Professor Detlef Pollack presented the NEF/van Leer conference with some data on secularisation in Europe: are we becoming less religious? can it be measured? is it getting faster or slower?
He contrasted a basic "secularisation hypothesis" - we are getting less interested in all things religious - with two other hypotheses: the "market model", whereby competition for the supply of religious goods is hotting up, and that competition leads to less activity in established churches; and the much more radical "individualization hypothesis" according to which religion can be viewed as a bundle of goods which are now being supplied in all sorts of different ways. As Professor Pollack says:
"Today, religion and religiousness can be encountered in previously
unexpected settings – in psychoanalysis, the leisure culture, communal cults, tourism,
and sports."
I'd love to find lists of what that bundle might actually comprise - but one thing it certainly involves is the control of the calendar. The oldest archeological relics we have of priestly ritual involve calendars - machines to measure when the critical annual events of a primitive agrarian society should occur. Each religion defines its year dot just as much as its annual rhythm of feasts and fasts. The Ise Shrine in Japan has been rebuilt every 20 years, each time identically, since 4BC, to represent simultaneously both renewal and permanence. With modern individualization - in Northern Europe, at least - the secular birthday won out over the Saint's day as the sanctioned, private beat to the family's year. By telling us what the important, recurrent milestones of a year should be, a public calendar sets social priority - be they planting, harvesting and fasting, or forgiving, remembering, fighting or defeat.
I like the Individualization hypothesis - even if Professor Pollack found it hard to find evidence for it in his current work. It certainly makes sense of all the land-grab over the calendar that we can see today. The anniversary of 9/11 is coming back; the deca-versary of Diana's death made an attempted grab at the British calendar; the quinqua-versary of the European Union has been marked as a year dot for some ... and Ethiopia is celebrating its own millenium tomorrow.
Clock-grabbing is bound to follow a fall in the power of established religion. Without wanting to suggest that we should remember less, I do think we should be careful of all the calls we face to remember together. As the first priests, measurers of time, show us: the request for common memory is also a call for a particular action: plant! harvest! fast! The anniversary of 9/11, with the Petraeus report expected, should not similarly become an unthinking call for the same old war on terror.
In the meantime, trying as far as possible to measure the passage of time in a way that will lend support to the individualization hypothesis, I see on my computer's home page that a big milestone is about to tbe reached: The cone of light that left my first daughter's nose at her birth is just 16 hours away from touching Alpha Canis Majoris, the second closest star to our sun. Without wanting to proseltyse, you too can measure time in this way by following the RSS feed available here.
