Josh Zyderveld
“The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter what outward ills it may have been engendered by? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation.
At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it out in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance. But it is impossible to carry on this discipline in the subjective sphere without zealously emphasising the brighter and minimising the darker aspects of the objective sphere of things at the same time. And thus our resolution not to indulge in misery, beginning at a comparatively small point within ourselves, may not stop until it has brought the entire frame of reality under a systematic conception optimistic enough to be congenial with its needs.” – William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Elsewhere in his lectures, James touches on the central idea of most religions — that they “minimise the darker aspects of the objective sphere” of the world, and put them in a perspective where they are no longer seen as purely “dark”. Politics can be similar: I think particularly of how politics attempts to redeem violence done and violence suffered.
This perspective on death, suffering, privation, and the confusion of the human mind are the main value of religion so far as I’m concerned; even those who feel hostility to Christianity often find the metaphysics of Buddhism deeply appealing, and among those who dislike all religions there remains the consolation of various other ‘faiths’ in progress, history, civilization, technology, justice, the personal, the artistic. So, in a world of a million diverse ‘religions’, there will always be a way to lift our wandering soul out of unhappiness.