It’s easy to call progressive culture a religion. They have their holy days and seasons of repentance, their prophets and pastors, and their sins, confessions, and penances. It’s an obvious point to argue, I’ll admit to doing so at least a few times in past iterations of this email, but I don’t think it brings much in the way of insight.
I think the more important observations about the gods we worship are the direct ones. In a world where fewer of us go to church or believe in god, why would corporate America adopt (and adapt) the practices of Buddhism? A search for mindfulness and meditation and a spiritual aura for technology work might indicate that tech’s engineering of the world is missing something vital. Buddhism-infused technology culture winds religion into tech work to give it value. We wouldn’t need to do this if the technology itself wasn’t valueless.
But at the same time, with religious institutions are becoming less responsible for our work with the sick and the poor, technocracy seems to become the framework for our altruism. Here we have moral crusades identified as “effective,” bringing our religious duties under a guiding ethos of technology, an attempt to make technology our framework for meaning.
Both of the articles below are worth reading, one on corporate Buddhism, the other on effective altruism, but I put them together because I saw their themes as an appositive. Pondering the themes and enjoy the reading!
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