Showing posts with label theology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theology. Show all posts
Sunday, 5 February 2023
Sunday, 18 July 2021
Marxist Jesuits are not for tribal welfare. India and Indian Catholics both must realise that
Jaithirth Rao in The Print
Representational image | A church in Tamenglong, Manipur | Simrin Sirur | ThePrint
The purpose of this article is not to go into the tragic circumstances around the recent death of Father Stan Swamy. While many columns have been written about the tribal rights activist, including one by retired IPS officer Julio Ribeiro in ThePrint, I believe an attempt should be made to look at the larger issues surrounding the Roman Catholic Church and the Jesuit order in the context of their extensive and intensive engagement with Adivasi communities in India.
Christian missionaries and schools are generally viewed positively by Indian society. In most Bollywood movies, the Christian (usually Catholic) padre is portrayed as a benign, helpful and healing figure. I certainly hope the image stays that way, and is not altered or tarnished. For that, it is important to examine the political ideology of Christian/Catholic Marxism.
It is a common belief in India that the Roman Catholic Church in general and the Jesuit order in particular are anti-Marxist. This belief is quite wrong. The so-called ‘liberation theology’ is very much a Roman Catholic product, absent from most Protestant Christian theological outpourings. Liberation theology is profoundly anti-capitalist, anti-markets and justifies violence, using selective quotations from the gospels. They like to talk about the reference in the gospels to Jesus throwing out money-changers from the temple; there is little if any reference to the parable of talents. The leading lights of liberation theology have been Latin American Jesuits who are completely opposed to a conservative strain in philosophical, theological and political matters. The influence of the Marxist Latin American liberation theologists has deeply permeated the Roman Church in India and has impacted the Jesuit order quite profoundly over the last few decades.
It is this ideological orientation among Jesuits that leads to many of them being well-disposed to Maoist insurgents, while publicly donning the robes of supporters, helpers and padrones of the supposedly helpless tribal people. This is pretty much what Catholic Marxists have endorsed in Central and South America also and is a classic “practice” of liberation theology.
In contrast with peaceful theology
My father and I both have been products of a leading Jesuit college in south India. I am personally a significant supporter of my alma mater. Every time I interact with older, kinder, more sober, more sensible Jesuits, they find it difficult to let their guard down. But directly or indirectly, they admit to me their frustration with the fact that the loudest and most active elements in their order today are Marxists. These Marxist Jesuits reject the earlier accommodative position of the Church and the order. They have also enthusiastically embraced ‘cultural Marxism,’ which in the West attacks white male dominance and in India has chosen to attack Hindu male dominance.
It is a part of liberation theology that such dominance cannot be addressed within peaceful, constitutional, parliamentary channels. A violent, revolutionary change is, therefore, considered necessary and desirable. They want to overthrow Indian society and specifically Hindu society, which, in the vocabulary of cultural Marxism, is seen as hegemonic, patriarchal, misogynistic, and casteist — a society that the Marxist Jesuits cannot and will not come to a peaceful engagement with. This is in complete contrast with the Jesuits of my college days who respected Hindu traditions and were votaries of an empathetic society.
Unfortunately, too many of today’s Roman Catholic and Jesuit priests take their inspiration not from Roberto de Nobili (a Sanskrit and Tamil scholar), Thomas Stephens (a Marathi scholar), Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (a Tamil scholar) and Anthony de Mello (a scholar of Vedanta, Buddhism and Sufism) but from Gustavo Gutierrez and Jon Sobrino (radical, even revolutionary Latin American Catholic scholars).
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who served as Pope Benedict XVI, was usually stuck between a rock and a hard place while heading the Vatican’s doctrinal office. He had to condemn de Mello’s fondness for Vedanta, Buddhism and Sufism as theologically not quite proper. At the same time, he had to emphatically oppose Gutierrez’ attempt to plant revolutionary Marxism into Catholic dogma. As early as 1984, Ratzinger’s office published a critical analysis where it was specifically mentioned that “Marxism and Catholic Theology are incompatible.” From my perspective, Ratzinger would have been better off supporting de Mello, who, after all, was engaging with traditions infused with the sacred and the spiritual, something that the founder of Christianity would have approved of.
Non-Christian double-talk
Only the most convoluted arguments can stretch the message of the Christian gospels to support violent materialism. Theologians like Gutierrez and Sobrino are looking for an alternative to market capitalism and reject the position that this economic system has in fact done the best job with respect to poverty reduction. They call for a dismantling of the “bourgeois State,” an old Marxist demand. Their influence extends well beyond Latin America and has found fertile soil in India. Marxist Catholic priests in India are no longer happy looking to the spiritual needs of their kinfolk and focusing on old-fashioned parish work. Instead, they want to move away from their home states and turn up in Tribal tracts, in order to work on the political consciousness of the people there and guide them towards the new Christian theology that resembles revolutionary Marxism, while emphasising some sentences from the gospels and ignoring others.
The idea that the Indian bourgeois State is an oppressor of tribals and that it needs radical transformation is frequently interspersed with positive references to the Indian Constitution. This kind of double-talk is taken straight from the tenets of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong and in its lack of respect for veracity, it is distinctly non-Christian. The ideas derived from more recent theories of cultural Marxism are even more aggressive and puzzling. These theories posit the existence of an endless irreconcilable set of contradictions between Hindu society and the tribals. Of course, these scholars do not bother to address that if there actually exists a chasm between Hindus and tribals, why would there not be a greater chasm between Indian tribals and Christianity, admittedly now channelled via a 19th century German philosopher?
Srisailam, Srikalahasti, Puri, Pandharpur, Jejuri, Dharmasthala, Dantewada, Sabarimala and so many other Hindu pilgrimage centres are intertwined with Adivasi traditions. Within the broad Indic tent, there seems to be more engagement, proximity and, may I suggest, unity in diversity. But, of course this narrative is anathema to cultural Marxists. They have to posit the existence of a wicked Hindu, male, hegemonic order that should be overthrown in the revolution that is just around the corner. In the meantime, at a minimum, it is important to keep the Adivasis worked up with real and imaginary grievances and challenging the Indian State as well as Hindu society.
Need for introspection
The Roman Catholic and Jesuit involvement with India’s tribal population is not a religious or spiritual one. It has, under the influence of Gutierrez and Sobrino, turned into a political one. Oddly enough, the tribals are denied subjective agency. They “require” the help of outside Marxist ideologues and we need to question if this so-called help is in fact a euphemism for manipulation. To manipulate tribals and set them up against a powerful State and against immediate neighbours may end up being the most cynical, sordid and dangerous of approaches.
As an external admirer of conservative traditions in the Catholic Church (the Latin Mass and Gregorian chants come to mind), I am deeply disturbed that a new generation of Marxist Catholics are willing to put at risk centuries of peaceful and cordial engagement between Indian society and Christianity of the Chaldean, Syriac, Roman or Anglican varieties. Opposing the Indian State and declaring war on Hindu society are, at a minimum, not smart. This of course certainly does not answer how Christianity, one of the most spiritually informed religious traditions of the world, can make friends with a violent, atheist, materialist cult.
I have already made a passing reference to my personal connections. Let me add. My brother is a product of a Christian Brothers school; my sister of Loretto and Presentation Convent schools. I am a strong supporter of my old Jesuit college. It is with great sadness and acute concern, therefore, that I view the unnecessary and destructive Marxist orientation of so many Roman Catholic priests, especially members of the Jesuit order.
I call for some serious introspection among my Indian Catholic friends. It is they who can best grapple with this thorny issue. Any non-Catholic speaking up will be accused of being non-secular and bigoted. Lay Catholics indulging in self-examination and confronting the imported Marxist rhetoric among their clergy are best placed to re-introduce spirituality and mutual accommodation into their faith and ensure that the forays into the political and materialistic spheres do not take a destructive turn.
Representational image | A church in Tamenglong, Manipur | Simrin Sirur | ThePrintThe purpose of this article is not to go into the tragic circumstances around the recent death of Father Stan Swamy. While many columns have been written about the tribal rights activist, including one by retired IPS officer Julio Ribeiro in ThePrint, I believe an attempt should be made to look at the larger issues surrounding the Roman Catholic Church and the Jesuit order in the context of their extensive and intensive engagement with Adivasi communities in India.
Christian missionaries and schools are generally viewed positively by Indian society. In most Bollywood movies, the Christian (usually Catholic) padre is portrayed as a benign, helpful and healing figure. I certainly hope the image stays that way, and is not altered or tarnished. For that, it is important to examine the political ideology of Christian/Catholic Marxism.
It is a common belief in India that the Roman Catholic Church in general and the Jesuit order in particular are anti-Marxist. This belief is quite wrong. The so-called ‘liberation theology’ is very much a Roman Catholic product, absent from most Protestant Christian theological outpourings. Liberation theology is profoundly anti-capitalist, anti-markets and justifies violence, using selective quotations from the gospels. They like to talk about the reference in the gospels to Jesus throwing out money-changers from the temple; there is little if any reference to the parable of talents. The leading lights of liberation theology have been Latin American Jesuits who are completely opposed to a conservative strain in philosophical, theological and political matters. The influence of the Marxist Latin American liberation theologists has deeply permeated the Roman Church in India and has impacted the Jesuit order quite profoundly over the last few decades.
It is this ideological orientation among Jesuits that leads to many of them being well-disposed to Maoist insurgents, while publicly donning the robes of supporters, helpers and padrones of the supposedly helpless tribal people. This is pretty much what Catholic Marxists have endorsed in Central and South America also and is a classic “practice” of liberation theology.
In contrast with peaceful theology
My father and I both have been products of a leading Jesuit college in south India. I am personally a significant supporter of my alma mater. Every time I interact with older, kinder, more sober, more sensible Jesuits, they find it difficult to let their guard down. But directly or indirectly, they admit to me their frustration with the fact that the loudest and most active elements in their order today are Marxists. These Marxist Jesuits reject the earlier accommodative position of the Church and the order. They have also enthusiastically embraced ‘cultural Marxism,’ which in the West attacks white male dominance and in India has chosen to attack Hindu male dominance.
It is a part of liberation theology that such dominance cannot be addressed within peaceful, constitutional, parliamentary channels. A violent, revolutionary change is, therefore, considered necessary and desirable. They want to overthrow Indian society and specifically Hindu society, which, in the vocabulary of cultural Marxism, is seen as hegemonic, patriarchal, misogynistic, and casteist — a society that the Marxist Jesuits cannot and will not come to a peaceful engagement with. This is in complete contrast with the Jesuits of my college days who respected Hindu traditions and were votaries of an empathetic society.
Unfortunately, too many of today’s Roman Catholic and Jesuit priests take their inspiration not from Roberto de Nobili (a Sanskrit and Tamil scholar), Thomas Stephens (a Marathi scholar), Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (a Tamil scholar) and Anthony de Mello (a scholar of Vedanta, Buddhism and Sufism) but from Gustavo Gutierrez and Jon Sobrino (radical, even revolutionary Latin American Catholic scholars).
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who served as Pope Benedict XVI, was usually stuck between a rock and a hard place while heading the Vatican’s doctrinal office. He had to condemn de Mello’s fondness for Vedanta, Buddhism and Sufism as theologically not quite proper. At the same time, he had to emphatically oppose Gutierrez’ attempt to plant revolutionary Marxism into Catholic dogma. As early as 1984, Ratzinger’s office published a critical analysis where it was specifically mentioned that “Marxism and Catholic Theology are incompatible.” From my perspective, Ratzinger would have been better off supporting de Mello, who, after all, was engaging with traditions infused with the sacred and the spiritual, something that the founder of Christianity would have approved of.
Non-Christian double-talk
Only the most convoluted arguments can stretch the message of the Christian gospels to support violent materialism. Theologians like Gutierrez and Sobrino are looking for an alternative to market capitalism and reject the position that this economic system has in fact done the best job with respect to poverty reduction. They call for a dismantling of the “bourgeois State,” an old Marxist demand. Their influence extends well beyond Latin America and has found fertile soil in India. Marxist Catholic priests in India are no longer happy looking to the spiritual needs of their kinfolk and focusing on old-fashioned parish work. Instead, they want to move away from their home states and turn up in Tribal tracts, in order to work on the political consciousness of the people there and guide them towards the new Christian theology that resembles revolutionary Marxism, while emphasising some sentences from the gospels and ignoring others.
The idea that the Indian bourgeois State is an oppressor of tribals and that it needs radical transformation is frequently interspersed with positive references to the Indian Constitution. This kind of double-talk is taken straight from the tenets of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong and in its lack of respect for veracity, it is distinctly non-Christian. The ideas derived from more recent theories of cultural Marxism are even more aggressive and puzzling. These theories posit the existence of an endless irreconcilable set of contradictions between Hindu society and the tribals. Of course, these scholars do not bother to address that if there actually exists a chasm between Hindus and tribals, why would there not be a greater chasm between Indian tribals and Christianity, admittedly now channelled via a 19th century German philosopher?
Srisailam, Srikalahasti, Puri, Pandharpur, Jejuri, Dharmasthala, Dantewada, Sabarimala and so many other Hindu pilgrimage centres are intertwined with Adivasi traditions. Within the broad Indic tent, there seems to be more engagement, proximity and, may I suggest, unity in diversity. But, of course this narrative is anathema to cultural Marxists. They have to posit the existence of a wicked Hindu, male, hegemonic order that should be overthrown in the revolution that is just around the corner. In the meantime, at a minimum, it is important to keep the Adivasis worked up with real and imaginary grievances and challenging the Indian State as well as Hindu society.
Need for introspection
The Roman Catholic and Jesuit involvement with India’s tribal population is not a religious or spiritual one. It has, under the influence of Gutierrez and Sobrino, turned into a political one. Oddly enough, the tribals are denied subjective agency. They “require” the help of outside Marxist ideologues and we need to question if this so-called help is in fact a euphemism for manipulation. To manipulate tribals and set them up against a powerful State and against immediate neighbours may end up being the most cynical, sordid and dangerous of approaches.
As an external admirer of conservative traditions in the Catholic Church (the Latin Mass and Gregorian chants come to mind), I am deeply disturbed that a new generation of Marxist Catholics are willing to put at risk centuries of peaceful and cordial engagement between Indian society and Christianity of the Chaldean, Syriac, Roman or Anglican varieties. Opposing the Indian State and declaring war on Hindu society are, at a minimum, not smart. This of course certainly does not answer how Christianity, one of the most spiritually informed religious traditions of the world, can make friends with a violent, atheist, materialist cult.
I have already made a passing reference to my personal connections. Let me add. My brother is a product of a Christian Brothers school; my sister of Loretto and Presentation Convent schools. I am a strong supporter of my old Jesuit college. It is with great sadness and acute concern, therefore, that I view the unnecessary and destructive Marxist orientation of so many Roman Catholic priests, especially members of the Jesuit order.
I call for some serious introspection among my Indian Catholic friends. It is they who can best grapple with this thorny issue. Any non-Catholic speaking up will be accused of being non-secular and bigoted. Lay Catholics indulging in self-examination and confronting the imported Marxist rhetoric among their clergy are best placed to re-introduce spirituality and mutual accommodation into their faith and ensure that the forays into the political and materialistic spheres do not take a destructive turn.
Friday, 29 December 2017
Saturday, 7 May 2016
Is it science or theology?
Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn
When Pakistani students open a physics or biology textbook, it is sometimes unclear whether they are actually learning science or, instead, theology. The reason: every science textbook, published by a government-run textbook board in Pakistan, by law must contain in its first chapter how Allah made our world, as well as how Muslims and Pakistanis have created science.
I have no problem with either. But the first properly belongs to Islamic Studies, the second to Islamic or Pakistani history. Neither legitimately belongs to a textbook on a modern-day scientific subject. That’s because religion and science operate very differently and have widely different assumptions. Religion is based on belief and requires the existence of a hereafter, whereas science worries only about the here and now.
Demanding that science and faith be tied together has resulted in national bewilderment and mass intellectual enfeeblement. Millions of Pakistanis have studied science subjects in school and then gone on to study technical, science-based subjects in college and university. And yet most — including science teachers — would flunk if given even the simplest science quiz.
How did this come about? Let’s take a quick browse through a current 10th grade physics book. The introductory section has the customary holy verses. These are followed by a comical overview of the history of physics. Newton and Einstein — the two greatest names — are unmentioned. Instead there’s Ptolemy the Greek, Al-Kindi, Al-Beruni, Ibn-e-Haytham, A.Q. Khan, and — amusingly — the heretical Abdus Salam.
The end-of-chapter exercises test the mettle of students with such questions as: Mark true/false; A) The first revelation sent to the Holy Prophet (PBUH) was about the creation of Heaven? B) The pin-hole camera was invented by Ibn-e-Haytham? C) Al-Beruni declared that Sind was an underwater valley that gradually filled with sand? D) Islam teaches that only men must acquire knowledge?
Dear Reader: You may well gasp in disbelief, or just hold your head in despair. How could Pakistan’s collective intelligence and the quality of what we teach our children have sunk so low? To see more such questions, or to check my translation from Urdu into English, please visit the websitehttp://eacpe.org/ where relevant pages from the above text (as well as from those discussed below) have been scanned and posted.
Take another physics book — this one (English) is for sixth-grade students. It makes abundantly clear its discomfort with the modern understanding of our universe’s beginning. The theory of the Big Bang is attributed to “a priest, George Lamaitre [sic] of Belgium”. The authors cunningly mention his faith hoping to discredit his science. Continuing, they declare that “although the Big Bang Theory is widely accepted, it probably will never be proved”.
While Georges Lemaître was indeed a Catholic priest, he was so much more. A professor of physics, he worked out the expanding universe solution to Einstein’s equations. Lemaître insisted on separating science from religion; he had publicly chided Pope Pius XII when the pontiff grandly declared that Lemaître’s results provided a scientific validation to Catholicism.
Local biology books are even more schizophrenic and confusing than the physics ones. A 10th-grade book starts off its section on ‘Life and its Origins’ unctuously quoting one religious verse after another. None of these verses hint towards evolution, and many Muslims believe that evolution is counter-religious. Then, suddenly, a full page annotated chart hits you in the face. Stolen from some modern biology book written in some other part of the world, it depicts various living organisms evolving into apes and then into modern humans. Ouch!
Such incoherent babble confuses the nature of science — its history, purpose, method, and fundamental content. If the authors are confused, just imagine the impact on students who must learn this stuff. What weird ideas must inhabit their minds!
Compounding scientific ignorance is prejudice. Most students have been persuaded into believing that Muslims alone invented science. And that the heroes of Muslim science such as Ibn-e-Haytham, Al-Khwarizmi, Omar Khayyam, Ibn-e-Sina, etc owed their scientific discoveries to their strong religious beliefs. This is wrong.
Science is the cumulative effort of humankind with its earliest recorded origins in Babylon and Egypt about 6,000 years ago, thereafter moving to China and India, and then Greece. It was a millennium later that science reached the lands of Islam, where it flourished for 400 years before moving on to Europe. Omar Khayyam, a Muslim, was doubtless a brilliant mathematician. But so was Aryabhatta, a Hindu. What does their faith have to do with their science? Natural geniuses have existed everywhere and at all times.
Today’s massive infusion of religion into the teaching of science dates to the Ziaul Haq days. It was not just school textbooks that were hijacked. In the 1980s, as an applicant to a university teaching position in whichever department, the university’s selection committee would first check your faith.
In those days a favourite question at Quaid-e-Azam University (as probably elsewhere) was to have a candidate recite Dua-i-Qunoot, a rather difficult prayer. Another was to name each of the Holy Prophet’s wives, or be quizzed about the ideology of Pakistan. Deftly posed questions could expose the particularities of the candidate’s sect, personal degree of adherence, and whether he had been infected by liberal ideas.
Most applicants meekly submitted to the grilling. Of these many rose to become today’s chairmen, deans, and vice-chancellors. The bolder ones refused, saying that the questions asked were irrelevant. With strong degrees earned from good overseas universities, they did not have to submit to their bullying inquisitors. Decades later, they are part of a widely dispersed diaspora. Though lost to Pakistan, they have done very well for themselves.
Science has no need for Pakistan; in the rest of the world it roars ahead. But Pakistan needs science because it is the basis of a modern economy and it enables people to gain decent livelihoods. To get there, matters of faith will have to be cleanly separated from matters of science. This is how peoples around the world have managed to keep their beliefs intact and yet prosper. Pakistan can too, but only if it wants.
When Pakistani students open a physics or biology textbook, it is sometimes unclear whether they are actually learning science or, instead, theology. The reason: every science textbook, published by a government-run textbook board in Pakistan, by law must contain in its first chapter how Allah made our world, as well as how Muslims and Pakistanis have created science.
I have no problem with either. But the first properly belongs to Islamic Studies, the second to Islamic or Pakistani history. Neither legitimately belongs to a textbook on a modern-day scientific subject. That’s because religion and science operate very differently and have widely different assumptions. Religion is based on belief and requires the existence of a hereafter, whereas science worries only about the here and now.
Demanding that science and faith be tied together has resulted in national bewilderment and mass intellectual enfeeblement. Millions of Pakistanis have studied science subjects in school and then gone on to study technical, science-based subjects in college and university. And yet most — including science teachers — would flunk if given even the simplest science quiz.
How did this come about? Let’s take a quick browse through a current 10th grade physics book. The introductory section has the customary holy verses. These are followed by a comical overview of the history of physics. Newton and Einstein — the two greatest names — are unmentioned. Instead there’s Ptolemy the Greek, Al-Kindi, Al-Beruni, Ibn-e-Haytham, A.Q. Khan, and — amusingly — the heretical Abdus Salam.
The end-of-chapter exercises test the mettle of students with such questions as: Mark true/false; A) The first revelation sent to the Holy Prophet (PBUH) was about the creation of Heaven? B) The pin-hole camera was invented by Ibn-e-Haytham? C) Al-Beruni declared that Sind was an underwater valley that gradually filled with sand? D) Islam teaches that only men must acquire knowledge?
Dear Reader: You may well gasp in disbelief, or just hold your head in despair. How could Pakistan’s collective intelligence and the quality of what we teach our children have sunk so low? To see more such questions, or to check my translation from Urdu into English, please visit the websitehttp://eacpe.org/ where relevant pages from the above text (as well as from those discussed below) have been scanned and posted.
Take another physics book — this one (English) is for sixth-grade students. It makes abundantly clear its discomfort with the modern understanding of our universe’s beginning. The theory of the Big Bang is attributed to “a priest, George Lamaitre [sic] of Belgium”. The authors cunningly mention his faith hoping to discredit his science. Continuing, they declare that “although the Big Bang Theory is widely accepted, it probably will never be proved”.
While Georges Lemaître was indeed a Catholic priest, he was so much more. A professor of physics, he worked out the expanding universe solution to Einstein’s equations. Lemaître insisted on separating science from religion; he had publicly chided Pope Pius XII when the pontiff grandly declared that Lemaître’s results provided a scientific validation to Catholicism.
Local biology books are even more schizophrenic and confusing than the physics ones. A 10th-grade book starts off its section on ‘Life and its Origins’ unctuously quoting one religious verse after another. None of these verses hint towards evolution, and many Muslims believe that evolution is counter-religious. Then, suddenly, a full page annotated chart hits you in the face. Stolen from some modern biology book written in some other part of the world, it depicts various living organisms evolving into apes and then into modern humans. Ouch!
Such incoherent babble confuses the nature of science — its history, purpose, method, and fundamental content. If the authors are confused, just imagine the impact on students who must learn this stuff. What weird ideas must inhabit their minds!
Compounding scientific ignorance is prejudice. Most students have been persuaded into believing that Muslims alone invented science. And that the heroes of Muslim science such as Ibn-e-Haytham, Al-Khwarizmi, Omar Khayyam, Ibn-e-Sina, etc owed their scientific discoveries to their strong religious beliefs. This is wrong.
Science is the cumulative effort of humankind with its earliest recorded origins in Babylon and Egypt about 6,000 years ago, thereafter moving to China and India, and then Greece. It was a millennium later that science reached the lands of Islam, where it flourished for 400 years before moving on to Europe. Omar Khayyam, a Muslim, was doubtless a brilliant mathematician. But so was Aryabhatta, a Hindu. What does their faith have to do with their science? Natural geniuses have existed everywhere and at all times.
Today’s massive infusion of religion into the teaching of science dates to the Ziaul Haq days. It was not just school textbooks that were hijacked. In the 1980s, as an applicant to a university teaching position in whichever department, the university’s selection committee would first check your faith.
In those days a favourite question at Quaid-e-Azam University (as probably elsewhere) was to have a candidate recite Dua-i-Qunoot, a rather difficult prayer. Another was to name each of the Holy Prophet’s wives, or be quizzed about the ideology of Pakistan. Deftly posed questions could expose the particularities of the candidate’s sect, personal degree of adherence, and whether he had been infected by liberal ideas.
Most applicants meekly submitted to the grilling. Of these many rose to become today’s chairmen, deans, and vice-chancellors. The bolder ones refused, saying that the questions asked were irrelevant. With strong degrees earned from good overseas universities, they did not have to submit to their bullying inquisitors. Decades later, they are part of a widely dispersed diaspora. Though lost to Pakistan, they have done very well for themselves.
Science has no need for Pakistan; in the rest of the world it roars ahead. But Pakistan needs science because it is the basis of a modern economy and it enables people to gain decent livelihoods. To get there, matters of faith will have to be cleanly separated from matters of science. This is how peoples around the world have managed to keep their beliefs intact and yet prosper. Pakistan can too, but only if it wants.
Sunday, 15 December 2013
The curious case of convenient liberalism
Swapan Dasgupta in Times of India
15 December 2013, 03:20 AM IST
Indeed, the most striking feature of the furore over the apex court judgment has been the relatively small number of voices denouncing homosexuality as ‘unnatural’ and deviant. This conservative passivity may even have conveyed an impression that India is changing socially and politically at a pace that wasn’t anticipated. Certainly, the generous overuse of ‘alternative’ to describe political euphoria and cultural impatience may even suggest that tradition has given way to post-modernity.
Yet, before urban India is equated with the bohemian quarters of New York and San Francisco, some judgmental restraint may be in order. The righteous indignation against conservative upholders of family values are not as clear cut as may seem from media reports. There are awkward questions that have been glossed over and many loose ends that have been left dangling.
A year ago, a fierce revulsion against the rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi led to Parliament amending the Penal Code and enacting a set of laws that extended the definition of rape and made punishment extremely stringent. It was the force of organized public opinion that drove the changes. Curiously, despite the Supreme Court judgment stating quite categorically that it was the responsibility of Parliament to modify section 377, there seems to be a general aversion to pressuring the law-makers to do their job and bring the criminal law system into the 21st century. Is it because India is bigoted or is there a belief that there are some issues that are best glossed over in silence?
This dichotomy of approach needs to be addressed. Conventionally, it is the job of the legislatures to write laws and for the judiciary to assess their accordance with the Constitution and to interpret them. In recent years, the judiciary has been rightly criticised for over-stepping its mark and encroaching into the domain of both the executive and the legislatures. Yet, we are in the strange situation today of the government seeking to put the onus of legitimising homosexuality on the judges.
Maybe there are larger questions involved. The battle over 377 was not between a brute majoritarianism and a minority demanding inclusion. The list of those who appealed against the Delhi High Court verdict indicates it was a contest between two minorities: religious minorities versus lifestyle minorities. Formidable organizations such as the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and some church bodies based their opposition to gay rights on theology. Liberal promoters of sexual choice on the other hand based the claim of decriminalised citizenship on modernity and scientific evidence. In short, there was a fundamental conflict between the constitutionally-protected rights of minority communities to adhere to faiths that abhor same-sex relationships and the right of gays to live by their own morals. Yet, if absolute libertarianism was to prevail, can the khap panchayats be denied their perverse moral codes?
The answer is yes but only if it is backed by majority will, expressed through Parliament. Harsh as it may sound, it is the moral majority that determines the social consensus.
There is a curious paradox here. On the question of gay rights, liberal India prefers a cosmopolitanism drawn from the contemporary West. At the same time, its endorsement of laws that are nondenominational and non-theological does not extend to support for a common civil code. Despite the Constitution’s Directive Principles, the right of every citizen to be equal before the law is deemed to be majoritarian and therefore unacceptable by the very people who stood up for inclusiveness last week.
For everything that is true of India, the opposite is turning out to be equally true.
15 December 2013, 03:20 AM IST
Last week, liberal opinion that enjoys a virtual monopoly of the airwaves pilloried the Supreme Court for what some feel was its most disgraceful judgment since the infamous Habeas Corpus case of 1976. The decision to overturn the Delhi High Court judgment taking consensual same-sex relationships outside the purview of criminal laws has been viewed as an unacceptable assault on individual freedom and minority rights and even an expression of bigotry. Overcoming fears of a virulent conservative backlash, mainstream politicians have expressed their disappointment at the judgment and happily begun using hitherto unfamiliar shorthand terms such as LGBT.
Indeed, the most striking feature of the furore over the apex court judgment has been the relatively small number of voices denouncing homosexuality as ‘unnatural’ and deviant. This conservative passivity may even have conveyed an impression that India is changing socially and politically at a pace that wasn’t anticipated. Certainly, the generous overuse of ‘alternative’ to describe political euphoria and cultural impatience may even suggest that tradition has given way to post-modernity.
Yet, before urban India is equated with the bohemian quarters of New York and San Francisco, some judgmental restraint may be in order. The righteous indignation against conservative upholders of family values are not as clear cut as may seem from media reports. There are awkward questions that have been glossed over and many loose ends that have been left dangling.
A year ago, a fierce revulsion against the rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi led to Parliament amending the Penal Code and enacting a set of laws that extended the definition of rape and made punishment extremely stringent. It was the force of organized public opinion that drove the changes. Curiously, despite the Supreme Court judgment stating quite categorically that it was the responsibility of Parliament to modify section 377, there seems to be a general aversion to pressuring the law-makers to do their job and bring the criminal law system into the 21st century. Is it because India is bigoted or is there a belief that there are some issues that are best glossed over in silence?
This dichotomy of approach needs to be addressed. Conventionally, it is the job of the legislatures to write laws and for the judiciary to assess their accordance with the Constitution and to interpret them. In recent years, the judiciary has been rightly criticised for over-stepping its mark and encroaching into the domain of both the executive and the legislatures. Yet, we are in the strange situation today of the government seeking to put the onus of legitimising homosexuality on the judges.
Maybe there are larger questions involved. The battle over 377 was not between a brute majoritarianism and a minority demanding inclusion. The list of those who appealed against the Delhi High Court verdict indicates it was a contest between two minorities: religious minorities versus lifestyle minorities. Formidable organizations such as the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and some church bodies based their opposition to gay rights on theology. Liberal promoters of sexual choice on the other hand based the claim of decriminalised citizenship on modernity and scientific evidence. In short, there was a fundamental conflict between the constitutionally-protected rights of minority communities to adhere to faiths that abhor same-sex relationships and the right of gays to live by their own morals. Yet, if absolute libertarianism was to prevail, can the khap panchayats be denied their perverse moral codes?
The answer is yes but only if it is backed by majority will, expressed through Parliament. Harsh as it may sound, it is the moral majority that determines the social consensus.
There is a curious paradox here. On the question of gay rights, liberal India prefers a cosmopolitanism drawn from the contemporary West. At the same time, its endorsement of laws that are nondenominational and non-theological does not extend to support for a common civil code. Despite the Constitution’s Directive Principles, the right of every citizen to be equal before the law is deemed to be majoritarian and therefore unacceptable by the very people who stood up for inclusiveness last week.
For everything that is true of India, the opposite is turning out to be equally true.
Wednesday, 18 September 2013
What is Religion
Part 1: civil religion and the state
The 'God' of American civil religion supplies a way for society to judge itself from a standpoint exterior to power
The recent death of Robert Bellah made me reread his classic essay on American civil religion, which first appeared in 1967 and this, in turn, sparked a series' worth of questions on what religion is. Bellah believed, as I have come to do, that a society without religion is impossible. This claim will strike quite a lot of readers as wholly absurd, as ridiculous as supposing that Earth goes round the sun when any fool can see the sun crossing the heavens several times at least in any English summer. So I think it's worth examining and defending at some length.
The first requirement, if you are going to do this, is to break all notions of religion as being something essentially like Christianity or any of the other monotheisms of today. To talk about "religion" as if the perfect form was modern Christianity is like talking about biology as if the perfect mammal was homo sapiens.
Bellah was a sociologist and to some extent an anthropologist too. He knew very well that there have been innumerable different forms of religion, and that counter-examples can be found for everything that is supposed to be distinctively religious. You don't need priests, holy books, or doctrines. You don't even need myths. All these are things which, once established, are hard to be rid of, because they reflect and help to constitute increasingly complex models of social organisation which will tend to replace more simple ones. But none of them are essential to a religion.
At the same time, it's important not to go too far in the other direction, and to suppose that every social activity, and every movement of the inner life, can be described as in some sense religious.
Bellah himself started off in the 70s with a long and complicated definition and ended up with a very simple and powerful one. This came in part from the early 20th-century philosopher George Santayana, who wrote that having a religion meant having "another world to live in – whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or not".
What Bellah added to this was the point that the world of everyday, from which religion promises to deliver us, is not more real, or less constructed than the one we access through religious practices. Everyday life may involve different kinds of cognition, but the world we see through its mechanisms is just as much the product of wish fulfilment as heaven might be. Only the appetites being satisfied in there are different.
And living entirely in the daily life world of those narrow appetites and immediate problems to solve is literally intolerable. No one can manage it all the time. He doesn't mean by this that religion speaks to our higher or more unselfish instincts. It needs to be taken for granted in these arguments that some forms of religion are almost entirely malign and lead to horror. But religion is also, importantly, selfless. Its atrocities derive from a higher cause. They offer the hope that things will be different.
How does this map on to his idea of an American civic religion, distinct from Christianity? Perhaps the most important point of his essay, easily overlooked, is that there has been from the very beginning of the Republic, he says, an American civil irreligion competing with the civil religion as a narrative and a general theory of the state and its people. Again, it is a characteristic of this thought that there are struggles rather than simplicities.
The struggle between civil religion and civil irreligion is also one between republicanism and liberalism as these were understood in the late 18th century. Republicanism, certainly as it was understood in the 18th century, depends utterly on religion, because a republic is built and maintained by its citizens in their interactions with each other. They have to subordinate themselves quite deliberately to a vision of a common good, and they must see this as fulfilling their own natures. That, very simply, is the task of religion. This is the spirit that he sees infuses the Declaration of Independence.
Against this is the competing tradition of liberalism, more fully developed in the constitution. Liberalism (in this sense) has no need of God because it trusts that the self-interest of the citizens will lead them to the best possible outcome: "the state is a purely neutral legal mechanism without purposes or values. Its sole function is to protect the rights of individuals, that is, to protect freedom." Such a state is, he thinks, an absurd impossibility, which could never exist (non-existence does not of course much diminish its power over our imaginations).
States and societies must have a way to judge themselves from some standpoint exterior to power. It is not enough for religion to give us access to another world: we must be able to contemplate our everyday world and judge it by the standards of the one we reach. And this judgment is what the "God" of American civil religion supplies. This God is clearly distinct from the Christian one, and still more the Jewish one. Rather he is the being who rescues, or who might sometimes rescue, America from the evil angels of its nature.
Whatever else you think of his ideas, this task is pressing today.
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Part 2: why football doesn't measure up
The most blinding and obvious deficiency of football as a religion is that it lacks any kind of theology – and excludes many women
'For a lot of people the fate of their football team does affect them the way that God's good opinion is supposed to do.' Photograph: Carl Recine/Action Images
A perfectly reasonable question to ask of people like me, who define "religion" in a way that plays down theology, is why something like football should not be a religion. After all, it involves collective emotion, quasi-mystical experiences of loss of selfhood in a higher purpose, even if that is only to crush those bastards from the visiting team. IfNick Hornby's Fever Pitch is to be believed, it is also a way of coming to terms with the disappointments and tragedies of life. Going to a match with your estranged father has something of the effect that taking communion together is meant to have for Christians.
If you do a Google news search, in the months of an English winter, for terms like "miracle", or "messiah" many results will turn out to be about football matches. For a lot of people the fate of their football team does affect them the way that God's good opinion is supposed to do. All kinds of mental illness and unhappiness diminish when their team does well, and increase when it does badly. And then there is the Bill Shankly quote, that football isn't a matter of life or death, it's much more important than that: this, in itself, is a wonderful definition of the ambitions of religious truth – that it should be more important than life or death.
And yet football very clearly isn't a proper religion. And the reasons why cast some light on what religions are, or must be.
I should perhaps add here that I am completely unsympathetic to the game. I have only been to one serious football match (a north London derby) in my life, when I was accompanying a police patrol. We sat on the touchline, and came away with our shoulders coated with spittle because the people behind us were howling out their feelings without any inhibitions. I will watch football sometimes on screens because the movement is so completely meaningless. I suppose this is a vague equivalent to the homoerotic pleasures of liturgical traditionalists.
But I absolutely lack something which is obviously a deep part of the engagement of real football fans – the ability to suspend disbelief so that I feel I am in some way present on the pitch myself. The sale of replica shirts that is such an important part of the economics of modern football clearly depends on the idea that you take on some of the virtue of the player whose number you wear. That's clearly one of the mechanisms that makes up religions. But it's not enough on its own.
And this is important. Religions aren't made from specially "religious" behaviour or thoughts, but from ordinary patterns of thought and behaviour which are assembled in particular ways.
The most blinding and obvious deficiency of football as a religion is that it lacks any kind of theology. There is in fact an absurd public rhetoric embraced by Fifa about brotherhood but no one takes it seriously. Although theology is the least important part of any religious system, and the one which alters most in response to changes either in public ritual or in private emotion, it is needed as a way to make sense – to the participants – of what is going on.
I'm inclined to think that it is a further disadvantage that football matches have results. It really doesn't matter what football managers say in public compared to what their players do. Compare this to American civil religion, which could be identified, and analysed by Robert Bellah because he had texts to work with. He was able to point out, and to analyse, the implicit theologies of American public rhetoric, and the kinds of things that presidents said when they wanted to unite their country around a common purpose. If you were to do that to the speeches made by football managers, the results would be less rewarding. The Gettysburg Address was rather more than a half-time pep talk in the American civil war.
But all this is really rather theoretical. The real reason why football could never function as a religion is blindingly obvious – which is why we are blind to it. Many women find it boring and incomprehensible.
For the most part "serious" men's football is an escape from all the problems entailed by the existence of another sex. This has its charms, but it won't do at all for a religion, which has to offer sense and meaning and hope to the whole of life. If religions were only expressions of willed stupidity, willed escapism, and orgies of communal feeling, then, yes, football might be a religion. But since it isn't, there must be more to religions than that.
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part 3: the role of the ritual
Robert Bellah argues that religion is underpinned and preceded by ritual – but that does not make all ritual religious
'Acts such as staring at the sunset might be a root of some of our perceptions of the world as ineffable and infinitely valuable.' Photograph: David Bigwood / Alamy
If you treat religion as a natural phenomenon, as Robert Bellah did, two things follow. The first is that what we observe will not have clear or logical boundaries. This means that what constitutes a religion is really quite hard to specify even if it is fairly easy to recognise. The second point is that any of the social phenomena or psychological phenomena we are interested in will have a history. In some aspects this will be an evolutionary history. What we have will have developed from earlier forms, and the capacities we use will have evolved from earlier ones.
This is most obvious in the case of language. It's reasonable to say that there could be no religion without a language – reasonable, but hardly inarguable. A great many of the experiences we think of as quintessentially religious come without language, mystical ones in particular. (I know it is perfectly possible for an atheist to have mystical experiences and to shape their life around them while denying them any theological explanation. So it would clearly be wrong to say that mystical experiences enforce any particular religious position. That's not the point.)
Nonetheless, even wordless religious experiences are embedded in language. Animals without language might have proto-religious experiences, but these are clearly not the same as those which a linguistically competent human has. The primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh once described to me a line of chimpanzees staring in apparent bliss at a sunset – something which might be a root of some of our perceptions of the world as ineffable and infinitely valuable. But the chimpanzees will never tell stories about it, and never try to embed the experience in a web of explicit meanings. Both of those things must form part of any religious experience.
So the emergence of language must have preceded the emergence of religion. Bellah, however, moved towards the view that ritual preceded both, and made both possible. This is a very large claim for ritual. It is made in compressed form in the big bookReligion in Human Evolution, and in an earlier, more spacious way in the paper Durkheim and Ritual, reprinted in the Robert Bellah reader.
Essentially, he argues that shared attention directed through repetitive and stereotyped actions is the essence of ritual, and that it is also at the root of all human learning, including the transactions between a mother and her baby. This makes a lot of sense when you consider the extraordinarily ritualised proto-language that we use when communicating with babies. When practised between two people, ritual and play give rise to love, whether sexual, parental, or simply between friends. When practised in larger groups, ritual and play give us religion and language.
This is a very compressed version of the argument. I have for instance entirely left out his speculations on the importance of music in the process, although they are also relevant to language acquisition, as anyone who talks to toddlers will tell you. But it carries the minimum we need to understand his approach to the question of what religion is.
Talking about the importance of ritual in this way is frequently attacked as a way to defend the relevance of religion in a world where it is (or merely ought to be) irrelevant. It looks like special pleading. Passages such as this: "Since ritual, for Durkheim, is primarily about the sacred in a sense in which the religious and the social are almost interchangeable, subsequent work … might be seen as disclosing an element of the sacred, and thus of the religious, at the very basis of social action of any kind," lend strength to the suspicion that this is just a way to make sociologists look as if they had the key to all mythologies, something no other scientists, of course, would ever do.
But the suspicion is importantly misplaced. To show that the earliest religions arise from the same processes as the ritual capabilities which make us distinctively human, is not an argument that everything which subsequently evolved using those capabilities must be religious.
The sense in which Bellah's claim seems to me really important, as well as quite right, is that it undercuts the idea that there is a special "religious" mode of irrationality – a mind virus, if you will – that could be eradicated and leave the rest of our humanity intact and purified. On the contrary, if you could remove the roots of religion, you remove the roots of humanity, too. Ritual and narrative are the basic ways by which we learn what it is to be human, and I don't think it's grotesque imperialism to regard arguments about which rituals and narratives are truly religious ones – whether or not their conclusions are atheistic.
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part 4: divinity, God and 'real' religion
Can you have a religion not based around the Abrahamic idea of a God who could, if he wished, behave like a mafia boss?
Thai men take part in a mass meditation ceremony. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features
One of the most unnerving passages in Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution is the section where he examines the central Jewish and Christian idea of a covenant with God. He traces it back to the treaties imposed by the remarkably brutal Assyrian empire on the nations it subjugated.
Some of the treaties have been preserved, so that it is possible to compare the language with that of the Bible. It turns out that the language in which God addresses Israel is almost identical to the language with which the Assyrians address the rulers they have suffered to remain in the states they would otherwise devastate. The nearest modern analogy would perhaps be for some tiny Baltic state like Estonia to model its understanding of God on Stalin. In both cases, there is a fundamental asymmetry of power: the weaker party is bound and compelled to obedience and even to love. The stronger party is entirely untrammelled.
"In both Assyrian and Israelite versions of the vassal covenant the subordinate must keep the stipulations of the treaty or face the most disastrous consequences: in Israel God, in Assyria the gods, will inflict leprosy, blindness, violent death, rape, and invasion by 'a nation you have not known' if the subordinate is disloyal."
Two questions arise from this. The first is whether this isn't just a really powerful argument for atheism – it looks as if the central idea of God's chosen people has nothing to do with revelation and is more a kind of wish-fulfilment arising from an abusive relationship. There is a counter-argument sketched out in Bellah's book, which I don't want to go into here because to enter into it would move away from the central question of what a religion is.
That demands that we ask the second question – whether there could be religions that were not based around the Abrahamic idea of a God who could, if he wished, behave like a mafia boss: the being Blake called "Old Nobodaddy".
I am writing this at a meeting of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion, which has been discussing atheisms. The plural is important, because one of the arguments here is that both religion and atheism are socially constituted. If you complicate the definition of religion, you also constitute the definitions of atheism, yet both complications are forced on us by the variety and inventiveness of human societies.
It is almost universally true that what counts as religion in one society at one time will be atheistic in another, and vice versa. Both Socrates and the early Christians were persecuted as atheists, yet its obvious that both lived in a world filled with spirits. Equally, most people are atheists with regard to most gods.
Even strict naturalists will claim to have transcendent experiences. Some will claim this with peculiar fervour, as if they wanted to show that atheists lost nothing by abandoning God. So it's perfectly possible, even if uncommon, to be a strict naturalist and Buddhist (I think Susan Blackmore would qualify as an example) and, clearly, Buddhism is generally classed as a religion.
So let's sharpen the question to whether it is possible to have a conception of the divine that does not involve any kind of personal God, or God having any kind of personal relationship with the believer.
Such a set of beliefs would be largely inarticulate. There might be a kind of intellectual superstructure – as there is in Buddhism – but a worked-out theology would be unnecessary especially if the main structure of religious participation was built around rituals and practices rather than creeds. In some forms of eastern religion, the only words required of a believer are mantras that are quite deliberately meaningless, or rapidly become so with repetition.
This does seem to me to be an almost entirely depersonalised picture of something otherworldly, whether we call it the divine, the transcendent, or the ultimately real. Whatever it is called it triumphantly fulfils Bellah's criterion that religion should show us another world and allow us to criticise and better understand this one from the other's perspective.
Of course, much of Buddhism isn't like this. You might argue that the deracinated Buddhism of western intellectuals isn't a real religion just as some antitheists argue that the beliefs of philosophically sophisticated Christian theologians aren't "real" Christianity. But I don't think this argument holds for a religion like Buddhism, which has no founding covenant. It can't be wrong to defy the intentions of a non-existent God. But it can be a very religious act.
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How are religions born?
What is religion, part 5: In the systems we know about, either folk beliefs coalesce or a charismatic founder emerges
Spanish soldiers in Malaga carry a statue of Christ during a holy week procession. Photograph: Jorge Guerrero/AFP/Getty Images
Since they are historical entities, religions are born and die. I'll think about their death some other time. But how do they emerge, and from what? This isn't a question with a single answer, although there are a couple of popular stories about the process left over from the 19th century.
It's widely believed, for example, either that religions must have a charismatic founder, a prophet figure, or that they are more or less self-conscious frauds perpetrated by a priestly class against the common people. This second version is clearly a secularised version of the Protestant history of the Reformation, and makes very little sense as a general theory. Obviously there have been examples of both types of religion formation. It's possible that Mormonism combines both, since a charismatic founder managed to create a social structure with huge rewards for the priesthood. But there are too many exceptions for these rules to be generally valid.
Robert Bellah's account of the emergence of religion might be said to break off just at the point when it becomes easy to talk about the emergence and existence of particular religions, distinguished clearly from other forms of social activity. The very earliest religions are, in Bellah's telling, indistinguishable from culture. He follows Emile Durkheim and most anthropologists in seeing "religion" as an intensification of ritual first of all. The things that everyone in the tribe does together, and the stories they tell together become their religion – or at least what anthropologists could study and classify as religion.
It's not at all clear that the people studied by anthropologists would understand this distinction. They certainly don't understand it theologically. There is a good attack on these kinds of misunderstandings in Pascal Boyer's book The Naturalness of Religious Ideas, in which he points out that most anthropological accounts of "primitive beliefs" refer to something that does not actually exist: "They [are not] thoughts that occur to actual people; they describe thoughts that people might entertain, in the anthropologist's view, if they wanted to make sense of what they actually do and say."
Bellah, with his stress on ritual and on the embodiment of beliefs in wider systems of meaning, avoids this pitfall. You make sense of what you do and say by acting on it, and embodying it in a larger narrative, not by extracting it into a system.
Yet systems do emerge, and they form a large part of what we now think of as religion. Although some form of healing ritual, and healing specialist, seems to have been among the very earliest precursors of religion, and of priesthood, the emergence of any kind of "religion" organisationally distinct from the rest of culture depends at the very least on agriculture, which provides enough of a surplus in fixed settlements.
It seems certain that religions, like other social forms, evolve: that is to say they arise from modifications of earlier forms. The trouble for historical inquiry is simply that without written records we simply have to guess what happened. With written records, we need no longer guess, but can be authoritatively misled. Two excellent accounts of this process are Tom Holland's book In the Shadow of the Sword, about the invention of Islam, and Jim Macdonald's blogpost on the emergence of the Bible as fan fiction.
In those religious systems we know about, there seem to be two processes under way. The first is a kind of coalescence of folk beliefs and practices into something more or less organised and more or less useful to the state. Shinto looks like that, and Hinduism. You could make a case that American Protestantism, which has increasingly less to do with historic, Orthodox Christianity, is heading in the other direction.
Then there are the religions that can be traced back to a single charismatic founder – most obviously Christianity and Islam, but also Sikhism and Mormonism, to name two modern successes.
In all these cases, there is considerable doubt about the relation of the teacher to the teaching subsequently encoded in their name (as with Marx and Marxism), but it does seem that the idea of the perfect teacher helps to spread teachings. The best illustration of that is Judaism, which seems to have been a coalescence or codification – with considerable distortions – of a folk religion recollected in exile, but which was codified around the almost entirely invented figure of Moses.
It seems intuitively obvious that in the modern world, where people must make a self-conscious choice of religion or belief system, a charismatic founder figure who can say "follow me" is necessary. But like many things intuitively obvious, this is wrong. Even today, the most interesting religious movements are those that coalesce without a single founder or a body of organised doctrine – Rastafarianism is a small example, charismatic Christianity a much more important one. There are still religions being born that will change the world.
Thursday, 6 September 2012
You can't dance to atheism
Any doctrine that actually works to hold society together is indistinguishable from a religion. It needs its rituals and its myths
'In America the myth of a particular sort of extreme individualism is inseparable from the myths of a particular sort of America whose history has been invented in almost every detail.' Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
I finished the series of articles I wrote on Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolutionwith a definition – a religion is a philosophy that makes you dance. It pleased me because the book itself can be read as a history of how philosophy grew from dance. But is it any use?
The great difficulty of definitions like mine is that they leave the content of religions entirely to one side. We are still enough of the heirs of Christendom to feel that religions must involve doctrines, heresies, and a commitment to supernatural realism. The trouble is that a definition with doctrines, heresies, and supernaturalism fits many varieties of atheism just as well. You will object that atheism bans, by definition, any belief in the supernatural. Yet almost all sophisticated religions ban at an intellectual level all kinds of belief which sustain them in practice. Buddhists worship; Muslims have idols. "Theological incorrectness" is found wherever you look for it.
And atheism can be just as theologically incorrect: today's paper told me that: "our bodies are built and controlled by far fewer genes than scientists had expected". The metaphors of "building" and "controlling" have here taken a concrete form that makes them palpably untrue. Genes don't do either thing. It seems to me that a belief in tiny invisible all-controlling entities is precisely a belief in the supernatural, yet that is the form in which entirely naturalistic genetics is widely understood in our culture. Religion can't really be about doctrine and heresy either, because these concepts don't make sense in pre-literate cultures. You can even ask whether the concept of "supernaturalism" makes any sense in most of the world without a developed idea of scientific naturalism, and scientific laws, that would stand for its opposite.
The serious weakness of my definition is that philosophy itself is a very late development and not one that has really caught on. As Bertrand Russell observed, many people would rather die than think, and most do. So maybe it would be better to say that religion is a myth that you can dance to. This is useful because it suggests that atheism is not a religion as you can't dance to it. There's no shortage of atheist myths – in the sense of historically incorrect statements which are believed for their moral value and because it's thought that society will fall apart if they're abandoned. The comments here are full of them. But they are no longer danceable.
There aren't any overwhelming and inspiring collective atheist rituals. I don't mean that these can't exist. Olof Palme's funeral procession was one unforgettable example. But they don't exist today. Possibly, the London demonstration against Pope Benedict would qualify but in terms of numbers it was wholly insignificant compared with the crowds that he drew, or that flock to church every Sunday.
Against this point the committed atheist replies exactly as a liberal protestant would have done 20 years ago: bums on pews don't matter; he or she is in the business of truth, not numbers, and the truth must in the course of time prevail. I don't believe this. I don't believe it in either case. Individualism without some myth of the collective is quite powerless. This is clearly illustrated by the Tea Party in America where the myth of a particular sort of extreme individualism is inseparable from the myths of a particular sort of America whose history has been invented in almost every detail.
If I'm right, then liberal, individualistic atheism is impossible as an organising principle of society because any doctrine that actually works to hold society together is indistinguishable from a religion. It needs its rituals and it needs its myths. A philosophy will grow around it in due course. Now perhaps you can have, at least on a small scale, a society committed to the principles of rational and tolerant disagreement and the sovereignty of reason. But what you end up with then isn't some rational Athens of the mind. It's Glastonbury.
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