Beyond Modernity’s Tunnel: Reclaiming the Primordial Tradition
An Interview With Huston Smith by Ronan Hallowell
February 13, 2001

Upon the publication of Huston Smith's most recent book, Why Religion Matters, CIIS alumnus Ronan Hallowell conducted the interview below, recapping the most salient points of Dr. Smith's long and distinguished career.

RH: You've had a long and illustrious career and have done many different things. At this point in your life what motivated you to write your current book Why Religion Matters?

HS: Well, I like that question a lot, because there is a definite reason. Throughout my career that I have enjoyed, teaching and writing, I have tried to present a pleasant face towards the world. But, the world being the pigsty that it is, is not always so pleasant. There is a beauty to it but it sure has its glitches. Some of them, natural disasters and so on are unavoidable, but I am talking about the human created tragedies, things that could be avoided in our culture. I am talking about excessive materialism, reductionism, consumerism, the ad-blitz, and things like that. For a long time when I ran into those things, I more or less swallowed them and stuffed them into the duffel bag of my inner self, but that duffel bag was getting pretty crowded and it was more and more like stuffing a sleeping bag. I had to really work at it, and finally I decided that I didn't want to carry all those pet peeves with me to my grave so I decided to dump them on the world and that is what I did in this book. It is a very opinionated book. That is my "flip" way of putting it. Underneath all this I am really in dead earnest in what I say within that book. One response to the book that I like very much was a very serious letter that said, "I think that the future of the church is," and then he puts a dash in, "--No, I am going to broaden that, the future of the world depends on the issue you described in this book." Well, I like that because I do think that it is a serious issue. But then another response which tops that in my pleasure as the author is a postcard from a friend who is a scientist at Livermore lab, and all it says is two sentences: "Dear Huston, I am reading your book. You are having entirely too much fun!" I like that too because with all these complaints, and it is loaded with complaints, there is a danger of feeling abused, you know, aggrieved and so on. And I didn't want it to be a complaining book. So I try to introduce playful ways of putting things, and this writer picked up on that.

RH: Good, that may be one of the antidotes to our current problem, a new kind of playfulness. We have kind of been backed into a corner and are sometimes too serious. Not to say that we shouldn't be serious about a lot of these problems, but I think we also need some light-heartedness to ease our existential load.

HS: Yes, you've caught me exactly. That is what I feel. In dead earnest our problems are very serious. But, you can just run the corners of your mouth down so far, and then the muscles get tired and you have to reverse them into a smile.

RH: Definitely! The main thrust of your work over the years has been this idea of "the primordial tradition," or the common vision of the world's religions, and you've indicated that this tradition provides an ennobling vision for the human. You also discuss how an ennobling vision is needed in our world today. Could you talk a little bit about what you mean by the primordial tradition and how you are trying to reclaim what you call the "forgotten truth"?

HS: Gladly. The more standard word is "perennial" as in Aldous Huxley's perennial philosophy, but that perennial means "always" so it is a temporal thing, where primordial means "no matter where or when." So, the forgotten truth is that invisible geometry, you might say, that underlies all the world traditions. And, of course, I don't have to tell you, the civilizations and religions are not carbon copies of each other, they are different. We use the analogy of the human body. Human bodies are different in height, in bulk, in coloration, and features and so on. But underneath all of those differences the human spine is remarkably the same, the curvature. And so it's that spine that I try to lift out, and that is the truth. This truth is forgotten in the sense that it has been neglected. With the coming of the modern scientific worldview, our culture traded the insights of the traditional worldview for the scientific world which I think is inferior to the primordial tradition and was unhorsed by modern science totally for psychological reasons not for logical or factual reasons. Modernity and post-modernity has discovered nothing, no fact that shows the primordial tradition to be wrong. It's just because it defies the controlled experiment and provable knowledge that is the cornerstone of modern science. Through that science gave us tremendous access to the laws of nature and then came technology, and then the cornucopia and avalanche of material goods. That is why the primordial tradition was unhorsed in the common, cultural mind, this feeling that the primordial tradition is second rate.

RH: Some scientists like Brian Swimme, at CIIS, and Amit Goswami look for an answer to the current problem in the birth of a new sacred or spiritual cosmology. In your book, you make a distinction between cosmology and metaphysics. I was wondering if you could expand on that a little bit.

RH: Yes. Cosmology deals with this physical universe. Metaphysics deals with everything, and is the larger circle that contains cosmology, unless your cosmology is materialism, or more broadly naturalism, which is the metaphysics that holds that the big circle, the metaphysical circle is coterminus with cosmology. Now, I am not a materialist. I think that these wisdom traditions, as I have come to speak of them, hold that Spirit is the ultimate and fundamental, whereas materialists and naturalists turn that on its head and say that matter is fundamental. So, that is the distinction between cosmology and metaphysics.

RH: You've spoken about the need for an ennobling vision for humanity. What do you see as an ennobling vision that would be appropriate for our times to help renew this primordial tradition?

HS: Well, I am using the great religion, or the primordial tradition and the wisdom tradition in the singular, because I have said already that I think the underlying architecture or the conceptual spine that runs through all of them is the same. And I do want to just throw in that, when I say the wisdom tradition, I don't hold that everything in these religions is wise. They don't always practice what they preach, so their behavior has not always been very wise; in fact, that is a gross understatement. Their cosmologies are antiquated by modern science, and their blueprints for social society, slavery, castes, and such can be antiquated. But it's this vision of a nature of ultimate reality, and how human beings can best comport their lives in that vision. It is there that I see nothing in modernity or post-modernity that tops the wisdom tradition in the big picture. Now built in to that conceptual spine of forgotten truth is the most successful plot device that the human mind has ever conceived. It comes down to this--it is the vision of a happy ending that blossoms after the most horrendously demanding ordeal has been faced and triumphed over. Okay, now there is the inspiring vision. If you omit the happy ending it's a downer, you know. And if you omit the ordeal that we have to face as a part of human life, then it's Pollyanna wishful thinking. So that's the inspiring vision and it's there. We just need to recognize it.

RH: How do you define love and what role does it play in spiritual life and the primordial tradition?

HS: Love is the movement within life that carries us, that enables us, that causes us to break out of what Alan Watts calls the "skin-encapsulated ego." Without love, we are self-centered, but love enables us to move the center of our lives outside our ego. Therefore it expands our lives and, needless to say, enriches it. Any human being would give anything to love or be loved. When it really happens, it is like heaven on earth.

RH: Yes, we could certainly use a lot more of it.

HS: Most definitely.

RH: Abraham Heschel has been quoted as saying "Praise precedes faith," which is something that has stuck with me. I was wondering if you agree with that assertion and how you define faith. Also, in your book, when you say, "Religion sees through the eyes of faith," what do you mean?

HS: What do you make of that? Is it legal for me to ask you a question? My pedagogical instincts sort of become irrepressible at times.

RH: For me it means that a deep experience of the Divine and of joy, wonder and awe is the ground of faith. The actual experience, not just an abstract idea, but an actual kind of melting with God, a theophany that evokes praise and rejoicing is the foundation that gives us faith. That's my interpretation.

HS: Wow, yeah, I like that very much. All of those are lustrous words--they glow, because they show the world in a wonderful God. When we experience an affirmative response to the world, it sort of phases into faith. A faith with this quality is a truer index to the foundation of things as a whole than are their opposites: ugliness, brutality, and the like. So I thank you for that, for reminding me of that phrase. Have we covered that?

RH: Could you expand on what you mean by, "religion sees through the eyes of faith"?

HS: Faith is trust, it is confidence. If you have faith in life, you have a capacity to see beyond the logjams and cans of worms that are so much in the foreground. This allows you to see possibilities for responding to the world in love and trust. We have this adage, "Seeing is believing." Christ saw people as they were, with no illusion; he treated them as though they were already where they ought to be. I think that is wonderful--that is what is mean by "the eyes of faith." A parent can see the child in this way, can see the child's possibilities, and this affects the way the child responds.

RH: What has your experience been over the years with indigenous traditions? I know that in the later editions of your book The World's Religions you began to write about indigenous traditions. What insights did you gain from that?

HS: Well, first I'll mention that of the various families of religions, I came to the indigenous, oral, and tribal traditions last. I feel so blessed because I had totally ignored them, until we moved to Syracuse for the last ten years of my full-time teaching and found ourselves just five miles from the Onondaga reservation. During those ten years I found myself first fascinated and then hanging out there, ending with the conviction that they are as advanced as any of the historical religions. All that is missing is the absence of writing. Today, most of these individuals can write, but traditionally they didn't. I was taught by my teachers that these were remnants of the childhood of the human race. They couldn't even write! What can you expect of people that can't even write? But I came to learn and see, and it could have passed me by entirely, that writing has its drawbacks. Obviously it brings many benefits, information we otherwise wouldn't come upon. I mean I'm a writer, I'm not going to knock writing entirely. But what I came to see is that it also lacks, detracts. It causes us to lose our sense of proportion, of what is truly important. You take a tribe that is completely oral, everything that tribe knows as they sit around the bonfire in the evening is in the skulls of the people around them, around the fire. And it stands to reason that the important things are remembered, from what plants have medicinal advantage to the great orienting myths that bring empowerment and inspiration. They keep rehearsing those, and what is unimportant--gossip and the like--are discarded. But you have studied shamanism, so you know this very well.

RH: There is something primordial and very important in those traditions, and I think living in the United States we have a responsibility to acknowledge the land we live on and the Native people who have lived here for thousands of years.

HS: Right, that is another thing. They hold ancient wisdom that contains an ecological grounding. Yes.

RH: I think that a lot of people don't even believe that there were millions of people living here before we got here; it is a bit of our forgotten history, and it can help us reclaim our spirit. In a lot of your work you espouse the insight of the mystical traditions and believe that the mystics are a great place to look for wisdom. I haven't seen in your work any mention of what Matthew Fox calls the "Creation Spirituality Tradition," which in his formulation is a reclaiming of the mystical tradition in the West that has been repressed for many years. I was wondering if you had any opinions on that line of inquiry or school of thought.

HS: Well, I don't see it lacking in the primordial tradition. I think he got, what you might say, bruised by his own tradition that over-emphasized original sin and did not mention enough regeneration or metanoia and so on. Obviously, he has hit a responsive cord with those who did not glean that positive aspect from their traditions. I don't want to knock it, because it is obviously good for many people. However, I didn't face that lack in the tradition, in my Christian upbringing, so it doesn't seem as exciting or as novel to me personally. We have talked a lot of times. Matthew Fox is a great dharma combat person, and we have had some have had some wonderful set-tos!

RH: Regarding the New Age movement, you said in your new book, "The New Age movement is so problematic that I would leave it alone were it not for the fact that it has two things exactly right. First, it is optimistic, and we need all the hope we can get. Second, it adamantly refuses to acquiesce to the scientistic worldview." Those are two great points, but the New Age movement seems to be lacking in depth and quality in many instances. I am wondering how the New Age movement might be able to potentially ground itself and find a way to mature?

HS: Well, I don't know, it's such a mixed bag. You rightly quoted me on the two very important strengths, but it's a bit flaky around the fringes. So it doesn't really have a clearly articulated metaphysics or a keen nose for gullibility. I recently saw someone with a pendulum going by the items on a grocery store list on the shelf, watching the pendulum where it would start swinging towards an item and convinced that that was the omniscient knowledge coming through as to what she needed nutritionally to buy. Well, I happen to think, I'm pretty open minded, but as Aldous Huxley said, "An open mind is a good thing, but if the hasp is off!!!" you know if the hinge is off! So that is it, I don't want to badmouth it. But you asked me what are the problems with it, and that's the problem with it. The New Age movement would do well to learn from the wisdom of the primordial tradition and to purify itself of its tendency towards commercialism, its superficial claims of instant enlightenment and Pollyanna wishful thinking.

RH: If there is one point from Why Religion Matters that you really want to drive home to people, or some over arching theme in the book, what would that be?

HS: That we have this wonderful heritage in the wisdom tradition, but we have through a small but fatal slip in logic assumed that the scientific worldview retires that other worldview. But the scientific worldview includes nothing in the way of fact or evidence that on this deepest level of the conceptual spine that the traditional worldview is mistaken. That is the message I would hope would come through so people would take the traditional/wisdom/religious world in its deepest import seriously again. I think it holds a greater potential and a greater safeguard against pessimism and despair and cynicism of which there is a great deal in our culture today.

RH: In the very beginning part of your book you used the metaphor of the "tunnel of modernity," and the four walls that prop up the tunnel. What are the four walls and how do they relate to the argument in your book?

HS: The floor that supports the other three sides is "scientism," now, not "science," and that is a very important distinction. Science, the findings of the scientific method and the instruments that have developed, is good. I do table the question of how it may, in the end, do us in by giving us more power over nature than we have the wisdom to use sanely. I bracket that issue, time will tell. But if it doesn't do us in, and we are able to use its power, then it is good, not only in terms of material benefits--heating against the cold, medical benefits, and so on--but also noetically. The excitement, the awesomeness of the physical universe is great.

Now scientism is science as a sacred cow. From the perspective of scientism, science has the potential to do everything, which is not true. It cannot deal with values, meanings, and purposes, and that is where our existential life is lived. So there are overblown expectations, though they seldom get articulated, that I think cause damage in the end. Now that's the floor. The left side is higher education that in America was originally for training ministers. When higher education moved away from primarily training ministers, which was too limited, it needed another model. At that time the German universities were the models; they came right out of the Enlightenment, which had three stages of history. The religious was considered the most primitive, then the philosophical, and then the scientific. The upshot is that religion is from the childhood of the race and science is for the future. They took over that model and they are still stuck in it. Again, there is nothing wrong with the emphasis on science; it is just shortchanging the other concerns. So, higher education used to be centered in the liberal arts, which were intended to reflect on the good life, but now it's a trade school on a very high level and a lot is lost in that. The ceiling is media that tends on the whole not to give religion a good press. But it influences us, batters us everyday, ensconcing the secular worldview as our lingua franca. The right side is the law, and there my showpiece is the perfidious decision of the Supreme Court to take away the religious rights of the Native American people, indigenous people. And I think that is just a horrendous thing. But it isn't an isolated thing; Culture of Disbelief, written by Steven Carter, the African-American professor of law at Yale, says that law tends to marginalize religion, to privatize it, and exclude it from our common field of discourse. Now, of course, there is a move at the moment to change that. How religion should be approached in public life is a complex question, and it remains to be seen how that is going to work out.

RH: In closing, would you mind if I asked you a somewhat personal question?

HS: Feel free . . .

RH: Over your long lifespan, and in family life and your wide range of experiences, what are some of the greatest lessons your wife, children, and grandchildren have taught you?

HS: Oh wonderful! Of course, I have been very blessed. I can't even remember how many years we've been married. It's in the upper fifties and that's rare in our time. I do not fault those who divorce and remain single or remarry, but I think it's fortunate if the chemistry is right the first time. Socrates has this myth of people being like balls, round, and somewhere they get split, and they spend the rest of there life trying to find their other half to come together into a full human being. I think that applies very well to us. I don't want to over-romanticize it and sugarcoat it. We have our run-ins, and that is part of the growing process. But even in the most intense of those, down under, I think we both sense that the chemistry is right. So, she keeps me on keel and we complement each other in many ways.

As a philosopher, I walk around with my head in the clouds, but my wife has her feet very firmly planted on Earth. I read journals, she reads the newspaper, and so she keeps me acquainted with the world. Sometimes I say, flippantly, that I married a clipping service, because of all the articles every evening on my desk reminding me, "These are the things you will need to know if you are going to live in this world." We always have a book that we read out loud, so after dinner or before, we read four or five pages out loud to each other. It makes for slow going but it gives us things to talk about. Children and grandchildren--they are so full of life. It is especially delightful, in our older age, for us to see their enthusiasm and their zest and the energy coming in, plus the humor that bubbles up from those fresh eyes onto the world.

RH: Thank you very much for your time.

HS: I enjoyed it. You have obviously done your homework, and I felt that the questions really went to the heart of what interests us both.

Ronan Hallowell is a teacher, writer, and DJ who lives on Kauai. After graduating from CIIS in 1997 with an M.A. in Philosophy and Religion, he worked as an administrator and lecturer in the M.L.A. program at Naropa University-Oakland.

While at CIIS, Ronan studied the world's wisdom traditions, the evolution of consciousness, youth culture and trance dance; he wrote his thesis on the Native American Sun Dance. During this time, Ronan served as the founding DJ for "Techno-Cosmic Mass", a multimedia ritual produced by Matthew Fox and friends.

Before moving to Kauai in 2001, Ronan worked at two Bay Area internet startups and continued to lecture, DJ, and write. During this time he was introduced to Huston Smith by a mutual friend. Over several months Ronan became friends with Huston, discussing his book Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plantsand Chemicals.

The California Institute of Integral Studies Invites you to join Huston Smith and guests in an historic set of discussions with some of the most inspirational spiritual thinkers and leaders in North America to explore the relevance of religion, the wisdom traditions, and spirituality at this critical juncture in human history. Discover what wisdom, hope, strength, and inspiration can be gained from the essence of the various spiritual practices.
SEE INFO

See the entire Lifelong Learning calendar.