Real Reformation
This article in Church and State had me thinking.
‘In a world that is teeming with humanity, armed with pipe bombs and machine guns and nuclear weapons and drones, we don’t need defenders of religion’s status quo—we need real reformation, as radical as that of the 16th Century and much, much broader. It is only by acknowledging religion’s worst ideas that we have any hope of embracing the best.’
In a world that is a self-made human hell, we don't need hell.
I don’t disagree with much of this at all. So why am I going to complain? Because this kind of writing is indulgent, or an invitation to self-indulgence – the people who support any of these ideas in the form in which they are presented here are not going to listen to this, or any, kind of criticism, and the people who agree with them really ought to be doing something more constructive with their time and intelligence. It’s boring, too: the people who will agree with these points, already agree with them, we know all this, so move on, please.
Before going further, let me acknowledge that the author does highlight elsewhere ‘some of humanity’s best moral and spiritual concepts, ideas like the Golden Rule, and values like compassion, generosity and courage that make up our shared moral core.’ That’s where my focus would be. I’m just interested in the question as to why the emphasis on the constructive with respect to love and peace generates much less passion and excitement than an emphasis on the worst. Hell crops up in these bad ideas, and it is noticeable that interest in Dante’s Comedy focuses overwhelmingly on the Inferno rather than the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. Why? Immediate answer – Hell is familiar, it is composed of recognizable characters doing things that are all-too-human. We know death, hatred, stupidity, greed, violence, war and suffering to be real in a way that harmony seems always remote from the way we live.
The author says this:
‘Some of humanity’s technological innovations are things we would have been better off without: the medieval rack, the atomic bomb and powdered lead potions come to mind. Religions tend to develop ideas or concepts rather than technologies, but like every other creative human enterprise, they produce some really bad ones along with the good.’
Again, I agree very much with this. But it requires no great intellect or insight to make these points. I shall quote from something I have written on Dante here:
‘I’ll just say here that I dislike the concept of Hell and would prefer to avoid it. The danger with such a notion is that it divides the world between the forces of infallible good and of irredeemable evil, so that your side – friends - can do no wrong and those with opposing views – enemies – can do no right. It’s the end of politics and it diminishes us all. The approach involves a dangerous mindset. The problem with fighting wars against evil is that you turn into the very evil you are fighting. Hell is embroidery, a poetry or a mythology that serves to elaborate certain points about right living and wrong living. It can be useful in showing how bad choices have bad consequences, and how we are always free and responsible in acting the way we do. That is how I read and value Dante. At the same time, it’s a human invention and, like all such inventions, it is one that can rebound on us, giving us the power and justification for human beings to do terrible things to each other. But isn’t that precisely the point about human power, culture, technology, knowledge? So whilst I have a great deal of sympathy with those who would prefer to close Hell down and send the devil packing, I do think this is an evasion of the big issue at stake here – good and bad and the human ability to choose one or the other, and the human responsibility to make that choice. This is precisely the issue raised by industrialisation and the extension of human technological power over the world. But just be aware of the danger that, in fighting the forces of Hell, you may become a devil yourself.’
I kept ‘Hell’ out of the title, for the reason that I do indeed dislike the idea. But such dislike does nothing in itself to prevent a Hell on Earth as a result of the failure to devise social, institutional, psychic and moral means and mechanisms to channel human behaviour positively rather than destructively. Or put more simply, global heating grace of specific activities on the part of specific humans within specific social relations will make this earth a Hellhole.
The author of this article goes on to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, saying these bad ideas of religion belong in the dustbin of history just as soon as we can get them there. Does anyone think Hitchens would have been sympathetic to the supposedly good ideas of religion that the author refers to? Good ideas are just good ideas, and would be so without religious sanction. Look at the image which accompanied the article, Bad Religion it reads, with a red veto over the cross. The message is anti-religious, sliding easily at the subconscious level from a critique of the ‘worst ideas’ of religion into the equation of such ideas with religion as such. Doesn’t religion, after all, invite the worst by suppressing reason in face of faith? In other words, whenever I, like the author, highlight ‘some of humanity’s best moral and spiritual concepts, ideas like the Golden Rule, and values like compassion, generosity and courage that make up our shared moral core,’ I can expect to be treated to an anti-religious diatribe which equates the 'bad ideas' of religion adumbrated here as religion as such. In which case, the 'real reformation' demanded is the extirpation of religion. That's the view I challenge as utterly chimerical and unrealistic, as utterly untrue to all we know of human nature and history. 'Get real' in other words.
Repeated over and again, such criticisms are merely a way of flagging up one’s own intellectual superiority, inviting others who agree to join in the self-congratulation. I want to see such people now start to engage in the ‘real reformation,’ give their reasons, establish their standards, make arguments of a substantial nature.
As some indication of what I mean by this, take this passage on Hell:
‘Invented, perhaps, as a means to satisfy the human desire for justice, the concept of Hell quickly devolved into a tool for coercing behavior and belief.’
Right. Instead of focusing on the obvious abuse of any human invention or institution, language, values, laws.
Now that is an invitation to get serious. Hell is an invention, but that human desire for justice is … innate in some way. Is it? That's the implication. Plato referred to thymos as that part of the soul that craved justice. Show me the part on the body where the soul exists, as someone once asked me. Show me a right in the same terms, I demanded back. Is it all invention? Because if it is, then we in the realm of conventionalism and power relations, with groups seeking to persuade others, or force on them, the idea that their particular good is the good of society as a whole, that their view of reality is the one and only true view of reality. Reality? Is reality merely human self-invention? If not, what is it? Tell us what it is, without recourse to invented human forms in language, law, science, philosophy, politics. Gets difficult, doesn’t it? It's not that created forms don't exist, they do. It's not that we can't envisage God, if we have to envisage God at all, as a human invention, because we can. It's just that once we recognize values, laws, institutions as human self-creations, we merely beg the question of why we ought to obey them. Expediency, civil peace, social order, yes. But justice? What moral grounds do we have?
I only ask because this author, in spending such time on ‘religion’s worst ideas’ does express a ‘hope of embracing the best.’ I’d love to see a focus on those, which is what I try to do. But I’ll make this point against those who remain at the level of repeating this kind of criticism of religion – bad theories and bad systems stick around until they are replaced, practically, by theories and systems who do the job better. If there are religious people still believing these bad ideas of religion, and in such numbers as to be such a problem as to justify endless repetition of such criticisms (taking them to be more than smug self-indulgence on the part of those with pretences of being intellectually superior and free-thinking), then we need to ask why. I’m all in favour of getting rid of the idea of the elect, the chosen people, predestination, damnation, hellfire, all of it, but I don’t make that opposition my main business. Instead, I engage with the difficulties of the questions, theoretically and practically, and examine what is entailed by, and what it would take, to live up to the best ideas, religious and otherwise. That’s the hard bit, and that’s where the questions get deeper (and where I lose people who merely want to give vent to their anti-religious spleen, a pointless sub-standard Nietzschean ressentiment that utterly fails to explain what stands in need of explanation).
I want to know what the 'real' in this ‘real reformation’ refers to. It’s easy enough to call for such a reformation, and I’m afraid that that’s what people focus upon: the easy. Scoring from the many open goals left by the history of organized religion doesn’t win any match. Same with the criticisms of the capital system. We are not short of them, but we are short of constructive models of transformation that have what it takes to draw sufficient numbers into real change. Reformation comes when those taking shots against easy targets start to do the difficult thing, criticizing dominant beliefs, practices and institutions, and start to constitute their own, something that makes for a viable social order, one that commands common assent, can motivate action, reproduce itself over time, secure the necessaries of life. Until you can do that, would-be reformers are destined to remain permanent carpers on the touchlines. Pressed at any length on this, and people will come to refer to the findings of evolutionary biology, psychology, and neuroscience, point to patterns and systems in nature, ecology, physics. Nature and human nature, in other words. Right. Here, through rational concepts and tools, we have some kind of test against reality. I’m all in favour. It’s just that when we move from the realm of fact in the physical realm, to the realm of meaning and significance that things get much more complicated. In short, naturalism is not an ethic and is not an option if – if – we are to take ethics, politics, organized systems of behaviour, codes and rules for social beings to observe. It isn’t speciesism, I would suggest, to say that human beings are distinct from monkeys in trees, satisfied with the habitual and the instinctive. We may regret the brainy brilliance of clever human monkeys, as we see civilisation about to go under in a planetary unravelling, but to what avail? If we are serious about realism, then this is what we are, as human beings. (A point made so well by John Finnis in Natural Law and Natural Rights). So who, really, has the nerve to address the hard questions at the heart of this matter? I could end discussion now and simply point to nature and conventionalism, here is the big world of which human beings are such a tiny part, on the one hand, and there is the society of power struggles. I’m afraid those calling for real reformation tend to come aground when trying to navigate these twin reefs.
Where does value reside? Is value created? If so, by who? Imposure or disclosure? If we propose realist theories of intrinsic value, then we are talking about objective standards that exist whether human beings choose to value them or not – a value that is independent of human valuers. If we can show what these standards are, then show them – and show us why they command obedience on our part. Those are the tricky questions with regard to realist theories. If these questions are answered adequately, then fine. If not – and I’d suggest they haven’t been – then we are in the realm of value as some form of social construction. We cannot demonstrate objective values without social construction, meaning that value and human valuer are inextricably involved – implying that, in the end, value is the creation of the human valuer. Analysed further, value as a social construction points to value as the product not of some vague, general, ‘social’ humanity but of human beings arranged within asymmetrical relations of power and resources. Take this route of social construction, and value, as Thrasymachus the sophist asserted long ago, is the interests of the strongest. We thus lose the sense of morality as independent of the laws and institutions of time and place. We lose, that is, the critical standard by which to evaluate existent social and institutional forms, hold the dominant classes to account, and demand a reformation of prevailing injustices and iniquities. Since Marx, we have become used to the idea of a dominant economic class determining the rules of social order, law as an instrumental of class exploitation. If we go further and see morality as conventional in the same way, then subaltern classes will find not only the laws arranged against them, but morality too. Under a constructivist approach, we will find that the rich and powerful have, as they do with the laws, the power to determine the moral rules which bind society under their domination. If we attribute to the ruling powers the right to create not only the legal rules but the moral rules as well, the powerless find not only that the laws are against them but that morality is against them too. Of course, constructivism holds that the poor and the powerless can, like the rich and powerful, create their own values, their own justice, their own sense of right and wrong, good and bad. But that returns us to the first questions – where does value reside, is value created, and, if so, by whom? At the level of constructivism, ethics becomes a mere matter of irreducible subjective opinion lacking an objective standard of evaluation – it becomes a power struggle in which the strongest do indeed win and impose their standards on everyone else. And we don’t need ethics, as a rational system delineating good and bad, right and wrong, for that. That is a theoretical and a practical contradiction that reveals social construct theories as, ethically, self-defeating. Instead, we can analyse history as a history of power struggles between rival classes, and no more, since no ethical standard outside of that struggle can be found, and choose the side which contains the promise of victory in any given historical context, and seek no more justification than that. It’s what the ruling classes and their lackeys have done since ever. And it is the end of ethics. When we complain, protest, and challenge such iniquitous social arrangements, we refuse assertions of necessity, and we refuse ideological assertions that the status quo is in the general interest. We refuse to accept the doctrine that justice is the interests of the strongest, we appeal to justice as a standard that exists outside of these power struggles and how they may come to be embodied legally and institutionally. I ask again – what is that standard? Realist theories propose an objective standard – ‘nature’ … except that when they come to be subject to analysis, they cannot withstand criticism, they cannot demonstrate the very objectivity they claim to rest upon. And so we are thrown back into constructivism, and the self-defeating attempt to assert value as a human creation within asymmetrical social relations.
I hear people keep saying there is no cosmic ordering and that we need to ‘grow up.’ Answer me, what does that growing up entail? The self-invention of values to live by? We’ve done that, and self-made man is in the process of implosion. We’ve grown up in that sense, it is nothing new, we have taken morality into our own hands, as atheists like Stuart Kauffman demands in Reinventing the Sacred, only to find that humanity is not constituted as a ‘we’ but as different classes and groupings, some much more powerful than others. That self-assertion means that not only do the dominant classes impose legal rules on the rest of society, they impose moral rules too. So maybe that’s exactly what the demand to ‘grow up’ really amounts to – a Hobbesian sophistry in which power is its own justification, and anyone who complains about the injustice of a prevailing social order should just give up the pretence and delusion that there are any moral standards outside of that order, with which to criticize it, hold rulers to account, and demand change.
I argue for love and peace, and show the importance of religion in that cause. When grounds for that belief are demanded from me, I simply make the same demands in return. Invariably, in response, I am presented with some form of realism which, to make good any moral claims concerning value, tends to slide over from epistemological questions to ontological questions, and may be subjected to decisive criticisms, or alternatively to some form of social constructivism, which is realistic enough with respect to a society of human agents creating values, laws, institutions etc within asymmetries in power and resources, but whose ethical claims dissolve quickly into relations of might.
The point? It is easy to point the finger at the worst of religion. Now, having done the easy, and done it to death for far too long, can the people demanding a ‘real reformation’ now start to address the hard questions. And if that seems ill-mannered, I’ll simply refer people to my work on Marx, which sought to defetishize systems of philosophy, politics and power, affirm an emancipatory critique of religiosity that generates knowledge from within material life-processes, as against developing theories that rationalized reality conceived as an objective datum from within, that sought to realize ethics as a living stream. It has generated little interest over the years. Taking easy shots against the worst of religion generates much more interest. That’s why things don’t change much. For Marx, it wasn’t the illusions that needed to be abolished so much as the social conditions that generated the need for illusions. Give that some practical attention, people, and while you are at it, give some indication as to how you would satisfy the cosmic longing for meaning, justice, significance – bearing in mind the criticisms that can be made of both realism and social constructivism as grounds for moral action. In fine, get to work on that real reformation which involves embracing the best ideas of religion, and which serve the cause of love and peace. The more we fail to do that, the more the bad ideas and bogus religions and idolatries that litter the contemporary world will thrive and prosper – and make a very real Hell on Earth.