A New Renaissance?

James Thornton, an environmental lawyer/activist, has an essay in the Sydney Morning Herald called "Our World Needs a New Renaissance." Although it only mentions Buddhism, it presents ideas harmonious, in many ways, with Buddhism.

It's a rich essay that can't be done justice in a couple of paragraphs, but his thesis is that societies are shaped and driven by narratives -- the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what we value, what is "normal." These narratives are always evolving and changing. And now we are tottering on the precipice of environmental and fiscal disaster, and humanity is in dire need of significant change.

Thornton says that what we need is nothing short of a new Renaissance. "I believe we can make up a new story to suit our needs," he writes. "That is what happened in the Renaissance. The flowering of art and finance, science and philosophy did not just happen." Great scholars met in drawing rooms to invent a new culture. People "talked, wrote, painted, experimented and financed the new culture into being."

However, my understanding is that the Renaissance was triggered when Europeans were exposed to Middle East culture through the Crusades. Europeans were exposed to new arts, new perspectives, and algebra. Minds were opened to new possibilities. The Renaissance might be explained as a kind of cultural hybrid vigor.

It is my hope that as westerners become more intimately familiar with Buddhism and the other religions and philosophies of Asia, this will open many minds to new perspectives and ways of understanding. This is not a wish that everyone convert to Buddhism; just that people go beyond their conventional ways of seeing; view the world with fresh eyes, so to speak.

I think many of our seemingly intractable problems wouldn't be so intractable if so many weren't stuck in rigid ideologies about what is "normal" and how the world is supposed to be.