Buddhist Romanticism

The first is that modern society is more destructive of a sense of inner
wholeness and outer connectedness than anything even the Romantics
knew. Economically and politically, we are more and more dependent on
wider and wider circles of other people, yet most of those dependencies are
kept hidden from view. Our food and clothing come from the store, but
how they got there, or who is responsible for ensuring a continual supply,
we don’t know. When investigative reporters track down the web of
connections from field to final product in our hands, the bare facts read like
an exposé. Fashionable sweatshirts, for example, come from Uzbekistani
cotton woven in Iran, sewn in South Korea, and stored in Kentucky: an
unstable web of interdependencies that involve not a little suffering, both
for the exploited producers and for those pushed out of the production web
by cheaper labor. Our monetary supply, which keeps these
interdependencies flowing, has been converted into electronic signals
manipulated by international financiers of unknown allegiances and
constantly open to cyber attack.
Whether or not we know these details, we intuitively sense the
fragmentation and uncertainty inherent in such an unstable system. The
result is that many of us feel a need for a sense of wholeness. For those who
benefit from the hidden dependencies of modern life, a corollary need is a
sense of reassurance that interconnectedness is reliable and benign—or, if
not yet benign, that feasible reforms can make it that way. Such people
want to hear that they can safely place their trust in the principle of
interconnectedness without fear that it will turn on them or let them down.
When Buddhist Romanticism affirms the Oneness of the universe and the
benevolence of interconnectedness, it tells these people what they want to
hear.
A second aspect of modern culture conducive to the popularity of
Buddhist Romanticism is the overload of information poured into our eyes
and ears every day. Never before have people been subjected to such a
relentless barrage of data from strangers. The sheer amount of data
challenges the mind’s ability to absorb it; the fact that it is coming from
strangers leaves, at least on a sub-conscious level, a lingering doubt as to
where to place our trust. Especially when we learn that much of the news
twenty or thirty years ago was little more than propaganda, we
instinctively suspect that the news of today will ultimately be revealed to be
a fabric of lies as well.
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