[13] Cyclical reform:  commmoners, snobs, and gurus

     Plott notes one sociological factor that implies that
the official summas of the various cultures should be taken
seriously but not too seriously.  When I interviewed Plott a
few years before his death he told me that he agreed with
Toynbee in the suspicion that certain types of isms arise and
fall according to more or less cyclical rhythms.  Now,
directly quoting him:
          Renewal, I have frequently noted comes from below.
     This happens in religion more than in philosophy because
     philosophers are literate; religion originated in
     preliterate times and even today does not necessarily
     depend on writing.  But now that the proletariat (blue
     collar worker or farmer) is becoming both more mobile
     and more literate, new philosophers, too, may emerge
     from below.
          "Below" is relative of course to someone or some
     class that looks down from above.  In the past certain
     languages were the natural languages of culture and
     privilege.  When vernacular tongues began to displace
     the king's Latin, or whatever, they were regarded as
     impertinent intruders.  One of the frustrations of our
     research has been that so little of this quite massive
     amount of material has been translated.  Isn't that
     because "scholars" reflect the prejudices of the upper
     classes in the various cultures and so "know" in advance
     that vernacular materials are unimportant?
          Consider also the tendency of secular bourgeois
     university profs to look down on religion and mysticism
     generally and all forms of monasticism specifically,
     although it was (is?) minds like Merton and Aurobindo
     who have helped (and may again help) keep civilization
     civil, if that is possible.
Later in the same interview Plott confesses to having become
Indianized or, as he says, "indigenized."
     But in one respect I was stubbornly myself:  I never
     could see why if one guru were a good thing, many gurus
     should not be a better thing.  Some of my mentors could
     never understand this quirk in my thinking.
While Plott is heavily critical of some of his Western gurus,
he does not turn his critical acumen off in reference to his
beloved India.  "Alas. . ., India has not yet produced a Kant
or even a Descartes who with authentic originality scrapped
the whole works and began from a fresh start!" (A Philosophy
of Devotion, 484)