Why are Sacred Spaces so Easily Spoiled?

The irony of how mass attention defiles what’s cool

If sacred things are so great, why are they so easily spoiled? And what could sacredness be in that case?

Indeed, there’s one surefire way to spoil a good thing: make it popular. Ironically, this is how success backfires. Coolness is the preserve of the bohemian underclass, the treasured secret, the remote hiding place that’s secure for a while from the ravages of entropy and from the bumbling of the hoi palloi.

We each first encounter this dynamic in our childhood playtimes. Remember that pillow fort you built, the play-acting you performed with your dolls or action figures which only you or your friends cared about, or how your treehouse felt more magical because its significance to you was a secret? There’s a turning point when a child prefers to play without his or her parents, or when the parents realize they can take a break and leave their child alone to play.

That’s the dawn of coolness, when hallowed territory is enchanted by its isolation from mundane social routines.

In high school, teens encounter this seclusion again in the class divides between the popular and the supposedly less cool cliques. The popular kids are usually the richest, and their parents’ mansions seem more remote from the middle-class houses, their parties more exclusive; even the popular teens’ good looks are unattainable by most of the other students who can’t afford their clothes and hair stylists.

This mundane secular hierarchy dovetails, then, with how in earlier societies the aristocrats were always supposed to be closer to the high gods.

After all, religions carry on this theme as their myths often portray their gurus, prophets, or saviors as obtaining their holiest state on a mountain top. Moses saw Yahweh and received the ten commandments on Mount Sinai; Christians construe Golgotha as a hill, and stylites were pillar-saints who fasted, prayed, and preached from on columns; and there’s an Eastern cliché of the mountain-top guru or of the monastery hidden in a remote location.

Why must that which is regarded as sacred be so elevated or otherwise hidden?

Partly, it’s because reaching a sacred state is supposed to require hard-won spiritual discipline. The mountain-top retreat or the pillar-saint is meant to symbolize the rarity of that attainment, as profane society is full of distractions from the opportunity for spiritual or moral growth.

But there’s also an ironic problem with popularity itself, with the excessive attainment of that growth.

Consider how much more heroic the climbing of Mount Everest seemed when the feat was rare, before this adventure became a business and guides were aiding long lines of tourists up the mountain. Everest itself lost its mystique when it became a more popular, littered destination. Likewise, beaches are best when they’re secret and pristine, untainted by the masses.

Movie producers often attempt to sell their film by saying it’s best viewed in a full theater, as the roar of the crowd helps to immerse you in the story. But this admiration of crowds is belied by the fact that a movie theater is plainly a retreat from the rest of society: you walk into a dark, cave-like room and you watch a story unfold, like an initiated prehistoric shaman who used to crawl through narrow passages in a cave to witness his secret, painted walls flicker in the torchlight. A crowded theater easily spoils a dramatic movie because of the folks’ chatter and cellphone distractions.

Countercultures are prized precisely when they’re unpopular because the masses haven’t yet discovered their charms. Once a cool hangout goes mainstream, as in the case of Facebook, for instance, the young hipsters look elsewhere for the new cutting-edge fad.

Think of the paradox that religious proselytizers must face as they proclaim the merits of their theology that supposedly saves everyone’s soul in the afterlife, even as Heaven or divine Paradise could be a sacred treasure only if its standards weren’t lowered by having to admit the teeming masses. Only if Hell were more populous than Heaven could the aim of a spiritual life seem worthy. Consequently, the proselytizer must welcome rejection as a sign that Heaven will remain pure, and that the saved folks won’t have their permanent paradise spoiled.

Similarly, there’s the paradox of the celebrity’s fame since the more attention you receive, the more tainted you are by the masses’ averageness. The superstar idols of pop culture are simultaneously sacred because of their rarity, and desecrated by their public photo ops when they’re mauled by crowds of adoring fans. This is why superstars must fly through those descents into profane spaces outside their gated mansions and exotic retreats, and it’s why they can’t be seen for too long on the red carpet because the longer they stay with the little people, the less remote and cool they’ll seem.

The fickle crowds tear down celebrities like Martha Stewart who lose their mystique when they’re caught in petty crimes, or when their precious image is revealed as a façade and their true character disappoints.

Perhaps that’s the subtext of the odd passage in the Gospel of Mark, in which a woman ‘came up behind him [Jesus] in the crowd and touched his garment…And immediately the hemorrhage ceased; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone forth from him, immediately turned about in the crowd, and said, “Who touched my garments?”’ (5:27–30).

Just as the canard would have it that primitive tribes are wary of having their photographs taken, for fear of losing their souls, superstardom based on mass attention can deplete the celebrity’s power.

But again, what could sacredness or coolness be if this peak attainment is antithetical to popularity or to commodification?

I suspect that all these examples that could be multiplied are symbols of something else. There’s only one truly sacred thing that’s known, and that’s the conscious, personal self. That’s the only undisputed spiritual anomaly: the existence of personhood in a universe of wild animals and mindless, physical processes and objects.

Notice, then, the quasi-Cartesian nature of this self, the privacy of mental states, their exclusive immediacy through introspection. We learn about what’s on each other’s mind by inferring those states from the other person’s behaviour, but we alone seem to access those states directly through self-awareness. I’m aware of your body or of your possessions or your work, but not of your mind itself because I lack introspective access to the mental by-product of your brain. Only your brain knows itself in undergoing its qualia, its subjective thoughts and feelings. And such mentality is confined to that rarity of the human brain.

As seekers, armed with psychedelic drugs and other spiritual disciplines, shamans likely initiated the religious exploration of the mind’s unconscious depths. So began the historic split between the enlightened few and the unenlightened many. Shamans were braver in exploring their mind through hallucinations and lucid dreams, while the other tribe members were closer to carrying on as sleepwalkers.

But in fact, every human mind is equally anomalous or “sacred,” even if many of us don’t appreciate that existential status. The root, then, of the identification of coolness with secrecy or isolation is likely the exclusiveness of qualia, together with humanistic pride in our species’ cultural and technological feats. That psychological exclusivity and preciousness of our inner life is the ur-hot spot, the paradigmatic remote location, the unsullied paradise that seems to itself to be barred from the lowness of materiality.

All the above social dynamics of how coolness dissipates when it’s sullied by democracy or capitalism, when the masses spoil the good thing with their greedy attentions seem like pale imitations of the private hallowed ground that’s known only to each of us. We treasure our inner life, of course, because we identify most intimately with it and we loathe the prospect of our personal death.

Mystics would interpret this explanation differently than a secular humanist, but the point is consistent with either perspective. You can think that the inner life is most valuable because it’s the sole reality, that the material world is an illusion thrown up by a singular, divine consciousness. Alternatively, you can think that nature is real enough and that consciousness is a construct of intricate physicality, that the personal self is thrown up as an emergent product of natural evolution.

Either way, that inner self’s relation to the apparent impersonal or nonliving world is the model for the ironic vulnerability of sacred spaces.

Another irony is that anything can seem sacred, even the most polluted, infantile cesspit of consumerist vulgarity, if it’s viewed from an enlightened perspective, which is one that appreciates, at least, the inner life’s preciousness.

Appreciating the absurd disparity between the inner and outer worlds, as in the awe-inspiring emergence of life from nonlife in deep time can elevate even the most humdrum mundanity. If we keep in the back of our mind the strangeness that we or anything else has evidently come to exist, we can instantly transport ourselves — in our imagination and in our peak interiority — from a despoiled condition to the hallowed mountaintop.

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