A few months ago I was visiting Hawaii on vacation. I stayed with friends and we had an excellent time.
I noticed something that I hadn’t fully noticed on previous visits: a lot of non-Polynesian folks who moved there and seem to embrace a quasi-Hawaiian spiritualism. You can see the same with westerners in Bali or India.
It often presents as using local or Hawaiian words for things (I don’t mean “mahalo” or similar) but words like hōʻihi, which is closer to meaning something sacred.
There’s a kind of environmentalist, return to natural connection vibe that seems to work it’s way into people’s opinions and speech who move there.
In and of itself, these are not bad values. But the way they get adopted, and how they seem to be a vehicle for sociopolitical thoughts channeled into a form of expression that makes them unpopular to challenge – I think that’s what I find particularly pretentious and annoying about it.
There’s also a lack of sacrifice or commensurate duty that is required of this kind of spiritual fashion. You can opt in, sound deeper and more thoughtful than you actually are, and present half-baked ideas in a format where previously you’d have to intellectually defend these ideas, but once you robe them language with appeals to indigenous culture, it becomes socially unacceptable and fraught to challenge those same ideas.
If a comfortable belief can find territory to migrate to that makes those beliefs expensive to for anyone to challenge, those ideas will always migrate to that territory.
It’s also suspicious because it’s the sexy, cool, and permissive forms of spiritualism that seems to have attraction to these folks. For whatever reason, they’re not adopting millenia old European orthodoxy. I suspect the lack of social cache, and the amount of duty and responsibility to a community has something to do with it.
So I have this instinctual distaste for people who I suspect are robing themselves in these cultures to sound and feel more deep and interesting. I can relate to the yearning for community, mythology, and connection to nature. But it simply feels too convenient to claim a sort of spiritual virtue but only when it’s got the cool factor that comes with Balinese and Hawaiian cultures.
There’s also something about how these beliefs only seem to be expressed in a certain way and with a spiritual accent. I’ve yet to hear someone academic and introverted discussing their Hawaiian spiritual beliefs. As in, when there’s a trade-off between sincerity, and looking cool, the beliefs seem to be discarded for looking cool.
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