Virtue: Vision

[hth]

As attached as I am to the search for ways to restore and make use of the wisdom of our ancestors, I recognize the practical limits of that idea. There was no Golden Age; the human past is not a utopia from which modern civilization has tragically devolved, and the way our ancestors would have answered a question is not always the best answer possible. More importantly, it's simply not the case that there is nothing new under the sun; many factors, chief among them the state of our technology, have created profound changes in who we are, not just cosmetic differences.

I don't know how traditional a virtue vision is, but that's exactly why it's so critical. Weapons of mass destruction require a new attitude about warfare. Safe and reliable birth control requires a new attitude about sexuality and what a woman's life means and is. Environmental crisis requires a new relationship between the tribe and the land, one that is not predicated solely on the need to control the land to ensure the tribe's prosperity. As our technologies of travel and communication expand without any sign of stopping, our whole concept of community has to change.

In nearly all traditional cultures, authority descends from the past. One of myth's most essential functions is to provide the mechanism for the passing of that authority. Whatever is most valuable and most essential to the tribe is reinforced by making a story out of its origin; by virtue of the fact that it comes down to us from Before, it gains importance beyond the practical. The neopagan community still engages in this process through the mythologization of the Old Religion; a secular version is making the rounds right now when conservatives claim that monogamous and lifelong heterosexual marriage is "the foundation of society." If it can be made to seem older than it is, originating at the very dawn of recorded history, then it is that much more powerful and can resist change that much more easily.

Truthfully, the meaning of marriage is not a constant in human civilization, reaching back to the beginning of all things, and it can change, and it does change. So do all sorts of human institutions, ideas, practices, prejudices, and values. Change and adaptation are the story of human existence.

But if nearly everything is subject to change, given the right circumstances, something has to guide us, has to measure the difference between a destructive change and an adaptive one. That source of guidance can only be vision; if examining the past does not always supply a tried-and-true solution, then we have to look forward. We have to use not only tested knowledge and sound deductive reasoning, but also imagination. We have to literally envision new ways of being, realities that are outside our concrete experience.

Paganism provides a theological idea that can make this seem less frightening, the concept that time is not linear and inflexible, but fluid and mysterious. From an empirical point of view, no one knows what the future holds, but prophecy is not only possible but quite sensible and even commonplace in the pagan world view. The pattern that holds reality together already exists; time passes differently in different states, and particularly in the realm of the ancestors, there is no intrinsic reason that we cannot look forward as well as backward. In fact, there is no intrinsic reason that "forward" and "future" are the same thing at all.

Whether or not we rely on augury and divination in a straightforward sense, part of being true to our ancestors' way of viewing the world requires us to adopt their belief that the future is accessible to those with eyes to see. We need to approach the future curiously and courageously, secure in the knowledge that "because we've always done it this way" is only part of the human story, and that the rest of the story is ours to discover and to pass on.