As a measure of our cultural values, it is interesting to consider that the Dalai Lama has become a commodity. When he appeared at the Parliament of the World's Religions in Melbourne, people flocked to the stage, mobile phone cameras aimed at His Holiness, presumably so they too could own a piece of the Dalai Lama, a snap shot as proof of their participation in the event.
Much as people took fragments of the Berlin Wall as keepsakes — history-as-commodity, concrete remnants of the past through which to personalise the enormity of the present moment — so too did the photographers of the Dalai Lama serve a personal interest. Their zeal to gather mementos feeds an ego that ironically contradicts the basic principle of selflessness that is central to Buddhist philosophy itself.
So what? Well, one wonders to what degree this example represents the self centeredness of western cultural values. What does missing the spiritual point so dramatically say about our capacity for self sacrifice at a time when global challenges appear to require the sublimation of our self interest?
Ours is a culture of self centeredness, characterised by pervasive greed as symbolised by the global financial crisis. Contemporary western culture has disposed of ideology, mass movements and mass culture. Singularity of national purpose seems to have been replaced by an active self interest that plays out in various ways:
In culture by the continuing process of fractioning mass culture into splinter cells of sub-cultural dialogue (of which blogging and internet chat rooms are the supreme example); in religion by the growing power of denominations resistant to centralised religious authority; in academia by the persistence of the postmodern experiment which seeks to empower the individual over the collective, to favour the personal over the meta-narrative; even in science, where the elusiveness of a cohesive, unified model of the universe leaves us to favour, by necessity, the elemental particles and individual processes which we can observe in the natural world.
In contemporary society, the individual, the small, the separate, the personal is sacrosanct.
And why not de-emphasise the collective? Are we not better off as sympathetic tribes bound by a language, an ethnicity or a sub-culture? Is it not better that we find safety in the smaller cultural enclaves from which we can be wary of anything or anyone who threatens to assume the mantle of authority, or be the status quo?
After all, our sub-cultures