Defining my terms: The Theosophical Approach

A major problem that discussions of culture and custom suffer from is a failure to appreciate origin and perspective. This is a byproduct of the modern philosophy of Relativism, the idiot nephew of Materialism in my view. One day soon, I intend to go in to some depth on the deep problems that I see in these concepts and elaborate my feelings surrounding them, but now is not the time. At present, I aim to describe what I call the Theosophical Approach to talking about Cultures and Customs.

You may have noticed by now that I really don't have much respect for Theosophy, and are therefore assuming that the Theosophical Approach is not exactly a good one. You would be correct in this assumption. I have mentioned it on previous occasions and went into a bit of history concerning the organization that relates to this phrase, and I will do so again here for clarity as I intend this article to be a future reference to point to as necessary. The Theosophical Approach is an effort to boil things down until there is an appearance that they all fit together neatly, regardless of whether they are actually meant to. It is a narrative creating method based on assumptions and sophistry, in short.

Like the Sophists of Plato's day, the Theosophical Approach is not always wrong and it is for this reason that it can be effective. Referring to world Traditions, we will find that most include stories of floods and folklore about fairies for example. These are good clues about what to expect when you are navigating Traditions, but it is a dangerous mistake to assume prima facia that all Traditions are necessarily mirrors of each other, cracked or otherwise. There may indeed be a common wellspring from which the peoples of the world at some point in the mists of antiquity took a sip, but there are some that hold that there is more than one well.

Relativism is the idea that all things are relative, in short. A tautology, I know. Some people really think that all cultures are beautiful, to include ones where people still eat each other and share little boys after hours. Maybe I'm just a snob, but I think some cultures are indeed inferior. This brings us back around to the Theosophical Approach, which is a similar idea. They noted that some Traditions had a wildly different cosmological outlook than others, and debated amongst each other how best to start their investigation of world Traditions. Eventually, it came down to either a Biblical narrative or a Hindu narrative to proceed roughly along.

The Theosophical Approach, in this context, is to assume that you can draw a neat little map once you have made your educated guess and just boil everything down in a given subject until you can make it all fit into your model. The hilarity of this, as you may have already noticed, is that it is a fallacy. At the very beginning, the Theosophists decided that one approach is wrong and the other right. The entire premise began with a sweeping value judgment rooted primarily in exclusivist egoism, and this is revealed with the observation that the Christians were a minority and the primary founders were biased towards eastern notions going into the discussions. Who was right or wrong isn't the issue, rather the point is that the debates were settled before they began and it was all a dog and pony show. They did what Christians are generally known for, and justified it with a facade of intellectualism beyond that of most previous cults.

An example of a failing of the Theosophical Approach in the aforementioned context is its own origin story. The Theosophists themselves essentially dressed up the Big Bang theory because it resembles the Hindu notion of Brahma exhaling the cosmos into existence, and eventually inhaling it all back in. This is all fine and good, and in their defense the Christian mythology of the 7 Days of Creation isn't too terribly different as long as we aren't digging into the weeds too far. The problems crop up when we start looking afield, however. Many ancient European traditions are QUITE different from the model presented by Hindu and Christianity. There is evidence that the Scandinavian story of Ymir is probably a surviving remnant of the Proto Indo European Creation story, or at the least an ancient Proto Germanic Creation story. Either way, on its face the broad elements are quite divergent from Hindu or Christianity. For a less subtle example of the Theosophical Approach failing in its Relativistic assumptions, we can turn to the seemingly ubiquitous flood narrative. Iran has neither a great flood nor a Noah figure. Instead, it has a great blizzard and a commandment to build an underground shelter to weather the icy conditions. There are similar African tales, incidentally.

This may amount to exercise in pedantry to describe an accusation of intellectual laziness. In all fairness, I am not inclined to argue that point. I simply hate people who claim to have a position or claim to be making a stand but won't define their position. Or worse, suffer from the delusion that they have some special insight into broad issues that they really have only a shallow understanding of. The latter especially are what this concept describes. It is ignorance born of elitist dismissiveness. A person engaging in it knows just enough to sound smart, but not enough to actually defend anything of substance concerning a subject. And yet, they still want to have a stake in a particular subject.

Hopefully, my disdain is hereby clarified. By all means, study all of the things. Just don't delude yourself into thinking they're all merely versions of the same things, because that's lazy at best and insulting at worst.

The pedantic may note that all the wellsprings in the end spout water, so it's all the same, right?

The romantic (like me) will note that the water from each wellspring has been flavoured by very different mineral mixes along the way from the common origin to the point that each cup of water from each well has entirely different properties and flavours to the point that saying "well ackshualley!" about the shared source is meaningless and entirely unhelpful when, say, making tea or liquor.

I think this applies to myths too.

Sure, at their core mythology comes from the same source. But the path that leads from that origin through our ginormous prehistory, across the vast distances we spread, and the radically different experiences we had along the way has led to a whole lot of mythical "mineral content" being added to the water such that what comes out is different in every meaningful profile. Reductionism (materialism's reductio ad absurdum kissing cousin) does damnable violence to understanding and communication as a result.

And what bothers me about all this is where they draw the line. They draw the line in that video I shared earlier at the mass exodus from Africa. But why? They're drawing the line from a reductionist culture standpoint. But this is silly. Culture is based on biology. Why aren't they researching how our brains' very constructs shape myths? Why are they not exploring the biology of myths?

Oh, wait. Biology is just physics a couple of levels up. They should be studying how quarks interact to form Bird Scout/Earth Diver mythology!

I mean if reductionism is good to the point that you can say all myths started from Earth Diver mythology, surely we can take a step farther down in the reduction chain and draw lines from top quarks interacting with charm quarks to give us Bird Scouts!

Yes, Holy Divers are what all mythical heroes boil down to. Disregard all of the fine details about founded cities and slain tyrants that we can verify with actual archeology and stop pretending that Carl Jung and Hesiod may have had a point, bigot!

We know that people of African descent have health problems when they move to Scandinavia or the European highlands, and the sweltering savannas of Africa disagree with Europeans so it's certainly safe to assume that there really is a biology to culture. These are just casual imperical observations, as is the notion that we used to conduct studies to verify such things....