Gedachten
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
The Dialectics of Religion
Much has been said the last few years about the supposed rise of fundamentalist religion and its influence on world opinion. This goes particularly for the Third World as well as the Arab dictatorships, where widespread oppression and poverty give rise to a need for escapism and religious purity that works wonders for the fundamentalist movements' popularity in those nations, even if the actual theology of the fundamentalists is not particularly popular.1
Yet the idea that fundamentalism, or even more generally the radicalized, principled forms of each major religion, is gaining "ideological ground" in the historical sense is based upon a mistake, though one that is easily made. It certainly seems to be true that more radical forms of Christianity and Islam are gaining members at the expense of the more moderate versions. Witness the slow bleeding to death of the Catholic Church as opposed to the explosion of popular support for Evangelical Christianity, especially in the United States. But to draw from this the conclusion that the future belongs to 'strong' religion, or that such movements can even historically challenge the many varieties of the secular, betrays a lack of historical sense.
What the 'strong' religions (or tendencies within religion, more accurately) have in common is that they apply a very simple, crude view of the workings of theological ethics. The world is not only directly run or supervised by God, but its rules are also very simple and applied by God in a tit-for-tat manner. If the believer does what God commands, he will be blessed; if he does not, he will be punished; and all this within the normal span of a human lifetime. The balance then has to be in the positive for a given believer to obtain heaven, otherwise their destination is hell. Non-believers, of course, always follow the latter course.
Nevertheless this form of religion immediately runs into a dialectical paradox, as Bernard Williams has accurately pointed out.2 This is the following. We must, as believers in such 'strong' religion, assume that the world really is run like that, for our view of God (and with it our God) to be correct. That means that necessarily the view of interpersonal ethics must be based on the premise that good deeds will be rewarded in life and bad deeds punished in life. However, it will of course soon enough turn out that this does not hold. The expression "no good deed ever goes unpunished" is more than a mere cynicism: it is a wry acknowledgment of the way that conforming to cultural standards or being of a benevolent disposition in no way precludes future personal disaster, and that being altogether evil or nonconformist in no way means that no fortune will befall you.
Religions, of course, have a strong tendency to maintain themselves. So instead of rejecting the God assumption, the ethical side and its theological counterpart will, in time, develop. 'Sophisticated' or 'modern' believers of the tendency will come to see God not as an all-powerful law enforcer but as a sort of personification of the divine ethics, a representation of the Good, since this is the only way to apply God's existence to the life of man without the divine standard being either all to clearly rejected by experience or by its own irrelevance to human dealings. However, here the dialectical catch comes in. Since the believers have made a development in their view of the meaning of God in the world and their relation to it, they must come to see their former religious ethics as crude or wrong or mistaken. Since such misguidance cannot come from a God that is the Good (since refusing to show the good way of things to humanity can't even be considered a "noble lie"), it must have been a human construction for an understanding of God, whose limitations have since become apparent.
This, of course, must destroy religion. If one takes prior religious views to be a human misunderstanding of God, that must mean that current views might also fall into that category. No amount of religious repression or conformism will be able to suppress that doubt. That of itself would be bad enough, if it weren't for the fact that religions are supposed to say something about the world as it is; that is, that God actually does exist and that God does actually have or give meaning and that God actually does represent an ethical standard of some sort. Understanding this, one cannot help but conclude, as a believer, that the prior view of how the world was was wrong, and that the God as he was understood to actually exist at the time did not as such exist, and was a human construction, as we established above. Once this conclusion is made, there's no escaping the creeping doubt that this may actually apply in general, that the God-proposition within reality itself is no more than a human construct. This, of course, is atheism.
What then to make of the continued existence of both forms of religion, 'strong' tendencies and 'modernist' tendencies? Supposing that, after thousands of years of exhaustive theology, no-one has come up with the above reasoning just yet is ridiculous, and belied by the increasing numbers of nonbelievers. The only answer, then, can be that religions have given up the reality claim in general: that they have in fact developed beyond the doubt stage above and that they have reconstituted themselves as ethics with a divine claim. The difference here is that whereas pre-modern religion actually makes a reality claim, that is, tries to establish the reality of God and the divine within the framework of the normal understanding of the world's properties, the post-modern divine ethics does not do this, but merely makes a claim about the Good, albeit one that is 'placed into' the mould of religion.
The religious aspect of this ethical view is not so much one that is really about God, as that it is an ethics that makes use of the cultural and sociological framework of religion as it already exists. In a certain sense you might say that it wears this divine coat that it has inherited from religion, but that does not originally belong to it. That is also why even the claims of the fundamentalists are still ones that engage the post-modern ethical views on an equal level, no matter how odd to the nonbelievers (and even to many believers) the claims may be. When Jews and Christians and Muslims fight over the way the Holy Land must be run and controlled, it is because of a heart-felt ethical obligation to the Holy Land, not because of a reality-based claim that God actually will reward them, in the face of the nonbelievers, for obtaining control over it, or punish them for not doing so.
The same goes for the necessity of forming an islamic ummah, long an obsession of Sunnis and Shiites alike ever since the days of the ruin of the Caliphate of Baghdad: the necessity to do this is to achieve the unity of the muslims, to give islam standing in the community of religions, and to show islam's power. But it is crucial to note that this means that even islam, perhaps the least post-modern of the major religions, is seen to be a force of its own on the world stage, rather an ethical identity. Despite the insistence on the part of fundamentalist and moderate muslims alike on the historical religious foundations of their claim to an ummah, this view would most likely be utterly incomprehensible to the muslims of the first few centuries of Islam. For them, the necessity to an ummah would be because that is the order of the world, it is as necessary for the ummah to be constituted as it is for water to flow down and not up, and both of them are equal claims about the nature of the world and both are, crucially, equally subject to the whims of God.
Because of this dialectical aspect of the reality claim of religion versus its ethical claim, the fundamentalist movements of religion cannot really recover the ground they lost to modernity during the centuries between the High Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. They will apply the old terms and go through the old rituals: but their claims itself, the content of their religion in its cultural and political significance, is irretrievably post-modern, and this will rob them of a God-fearing future for the world even as they attempt to construe it.
1What might be worth remembering here is that what makes Hamas popular is its charity hospitals, not its view of Islam.
2Sir Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 1985)
