“The
shudder of awe is humanity’s highest faculty, Even though this world is forever
altering values ...” --- Goethe, Faust
We
live in an age of faith. We are assured we are advancing as a species toward a
world that will be made perfect by reason, technology, science or the second
coming of Jesus Christ. Evil can be eradicated. War has been declared on
bibulous forces or cultures that stand as impediments to progress. Religion (if
you are secular) is blamed for genocide, injustice, persecution, backwardness
and intellectual and sexual repression. “Secular humanism” (if you are born
again) is branded as a tool of Satan. The folly of humankind, however, is
pervasive. It infects all human endeavors. Institutional religion or the cults
of science and reason are not exempt.
The
greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it
comes form those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine
that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the
human species. Those who insist we are morally advancing as a species are
deluding themselves. There is little in science or history to support this
idea. Human individuals can make moral advances, as can human societies, but
they also make moral reverses. Our personal and collective histories are not
linear. We alternate between periods of light and periods of darkness. We can
move forward materially, but we do not move forward morally. The belief in
collective moral advancement ignores the inherent flaws in human nature as well
as the tragic reality of human history. Whether it comes in secular or
religious form, this belief is magical thinking. The secular version of this
myth peddles fables no less fantastic, and no delusional, than those preached
from church pulpits. The battle underway in America is not a battle between
religion and science; it is a battle between religious and secular
fundamentalists. It is a battle between two groups intoxicated with utopian and
magical belief that humankind can master its destiny. This is one of the most
pervasive forms of self-delusion, as Marcel Proust understood, but it has
disastrous consequences. It encourages us to ignore reality.
“The
soldier is convinced that a certain interval of time, capable of indefinitely
prolonged, will be allowed him before the bullet finds him, the thief before he
is caught, men in general before they have to die,” Proust wrote. “That is the
amulet which preserves people - and sometimes peoples - not from danger but
from the fear of danger, in reality from the belief in danger, which in certain
cases allows them to have it without actually needing to be brave it without
actually needing to be brave.”
The
word utopia was coined by Thomas
Moore in 1516 from the Greek words for no
and place. To be a utopian, to live
for the creation of a fantastic and unreal world, was to live in no place, to
remove oneself from reality. It is only by building an ethic based on reality,
one that takes into account the dangers and limits of the human situation, that
we can begin to adjust our behavior to cope with social, environmental and
political problems. All utopian schemes of impossible advances and glorious
conclusions end in squalor and fanaticism. The current “war on terror” by the United States is one such scheme. It is
being fought so that evil can be violently uprooted. It proponents promise a
world that will become “reasonable,” a “civil” world ruled by the “rational”
forces of global capitalism. Those who support the war on terror speak as if
victory in any tangible sense is possible. This noble version of a harmonious
world is used to justify violence and war, to turn us into criminals who carry
out needless murder and torture in the name of human progress.
The desire for emancipation, universal
happiness and prosperity has a seductive pull on the human imagination. It
preoccupied the early church, which was infused with exclusivist utopian sects.
We are comforted by the though that we progress morally as a species. We want
things to get better. We want to believe we are moving forward. This hope is more
reassuring than reality. All the signs in our present world point to a coming
anarchy, a massive dislocation of populations resulting from ecological
devastation and climate change, multiple pollutions, the weight of
overpopulation and wars fought over dwindling natural resources. Science, which
should be used to address these looming disasters, has largely become a tool of
corporations that seek not to protect us but to make a profit and stimulate the
economy. New, potentially threatening technologies, such as genetically
modified organisms and nanotechnologies, are being unleashed with no
understanding of the impact on the biosphere. The global population is expected
to jump from 2 billion in 1927 to 9 billion people by 2045, which means that if
this growth is left unchecked, we will no longer be able to sustain ourselves,
especially as nations such as China seek the consumption levels of the
industrialized nations in Europe and North America. Nearly two-thirds of the
life-support services provided to us by nature are already in precipitous
decline worldwide. The old wars of conquest, expansion and exploitation will be
replaced by wars fought for the necessities of air, food, sustainable living
conditions and water. And as we race toward this catastrophe, scientists
continue to make discoveries, set these discoveries, set these discoveries upon
us and walk away from the impact.
Yet
the belief persists that science and reason will save us; it persists because
it makes it possible to ignore or minimize these catastrophes. We drift toward
disaster with comforting thought that the god of science will intervene on our
behalf. We prefer to think we are the culmination of a process, the result of
centuries of human advancement, rather than creatures unable to escape from the
irrevocable follies and blunders of human nature. The idea of inevitable progress allows us to
place ourselves at the centre of creation, to exalt ourselves. It translates
our narrow self-interest into a universal good. But it is irresponsible. It
permits us to avert our eyes from reality and trust in absurdist faith.
“For
our age,” Joseph Conrad wrote, “is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce
life early and the human race comes to an end.”
The
belief that rational and quantifiable disciplines such as science can be used
to perfect human society is no less absurd than a belief in magic, angels and
divine intervention. Scientific methods, part of the process of changing the
material world, are nearly useless in the nebulous world of politics, ideas,
values and ethics. But the belief in moral progress is a seductive one. It is
what has doomed populations in the past who have chased after impossible
dreams, and it threatens to doom us again. It is, at its core, the enticing
delusion that we can be more than human, that we can become gods.
We
have nothing to fear from those who do or do not believe in gods; we have much
to fear from those who do not believe in sin. The concept of sin is a stack
acknowledgement that we can never be omnipotent, that we are bound by human
flaws and self-interest. The concept of sin is a check on the utopian dreams of
a perfect world. It prevents us from believing in our own perfectibility or the
illusion that the material advances of science and technology equal an
intrinsic moral improvement in our species. To turn away from God is harmless.
Saints have been trying to do it for centuries. To turn away from sin is
catastrophic. Religious fundamentalists, who believe they know and can carry
out the will of God, disregard their human limitations. They act as if they are
free from sin. The secular utopians of the twenty-first century have forgotten
they are human. These two groups peddle absolutes. Those who do not see as they
see, speak as they speak and act as they act are worthy of conversion or
eradication.
We
discard the wisdom of sin at our peril. Sins remind us that all human beings
are flawed - though not equally flawed. Sin is the acceptance that there will
never be a final victory over evil, that the struggle for morality is a battle
that will always have to be fought. Studies in cognitive behavior illustrate
the accuracy and wisdom of this Biblical concept. Human beings are frequently
irrational. They are governed by unconscious forces, many of them self-destructive.
This understanding of human corruptibility and human limitations, whether
explained by theologian Augustine or the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, has been
humankind’s most potent check on utopian visions. It has forced human beings to
accept their own myopia and irrationality, to acknowledge that no act, even one
defined as moral or virtuous, is free from the taint of self-interest and
corruption. We are bound by our animal natures.
The
question is not whether God exists. It is whether we contemplate or are utterly
indifferent to the transcendent, that which cannot be measured or quantified,
that which lies beyond the reach of rational deduction. We all encounter this
aspect of existence, in love, beauty, alienation, loneliness, suffering, good,
evil and the reality of death. These powerful, non rational, super-real forces
in human life are the domain of religion. All cultures have struggled to give
words to these mysteries and moments of transcendence. God - and different
cultures have given God many names and many attributes - is that which works
upon us and through us to find meaning and relevance in a morally neutral
universe. Religion is our finite, flawed and imperfect expression of the
infinite. The experience of transcendence - the struggle to acknowledge the
infinite - need not be attributed to an external being called God. As Karen
Armstrong and others have pointed out, the belief in personal God can, in fact,
be antireligious. But the religious impulse addresses something just as concrete
as the pursuit of scientific or historical knowledge: it addresses the human
need for the sacred. God is, as Thomas Aquinas argues, the power that allows us
to be ourselves. God is a search, a way to frame the questions. God is a call
to reverence.
Human
beings come ingrained with this impulse. Buddhists speak of nirvana in words
that are nearly identical to those employed by Many monotheists to describe
God. This impulse asks: What are we? Why are we here? What, if anything, are we
supposed to do? What does it all mean?
Science
and reason, while they can illuminate these questions, can definitely answer
none of them.
This impulse, this need for the sacred,
propels human beings to create myths and stories that explain who they are,
where they came from, and their place in the cosmos. Myth is not a primitive
scientific theory that can be discarded in an industrialized age. We all stoke
and feed the fires of symbolic mythic narratives, about our nation, our times
and ourselves, to give meaning, coherence and purpose to lives. The danger
arises when the myth we tell about ourselves endow us with divine power, when
we believe that it is our role to shape and direct human destiny, for then we
seek to become gods. We can do this in the name of Jesus Christ, Muhammad or
Western civilization. The result, for those who defy us, is the same -
repression and often death. The refusal to acknowledge human limitations and
our irrevocable flaws can thus cross religious and secular lines to feed both
religious fundamentalism and the idolization of technology, reason and science.
The
language of science and reason is now used by many atheists to express the
ancient longings for human perfectibility. According to them, reason and
science, rather than religion, will regulate human conflicts and bring about a
paradise. The vision draws its inspiration from the Enlightenment, the European
intellectual movement of seventeen and eighteen centuries that taught that
reason and scientific method could be applied to all aspects of human life.
This application would need to progress, human enlightenment and a better
world. Rene Descartes, David Hume, John Locke, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, Denis
Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine bequeathed to us this godless
religion.
The
Enlightenment was a curse and a blessing. Its proponents championed human
dignity and condemned tyranny, superstition, ignorance and injustice. Because
French philosophers including Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot, who influenced
the ideologues of the French Revolution, called foe social and political
justice, the Enlightenment led to the emancipation of Jews in Western Europe,
freeing them from squalid ghettos. But there was a dark side to the
Enlightenment. Philosophers insisted that the universe and human nature could
be understood and controlled by the rational mind. They saw the universe as
exclusively by consistent laws such as Isaac Newton’s law of gravity or
Galileo’s law of falling bodies. These laws could be explained mathematically
or scientifically. The human species, elevated above animals because it
possessed the capacity to reason, could break free of its animal nature and,
through reason, understand itself and the world. It could make wise and
informed decisions for the betterment of humanity. The disparity between the
rational person and the instinctive, irrational person, these philosophers
argued, would be solved through education and knowledge.
The
Enlightenment empowered those who argued that superstition, blind instinct and
ignorance had to be eradicated. Kant, in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of
View, published in 1789, asserted that Africans were inherently predisposed to
slavery. Thus the Enlightenment gave the world the “scientific racism” adopted
as an ideological veneer for murder by nineteenth- and twentieth-century
despots. Those could not be educated and reformed, radical Enlightenment
thinkers began to argue, should be
eliminated so they could no longer poison human society. The Jacobins who
seized control during the French Revolution were the first in a long line of
totalitarian monsters who justified murder by invoking supposedly enlightened
ideals. Their radical experiment in human engineering was embodied in the Republic of Virtue and the Reign of Terror,
which saw 17,000 people executed. Belief in the moral superiority of Western
civilization allowed the British to wipe out Tasmanian Aborigines. British
hunting parties were given licenses to exterminate this “inferior race,” whom
the colonial authorities said should be “hunted down like wild beasts and
destroyed.” The British captured many in traps and burned or tortured them to
death. The same outlook led to the slaughter of the Caribs of the Caribbean, the Guanches of the Canary Islands, as well as Native Americans.
It justified the slave trade that abducted 15 million Africans and killed even
more. And it was this long tradition of colonial genocide in the name of
progress in places like King Leopold’s Congo that set the stage for the
industrial-scale killing of the Holocaust and man-made famines of the Soviet Union.
Reigns
of terror are thus the bastard children of the Enlightenment. Terror in the
name of utopian ideals would rise again and again in the coming centuries. The
Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulags were spawned by the Enlightenment.
Fascists and communists were bred on visions of human perfectibility. Tens of
millions of people have been murdered in the futile effort to reform human
nature and build utopian societies. During these reigns of terror, science and
reason served, as they continue to serve, interests purportedly devoted to the
common good - and to vast mechanisms of repression and mass killing.
The
belief in human perfectibility, in history as a march toward a glorious
culmination, is malformed theology. It permits wild, eschatological visions to
be built under religious or secular banners. The dangerous belief colors the
new crop of atheist writers. They will tell us what is right and wrong, not in
the eyes of God, but according to the rational minds. They, too, seek to
destroy those who do not conform to their vision. They, too, wrap their
intolerance in Enlightenment virtues.
“Some
propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for
believing them,” Sam Harris writes, “This may seem an extraordinarily claim,
but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live.
Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means
of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence
against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be
captured and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in
killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and
other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves
and to innocents abroad, elsewhere on the Muslim world. We will continue to
spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.”
Any
form of knowledge that claims to be absolute ceases to be knowledge. It becomes
a form of faith. Harris mistakes a tiny subset of criminals and terrorists for
one billion Muslims. He justifies the unjustifiable in the name of
civilization. The passion of atheists like Harris, hidden under the jargon of
reason and science, are as bankrupt as the passions of Christian and Islamic
fundamentalists who sanctify mass slaughter in the name of their utopias.
Religious fundamentalists pervert and distort religion to serve their own fears
and aggrandize themselves. Atheists such as Harris do the same with science and
reason.
The
dangerous myth that confuses moral progress with material progress permits us
to believe we have discovered a way out of the human predicament. It places
faith in an empowered elite to guide us toward a new world. Science increases
not only our power to protect life and encourage virtue, but also our capacity
to inflict death and destruction. The industrial slaughter and genocides of the
past centuries were all products of the Enlightenment and their satellite
ideologies, from liberal imperialism to communism to fascism. All preach
collective moral progress through exploitation, repression and violence. All
were utopian. And all unleashed science and technology, in the service of war
and profit, to kill human beings on a scale unseen in human history. The
Enlightenment vision, because it renders all other values subservient to reason
and science, allows us to divide the human species into superior and inferior
breeds. It sanctifies inhumane abuse of the weak to push the human race
forward. This corruption was built into Enlightenment from its inception. The
Enlightenment may have encouraged an admirable humanism, but it also led to
undreamt-of genocide and totalitarian repression.
Those
who offer collective salvation, whether through science, Jesus Christ or
Muhammad, promise an unattainable human paradise. They embrace the Christian
conception of time as linear, the idea that we are moving toward revelation and
paradise. The difference - and it is a vast one - is that human beings, rather
than God, will make this final victory possible. The Enlightenment religion has
dominated the last century. These utopian visions, often after a great deal of
death and suffering, always fail. They will fail once again.
Those
who believe in collective moral progress define this progress by their own
narrow historical, cultural, linguistic and social experience. They see “the
other” as equal only when the other is identical to themselves. They project
their values on the rest of the human race. These secular and religious
fundamentalists are egocentrics unable to accept human difference. Those who
are different need to be investigated, understood or tolerated, for they are
intellectually or morally inferior. Those who are different are imperfect
versions of themselves.
These
secular utopians, like Christian fundamentalists, are stunted products of a
self-satisfied, materialistic middle class. They seek in their philosophical
systems a moral justification for their own comfort, self-absorption and power.
They do not question the imperial projects of the nation, globalization or the
vast disparities in wealth and security between themselves, as members of the
world’s industrialized elite, and the rest of the human race. Philosophy, like
theology, is often in the service of power. The creed is no exception.
“And
to say the Christians while I’m at it, ‘Go love your own enemies; by the way,
don’t be loving mine,’ “Christopher Hitchens, the author of God Is Not Great,
said when I debated him in San Francisco. “I think the enemies of
civilization should be beaten and killed and defeated, and I don’t make an
apology for it. And I think it is sickly ands stupid and suicidal to say that
we should love those who hate us and try to kill us and our children and burn
our libraries and destroy our societies. I have no patience with this
nonsense.”
The
rise of religious fundamentalism has been a spur to many decent, skeptical
people who find religious bigotry, superstition and intolerance repugnant.
These have made them receptive to antireligious polemics. Atheism, unlike
Christian fundamentalism, has not wormed its way into the corridors of power or
built an alliance with the corporate state to dismantle American democracy.
Atheists, unlike the Christian radicals, have not set up frightening systems of
indoctrination through television, radio, schools and colleges. Atheists have
not mounted an assault against dispassionate intellectual inquiry.
But
atheists such as Harris and Hitchens do offer, in place of religious
fundamentalism, a surrogate religion. The battle against Christian
fundamentalism, however, one of the most important struggles in the United States, is not going to be won by
promoting a rival religion that also ignores human nature, is chauvinistic and
intolerant, and speaks in jingoistic cant. Only an ethic that faces the reality
of the coming decades, one that has already seen us disrupt the geological and
biological patterns of the planet, will save us. Environmental catastrophe and
wars fought for water and oil and other natural resources will become our
collective reality. Terrorism will not be eradicated. We must accept our
limitations as a species and curb our wanton disregard for the
interconnectedness of life. We need to investigate and understand the
desperation of those who oppose us. If we continue to dismiss those who defy us
as satanic, or as religious fanatics who must be silenced or eradicated, we
stumble into the fundamentalist trap of a binary world of blacks and whites, a
world without nuance. To explain is not to excuse. To understand is not to
forgive. Those who look at others as simple, one-dimensional caricatures fuel
the rage of the dispossessed. They answer violence with violence. These utopian
belief systems, these forms of faith, are well-trod paths of self-delusion and
self-destruction. They allow us to sleepwalk into disaster.
An
atheist who accepts an irredeemable and flawed human nature, as well as a
morally neutral universe, who does not think the world can be perfected by
human beings, who is not steeped in cultural arrogance and feelings of
superiority, who rejects the violent imperial projects underway in Middle East, is intellectually honest.
These atheists may not like the word sin, but they have accepted its reality.
They hold an honored place in a pluralistic and diverse human community.
Atheists,
including those who brought us the Enlightenment, have often been a beneficial
force on the history of human thought and religion. They have forced societies
to examine empty religious platitudes and hollow religious concepts. They have
courageously challenged the moral hypocrisy of religious institutions. The
humanistic values of the Enlightenment were a response to the abuses by
organized religion, including the attempt by religious authorities to stifle
intellectual and scientific freedom. Religious authorities, bought off by the
elite, championed a dogmatism that sanctified the privileges and power of the
ruling class. But there were always religious figures who defied their own.
Many, such as the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, were branded as heretics and
atheists.
The
pain of living has also turned honest and compassionate men and women against
God. These atheists do not believe in collective moral progress or science and
reason as our ticket to salvation. They are trying to perfect the human race.
Rather, they cannot reconcile human suffering with the concept of God. This is
an honest struggle. This disbelief is a form of despair, not self-exaltation.
“We
then all just settled into bleak New England mourning,” wrote the poet
Liam Rector following the funeral of his close friend and fellow poet Jane
Kenyon. “For my part, I spent a raging few years questioning how any god could
let this happen, which drove me from a skeptical and buoyant agnosticism into
virulent atheism.”
No
one has a right to question or discredit Rector’s atheism. He earned it. It is
an atheism that does not try and substitute itself for religion. And it does
not subjugate others who have opposing beliefs.
The
concept of God, even within the same religious tradition, mutates as human
societies chant. The reaction of nonbelievers changes with it. As Karen
Armstrong writes in A History of God, “the idea of God formed on one generation
by one set of human beings could be meaningless in another.” There is no
immutable concept contained in the word God, “instead the word contains a whole
spectrum of meanings, some of which are contradictory or even mutually
exclusive.” This flexibility is what keeps the concept of God - of the divine -
alive. As one conception of the divine no longer has meaning or relevance in
the shifting sands of a culture, it is discarded, replaced by a new
interpretation. Because there is no clear, objective definition of God, the new
atheists must choose what God it is they attack. Is it the God of the mystics,
the followers of the Social Gospel, the eighteen-century deists, the Quakers,
the liberation theologians, or the stern God of the patriarchs? Are they at war
with Thomas Aquinas or John Calvin or Mohandas Gandhi or Thomas Tillich?
These
are not questions these atheists answer. They attack a religious belief of
their own creation. They blame religion for the worst of human depravity,
superstition and ignorance, and call on us to discard it. And once we free
ourselves from religion we will be able to march forward as a species to their
sunlit utopia. This is the simplistic utopian vision of human advancement
shared by all fundamentalists, all those who are capable of dealing
intellectually, and perhaps emotionally, with human contradictions, limitations
and ambiguities. Utopian visions of paradise, including the literal belief in
heaven, are always curiously vague. This may be because a world without vice
and conflict has little appeal to human beings. The atheists and religious
fundamentalists perpetuate their belief systems with fear, fear of the other
who seeks to destroy us and our way of life. They go into excruciating detail
when speaking about the danger posed by their enemies, but slip into dreamy
vagueness when they attempt to describe their new heaven and new Earth. If we
live in a world ruled by human reason, what would it look like? Would it be a
deathless life? Would it be eternally young? Would we live in monochromatic and
stifling harmony? Would we all be alike in our desires and our needs? Would
human suffering come to an end?
Religious
understanding takes time and work. It is, as Armstrong pointed out in an
interview on Salon, an art forum:” It’s a way of finding meaning, like art,
like painting, like poetry, in a world that is violent and cruel and often
seems meaningless.” Religious thought and scholarship, often belittled within
many universities, is difficult and laborious: “You don’t just dash off a
painting. It takes years of study. I think we expect religious knowledge to be
instant. But religious knowledge comes incrementally and slowly. And religion
is like any other activity. It’s not easy to do it well.”
Those
who teach that religion is evil and that science and reason will save us are as
deluded as those who are believe in angels and demons. They think education and
knowledge will save us - but because they do not accept human limitations, they
would use education as a system of indoctrination. They seek, through
education, to make us conform.
Evil,
however, cannot be eradicated through education. Evil will always be with us.
Science and human reason, like institutional religion, has delivered much
suffering as comfort. The victims of the death camps, those killed at
Hiroshima, the tens of millions who died in the Soviet gulags, or those
millions maimed and killed in Vietnam, Angola, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan or
Iraq and a host of other wars, know the awful truth: “the fault, dear Brutus,
is not in our stars,/But in ourselves...” There are scientists in the United States - a huge proportion of
whim work for defense-related industries - constructed sophisticated weapons systems
that have the capacity to exterminate millions of people. Is this a rational
enterprise? Is it beneficial to humankind? Is it a reason to place our faith
for the future of human race in reason and science?
The
story of the fall in the Garden of Eden is a warning about the danger posed by
blind faith in the power of human knowledge. The figure who delivers knowledge
to Adam and Eve is the source of evil - the devil. Knowledge brings with it
benefits, including self-awareness and power, but it also tempts us to play
God. To act on this temptation, to worship our own capacities, lures us into
utopian projects. The Biblical story of the fall conveys fundamental truths
about freedom, guilt, out relation to nature and mortality. Those formulated
religious myths imparted an important spiritual truth rather than a historical
or scientific fact. Those who created the Greek myths, the Vedas, the
Upanishads, as well as the Bible, were trying to explain human beings to human
beings.
We
called on a never-ending struggle with “the evil that I would not that I do,”
as Paul wrote. It is this capacity for empathy, remorse and self-reflection
that saves us from ourselves. The struggle for survival, the interplay between
prey and predator, does not appear to engender feelings of guilt and remorse,
this capacity for empathy, which plagues many of those who return from combat.
The knowledge that we have the capacity to impose indignities to other human
beings is the essence of human dignity. Non
sum dignus. When we lose this capacity for empathy, when we see the other
as someone who must be “educated” to embrace our values or eliminated, we slip
swiftly back into the world of animals.
The
call to the moral life, which includes the isolation and anxiety that often
accompanies moral responsibility, is built on the human capacity for empathy.
Immanuel Kant founded his ethics upon this concept. And Kant’s injunction
always to “recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not us them as
mere means” run in a direct line from the Gospels.
Those
who argue that religion is the product of a time of intellectual darkness ask
us to forget the wisdom of the past. They offer a new faith.
Dawkins,
who blames religion for stifling human curiosity and intellectual growth,
encourages people to transfer their faith to “rational” belief system to fill
the hole by the obsolescence of religious belief. “If the demise of God would
leave a gap, different people will fill it in different ways,”Dawkins writes.
“My way includes a good dose of science, the honest and systematic endeavor to
find out the truth about the real world.”
Hitchens
is rhapsodic about the future world made possible by science and human
ingenuity. He writes of the accessibility of scientific knowledge to “masses of
people by easy electronic means.” Science, he promises, will soon
“revolutionize our concept of research and development.” He adds: “Thanks to
the telescope and the microscope (religion) no longer offers an explanation
important.” Dawkins uses the term zeitgeist
to describe what he sees as ever-increasing progress, with just the occasional
“set back”. A glorious future, brought to us by science and reason, is within
reach. They have seen the future and it works. Scientific and moral progress,
however, are not the same. One advances. The other does not.
“The
core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in
parallel with our increasing knowledge,” the British philosopher John Gray
wrote. “the twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of
scientific knowledge to assert and define the values and goals they already
have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom.
They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science
made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the
twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and
genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line
with the growth of knowledge - not even in the long run.”
The
prospects for the human race are bleak. The worse things get in human
societies, the more powerful the yearning for illusion and false hope. The
reality of what we face as a species is increasingly frightening. We cannot
stop the destructive forces we unleashed. We can only hope to lessen the
disasters looming before us. They will require a sober, dispassionate response,
one that accepts the severe limitations of humanity and gives up utopian
fantasies. It will require empathy, the ability to see the world from the
perspective of those outside our culture and our nation. Dreams of fantastic
miracles and collective salvation, whether through science or God, will
accelerate our doom, fore they permit us to ignore reality. Our survival as a
species depends on accepting our narrowing possibilities, doing what we can to
mitigate disaster and reaching out to the rest of the planet in ways that
promote cooperation rather than conflict.
The
blustering televangelists, and the atheists who rant about the evil of
religion, are little more than carnival barkers. They are in show business, and
those in show business know complexity does not sell. They trade cliché and
insults like cartoon characters. They don masks. One wears the mask of
religion, the other wears the mask of science. They banter back and forth in
predictable sound bites. They promise, like the advertisers, simple and
seductive dreams. This debate engages two bizarre subsets who are well suited
to the television culture because of the crudeness of their arguments. One
distorts the scientific theory of revolution to explain the behavior and rules
for complex social, economic and political systems. The other insists that the
six-day story of creation in Genesis is fact and Jesus will descend from the
sky to create the kingdom of God on Earth. These
antagonists each claim to have discovered the absolute truth. They trade
absurdity for absurdity. They show that the danger is not religion or science.
The danger is fundamentalism itself.
“Men
seek a universal standard of human good,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote. “After
painful effort they define it. The painfulness of their effort convinces them
that they have discovered a genuinely universal value. To their sorrow, some of
their fellow men refuse to accept the standard. Since they know the standard to
be universal the recalcitrance of their fellows is proof, in their minds, of
some defect in humanity of the nonconformists. Thus a rationalistic age creates
a fanaticism. The nonconformists are figuratively expelled from the human
community.”
The
new atheists, who attack a repugnant version of religion, use it to condemn all
religion. They use it to deny the reality and importance of the religious
impulse. They are curiously unable to comprehend those found through their
religious convictions the strength to stand up against injustice. Hitchens
writes of Martin Luther King Jr. that “in no real as opposed to nominal sense,
then, was he a Christian.” He disparages the faith of Abraham Lincoln and
assures us that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whom the Nazis put to death for resistance,
was the product of a religious belief “that had “mutated into an admirable but
nebulous humanism.” He declares Gandhi an obscurantist who distorted and
retarded Indian independence, and calls the Dalai Lama a medieval princeling
who is the continuation of a parasitic monastic elite. All those religious
figures who found the courage to live the moral life must be maligned and
dismissed as not authentically religious. Their presence speaks of another kind
of religion, one these atheists do not comprehend.
These
attacks dismiss those - and there are millions - who found the inner fortitude
through religion to fight for justice and lead lives of compassion. It seeks to
invalidate the achievement of those religious figures who lost their lives in
the defense of humanity. Religious leaders, such as King or Bonhoeffer, and all
those who followed them, are excluded from this version of religion. The new
atheists, like all fundamentalists, flee from complexity. They can cope with
religion in its most primitive and abusive form. They are helpless when
confronted by a faith that challenges their caricatures.
These
atheists’ knowledge of the Bible, as well as the Koran and other religious
texts, is shallow and haphazard. They do not distinguish between religious myth
and factual narrative, between a truth expressed through story or art and the
truth that arises from factual investigation onto a historical event or
scientific experiment. They are blind to the underlying human truth and reality
expressed through religious myth. The Bible, which they are so fond of
attacking as incoherent, was never designed to be a coherent book. The word
Bible is derived from the Greek words ta
biblia, “little books”. In ancient libraries it was not a unified whole but
a collection of scrolls placed in cubbyholes. These scrolls, all read
separately, contained wisdom literature, moral treatises, stories, rules,
aphorisms, creation myths, letters, fables, polemics, histories and poems.
History, as a collection of verifiable facts, was a foreign concept to the
writers of the Bible, as it was to the Greek historian Herodotus. The stories
about Jesus in the Gospels were meant to convey the essence of a life and a
teaching, not facts. The discrepancies in the accounts by the four Gospel
writers, as well as the various versions of myths in the Hebrew Bible,
including the creation myth, illustrate the indifference these writers felt to
factual narrative. Those who wrote ancient texts included reportage, myth,
legend, received wisdom and stories in their “historical” accounts. Readers,
since the Bible came into existence, have picked and rejected what suited and
did not suit the circumstances of their lives. William Blake, who understood
this, referred to the Bible as “the Great Code of Art.”
“If
religion is essentially the inner life,” wrote Wilhelm Schmidt, “it follows
that it can be truly grasped only from within. But beyond a doubt, this can be
better done by one in whose inward consciousness an experience of religion
plays a part. There is but too much danger that the [nonbeliever] will talk of
religion as a blind man might of colors, or one totally devoid of ear of a
beautiful musical composition.”
I
fear that in a period of instability and crisis, perhaps after another
terrorist attack, an economic collapse or an environmental disaster, these
secular and religious fundamentalists will merge to call for horrific
bloodletting and apocalyptic acts of terror to save us. It does not matter if
one billion Muslims are condemned as “Satan worshippers” or irrational
religious fanatics. The resulting catastrophe - for them and for us - will be
the same.
In
The End of Faith, Harris, in the passages that could be lifted from a sermon by
a Christian fundamentalists, call for a nuclear first strike against the
Islamic world. He defends torture as a logical form of interrogation. He, like
all utopians, has reduced millions of human beings and cultures he knows
nothing about to primitive impediments to his vision of a better world. “What
will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyes at the mere mention of
paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry?” Harris asks. “If history
is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or
what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted,
conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing
likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own.
Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime - as it would kill tens of
millions of innocent civilians in a single day - but it may be the only course
of action available to us, given what Islamists believe.”
Harris
again reduces a fifth of the world’s population to vast, primitive enemy. He
argues that we may have to murder “tens of millions of people in a single day.”
His bigotry, and the bigotry of all who dehumanize others, is used to justify
indiscriminate slaughter and atrocity. The people to be killed, we are told,
are not distinct individuals. They do not have hopes and aspirations. They only
appear human. They must be destroyed because of what they represent, what lurks
beneath the surface of their human form. This dehumanization, especially by
those who live in a society with the technological capacity to carry out acts
of massive slaughter, is terrifying.
Our
enemies have no monopoly on sin, nor have we one on virtue. We all stand in
need of self-correction. We do not live in a world where we ever get to choose
between pure virtue and pure vice. Human actions combine within them the moral
and the immoral, no matter how pure they appear to us or to others. We are
always like our enemy. Human virtue is always ambiguous.
Niebuhr
captured this inclination to paint our self-interested motives as a universal
virtue when he wrote in The Irony of American History about America’s response to communism
during the cold war:
John
Adams in his warnings to Thomas Jefferson would seem to have has a premonition
of this kind of politics. “Power,” he wrote, “always thinks it has a great soul
and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s
service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice,
love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much
overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understandings
of the conscience and convert both to their party.” Adam’s understanding of the
power of the self’s passions and ambitions to corrupt the self’s reason is a
simple recognition of the facts of life which refute all theories, whether
liberal or Marxist, about the possibility of a completely disinterested self. Adams, as every Christian
understanding of man has done, nicely anticipated the Marxist theory of an
“ideological taint” in reason when men reason about each other’s affairs and
arrive at conclusions about each other’s virtues, interests and motives. The
crowning irony of the Marxist theory of ideology is that it foolishly and
self-righteously confined the source of this taint to economic interest and to
a particular class. It was, therefore, incapable of recognizing all the
corruptions of ambition and power which would creep inevitably into its paradise
of innocence.”
Niebuhr
warned that when we divide the world into darkness and light we take on the
attributes of those we oppose. We adopt their language and their binary vision
of good and evil, speaking also of a “new enemy” and “perpetual war.” Democratic
systems function because they begin from the premises that human nature is
corrupt, and absolute power, as well as absolute truth, is antithetical to the
common good.
“We
must fight their falsehood with our truth,” Reinhold Niebuhr cautioned, “but we
must also fight the falsehood in our truth.”
This
is what these secular utopians fail to do. They believe that the best human
beings, defined by them as “rational” and “enlightened,” should become powerful
enough to dictate to the rest of the planet a new way of being. They see these
“best” human beings in themselves and assume they represent the best of the
nation. The fail to see their own irrationality of those they oppose. They have
forgotten that they, too, are human. The question is never who shall rule. A
democratic state begins from the assumption that most of those who gravitate
toward power are mediocre and probably immoral.
It assumes that we must always protect ourselves from bad government. We
must be prepared for the worst leaders even as we hope for the best. And as
Karl Popper wrote, this understanding leads to a new approach to power, for “it
forces us to replace the question: Who shall rule? By the new question,: How
can we so organize political institution that bad or incompetent rulers can be
prevented from doing too much damage?”
“I
am inclined to think that rulers have rarely been above average, either morally
or intellectually, and often below it.” Popper wrote. “And I think that it is
reasonable to adopt, in politics, the principles of preparing for the worst, as
well as we can, though we should, of course, at the same time try to obtain the
best. It appears to me madness to case all our political efforts upon that
faint hope that we shall be successful in obtaining excellence, or even
competent, rulers.”
Those
who call on us to carve out a world in our own image and tame and quell
“irrational” religious fanatics offer an invitation to despotism. In the name
of noble ideals and universal harmony they empower the demons of self-exaltation,
greed and lust for power. This utopian vision imbues human history and human
nature with a fictitious linear progression toward an idealized future.
“The
point is that we have almost moved on, and in a big way, since biblical times,”
Dawkins writes. “Slavery, which was taken for granted in the Bible and
throughout most of history, was abolished in civilized countries in the
nineteenth century. All civilized nations now accept what was widely denied up
to the 1920s, that a woman’s vote, in an election or on a jury, is equal of a
man’s. In today’s enlightened societies (a category that manifestly does not
include, for example, Saudi Arabia), women are no longer
regarded as property, as they clearly were in biblical times. Any modern legal
system would have prosecuted Abraham for child abuse. And if he has actually
carried through his plan to sacrifice Isaac, we would have convicted him of
first-degree murder. Yet, according to the mores of his time, his conduct was
entirely admirable, obeying God’s commandment. Religious or not, we have all
changed massively in our attitude to what is right and wrong.”
Dawkins
argues that we are “way ahead of our counterparts in the Middle Ages, or in the
time of Abraham, or even as recently as the 1920s. The whole wave keeps moving,
and even the vanguard of an earlier century (T.H. Huxley is the obvious
example) would find itself way behind the laggers of a later century. Of
course, the advance is not a smooth incline but a meandering sawtooth. There
are local and temporary setbacks such as the United States is suffering from its
government in the early 2000s. But over the longer timescale, the progressive
trend is unmistakable, and it will continue.”
Dawkins’
hope that George Bush is an aberration on the road to enlightenment is naïve.
It dismisses the rise of a militarized corporate state that has slowly
cannibalized the democratic system and made the corporation a shadow
government. The corporate state will not vanish when Bush leaves office.
Dawkins applauds the taming of past evils - although human trafficking and
slavery continues in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe - and ignores new ones,
such as industrial warfare and nuclear weapons, the brutality of totalitarian
capitalism, globalization and looming environmental disasters. We do not march
toward a rational paradise. We march towards a world where the rapacious greedy
appetites of human beings, who have overpopulated and failed to protect the
planet, threaten widespread anarchy, famine, nuclear terrorism, and wars for
diminishing resources. The belief that the human animal is evolving morally and
will finally become reasonable is possible only when we close our eyes to human
predicament. Human beings prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes
life easier to bear. It lets us to turn away from the hard choices ahead to
bask in a comforting certitude that God or science will bring about our
salvation.
History,
as a meaningful narrative of progress shaped by human beings, is unknown in the
traditions of Asia or Africa. This vision of history is a peculiar product of the Christian faith
and the Enlightenment. This vision was tempered within Christianity, however,
by the acknowledgement of human corruption or sin, taught that our physical and
social environment could be transformed through rational manipulation. We could
advance morally as a species. This belief in rational and scientific
manipulation of human beings to achieve a perfect world has consigned millions
of hapless victims to persecution and death.
Human
history is not a long chronicle of human advancement. It includes our cruelty,
barbarism, reverses, blunders and self-inflicted disasters. History is not
progressive. The ancient Greeks, like Hindus and Buddhists, saw human life and
human history as cyclical. We live, they believed, in alternating stages of
hope and despair, of growth and decay. This may be a more accurate
understanding of human existence. To acknowledge the purposelessness of human
history, to refuse to endow it with a linear march toward human perfection, is
to give up the comforting idea that we are unique or greater than those who
came before us. It is to accept our limitations and discard out intoxicating
utopian dreams. It is to become human.
The
worst tyranny in human history was carried out by utopian idealists. These
idealists plunged their nations and societies into famine, war and genocide for
great ideals and laudable virtues. Utopian dreams are always psychotic. They
promise that we can achieve what no generation before us has achieved. They ask
us to unleash, one last time, acts of horrific violence and repression to make
ourselves happy. These dark visions begin with the annihilation of the other,
but end with self-annihilation. In the name of beauty, progress, goodness and
truth they bring death.
(Chris) Hedges Vs. (Christopher) Hitchens
(Chris) Hedges Vs. (Christopher) Hitchens