, call it what you may – which can find ways of effectively influencing the warmongers who don’t seem to recognize how their traditional religions can ever be relevant to our experiential, earthly life.

For many, our earthly life is of no significance without that ‘afterlife’; it’s a mere interim period to prepare for eternal happiness on the other side. Of course, there are differences among the ways in which religions describe afterlife, but they have without exception, have made us conscious of an afterlife, investing it with greater meaning and significance than this life. Very often, the obsession with that afterlife tends to belittle, if not overlook, the horrors of violence in ‘this’ life. Sam Harris says, “One of the problems with religion is that it creates in-group loyalty and out-group hostility, even when members of one’s own group are behaving like psychopaths”. This is enough reason to be disturbed and curious about why religions have failed to sensitize people towards miseries of our own making.

However, it is useless to blame religion for failing to stop wars or major violence. Let’s take a step back to ask the obvious question. If it’s not religion that causes estrangement and bias, then what? Can this be understood with reference to a secular theory? Have we made religions to be what they have been, and what they will be, by using a model of communication of our own making, which doesn’t seem to have any inseparable or necessary connection to religion? In other words, would it be better for us to continue to transmit religion to succeeding generations in the same way we have been doing for ages through inheritance?

Well, all may agree that the content or the ‘message’ of every religion subscribes to a meaningful life. However, after all these centuries of religious instruction we are no better than our ancestors when it comes to the all-important problem of conflict resolution. There’s the rub. If all religions are wise in their content what on earth could have rendered them ineffective in making us a bit more sober?

The philosopher and media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, hopefully, may throw at least a little light on the intractable problem of why religion is not what it is intended to be, that is, to serve as a promoter of peace and goodwill. According to Prof. McLuhan, “The medium is the message” in all forms of communication. He emphasized that the message is so much a part of the medium through which it is communicated and perceived by us, that our primary focus in understanding communication should be the medium, because the message is embedded in the medium. Taking the light bulb as an example, he showed that it was a medium without ‘content’, but it changed everything around it, including our perceptions, the numerous ways in which we organize our work, etc. Some may say that it is not very prudent to borrow from McLuhan to understand religion-related communication. But we cannot think of the passing of religion to progeny without a medium through which it comes to us no matter how much aura it has gathered around it. That is, we cannot consider religion as an abstraction naturally descending on us with no human intervention.

What is the medium through which religion has customarily been communicated for centuries? It comes to us as a cultural experience together with all other traditions. It is given to us by parents and the relevant institutions of the community. As far as the receivers are concerned, it is much more of an overarching and multifaceted experience than it is ‘learning’ per se? It is an inescapable experience we begin to get from our early childhood in which knowledge resulting from conscious learning is virtually absent and unworkable. As children, we all have “experienced” religion in a variety of customary ways with no adequate cognitive resources to understand it. The means of religious communication, from what we know quite well, is repeated exposure. It defines what we understand as religion.

The same content or ‘message’ transmitted through two different processes or ‘mediums’ wouldn’t be the same message. To put it in a better way, we cannot conceptualize message independent of the means of its communication. In other words, religion, when it is embedded in a communication model, we may call its medium, cannot escape being determined by the medium used.

If a religion, or religions, were to come to us along with other subjects in the school curriculum bypassing that no-escape childhood experience, then it wouldn’t be the same ‘religion’ as we have come to know it for millennia, which has unwittingly created alienation amongst us. Thus, if we want religion to be more effective in addressing burning problems, perhaps we have to turn to another medium of communication.