The Death of God and the Abolition of Religion

Religion should be extirpated.

That's not my view, I hasten to add, but a view that has been expressed to me (many times, in fact, in different forms, some much more extreme, most others in the much more benign terms of education and enlightenment). I'm always keen to know what plans are in store for those religious folk who prove incapable or unwilling with respect to re-education. The extirpation of ideas, beliefs, values and so on has the strong whiff of bigotry and fanaticism about it, and is particularly worrying when allied to political power and legal force. We should always be cautious of notions of public intervention to coerce people for their own good. I see people going in hiding, being investigated, policed, reeducated, imprisoned and exterminated in such demands. Such demands are set at extremes, and so may be ignored. There are other, much more interesting aspects to this question.

Here we go again, with another addition to the growing list of my interventions on religion. I should ignore, for reasons I set out here and elsewhere. But the attacks on religion are so misguided, missing the real issues at stake, then I cannot help but respond.

From a seemingly benign appeal to dream with John Lennon and ‘imagine no religion’ there is often no distance at all to some pretty vicious attacks on religion and religious people. There is one thing I dislike more than hateful bigots, and it is hateful bigots who were a mask of reasonability. I push people a little on this, and nearly every time it provokes an extreme statement aimed against religion and religious folk.

And I note how, without fail, my questioning is interpreted as an unthinking defence of religion. Such people are trapped in the set positions, leading only to assertion and counter-assertion.

I’ll tell you my view. If you really are interested in imagining alternative futures, then by all means do s - but do so properly. Do it not by negation, but by affirmation. Appreciate that point, and you will see that my statements are not uncritical, unthinking defences of religion at all, but challenges to people to really think and really imagine an alternative future.

To begin, I’ll state the point simply, in an attempt to establish a clarity that avoids descent into rival bigotries.

Karl Marx was all for a world without religion. But he didn’t waste time criticizing religion. Instead, he was keen to establish the point that the critique of religion must quickly be resolved into a critique of politics, involving an examination of the institutions, structures and relations of an ‘inverted’ world that generated religious illusion. Religion, in other words, is not the cause of the problem but an expression of the problem. He therefore criticised his atheist colleagues and friends for misdiagnosing the problem, wasting time and energy on the wrong target. Even if they succeeded in realizing their aim of driving religion from the public realm, they would leave the ‘inverted’ world untransformed, with religiosity remaining at its core. Marx’s famous statement that religion is ‘the opium of the people’ is frequently misunderstood by those who wish to press Marx into service for their atheist cause. In truth, Marx in the work that statement comes from was arguing against the atheist view. He considered atheism to be an indirect way of proceeding, drawing attention away from the real problem and solution – social relations and their transformation. Marx writes: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” Driving religion out of public life, even social life, deprives the people of their (self-administered) opium, without removing the “heartless” and “soulless” social conditions. Such a position is a basic inhumanism which keeps oppression in place, but denies people even the solace of a sigh. That doesn’t mean that Marx is arguing in defence of religion, he isn’t. But he argues that we move to a world without oppression and illusion through direct affirmation, the affirmation of life, and its emancipation from those exploitative, parasitic forces that steal the commons away from us, rather than by an indirect negation that merely targets one manifestation of the problem, not its true cause.

Moving on a generation, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche announced “the death of God.” God is dead, and we have killed him. By this, Nietzsche is referring to scientific advance giving us knowledge of the world and its origins, revealing not merely God, but our whole God-centred morality, by which we have organized our affairs, is dead. The age of overarching moral frameworks and codes is over. That was 1882 in The Gay Science. That is a long, long time ago. Max Weber followed in the footsteps of both Marx and Nietzsche and declared that we live in a ‘godless and prophetless time.’ Which should tell us something. These continued calls for liberation from religion in the contemporary age are missing their target by an incredibly wide margin – such people fail to recognize that we are indeed living in irreligious times and have been for a very, very long time.

Of course, there is still religion, of many forms, in the world. But ponder deeply the economist Keynes’ words in the 1930s: 'Modern capitalism is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.' Except that Keynes isn’t quite right. Capital is indeed religious, it is a new idolatry, an idolatry of alien power in the form of capital, money and commodities. These are your new gods. Marx in Capital wrote of the ‘fetishism of commodities.’ Marx was right, the capital system is a new religion, a cargo cult, a fetish system of power, politics and production.

The problem is that those who take aim against religion do so against targets long in decline, not against the new religions of prideful self-worship in the form of the idolatrous humanisms of money, power and knowledge. These are the new gods demanding human sacrifices every day of the week, and this is the religion that is transgressing every limit on the planet – social, moral and ecological. But it is easier to take cheap shots against a God that is dead and against religious folk who cling to the view that maybe, all the evidence of the liveliest minds of the age, to the contrary, such a God may well be our own salvation. Human stupidity and selfishness is infinite, exceeded only by God’s mercy.

I return to Nietzsche here. Nietzsche made many provocative statements about the mass of humanity as ‘the weak and the botched.’ He felt Christianity to be a religion of slaves. He argued for a pitiless nature eliminating the poor and the weak. Care for the deficient is a religious morality, he argued, and contrary to nature. His statements are so extreme as to drive any atheist retaining any concern for others back to Christianity. What Nietzsche was trying to do was get people still espousing a morality of freedom, equality, justice and democracy to see that they were, in effect, subscribing to a religious morality, even as they abandoned their belief in God. For Nietzsche, such a position was empty and hypocritical, and ultimately untenable. Rather than realize those worthy goals, there would instead be an institutionalized ressentiment, a false collectivism inimical to true individuality and authenticity.

I take Marx, Nietzsche and Weber together to be arguing for an authentic existence without illusion. The great danger is that the ‘death of God’ would leave a gap that human beings would be inclined to fill with any number of false collectivisms – Nietzsche was a great critic of nationalism, Weber saw socialism as an ersatz community, Marx described the state as an ‘illusory community’ – or with a thoroughly self-absorbed egoism.

I think that pretty much sums up the modern age. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber refers to the capitalist economic system as determining the lives of each and all with ‘irresistible force.’ The moderns have liberated themselves from all the old traditional ties and morals, only to become incarcerated in an ‘iron cage.’ And yet many still see themselves as free. Weber describes this as a ‘mechanized petrification embellished with a convulsive self-importance.’

That describes the age of ignorant self-assertion, routine declarations of independence from isolated individuals confined within the Megamachine. The new idols demand their sacrifices daily, and these self-absorbed subjectivists offer themselves up meekly. It’s an exercise in the age old human pastime of picking on easy targets, enabling them to make big stands, safe in the knowledge there will be no consequences to face in their precious private lives. It saves them of having to do the hard yards in challenging the really big guns on this, taking on the real gods with real powers to strike you down, take away your livelihoods, put you in prison, send you off to war. For the Lord God Capital is a jealous god ..

Which brings me to God. I dislike Lennon’s Imagine, for the simple reason it is an evasion and an extremely dangerous one at that. It is an invitation to evasion, too, taking us away from the institutional and structural analysis and transformations that alone will change our situation for the better. It's a non-politics that is actually highly political in keeping the status quo firmly in place. And I don’t like the smug, superior tone, either, the suggestion that this handful of dreamers have seen through the world of illusions, and it is for the rest of us not so enlightened beings to join their hallowed group. They have seen nothing and denied everything. And they leave gaps so huge as to invite their filling by any number of monstrous forms. I make a defence of politics, of religion, of human beings as symbol-making creatures, of the necessity of institution- building to any viable society, of a world of borders and boundaries and definable polities – and am met by a general denunciation of the human species and of civilisation. Well what can I say? The fallen nature of man is central to the wisdom of religion, starting from the premise that human beings are flawed creatures standing in need of limits and inhibitions. That’s a libel against the species, the moderns have taught since the Enlightenment. Redemption is something that lies in human hands, creative human agency being capable of resolving all problems. Such is the claim of modern men as gods. The only flaw in the argument is a big one – it is plain wrongheaded. I’ll put it this way: if human beings really are greedy and stupid and violent, then we are badly in need of God and religion, because we are assuredly incapable of redeeming ourselves. There are no grounds at all for affirmation in humanist terms with such a negative view of human beings.

This view that religion should be extirpated, though, really shows the lie at the heart of liberal pluralism. Even if we discard the extreme way in which the demand is made, and argue instead for a world without religion, it really does indicate a positive view of the good on the part of those who claim the impossibility and undesirability of such views. The liberal view holds that individuals should be free to pursue the good as they see fit, a view in which ‘the good’ ceases to exist as an overarching conception. Rather than the one good embracing all, there are merely as many goods as there are individuals. Liberals claim only to want to drive religion from the public sphere, which is presented as a ‘neutral’ sphere that is agnostic on the good. That may seem reasonable until one realises that liberals have effectively claimed this ‘neutral’ sphere for their own values and institutions. Neutrality is just another name for liberalism; liberal agnosticism is in reality an aggressive promotion of the liberal worldview involving a concerted campaign against alternate conceptions of the good which do not conform to the liberal notion of the good – a world of subjective choice on the part of a free, autonomous self unconstrained by governmental, social, communal and moral bonds and codes. Those who think such licence liberty need to think long and hard about the way that a world of self-interest is currently transgressing planetary boundaries, recognizing no ecological limits that stand in the way of subjective desire. At the heart of the planetary unravelling is a social and moral transgression driven by freely choosing self-interested subjects. The truth is that, for all that such liberalism is rationalized in terms of pluralism, liberals want all goods but the liberal good extirpated. They put this in terms of no good coming to prevail over any other good in the private sphere too, ensuring the continuous play of a conflict pluralism. This is all on the assumption of the prevalence of a ‘neutral’ sphere agnostic on the good – a sphere that correlates precisely with liberal institutions and values. We are all entitled to see the good as we see fit, on the assumption that the liberal view remains dominant. But even that pluralism is not respected, given the extent to which liberals are not content to merely drive religion from the public realm but argue for the elimination of religion from the world as such. The position is cowardly and deceitful. And downright dangerous, too. Because extirpating religion in private life too amounts to a demand to extirpate religious people from the world. And where, prey, do all the religious folk go?

I am not, here, presenting a vigorous defence of religion against liberal secular assault, although I am concerned to expose the reality and hypocrisy of this assault. I am more concerned with exposing the phoney radicalism of such demands, showing the self-absorption that lies at their base. Such people are really libertarians and sophists, people who want to be free to what they want to do, and pursue their desires unconstrained by limits of any kind, whether supplied by others in society or by the realities of the social and natural environments. Marx is truly radical on this question. If religion is indeed an illusion, Marx argues, then the cause lies in the existence of an inverted reality which generates the need for illusion. The solution is to transform that reality so as to affirm life without inversion and without illusion. That’s not what liberal secularisation does, however. Instead there is the pretend pluralism, claiming there is a place for religion alongside other conceptions of the good – a private place where no one has to see it or hear it unless they choose to. But, deep down, liberals don’t like religion to have that private space either. They want religion and religiosity extirpated completely. It’s just that they want to effect this extirpation without undertaking the social transformation demanded by Marx at the same time. Instead, they keep the “soulless” and “heartless” conditions of capitalist society firmly in place, whilst removing the source of solace many people have. And they dare call this inhumanism a humanism, claiming the name of reason.

It is easy enough to envisage a world without religion. We need only look around us, and dare look directly at the heartless and soulless world of capital. As Keynes pointed out, the capitalist world we live in is absolutely irreligious, a congeries of predators, pursuers and possessors. It is a world where the strong predate on the weak, rich prey on the poor, where justice is the interests of the strongest, where the winners take all and the losers go to the wall. We don’t need an imagination to see any of this, only the eyes to see. But if you have an imagination, then by all means take the opportunity to use it! And take up Nietzsche’s challenge with respect to the revaluation of all values in the aftermath of the ‘death of God.’ It is easy enough to abolish God, Nietzsche argued, since this God never existed in the first place. It is much less easy to do without the theological assumptions attendant upon that God. Unattached, these assumptions simply go elsewhere and get reattached to the new idols of the modern world – nation, state, and bureaucracy, said Nietzsche, capital, commodities, money, said Marx. The result is a world at war with itself. Today, Max Weber warned, ‘many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another.’ It will take more than imagination to achieve a world without such a polytheism. What Weber describes here is the conflict pluralism of modern liberalism, a liberalism shorn of its old metaphysical supports of the good to give us a world in which each chooses their own good, or devil, since there is no longer any objective standard of evaluation enabling us to distinguish between them. It is, Weber comments, ‘how to measure up to workaday existence' in this disenchanted world that is so 'hard for modern man' (1970: 149). It is, Weber makes clear, the isolated individual who ‘has to decide which is God for him and which is the devil’ (Weber 1970: 148). This predicament is not an easy one to live with. The transcendental standards that once gave decisions a basis and a reference point no longer exist, meaning that there are no rational criteria for choosing between ultimate ends either. A world of rational disenchantment is a world without religion, with the result that those things which alone give human lives their meaning and purpose, their very point, have become contingent, transitory, and elusive. And irredeemably so, since rational disenchantment has destroyed not merely the traditional religious or transcendent framework, but its very possibility, making future recovery impossible. With the ‘death of God’ we enter a pluralist, subjectivist and sophist world that is incapable in principle of furnishing any kind of substitute for the old overarching moral framework. But that, Nietzsche and Weber feared, would not stop people making the attempt. Hence they predicted a number of surrogate communities and ersatz collectivities, all of them attempts to fill the meaning space left by God. Such things could only take monstrous form. On the other side of the same coin there is what Weber called a “convulsive self-importance,” subjectivism as an egoism, the utter self-absorption of individuals thinking themselves to have become as gods, self-choosing individuals living in a world of their own desire and choosing. Also a delusion and a fantasy taking monstrous forms. Collectivism and egoism as the new gods filling the space left by the old absent God. It’s enough to make anyone want to go back, or cling on, to the old faith. Many do. Others cling on to the naivest faith of all, the belief that somehow it is only the old enemies of the Enlightenment that stand in the way of reason and freedom. They cannot see that the new gods have failed.

Little wonder, then, that, in the tired spirit of John Lennon’s Imagine, many are inclined to wish that such a world simply go away. Its challenges are too much for us, with no God to fall back on. Worse, instead of analysing the nature of the forces driving such a world to distraction, they succumb to the temptation to blame old, and long since dead, gods. It will achieve nothing. The new gods will continue to hold sway. 'Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us,’ Weber writes, ‘but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but the proletarian has lost his rights' (1970: 128). There is ‘nothing,’ Weber declares, meaning there is no objective good, no overarching moral framework, no God, no meaningful religion, only a disenchanted, dis-godded world without inherent purpose, meaning and value. And since this so, it doesn’t matter which group prevails in the much vaunted conflict pluralism of liberalism. And it doesn’t matter whether or not individuals secure their desires and interests. Hence the cry of the self-absorbed when, surveying the emptiness all around them, they take aim against ghosts and memories of a lost past.

And it resolves nothing. The new deities reign supreme. They have held sway for a long time now, and have been demanding human sacrifices for the past century and more. It is a large part of the modern predicament that so many people still, even now, after a century of civilized barbarism and slaughter, fail to see this:

This makes any notion of an emancipatory politics deeply problematic, in so far as the very forms in which modern politics are conducted - states, parties, ideologies - partake of the same nexus of estrangement. The history of socialism, in this century, has confirmed Weber's worst forebodings; its proponents have proved all too willing to strike Faustian bargains with his modern devils, notably the machines of industry and state. I do not draw the conclusion that improvement of the human condition is impossible; but I would insist that it is no longer capitalism alone, but the monstrously abstracted progeny it has engendered, that is our problem. The modern world is in one respect at least different from all of its predecessors. Only now is the survival of the human race itself in jeopardy. What earlier century had even a presentiment that such destructive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

The ultimate measure of the awesome power, and the fundamental violence, of unfettered abstraction is to be found in the millions upon millions of nameless corpses which this most vicious of centuries has left as its memorial, human sacrifices to one or another of Weber's renascent modern gods. War itself is not new, modernity's contribution is to have waged it, with characteristic efficiency, under the sign of various totalizing abstractions which name and claim the lives of all. Here the 'lightness' of the modern subject becomes all too evident, and the truth of the real living individual as Marx's 'plaything of alien forces' is written in blood.

Derek Sayer Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and Weber 1987

Are you still inclined to think yourselves so free? Do you still think you are so rational? You are slaves, subjugated to a world of institutional and systemic determinism! And you have the conceit to think you are free. Have the nerve to see reality with sober senses. If you have any revolutionary spirit in you, then challenge the forces behind that determinism. If you have any intellect or imagination, then identify the real causes of the tyranny and violence of abstraction, and then act to uproot them! Have you the courage to target the new idols of the modern age? Weber summed the age up over one hundred years ago, describing it as a ‘mechanized petrification embellished with a convulsive self-importance.’ Weber is worth quoting at length on this, because he takes us to the dark heart of the matter. Weber brings us straight to the irresistible economic determinism of the capital system:

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.

Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

In words that have become all the more pertinent in an age that stands on the brink of ecological catastrophe, Weber speculates that ‘perhaps’ this economic system ‘will so determine’ our lives ‘until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.’ And here Weber forces us to confront the extent to which the old religious faith has given way to the new idolatry of capital:

In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.’

Weber 1985 ch 5

Capital is the new god, and economic growth the new religion. As Marx sardonically commented: ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and all the prophets!’ There is the new categorical imperative, and it imposes itself without regard to persons.

Imagine no religion? Which religion? The old gods lie behind us, it is the new gods of money and power that rule this world. And these cannot be dreamed away:

Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. To-day the spirit of religious asceticism—whether finally, who knows?—has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs…

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."

Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Destroy the old gods and they may well be replaced with new gods demanding sacrifice. There was nothing to be gained, Nietzsche warned, by supplanting God with the idolatrous humanism of men as gods. He cautioned against the temptation of the weak and inauthentic to indulge in resentment and launch myriad collectivisms in a desire to achieve equality and justice. This would be merely to fill the space vacated by God with false and ersatz communities. Nietzsche demanded a revaluation of all values. I take this to be in keeping with Marx’s affirmation of life, his demand for the realization of essential needs on the part of human beings, free from exploitative and parasitic social relations. This affirmative materialism is quite distinct from a negation of religious alienation, demanding the overthrow of alienative social relations through widespread social transformation. Weber speculated about new prophets arising to take us out of the iron cage of capitalist modernity. This would be the revaluation of values that Nietzsche wrote of, taking us to the affirmation of life and life-processes. That’s the transformation of the inverted reality Marx demanded in 1843, when arguing that the critique of religion be quickly converted into a critique of politics. Having lived through it all, Martin Heidegger in an interview from 1976 expressed the view that ‘only a god can still save us.’ New prophets of a revaluation of life? A restatement of Marx’s old affirmative materialism? That space beyond metaphysics from which we may recover a genuine humanism? That was Heidegger’s view.

Whatever form the resolution of this crisis in the soul of the modern world takes, these views are light years away from that crude atheism of liberal secularism which is still fighting old and irrelevant battles with the long dead institutional forms of religion. Max Weber was pessimistic. If we fail to press on beyond a status quo that is simply unliveable, then maybe ‘there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals.’ He was clear that if we fail to move forward or cannot go back, then our fate is a ‘mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance’ ‘until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.’ The problem is, should we wait that long, the resulting climate catastrophe will have long decided the issue against us. We’ve been warned. And yet we fail to act. Why? Our location within a structured system of social relations is a large part of the answer. But not the only part. That ‘convulsive self-importance’ that Weber refers to also explains a lot. We lack a sense of limits. Subjectivism is a new polytheism in which the new gods ultimately reduce to the self or, rather, carry on unabated and untouched as those subject to their irresistible abstract force act as though the world is entirely of their own choosing. Martin Luther (1483-1546) loved the Latin phrase Incurvatus in se. The phrase came from St. Augustine, referring to the dangers of being curved in on oneself. Without God and the invitation to the ego to expand outwards, human beings possess an inherent tendency to worship their own selves and, further, to see the world only in accordance with their self-interest. Destroy the sense of God as an entity that expands being outwards beyond the ego, and individuals tend to curve in on themselves. Instead of seeking to serve God, as an entity outside of the human ego and will, calling human beings to enlarge themselves outwards, human beings will come to attempt to make God serve them, calling upon God to do their bidding. The ego draws everything into itself, thus negating the world instead of relating to it. Instead of reaching outwards to others and to the world, individuals look inwards and start to worship themselves. One of the worst aspects of Incurvatus in se is that human beings cease to enjoy the world for what it is, valuing it only for what benefit it promises to them as self-maximising egoistic individuals. This is not freedom but enslavement to desire. (I wrote at length on this in my recent book: Critchley, P., 2018. A Home and a Resting Place: Homo Religiosus: The Reality of Religious Truth and Experience).

We were ‘treated’ to an example of this narcissism in the past few days when Emmy winner Thandie Newton made this statement on receiving her award: ‘I don't even believe in God but I'm going to thank her tonight.’ Or, as John Lennon put it a few decades ago in his song God, where he lists all the things he doesn’t believe in: ‘I just believe in me.’ The self as god. I don’t believe in God, ‘only me,’ the me as god. It is prideful self-worship and has none of the humility of true religion, none of the sacrifice for principles greater than self-interest, and none of the service to others. It is narcissism. Such characters – the ones who claim they are spiritual but not religious – are in truth the sensualists without spirit for whom Weber expressed contempt. They are not talking about God or any other entity outside of their own petty egos. They refuse to be bounded by anything greater than themselves, not just God but each, any and every common purpose and interest. That applies to socialism, to public goods, to planetary health. They make no commitment to anything other than their own self-image and self-identity. John Lennon really is the prophet of such egoistic infantilism, believing in nothing but ‘me.’ Me and Yoko, he quickly added in God, thereby breaking his egoistic premise immediately. Not being much of a philosopher, he hadn’t thought his self-assertion through. But once a relation to another is admitted into the world of the ego, the question is begged of how else one’s being can come to be expanded in relation to others.

Such individuals worship themselves; they are utterly self-absorbed. These are the people who dominate on a planet that is burning. They accept no constraint on their desires. And I hold them in contempt.

But what is religion? The word religion derives from the Latin religio, meaning to bind together. Lose that capacity to bind, and let the ego go free, and in short time collective purpose comes to be dissipated in a sea of myriad narcissisms. Not that it issues in any genuine freedom, quite the reverse. For presiding over all these petty egoisms are new external, impersonal gods demanding human sacrifice. Hence Weber’s reference to a ‘mechanized petrification embellished with a convulsive self-importance.’

Such a self-serving existence may feed the flesh, but it can never touch the soul. Hence the anxiety, misery and depression in the world. Religion has naught to do with strong assertions rammed down the throats of people! Instead of imagining a world with no religion, try imagining a world truly with religion.

‘Do two walk together unless they have agreed to do so?’ (The Book of Amos)

‘He has made it clear to you, mortal man, what is good... To act with justice, to treasure the Lord's gracious love, and to walk humbly in the company of your God.’ (The Book of Micah)

And sings my soul, as the hymn goes.

I shall repeat here an exchange I had on social media with a friend who expressed an ambivalence towards religion, but confessed to being ‘greatly repulsed and disgusted by the "new atheist movement."’ He identified with Noam Chomsky in being a ‘mysterian,’ which is fine by me. The things for which we have proof and evidence are pretty trivial, but not the things which give life its meaning. I’m simplifying Wittgenstein greatly here, admittedly, but it not distorting his view.

If I may quote myself from this exchange:

‘I'm leery of strong statements. I emphasize humility, sacrifice and service to others as a genuinely religious ethic, as against ramming principles and positions down the throats of others. The problem of strength of assertion applies right across the range of human society, not just religion. I would cite Tolkien, for whom it was not the strength of intervention that mattered, but the interweaving that was at work in the world (which, for him, was the power of divine grace, whether we consciously know it and state it or not. There is no reference to God in The Lord of the Rings. But God is the invisible magic at work in the book, the real hero). Whether we agree or disagree, this was a statement in favour of humility - of love against power (against the Ring, which was made to coerce and dominate the world and others). I wonder if the theologians have served only to create artificial constructs and concepts involving us in a misplaced concreteness. As for being a "mysterian,” I would recommend Wittgenstein in the Tractatus writing on the things about which we must remain silent: ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.’ We can only speak of things in terms of fact and logic, anything other than these are literally non-sensical. But not actually nonsense or meaningless. On the contrary, for Wittgenstein these are the really important things making for a human life. It’s just that they exceed the capacities of our reason. As Hannah Arendt commented, ‘Kant … discovered “the scandal of reason,” that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.’ So those who seek to marshal proof and evidence against God and religion (even when they persist in making the error of conflating proof and evidence, an old bugbear of mine!) should be aware that these are very much double-edged weapons that can turn just as sharply against those things that they themselves hold dear. The irreligious may well find that they are far more religious than ever they thought. As a friend, a maths professor, informed me, mathematics rests on ‘almost nothing.’ Which remains a something, however difficult to prove or find evidence for. Wittgenstein describes the religious man or woman as a ‘tightrope walker’ who walks on almost nothing:

‘It almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.’

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value 1948: 73

I’ll declare myself a mysterian too, in the manner of Wittgenstein:

“Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.”

Wittgenstein

We live forwards into mystery with faith and courage. How else could we live? We can never have complete knowledge in a ceaseless creative universe that is forever unfolding around us. We must proceed as if we knew. As Nietzsche put it, ‘we live as if we know.’

A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche's message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally.

Irvin D. Yalom

How different is that from living as if God existed? Nietzsche is well worth pondering at length on the implications of 'the death of God.' Nietzsche’s views on religion in general and Christianity in particular are harsh, repulsive to my ears. But his view isn't the outright dogmatic assertion of atheism it has sometimes been taken to be. Nietzsche’s positive emphasis is upon the revaluation of values, ending moral emptiness and hypocrisy by bringing ethics back to its source in the will-to-life. It is easy enough to abolish God and God-centred religion, but Nietzsche drew attention to the difficulty of abolishing the theological assumptions once attendant upon God, fearing their re-attachment to the new idols of modernity, nationalism, state, bureaucracy (we can throw in Marx here on capital, commodities, money), all of them replacement gods. For Nietzsche, there is nothing to be gained by replacing a God-centred religion with humanism as a new idolatry. It isn't so easy to extirpate religion as some seem to think, and Nietzsche challenges us to do much more than reinvent new religions in ever more monstrous forms. I am currently researching Lewis Mumford. He had no religion, but took religion seriously. He understood the psychic, imaginative and therapeutic depths of religion, and he appreciated the inhumanism involved should these be destroyed out of anti-religious bigotry.

A friend described God to me the vital, metaphoric, therapeutic and proximal support we all need as weak, flawed, needy creatures. I agree. I see God as the transcendent origin, the source of life, meaning and hope, the anarchic excess that is beyond reason, incapable of being captured and enclosed by reason, the core that is beyond evidence and proof. That is not a God that those armed only with empirical and logical tools will ever be able to see, understand and appreciate. Of course they don’t believe in the existence of such a God, just as they don’t believe in the existence of anything meaningful outside of the world of fact and logic. It is easy enough to turn those sensical and logical tools upon religion and denounce religion as an illusion. But the same thing can be done to the works of art, poetry and literature. It can be done to all that makes human being human, and make life worthy of living. It can be done to love, as well as to Love. The God of the scientists and the philosophers is the easiest of all Gods to disprove. But it is no God at all.

Every culture has developed its own particular way of asking these ultimate questions concerning life and its meaning, has assigned its own special values to the experiences symbolized as God, eternity, immortality, being and non-being. Whilst the answers to these questions differ with respect to details, ‘they all point to a common substratum of human experience which is none the less real because language is so inept and ineffectual in coping with it.’ For Mumford, the more naïve conceits of theology are ‘impatient attempts to picture, in familiar terms, more obvious forms of continuity between the known and the unknown, between the immediate and the whole, the manifest and the mysterious, than the facts warrant.’ But that is no reason not to make the attempt to form a picture. Some recognition of the whole is better than none at all. Without some sense of the whole, ‘the part played by earthly life would be almost as meaningless as the severed hand, in Aristotle's famous illustration, if one did not know its normal connections with the human body: the organ, by its very existence, implies the organism it serves.’ (Mumford 1952: 61).

Any metaphysical reconstruction we attempt must respond to our need to picture the whole. ‘Even a false picture of man's cosmic relations—and no picture can be free from many finite human errors—may give a closer image of reality than no picture at all.’ We may overestimate our powers, give too absolute a value to our individual lives, and project our own passions and animosities upon the universe itself, but ‘there is still more of the cosmic process in these distorted pictures than in the neat mathematical frame of positive science, which disdains even to place a picture within its boundaries. Partiality and persistent error in a field of genuine interest are more active paths to truth than indifference.’ (Mumford 1952: 62

The fault lies not in our sense of mystery and divinity, for this rests on valid translations of human experience: ‘we err merely in our effort to cast this intuition in a too-familiar mold, in order to pass more freely from the known to the unknown.’ (Mumford).

What is at fault is not our attempts to picture the whole, since this is a valid translation of human experience. We err if we come to cast this intuition in familiar form in an attempt to pass more easily from the known to the unknown. The process of development is not predetermined at either the beginning or the end. Rather, there is direction, a tendency toward organization, lines of development, so the culmination of meaning lies in the future. ‘In other words, a large part of man's nature and destiny must be taken on faith; and the groundwork of that faith is no firmer in science than it is in religion.’

Even half a picture, even a false picture, Mumford argues, is better than no picture at all. But, if we are charged with living into mystery, as I think we are, how will we ever know that we have a whole and true picture? We won’t, not ever, hence the need to live forwards with faith. There is no other way.

One thing I do know for certain is that is strong assertions, whether of belief or non-belief, that really divide, anger, irritate and annoy people. I like a statement that Mumford made with respect to Capt Ahab in Moby Dick - the problem lies with people who fight power with power, rather than approaching the world out of love. Mumford had no religion, but I take that to be the religious message at the core of Tolkien’s work too. And I think it's something that we can unite on as we ponder the mystery of it all. A marxist whose life has sometimes anticipated, sometimes paralleled and now seems following mine is Terry Eagleton, and he is writing some very interesting things on Christianity and religion, in defence against some very militant and wrong-headed attacks from the new atheism. He seems so passionate about it that I just see some interesting times ahead.

The best thing, in my view, is to pull clear of such "debates" immediately, get back to source and the springs of life, joy and hope, get in tune, and take it from there. That’s what I mean by affirmation as against negation. And it is an affirmation of life. It’s just that the spiritual dimension is very much as real as any other part of human life, and any view in denial of that is a fundamental inhumanism. Bickering over concepts and words just feeds on itself, it is mere shadow boxing that never touches true realities. What was it Nietzsche said? Never trust a god that doesn't dance: ‘I would only believe in a god who could dance.’ We should have known that God was just an old song and dance man all along. ‘Dance, dance, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the Dance, said He …’ Let word return to music.

I've promised myself never ever to return to such "debates,” they are pointless, however much they may raise some interesting philosophical questions concerning the limits of reason, and the world that exists beyond proof and evidence.

From ‘The Ancient Sage’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)

IF thou would’st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive

Into the Temple-cave of thine own self,

There, brooding by the central altar, thou

May’st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice,

By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise, 5

As if thou knewest, tho’ thou canst not know;

For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake

That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there

But never yet hath dipt into the abysm,

The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within 10

The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth,

And in the million-millionth of a grain

Which cleft and cleft again for evermore,

And ever vanishing, never vanishes,

To me, my son, more mystic than myself, 15

Or even than the Nameless is to me.

And when thou sendest thy free soul thro’ heaven,

Nor understandest bound nor boundlessness,

Thou seest the Nameless of the hundred names.

And if the Nameless should withdraw from all 20

Thy frailty counts most real, all thy world

Might vanish like thy shadow in the dark.

‘And since—from when this earth began—

The Nameless never came

Among us, never spake with man, 25

And never named the Name’—

Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,

Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,

Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,

Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone, 30

Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:

Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no

Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay my son,

Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,

Am not thyself in converse with thyself, 35

For nothing worthy proving can be proven,

Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,

Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,

And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith

She reels not in the storm of warring words, 40

She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’,

She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,

She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,

She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,

She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, 45

She hears the lark within the songless egg,

She finds the fountain where they wail’d ‘Mirage’!

From ‘The Ancient Sage’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Nicholson & Lee, eds. 1917. https://www.bartleby.com/236/98.html

Theologians, like artists, are engaging in the very human practice of attempting to explain the inexplicable -- our finite expression of the infinite. So replied my friend. That's a view which very much fits what Mumford was saying above.

Spinoza cropped up in the exchange. (It was a rather high quality debate for social media!) I wrote a very good introduction to the thought of Spinoza, in my days as an atheist, the idea of God/Nature as a single self-subsistent substance. I no longer take that view. I believe that Spinoza/Einstein have half the picture, the God of physical creation, the God of science and philosophy. I believe there is a personal God in addition to this, the God of Love and personal relationships. Eagleton, as one who stood by Marx all through the 80s and 90s, is a very interesting man. I left Manchester just as he returned. His next book, After Theory, was full of all the Aristotle and the essentialism that my recovery of Marx was full of. The next thing, a decade on, and Eagleton is vigorously defending Christianity and religion against the often ignorant and bigoted attacks of the new atheism (without committing himself to religion, not yet, anyway – here I may have jumped ahead of him, or taken a step too far, depending on one’s view). I would recommend Eagleton’s Reason, Faith and Revolution. There are articles now being written which claim that Eagleton is now closer to Christianity than he is to the Marxism he has espoused his whole life. Maybe we are coming to realize that redemption and salvation are not, after all, in the power of human agency, that we cannot do it alone. That’s not a view that you will find easy to fit with Marx (impossible, actually). But it is a view that the myriad crises engulfing the world seem to force upon us. If God doesn’t save us, then nothing else will.

Eagleton has been a good judge over the years. He's very nuanced, and I trust him. Morality is about joy and abundance, he writes in After Theory (2004). That’s view that people who believe in God and those who don't can agree with. Spinoza wrote ‘there cannot be too much joy, it is always good’ (Ethics). Nietzsche wrote on the ‘joyful’ or ‘the gay science.’ There is a convergence here that we can all agree on, I think.

With respect to theology, I very nearly invested in Edward Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God. It's getting great reviews. But I'll make a guess that the great reviews are coming from the people who already believe in God and that those that don't will make all the standard objections. I don't believe anyone ever comes to God through rational proof and intellectualisation, and I don't think anything worthy of proving is capable of being proven. And I believe that this is a classic case of comparing apples with pears. Kant taught us long ago not to mix our logics. ‘Philosophy leaves the world unchanged,’ argued Wittgenstein. Religion doesn’t, it makes a difference, it rules out the moral indifference that follows from the reduction of the world to the mere facts about it. It is pointless to set science, philosophy and religion against each other, for they are different ways of dealing with the same reality, each as valid in its own terms as the other. Those who stick to proof and evidence miss the reality of religious experience and truth. They are in no position to give lessons here.

As I understand it, theology should never be understood as a substitute for faith and belief, merely to support and clarify specific positions and controversies with respect to texts and terms. The problems come with what I would call an axiological extensionism. It’s jargon, I know, but it refers to the dangers of extending concepts, as constructs of reality, in place of that reality, including the reality of religious experience, something which is sensuous and practical rather than intellectual. In other words, ethics is an ethos, something that people do, a practice, a way of life.

Chris Hedges is good. I knew him first from his book I Don't Believe in Atheists, which is a pretty tough and cogent denunciation of the new atheism as a form of scientism (and not true science). It's worth saying here that there is another, more genuine, atheism, which is really about affirming life and the natural creativity of existence. To the likes of theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman, being able to identify ourselves as co-creators at work in a ceaselessly creative universe is ‘God enough.’ (Kauffman Reinventing the Sacred 2007). I think that's a good start. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote a book called The Great Partnership concerning our active relation to God. Sing. Dance. Wittgenstein's point is that nothing meaningful can be said about these things, not in terms of fact and logic, but that didn't mean they were not meaningful - on the contrary, to Wittgenstein, whilst they were non-sensical, they were also the most meaningful things of all.

I was then asked about Hitler and war - what is the alternative? War seems inevitably to lead to the corruption of character/morals. The only alternative seems to be what Gandhi proposed – non-cooperation, and the willingness to die in huge numbers rather than to kill. There is some reason to believe that might have worked.

Mumford argued for intervention in the Second World War, claiming no alternative. It lost him many friends on the Left, it also lost him his son Geddes, fighting in Italy. Mumford noted from the first that such intervention would also reinforce our descent into the Megamachine as a result. Hence his tragic view of life. I take a comedic approach, I can see a happy ending (but that's where the religious ethic comes in, the transcendent source that not everyone can accept, for want of proof and evidence). On non-cooperation, Mumford in the end called for withdrawal, abstention and conversion to a new way of life. This view is not dissimilar at all to Alisdair MacIntyre's call to create local communities of virtue at the end of After Virtue (1981). In that book, MacIntyre concludes by drawing an analogy with the Fall of Rome, with this difference - the barbarians are not at the gate seeking to gain entry, they are already inside, ruling over us and have been for some time. It is part of our predicament that too many do not see this. Withdrawal in these views amounts to an attempt to disempower the machine. On Gandhi, I recall something Mumford said to the effect that Gandhi's tactics of passive resistance and non-cooperation could only work on the assumption that the oppressing power at least has a modicum of humanity and decency (which he claimed the British had). But, in general, I like the idea of a-himsa - non-harm, compassion. Without it, it's just power struggles, justice being the interests of the strongest. (Some biologists will claim that's all there is to it, the only point of the game is to stay in the game. It's not enough for a meaningful life, I say. I like Bruce Lipton, who writes of the survival of the most loving).

But I’d like to return to Chomsky at this point. It’s weird how much Chomsky sounds like Chesterton sometimes

SEPTEMBER 16, 2018 BY MARK SHEA

‘The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings. Man cannot live without the two props of food and drink, which support him like two legs; but to suggest that they have been the motives of all his movements in history is like saying that the goal of all his military marches or religious pilgrimages must have been the Golden Leg of Miss Kilmansegg or the ideal and perfect leg of Sir Willoughby Patterne. But it is such movements that make up the story of mankind and without them there would practically be no story at all. Cows may be purely economic, in the sense that we cannot see that they do much beyond grazing and seeking better grazing-grounds; and that is why a history of cows in twelve volumes would not be very lively reading. Sheep and goats may be pure economists in their external action at least; but that is why the sheep has hardly been a hero of epic wars and empires thought worthy of detailed narration; and even the more active quadruped has not inspired a book for boys called Golden Deeds of Gallant Goats or any similar title. But so far from the movements that make up the story of man being economic, we may say that the story only begins where the motive of the cows and sheep leaves off. It will be hard to maintain that the Crusaders went from their homes into a howling wilderness because cows go from a wilderness to a more comfortable grazing-ground. It will be hard ‘to maintain that the Arctic explorers went north with the same material motive that made the swallows go south. And if you leave things like all the religious wars and all the merely adventurous explorations out of the human story, it will not only cease to be human at all but cease to be a story at all. The outline of history is made of these decisive curves and angles determined by the will of man. Economic history would not even be history.

But there is a deeper fallacy besides this obvious fact; that men need not live for food merely because they cannot live without food. The truth is that the thing most present to the mind of man is not the economic machinery necessary to his existence; but rather that existence itself; the world which he sees when he wakes every morning and the nature of his general position in it. There is something that is nearer to him than livelihood, and that is life. For once that he remembers exactly what work produces his wages and exactly what wages produce his meals, he reflects ten times that it is a fine day or it is a queer world, or wonders whether life is worth living, or wonders whether marriage is a failure, or is pleased and puzzled with his own children, or remembers his own youth, or in any such fashion vaguely reviews the mysterious lot of man. This is true of the majority even of the wage slaves of our morbid modem industrialism, which by its hideousness and inhumanity has really forced the economic issue to the front. It is immeasurably more true of the multitude of peasants or hunters or fishers who make up the real mass of mankind. Even those dry pedants who think that ethics depend on economics must admit that economics depend on existence. And any number of normal doubts and day-dreams are about existence; not about how we can live, but about why we do. And the proof of it is simple; as simple as suicide. Turn the universe upside down in the mind and you turn all the political economists upside down with it. Suppose that a man wishes to die, and the professor of political economy becomes rather a bore with his elaborate explanations of how he is to live. And all the departures and decisions that make our human past into a story have this character of diverting the direct course of pure economics. As the economist may be excused from calculating the future salary of a suicide, so be may be excused from providing an old age pension for a martyr. As be need not provide for the future of a martyr, so he need not provide for the family of a monk. His plan is modified in lesser and varying degrees by a man being a soldier and dying for his own country, by a man being a peasant and especially loving his own land, by a man being more or less affected by any religion that forbids or allows him to do this or that. But all these come back not to an economic calculation about livelihood but to an elemental outlook upon life. They all come back to what a man fundamentally feels, when he looks forth from those strange windows which we call the eyes, upon that strange vision that we call the world. No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world. But it may be allowable to say that we need a new thing; which may be called psychological history. I mean the consideration of what things meant in the mind of a man, especially an ordinary man; as distinct from what is defined or deduced merely from official forms or political pronounce ments. I have already touched on it in such a. case as the totem or indeed any other popular myth. It is not enough to be told that a tom-cat was called a totem; especially when it was not called a totem. We want to know what it felt like. Was it like Whittington’s cat or like a witch’s cat? Was its real name Pasht or Puss-In-Boots? That is the sort of thing we need touching the nature of political and social relations. We want to know the real sentiment that was the social bond of many common men, as sane and as selfish as we are. What did soldiers feel when they saw splendid in the sky that strange totem that we call the Golden Eagle of the Legions? What did vassals feel about those other totems, the lions or .the leopards upon the shield of their lord? So long as we neglect this subjective side of history, which may more simply be called the inside of history, there will always be a certain limitation on that science which can be better transcended by art. So long as the historian cannot do that, fiction will be truer than fact. There will be more reality in a novel; yes, even in a historical novel.

In nothing is this new history needed so much as in the psychology of war. Our history is stiff with official documents, public or private, which tell us nothing of the thing itself. At the worst we only have the official posters, which could not have been spontaneous precisely because they were official. At the best we have only the secret diplomacy, which could not have been popular precisely because it was secret. Upon one or other of these is based the historical judgment about the real reasons that sustained the struggle. Governments fight for colonies or commercial rights; governments fight about harbors or high tariffs; governments fight for a gold mine or a pearl fishery. It seems sufficient to answer that governments do not fight at all. Why do the fighters fight? What is the psychology that sustains the terrible and wonderful thing called a war? Nobody who knows anything of soldiers believes the silly notion of the dons, that millions of men can be ruled by force. If they were all to slack, it would be impossible to punish all the slackers. And the least little touch of slacking would lose a whole campaign in half a day. What did men really feel about the policy? If it be said that they accepted the policy from the politician, what did they feel about the politician? If the vassals warred blindly for their prince, what did those blind men see in their prince?There is something we all know which can only be rendered, in an appropriate language, as realpolitik. As a matter of fact, it is an almost insanely unreal politik. It is always stubbornly and stupidly repeating that men fight for material ends, without reflecting for a moment that the material ends are hardly ever material to the men who fight. In any case no man will die for practical politics, just as no man will die for pay. Nero could not hire a hundred Christians to be eaten by lions at a shilling an hour, for men will not be martyred for money. But the vision called up by real politik, or realistic politics, is beyond example crazy and incredible. Does anybody in the world believe that a soldier says, ‘My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of my government obtaining a warm water port in the Gulf of Finland! Can anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, ‘If I am gassed I shall probably die in torments; but it is a comfort to reflect that should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, that career is now open to me and my countrymen! Materialist history is the most madly incredible of all histories, or even of all romances. Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in the soul; that is something akin to religion. It is what men feel about life and about death. A man near to death is dealing directly with an absolute; it is nonsense to say he is concerned only with relative and remote complications that death in any case will end. If he is sustained by certain loyalties, they must be loyalties as simple as death. They are generally two ideas, which are only two sides of one idea. The first is the love of something said to be threatened, if it be only vaguely known as home; the second is dislike and defiance of some strange thing that threatens it. The first is far more philosophical than it sounds though we need not discuss it here. A man does not want his national home destroyed or even changed, because he can not even remember all the good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down because he can hardly count all the things he would miss. Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is really a house.'

– GK Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

Mark Shea claims that much that Chomsky says savours a great deal of this passage from Chesterton, commenting that: ‘The Old Left has a far higher view of the nobility of human beings than New Nihilist Right that sees them simply as prey and cattle.’ I don’t believe Chomsky is ‘old Left,’ but I do agree with that view, with the new right as libertarian sophists who have sold their souls to the new idols of money and power.

And that returns me to my main point - liberals and libertarians persist in talking as though they are emancipators on the repressed margins of society, whereas in truth they are the dominant force whose worldview pervades the world we live in. It won't wash. Their emancipatory claims no longer conceal the hidebound, sterile conservatism of their attempts to defend a liberal world in implosion.

These attitudes betray a remarkable lack of self-consciousness on the part of those issuing emancipatory demands against the oppressions and inhibitions of the world. They talk as if we were living a couple of centuries or more ago, ruled by monarchical states and censorious churches. Those days have long since gone. The stark undeniable fact is that we live in the emancipated world, a world in which the individual is, in the words of Milton Friedman’s book, ‘free to choose.’ We live in a liberal world, a world in which liberal values are all-pervasive and dominant. Of course, the freely choosing individual, unencumbered by the social ties, common constraints and moral commitments that serve to give depth, meaning and identity to a life, looks around and sees only a meaningless void and wasteland. This is a world created by individual choices and actions that recognize no limits, whether governmental, social, moral or ecological. Instead of expressing a sense of ownership for this world, the libertarians whose viewpoint is the dominant one of the age prefer instead to look around for the vestiges of common purpose and collective constraint that still exist. Socialism was always a convenient target, identified with each, any and every government action or policy concerned with the common good. Trade unions, too. In fact, any collective body or intermediary association expressing a collective purpose. That great abstraction called ‘government’ is, of course, by definition the enemy of individual liberty. Institutions such as the European Union, with all its bureaucratic regulations and ‘red tape,’ is another easy target for libertarians. Constraint, regulation, authority, morality, red tape, all these things are boring, repressive of liberty and individuality, at least to those minds unable to see beyond immediate desire and appreciate how freedom is actually expanded rather than inhibited by collective purpose. Such libertarians do not merely start from the ego and its own, they remain there. They are unable to see how those things that exist outside of the ego expand being and enable a deeper, richer, more meaningful sense of freedom. True freedom as relational. Such individuals switch on their electrical gadgets at home and take it for granted that it won't electrocute them or blow up their house; they take it for granted that when they microwave their food that they are not microwaving their bodies and brains at the same time. They are the same people who object to red tape in the EU and take the opportunity, when someone puts a pitchfork in their hands, to pull out, with no plan in mind other than ‘buccaneering’ their way through the future. It’s a world where the rich and powerful predate on the poor and the weak, and those not up to the competition will go to the wall. Individuals taught to see subjective preference and choice as the road to freedom, and unable to see reality as it is beyond that belief, persist in talking as if they are oppressed radicals fighting for emancipation. In truth, they are emancipated individuals struggling to see the empty, howling madhouse their choices and actions have brought about as the world they have created. Rather than grow up and face the harsh truth that libertarians are the authors of their own misery and despair, it is easier to take shots against past enemies. Let’s blame religion. As if we are living in a theocracy and not a democracy! A book that is selling well and earning great critical acclaim in America is Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen, a man I am proud to call a friend on Facebook. He pulls no punches here – look around the world and survey the economic crises, the social injustice and inequality, the moral disorder, the unravelling of the planetary ecology, and ask who is to blame for this unfolding catastrophe. I’ve written in praise of Patrick in a previous post, and refer people to that. Deneen is unapologetically conservative but, in being so, sounds infinitely more radical – and more right – than the liberals he criticizes. The reason for this is actually very simple – whilst liberals and libertarians persist in expressing themselves in emancipatory language and slogans, as though they are on the outside making demands upon recalcitrant authority and power, the truth is that liberalism is the dominant authority and culture, with liberal principles pervading the entire political, legal and social fabric. Rather than being outsiders leading the cause of emancipation, liberals and libertarians are the dominant ruling force. And since that is so, the myriad problems besetting the planet can be attributed directly to liberalism, and to those who persist in identifying freedom with personal preference and subjective choice. This howling wasteland of a world of tyranny, terror, repression, depression and environmental destruction is the liberal world. Deneen tells us why. “Today’s widespread yearning for a strong leader, one with the will to take back popular control over liberalism’s forms of bureaucratized government and globalized economy, comes after decades of liberal dismantling of cultural norms and political habits essential to self-governance,” Deneen writes. His critique is impressively clinical and concise, sparing neither left nor right as different wings of the same liberal bird. Relentless economic liberalization – the liberalism of the right - has left many people materially insecure in a society of widespread and deep inequality and injustice; relentless cultural liberalization – the liberalism of the left, also comprising top-down bureaucratic government - has left individuals unmoored. Communal ties are discouraged in order to encourage a mobile force of workers taking their chances on the market. Freedom becomes merely something for an increasingly powerful government to grant or withhold. You don’t need to imagine a world with no religion, for here it is, right before your eyes, should you care to open them. It’s an unpleasant world, a world without transcendent standards to live by, and to constrain overweening power by. There are those who argue for the sufficiency of natural sympathy. Where is that sympathy when rich predate on the poor, the strong on the weak? Because they do. And when they do, we continue to make an appeal to justice, decency, dignity, fairness, respect. Why, given the facts of human predation and exploitation, would we make such appeals and expect such appeals to succeed? It only makes sense within a religious understanding. Mere tinkering won’t alleviate the deep rot in the liberal project, even if we succeed in getting liberals and libertarians to admit this project is rotten. Deneen argues that we need to see the extent to which liberalism has failed on account of its internal flaws and envision a future beyond its collapse, should we have a future. In this future society local, preferably religious, communities would tend to the land and each would look after their own in proximal connection. These groups would cultivate ‘cultures of community, care, self-sacrifice and small-scale democracy.’

Deneen’s view is the conservative view. But note well that it is also the view from the outside and from the margins, the genuinely radical and emancipatory view taking aim against the dominant liberalism of the modern age. The seemingly emancipatory rhetoric and sloganizing of liberals and libertarians taking aim against old targets, as if these still ruled the world, merely reveals how tired and irrelevant this old ideology has become. Nietzsche announced ‘the death of God’ in 1882. And it is no longer 1900. The emancipation happened. It turned out to be empty. Own it.

Eagleton the apologist

Theo Hobson

Terry Eagleton is not prepared to come out as a Christian. Yet his most recent book shows he is closer to Christianity than Marxism

9 Jan 2010

Theo Hobson describes Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith and Revolution as ‘one of the most important works of Christian apologetics to have emerged in recent years – despite the fact that its author is not quite willing to wear the "Christian" label.’ The easy part concerns rebuttals of the crudities of Dawkins and Hitchens (which is hardly worth the time and effort of any decent thinker, Alister McGrath’s The Dawkins Delusion was a very slim volume, but utterly emphatic in its destruction of Dawkins). More interesting is Eagleton’s criticisms of the narrow bourgeois version of rationality, eviscerating that faith in Progress that thinks it is just enlightened neutrality. In truth, we are seeing a crude rehash of a liberalism modelled on an Enlightenment materialism, sophism and conventionalism that proceeds as if the old feudal targets remain firmly in place and are all that stand in the way of reason and freedom. We are in 2018, not 1818, the date of Marx’s birth. Such bourgeois rationality has yet to catch up with Marx’s status as a post-Enlightenment critical thinker. I’ve dealt with this at length elsewhere, particularly in relation to Stephen Pinker’s very uncritical and highly scientistic Enlightenment Now.

Ethics, Essence and Immanence: Marx's Normative Essentialism

More pertinent in this context is Eagleton’s thoughts on the relation between revolution, socialism and Christianity. Predictably, Eagleton the Marxist is sympathetic to Jesus's message of the kingdom of God, in which the poor will finally have justice. But, less predictably, he resists the normal Marxist response: that instead of fetishising the dead Jesus, we must do what Jesus failed to do. Instead he does something much more Christian than Marxist in recognizing that the myth of Christ's death and resurrection is no escapist illusion, arguing that Jesus's ‘death and descent into hell is a voyage into madness, terror, absurdity, and self-dispossession, since only a revolution that cuts that deep can answer to our dismal condition.’ For a Marxist this is illusion rather than revolution. Marxists hold that the remedy for ‘our dismal condition’ is political action bringing about social transformation. I am currently preparing books on Rousseau and on seventeenth century religious radical and proto-socialist Gerrard Winstanley. Both rewrite Biblical myth to argue for a social Fall of man through the institution of private property.

Spirit, Reason, Nature, Freedom

Rousseau, Natural Law, and Rational Freedom

I will make strong arguments in support of the cogency of their arguments for a social Fall. But at the same time I will also argue for the cogency of the original Fall, pointing to human fallibilities, alienation from God, and the need for personal moral effort in overcoming alienation. I argue this strongly as a criticism of Marx in my last book, A Home and a Resting Place: Homo Religiosus: The Reality of Religious Truth and Experience

It is a view with which Terry Eagleton concurs. For Eagleton, the idea of the Fall cannot be so easily brushed aside by rationalists holding out hopes for human salvation/emancipation contradicted so clearly by the brute facts of the twentieth century. He notes that Dawkins and Hitchens ‘have no use for such embarrassingly old-fashioned ideas as depravity and redemption. Even after Auschwitz there is nothing in their view to be redeemed from.’

There is, in fact, plenty from which human beings need to be redeemed from, and that redemptive power cannot come completely from within human agency in history. For if all that we have are our own resources in history, then the die is cast. Hence the pessimistic and misanthropic cast of mind on the part of many in the contemporary age, I would suggest. Many have placed all their faith in human reason untempered by faith and love, in technological power, scientific knowledge and economic growth. These forces have subjugated the Earth. And as we survey the wasteland we have produced, we see that we are not gods at all, merely the masters of nowhere.

Dawkins and Hitchens, Eagleton objects, have a two-dimensional idea of history: it can get well through the spread of rationality. They arrogantly gloss over a huge and profound paradox: yes, there is progress in modernity, but it is unstable, prone to error of the worst sort. Eagleton notes that whilst the Christian view of history may rely on miraculous intervention, this actually makes more sense on a certain level: ‘Christian theology believes in the possibility of transforming history without the hubris of the idea of Progress.’ Frankly, in a world on the brink of ecological collapse as the result of technological progress and industrial expansion, that’s the only kind of transformation that can save us now. There is nothing else.

Eagleton concludes by identifying the chief blindness of Dawkins and Hitchens as lying in their refusal to see that true humanism must have a "tragic" dimension: ‘Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own.’

When it comes to this process, Eagleton needs to answer whether the Christian myth of fall and redemption has any special authority and, if so, how can it be accessed, and inhabited, without the bossy downside of religion intruding? Eagleton makes the case for the Christian myth as against the Promethean myth of modern man, but refuses to come out in favour of Christian redemption. It is, Hobson suggests, a ‘very cagey “coming out.”’ It is very cagey indeed, seeing as nearly a decade on and Eagleton has still to come out. Perhaps Eagleton realizes that he has too much to lose, for a very uncertain gain, if one really does not believe in the reality and truth of God and everlasting life. It seems, deep down, Eagleton retains the Marxist faith in the view that salvation lies in our own hands. ‘For the fact is that Marxism is not compatible with the idea of fallenness. It holds that a form of human agency can be trusted to put life right; this is the only "salvation" worth talking about.’ ‘Eagleton clearly does not believe this,’ claims Hobson. So why, then, is he so cagey about his Christian sympathy? Hobson suggests that Eagleton is like a student, in a good sense, of being still a sort of seeker. ‘But perhaps he also resembles a student in that he can't quite bear the uncoolness of allowing the Christian label to stick to him.’

‘What is valuable about this book is that Eagleton is not defending a stable position. Instead he is admitting that, though he is not exactly a Christian, the Christian myth seems to underlie the very best form of socialist radicalism. For a famous intellectual, he is startlingly open-minded, humbly admitting he is still not sure, almost as if he is still a student.’

I’ll put it simply, it’s like pontoon. If you reach 21 you’ve got the perfect world. Religion has given us a figure of 14. Those who loathe religion would say much less, those who love it would say much more. I’ll give a reasonable view and say 14. There’s room for improvement. Those who press the claims of science or philosophy (or football or pop music or anything else for that matter) need to bear in mind what I mean here. Religion gives us a bit of everything, a whole sensuous as well as transcendent experience. It is a poor man’s philosophy, giving us complex arguments and moral dilemmas in forms that are within the comprehension of everyman and everywoman. It is also a crude psychology (crude in the estimation of the expert professionals, whose only scientism reveals them to be crude and their religious counterparts far more humanly sophisticated). So I’ll say religion is a 14. That leaves us 7 short of the perfect world. The modern age, with its scientific, technological, industrial and democratic revolutions, points to the redemptive power of creative human agency. Surely it is within human power to reach 21? The problem is, with only our own sense of our own limits to guide us, there is nothing inherently to stop us aiming for any figure we like. We can shoot for infinity. Except that the nature of reality calls for self-determining beings to establish a self-limiting principle. We go over 21 and we are bust. And the facts seem to suggest the conclusion that that is precisely what we are – busted.

The only abolition of religion worth a light is one that proceeds directly and positively through the affirmation of life. It's just that human beings, being symbol-making, story-telling, meaning-seeking creatures immersed in the culture that they create cannot but see that life as something much more than biological imperatives.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal ..." (Thomas Jefferson).

Those truths are not given by nature. We don't have to live by them. The same goes for freedom, justice, and democracy. There's no proof in support of any of these things. Science can say nothing here either. I think in the original statement, the word 'sacred' was used instead of 'self-evident.' That makes more sense (or non-sense, since these truths have neither the strength of fact or logic to support them). Jefferson continues on the rights of individuals: "that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It's just a myth, a cultural creation, a 'made-up' ethic? OK. But once we come to a position in which we consider such rights to be conferred by government, then we have also to accept that they can also be removed by government. To whom, then, do we appeal for their reinstatement? A world of a self-legislating reason is a world of endless power struggles.

As to those who make strong, aggressive, contemptuous statements on religion, I would simply ask them to compare themselves with some of the religious thinkers I admire the most, and have written on over the years. Tolkien for one, but also Erasmus, Cervantes and Montaigne, three writers whose humanism soars far above those who prove all too willing to put a dog in the fight, and wish to see this fight prosecuted to the death. I mention these figures in relation to this article speculating on the nature of Shakespeare's religious belief. Because this makes it clear that the bigots causing trouble and spreading hatred, intolerance and stupidity can very much come from the anti-religious community.

'The result of Noonan’s commentary is a Catholic Shakespeare in the vein of Erasmus, Cervantes, and Montaigne—in other words, “no fanatic ready to fire a train of gunpowder” like Guy Fawkes of 1605, and “no choirboy always in tune with the choir,” but rather a “critical Catholic,” possessing a “mind in religious matters...attentive, observant, complex, active” and “an alert awareness of the arrogance and abuses of authority, the danger of dogmatic hatred or odium theologicum, the cruelty and the foolishness of religious persecution.” Above all, Noonan’s Shakespeare was a “great humanist” who stood “in sharp contrast to those who might polemically be termed the ultras,” religious ideologues full of “invincible certainties” and “aggressively eager to assert their superiority.”'

Was Shakespeare Catholic?

For my part, I have been routinely abused over the years for taking religion seriously. I know from personal experience that the very things people critical of religion accuse religious people of come very easily from the irreligious. So, please, spare me the Lennonist delusion that without religion we would all live together in peace as one - this from a man who couldn't even get on with his three former friends from the same part of the world, splitting up The Beatles in extreme rancor. Over what? Petty ego. Give me Marx and Nietzsche any day on this, give me a genuine revolution and revaluation of all values. That takes a nerve and a nous far beyond the capacity of the petty narcissicists of our times with their pick-and-mix view of a world fitted to their wants, likes and desires. And "this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."

So we give Bach up for dreary, hypocritical, self-important John Lennon?

Imagine A World Without Religion…

Seth Adam Smith / February 4, 2014

Imagine a world without religion. To those who identify religion with bigotry, cruelty, violence, holy wars and honour killings, this sounds good. It promises a world with no more “righteous” judgement, and no shame in just being yourself. And what could be better than that?

But who are we? Aristotle made a distinction between human beings as they are and human beings as they could be. That distinction comes with a standard which exists to evaluate whether human beings are flourishing as they ought or are not. That may not be "righteous" but it is certainly a standard of evaluation that entails a judgement. We could discard it and let individuals be as they are. Why should George Best have flourished and lived well in accordance with the full range of his talents, when he could have just lived subject to empirical desire and necessity?

Identify religion with the worst that human beings can be, and it is easy to agree that the world would be a better place without religion. Actually no. That argument is based on an obvious non sequiteur. It may seem that religion only brings out the worst in people, but it's an optical illusion based on a selective approach. Talk about being judgemental! If your vision is limited only to the worst aspects of human behaviour couched in religious rationalization, then of course you will be inclined to think this behaviour will disappear with religion. It won't, it is endemic to the human species. Your objection is not to religion, it is to human beings. Well that's what we are, semi-clever, mischievous, meddlesome monkeys, shaved chimpanzees clinging to a barren rock that came from nowhere and is going nowhere. Why do we think we ought to be any better than we are? Why the disappointment from people who pride themselves on being non-judgemental? It is as if certain people think that we really are made in the image of God, and expect us to behave accordingly.

'Well, let’s try it out. Let’s imagine what the world would be like without religion.

There is, however, one small catch: if we are to do away with religion, we must—out of fairness—erase all of the good which it has inspired. After all, religion itself is not in the à la carte business. Religion doesn’t allow us to pick and choose which teachings and commandments we like and discard those we don’t like. No, religion works in absolutes. So if we’re going to do away with all the nasty parts of religion, let’s make sure we pull up the entire tree—roots, fruits, and everything else.

Michelangelo’s Pieta

Therefore, let’s assume that we have the power to absolutely erase every trace of say, Christianity from history; to strip it from the earth as though it had never existed. And if we are to do this, then we must start with all of its scriptures, stories, maxims, philosophies, and its commandments. That is the key. Erase the words of a religion and everything else evaporates into nothingness.

And what would we lose? More than we could possibly imagine.

Many of the great, classic works of art, inspired the writings of religion, would vanish. Think about it: the religious artwork of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Botticelli, and countless other Masters—gone. Powerful hymns, carols, and moving oratorios would be forever silenced. The writings of Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Dickens, Tennyson, Melville, Blake, Milton, Hardy, and Lewis would be gutted—stripped of passages influenced by religion.

The epic speeches and revolutionary political documents of the Western world would mean little to nothing for they would no longer invoke the heavenly ideals set forth by religion. Politicians, comedians, and activists would have difficulty criticizing others for failing to live up to certain divine standards because those standards would not exist.

And with the loss of Christ’s simple command to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” humanitarian efforts would suffer incalculable losses.

But those are merely a few of the more observable loses. Try to imagine the ripple effect that those losses would create upon untold numbers of artists, writers, musicians, humanitarians, and political activists. Try to imagine all of the good inspired by religion which we do not see. Consider all of the things you have refrained doing because you felt they were morally wrong—that they were emotions or activities that your religion preached against. Think about all of the other people who have refrained from mistreating others because their religion preached against it. Think about how many marriages and families have been held together because of religion. Think about how many people have overcome addictions and vices because of religion.