On Religion At Yule-Tide

Some social scientific estimates suggest that up to 84% of the world’s population are members of religious groups or claim that religion is important in their lives (two very different things). We can draw three general conclusions from this: 

• A very large number of people are 'stuck' in religion because of inherited religious structures even when religion is not actually important in their lives. Some might actively do with some support in becoming liberated from the communitarian power of religion and it is ironic that right-wing Christians often want to 'liberate' Muslims without seeing the mote in their Southern Baptist eye.

• A very large number of people have unstable 'selves' (we explain this further below) or are hard wired into a faith-based view of the world: the rest of us are going to have to contain (preferably) or accommodate such people from a position of relative cultural weakness.

• Those who are both free of religion and free from religion are a minority about the size of (say) other 'historically deviant' minorities such as the gay community, once violently oppressed (we think of Giordano Bruno), then pushed to the margins and then having to put up with the dead weight of a past dominated by the narratives of their former persecutors.

The logic of all this is that those who are free in both senses (free of religion and free from religion) might need not to be so soft in accommodating an unstable, hard-wired bunch of true believers. The latter hold the high ground here, despite over three centuries of steady scientific and political progress, and are quite capable of misusing their position given half a chance.

Accommodation really ought to be replaced with containment. Those of our 'brothers and sisters' who are not hard-wired to faith and don't think religion is important may need to be actively liberated through propaganda and perhaps political action given the dominance of the hard-wired believer and the religious conformist.

A tougher stand on accommodation does not mean the counter-oppression of soft or different minds, just a re-balancing of culture so that people can choose what they need for their own psychic security completely free from enforced and historic social and cultural pressures or the need for order as some theocratic-backed ruling caste defines matters. Another corollary of a tougher stand is support for the idea that education should be about encouraging internally resourced psychic security and so have this taken out of the hands of those offering only external psychic security and, so, psychic dependency. 

And here we have a secularist action plan of sorts - a dismantling of communitarian religio-cultural structures, containment of spiritual and ideological types (both those advocating our beholdness to the external and those advocating the non-existence of the personality or self) and a shift of education back to the centre ground between faith-based and non-faith-based personalities ... so that young people (as well as those engaged in life-long learning) are enabled to make private choices about their own best bet psychic survival mechanisms. 

Such mechanisms may reasonably include belief (assuming a state of freedom to choose beliefs consciously or sub-consciously) in any sort of nonsense that serves a personality's purpose. The strong-minded, those grounded in material reality, have perhaps become too soft in their instinctive tolerance.

Obedience & Marginality

This matters because psychological research shows that if you remind someone (most people) of 'God' then that person tends to become more socially obedient. It is pointed out in favour of religion that this orientation towards obedience is so great that, when religion is disposed of, it is simply replaced by cults of the State and the Leader (conformitarian constitutionalism as in the US and EU, fascism and Stalinism). 

There is some truth in this but only because religion is removed suddenly without the prior work required to undermine the culture of obedience through practice, persuasion, example and education. It is, therefore and against the prevailing narrative of liberal intellectuals, not an argument for religion but an argument against religion for having permitted the culture of obedience to embed itself in the social in the first place - understandable perhaps in managing resource-poor societies but scarcely justifiable today.

The fact that social and economic instability inclines people much more towards faith-based analyses tells us that religion is very much associated with social and economic anxiety. The best way ((in theory) to eliminate faith's hold on people is not only to educate but to educate within a context of order and economic prosperity. 

Secularists' primary concern should be to resist the religious moral praise for poverty and community and drive society forwards towards maximum satisfaction of needs and (within reason) wants whether in capitalist or socialist terms (the method is irrelevant so long as total prosperity is enhanced and order maintained). Low growth 'green' politics is, for example, a natural vector for the introduction of faith-based solutions to problems and is deeply conservative.

The same applies to 'marginality'. Religion has always provided security to marginal communities and it gets reintroduced in more fundamentalist and despairing ways (as in the Ghost Dance phenomenon amongst the defeated Sioux) under extreme stress. It could be argued that radical Islamism arises out of marginalisation, defeat and relative poverty as much as ideology, an ideology actually not really any more irrational in itself than evangelical Christianity and Eretz Israel. 

If we want to weaken religion's hold on free people, we have to deal with these marginal cases which have a dangerous tendency to embed their survival models in later and more prosperous generations, albeit in an attenuated form. There are people still 'religiously' and without serious internalised faith going to mass on Sundays because Irish famine refugees in their family pasts brought a strengthened peasant Catholicism into host countries that allows even today Cardinals to claim informal powers over education and social mores. 

Any strategy of reason is going to have to deal with marginality as soon as it appears - either by keeping marginality out of the main community in the first place (so as not to have Islamist and Pentecostalist problems in the future) or requiring conformity with host values as a condition for inclusion (I can hear the rage of post-modern liberals mounting at that suggestion). We must ensure that such people (especially the young) do not remain marginal for long and can escape from their communities of that is what they want.

The Psychology of God-Things & Wobbly Minds

But it is the psychology of the God-thing (and the God-thing is, of course not the only manifestation of religion) that is most interesting because even if we had absolute prosperity and no marginality, religion would always reappear because of something we can do nothing about - which is the fragility of some people's relationship to other minds and their wobbly inability to see a clear distinction between their own subjectivity and that of others and then that of all others to all other others. 

This wobbliness results in the imputation of mind to things (in fact, for all the protestations to the contrary, other humans become just other things and, if so, so why should not non-human things have minds). This can then proceed to an unwarranted imputation of mind to all-things taken as a whole (that is, universally). 

The religious person is not interested in general in the alternative subjectivity of the other. They ask no questions of the other except within a framework of conformity to pre-set narratives and codes. The other becomes a person only insofar as they are defined as a person (in a way that invents an equality of all non-subjectivities) within a particular pre-set narrative. 

This mind-set has transferred itself to contemporary non-religious ideology and created revealing paradoxes so that, for example, the feminist who targets fellow human beings as objectified and objectifiers has actually objectified both herself or himself instead of allowing both the dignity of speaking for themselves and being permitted free choices. Religion is derivative of the psychological problem rather than cause of it.

There is little that can be done about this because having wobbly minds is embedded in all humanity. There are, of course, degrees of wobbliness and none of us is free of it. It was inherent in the evolutionary process itself. Anyone who would seek to make the human mind universally un-wobbly is really asking for us to cease to be human which is neither necessary nor helpful. 

Indeed, radical negativity towards the wobbliness of human minds is always a form of radical wobbliness in its own right - an inability to accept human reality, a drift towards an abstract universalism as absurd as the God-thing. It is yet another form of mental instability arising out of personalities disconnected from observable material reality (worse, when, from purely intellectual speculation, such mental instability denies the very existence of personality).

The projection of mind onto a social world of resource scarcity is the source code of religion. Removing resource scarcity and the culture of obedience that derives from it can only culturally re-balance humanity towards liberation from the irrational as part of our social and material condition but the projection of mind onto materiality itself is not a solvable issue. It is not even necessarily desirable (for the bulk of humanity) since the projection is an intrinsic part of many people's ability to survive in the world.

Brain and Religion

Increasingly neuroscientists are accepting that this projection function is hard-wired into the brain, whether genetically predetermined or emergent from social interaction with others predisposed to belief. The genetic component is anecdotally confirmed by the many testimonies of totally atheist persons whose atheism was recognised as an absolute personal fact on the ground (a disposition) early in life despite highly religious family environments - the reverse is likely to be the case with 'spiritual' types emerging regardless of rationalist and pragmatic parents. 

It is just as grim for deeply religious parents to have an atheist child as it is for atheists to find that their son or daughter believes in the Second Coming. The trauma can be greater than for parents who find their child is gay or transgender because a sexual disposition is less threatening to their own identity.

The genetic component may make having rational or faith-based children a bit of a lottery with a consequent tendency to try to force such children into communitarian modes of being that are grossly unfair and limiting (on both sides). The point here is not whether there is a God or not but how a belief in God (or not) represents the true inner nature of a person as a function of their brain structures. 

Few modern religious people would make the claim today that they can prove the existence of God on material evidence. Even reliance on revealed texts is fairly lightly held among the majority. Yet that does not stop belief despite believers often being highly educated, intelligent and functionally effective in every other way ... so long as they are allowed their belief. People will die for their beliefs because the belief is who they are. 

The negative detached view of this as a 'mere' psychic survival mechanism (to the extent that bodily survival may be abandoned if the psyche is threatened) is irrelevant and circular. If believing a non-provable proposition ensures psychic survival and affirms identity, then it is functionally useful. End of argument.

However, it is important to understand that there is no actual God-spot in the brain ... this capacity for belief or faith arises out of a general perception of reality, of the relationship between mind and matter. Let us take brain aspects of the case ...

• The medial prefrontal cortex-together with the temporopolar region, temporoparietal junction and precuneus are strongly associated with our ability and tendency to figure out other people’s thoughts and feelings. These regions of the brain are particularly active among religious believers, especially when they are praying. This suggests that religious activities involve processes related to the 'flow' of managing the difficulty of dealing with other minds. It is as if other minds cannot be seen as separated but must be integrated into the observing mind in some way. This would accord with the religious person's tendency to be more communitarian in general.

• There seems to be some connection between temporal lobe epilepsy and religious experiences. A few controversial attempts have been made to stimulate this part of the brain to generate religious experiences artificially but they have been inconclusive. Ecstatic religious experience (which is different from the communitarian normality involved in social religion) would seem to have its origins in the brains of some people. Non-believers in general find this (unless induced by drugs) either incomprehensible or find it rationally contained within artistic, creative or emotional experiences that are not presumed to have a meaning beyond the expression of the Self in the world.

• And an odd one - neuro-imaging studies and studies with brain damaged patients indicate that decreased activation of the parietal cortex – particularly the right side – may be involved in religious experiences. These seem to be linked to the dissolution of the self which, of course, is also a consequence of some drug experiences and it may be at the basis of the experienced rather than rational interest in dissolution of the self in post-Wittgensteinian and post-modern philosophy. 

This last is of great cultural importance because as formal religion declines and religious ecstatic experience is marginalised, the discourse of dissolution of the self has become more salient - to the point where it is having the precisely opposite social effect to that of communitarian 'pre-frontal cortex' shared experience. The dissolution model, rationalised for this type much as Scholastics rationalised the first type, has fragmented the social and not in ways appreciated by the rational or Enlightenment atheist.

Ritual and Anxiety
  
This brings us on to ritual where there are highly variable approaches to its importance and necessity. Some individuals have private habits (which may have ritualistic aspects, even to the point of being clinical as in OCD cases) but no interest in social rituals - they may not even see the point of Christmas or only see its point in restricted family contexts. Others crave mass social rituals, ranging from the comfort of Mass on Sundays to engagement with national funerals and royal weddings. 

This is just how it is but the need for private and social rituals has become embedded, perhaps appropriated by religious structures. It is these rituals that ensure that religion remains extremely 'sticky' in terms of its social survival. Ritual, also often embedded in brain structures, whether a genetic propensity or environmentally determined, also arises from deep within our evolutionary heritage. 

Ritual ensures that religion can never die but can only be contained. Once the Mexican revolutionaries and Soviets departed, the rituals, far from forgotten, returned. Any aspiration to do otherwise than contain religion is doomed to failure. Ritual is the primary mechanism for many human beings (possibly, if we include private ritual, all human beings) in dealing with a fundamental human issue - anxiety.

Anxiety is central to being human for evolutionary reasons. Again, this is totally regardless of truth propositions about religion. Psychologically, religion deals primarily with anxiety (rather than, say, depression). This deals with the 'straw god' point (that many religions have no God-thing) because this anxiety-relieving function has no requirement for the God-thing in itself. The ideology and ritual are sufficient.

We can simply replace the God-Thing with a Universal whether Tao or Buddha-hood, and the same mechanism starts to emerge. It would emerge with a theoretical form of organised Atheism or Existentialism. The Satanists consciously invented a Satan in order to have ritual although this is probably more for fun and self-expression than in order to relieve any direct anxiety. If anything the Satanists are 'detourning' religion by denying completely the motivational force for anxiety.

Since human anxiety cannot ever be truly extirpated by even the most enlightened form of social action and only with great difficulty by individual action (since not everyone has a desire to buy tranquillity at the cost of serving an imagined Satan), religion provides a relatively cheap and effective form of mass psychotherapy for minds otherwise unable to cope with circumstances or even reality itself, even if it exacts its high price in conformity and even oppression in other areas such as sexuality. 

It is all a trade-off but the restrictions placed on an anxious person by religion sometimes ensures that the anxiety can only be contained by containing the person. From this perspective, extirpating religion could represent a profound social bad. Religion may need to be contained but its psychotherapeutic function, for lack of anything better for a large portion of a distressed humanity is beneficial and vastly more cost-effective than trying to divert limited resources to some sort of state mental health operation. 

Indeed, it might be regarded as a cruelty if atheists with access to sufficient power removed this salve from such people. One thing we should not abide is ignorant cruelty to other human beings by fanatics of any type.

In addition to its anxiety-relieving function (which is simply a matter of ensuring that the world has sufficient meaning to give an individual sufficient security for the future aka 'hope'), the wider 'meaning function' of religion is what gives it its cultural power and strength. Again, the non-religious are going to find it thoroughly futile exercise (as the Soviet experiment demonstrated) to invest vast resources in providing a structure of alternative total meaning. 

This merely becomes, to all intents and purposes, a religion in all but the supernatural aspects. It requires brutal means to effect the transition and nothing is gained for anyone, especially as core surviving believers tend to have their beliefs strengthened rather weakened in the long run by outright repression. 

Strategies of Tolerant Containment

We are back to a strategy of containment and (qualified) respect, appropriating religious items (such as a baroque painting, Mozart mass or derelict monastery) as non-religious heritage items, in effect as part of a meaning structure that is cultural rather than religious. Of course, this could get us into a political discussion about who dictates cultural meaning and about multiculturalism and the collapse and fragmentation of national cultures under the combined effects of neo-liberalism, post-modern philosophy and so forth - but that is for another time.

Religion has thus emerged not only because of the manipulative operations of specialised classes or the needs of Power (though there is this element to the story that needs its own analysis) but because it has provided quite simple totalitarian means of dealing with psycho-biological realities for many people (albeit at the expense of a lot of other people). In short, religion is a manifestation of inter-personal and social power relations iltimately derived from biology, being useful and insidious at the same time. It can be false and yet still expressive of real human needs (though only of the needs of the weaker in terms of mental state). 

The problem of religion is, in effect, the problem of human weakness as vulnerable creatures surrounded by material uncertainty in permanent potential conflict with other persons (anxiety) and seeking to give order its world ('give it meaning') in order to limit personal vulnerability through the compromises of social cohesion and through shared ritual. Religion has its passive total withdrawal aspects or those associated with aggressive and violent proselytising but the core of religion is that it is a tool in the hands of a tool-using animal and a tool where those using it have been incorporated into the tool like the Borg.

Because the nature of such a tool is that it cannot be used except cynically (psychopathically) or by incorporation of the Self into it, then, as it develops, religion becomes a lived totality if not in terms always of actual belief, at least in terms of communitarian power relations. For the non-religious position, this is what makes it insidious because these communitarian power relations extend themselves beyond actual believers to demand conformity from non-believers. The attempted Borg-like incorporation of non-believers is either a matter of Power exercised in a struggle for control and resources (as in the Constantinian Settlement) or it is a case of believers actually being blind to the equal status and reality of non-belief. 

Non-belief represents a serious challenge to the anxiety-reducing belief system of the believer to the degree to which religion buttresses identity and community. Non-belief creates anxiety simply by existing. The non-believer is not, on the other hand, made at all anxious by belief. Unaware that his indifference creates such anxiety in the believer, his own lack of anxiety makes him complacent about the threat to his own integrity from what amounts to an 'enemy' (at the level of the fundamentalist or politically active religious interest). 

This is the central nature of our problem as people who have a balanced view of the separation of our own minds from other minds, of the equality of value of other minds (except when our own survival is at stake) and who cannot impute minds like ours to animals or any minds at all to vegetables and minerals. We are dealing, on the other side, with wobbly minds unable to understand the actual relationship of our minds to other minds and non-minds and there is no educational way of changing that perception in those hard-wired to believe. In the end, containment becomes the only option if the wholly rational person is himself or herself to be wholly secure.. 

The Challenges for Post-Christian Europe

Christianity in Europe is far from dead. It has split into many elements, liberal and conservative, communitarian and evangelical, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and free-thinking, with many offshoots including imported and indigenous 'new religions' derivative from it (often from America). Yet the cultural model of idealism towards and faith in the other ('God'), salvation and (to a greater or lesser extent) tradition and good works still makes up a considerable part of the European branch of Western culture. Into this complexity, the Judaic element is added with its own mix of liberal and conservative, comunitarian and free-thinking ideals and we have, more recently, the re-irruption of Islam with elements that are hyper-traditionalist as well as others seeking the path of assimilation and collaboration following the Jewish precedent.

The mix becomes ever more complex with time. The religious wars of the early modern period and the Enlightenment brought us not only the opening for Judaic thought and for both liberal Christianity and an evangelical and traditionalist reaction to it but an opportunity for atheism and 'ideology' which became the basis for secular faith systems - nationalism, both authoritarian and liberal, liberalism (the currently dominant ideology), various forms of socialism (as complex as Christianity and perhaps even to be considered a Judaeo-Christian heresy adapted to science and materialism) and, finally, anarchisms, existentialism and scientific atheism. We might add, more latterly, neo-paganism, whether innocent and associated with post-fascist traditionalism, and the so-called hyper-real religions developed out of popular culture and modern myths such as those surrounding UFOs.

Have I missed any? Theosophical movements may have declined but Buddhism has a position in European society and there is space for nearly all the non-tribal Eastern religions as exemplars or philosophies of life. You may add to taste what I have forgotten. Whichever way we look at it, the sheer scale of the variance of belief is staggering compared to the early modern and modern totalitarian attempts to impose monotheism or a single ideology on a population - let alone the 'tolerant' conformity of a hegemonic Christianity in the liberal world of the nineteenth century. This is the chaos of late paganism or of the East held together only by the monopoly of force that a secular authority can maintain. Historically, it has often been convenient for that force to take one religion and endorse it and crush others if that will bring victory or order - Constantine springs to mind.

If there are modern tendencies in that direction, they are not towards imposing a religion but uniting forces against a religion - radical Islam. Both traditionalists and liberals are conflicted even here, some choosing confrontation for the sake of 'purity' and the imagined past and others seeking accommodation with the majority of Muslims as shared peoples of the book or just as political realities in our inner cities who have to be taken account of. But, unless political order completely breaks down (if it does do so, it is at the crumbling far periphery of the European Project), the presumption of the authorities remains one of tolerance, secular order and allowing religious moderates to enter into policy-making within the framework of democratic persuasion and political organisation. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the indifferent and the agnostic - those who have no real interest in the myth of the spirit or invisible creatures - have votes and want to be consumers and producers first and rely on the movies not the churches for their access to the fantastic.

But underpinning this struggle within and between the myths and legends that came in with a desert wind between the first century BC and seventh century AD under the Pax Romana and then as a political tool for kings and emperors subsequently and then with the reaction to obscurantism (often creating new obscurantisms) that took place from the sixteenth century to the twentieth and with the arrival of spiritualities from below under American, Eastern and nationalist influence later still, there are ancient mental models that preceded these waves of external and democratic mental change. We should ask whether and where they shave life and potential today (or present dangers perhaps). I have identified six that still exist below the surface of or alongside the Christian sub-stratum in our cultural-archaeological dig. You may think of others but I suggest these are the six that make up our indigenous pre-modern European culture and act as 'to-hands' for political and cultural actors in our future.

Strand One - The Athenian Texts

In each of these cases, we are less concerned with what these traditions actually were or meant in the past and more concerned with what they have come to mean and what they could mean in the future. Nowhere is this more true than with the mythology surrounding Athenian democracy. Although it is now righly criticised as a flawed democracy with slaves and a subservient role for women as well as implicitly xenophobic, in its historic context it was a remarkably robust system for sovereign independence and then empire before being crushed by Alexandrine imperialism. The core of the ideology is of a closed democracy as necessarily the 'good society' and it stands as challenge to multicultural fluidity of the globalising West. Historically, it was influential on American democracy and on Jacobinical republicanism and so, by twists and turns, on both liberalism and fascism as well as on all forms of republicanism. It stands as an ideal with continued potential for misapplications of notions of purity and conformity on the one hand and self-determination and freedom on the other.

Strand Two - The Dialectic Between the Roman Republic and Empire

The Roman Republic and the subsequent Empire might appear to be opposites as models for the future. They could be contrasted in later generations as narratives of decadence or of failure but they also present a particularly strong narrative of increasing order undermined by internal dissent, over-accommodation of the barbarian (external ideologies and forces) and accommodation with the popular (the Roman mob and Christianity). They are an 'object lesson' - the story is one of an ideal perverted and one where the ideal could be restored. That ideal is universal law applied by force. It is an ideal of conservative perfection at heart and it became an influence on Napoleonic and British imperialism, a driver for American perfectionism and empire and for Italian fascism but is also an 'at hand' for the increasingly frustrated European Project, even the West (as self-conscious political cause,) by which they could create an 'ideal' from which order might be imposed on fractious populations, Political Islam and Russia be resisted in their feared incursions (although Russia might equally be cast as Eastern Empire and the US as Western Empire to taste) and some accommodation be made with the dominant faith groups (a resolution devoutly wished for by the Vatican).

Strand Three - The Romance of Arthur

This might be considered peculiar to the British and lost now to the nineteenth century but it stands for something else that is derivative from Christianity yet exists not to be Christian first and foremost. It is a redirection of the inherent potential for warlordism and piracy in elites into social responsibility - the imperial version of corporate social responsibility. It is ideal behaviour as an aristocracy presented as 'service' (even if it is pretty flexible as to the question 'to whom' is the service owed). Today, we see it as an ideology of technocracy and managerialism where managers seek to assert their authority over what they see as anarchic social forces - whether finance capital or the mob. The ideal is romantic and is an irruption of the Roman past into, first, the medieval and then the modern present, first as restraint of feudalism, then as restraint on imperialism and now as restraint on capitalism. This the Western equivalent of mandarin confucianism. The 'to whom' is key - the Crown, the State, the Empire or the People. The vision is a form of liberal conservatism, a top-down granting of boons to the commonwealth, that could be useful if universal law is applied by force in the European Project since force requires an accompanying ideology of restraint. Or it could be used for the reconstruction of the power of a service elite following scandal after scandal in political, financial and bureaucratic elites in particular nation-states.

Strand Four - The Volkisch

Volkisch ideology invented history by intellectuals with time on their hands for the petit-bourgeoisie. It might be thought to have crashed in flames in the cellars and bunkers of mid-twentieth century Europe. Its origins lies in pre-Christian barbarian cultures and is at the root not only of neo-nationalism but of northern democracy. It has potential resonance three generations on from Hitlerism for two reasons - revisionist history can provide more rationale than liberals may like for the rise of nationalism as response to disorder in the 150 years before the conflagration and current conditions of hyper-modernity and multiculturalism almost require the existence of something to which those whose identity is threatened or who are economically disadvantaged can rally. What will emerge is unlikely to be precisely what existed in the past. It does not appear to be a very pan-European identity but more a populist identity based on language and place. It is thus in a dialectic tension with the first three strands.

Strand Five - Political Neo-Paganism

Neo-paganism is very much a minority sport, a clubbable business of small very liberal or hyper-conservative sub-sets of the population. The instinctive preference of most Europeans is Abrahamanic or secular. Although there is an association of Germanic and Nordic paganism with the Radical Right (although we should note that the murderous Breivik cast his violence in terms of Christian retribution and righteousness), the real contribution of neo-paganism is a withdrawal from politics into self-reliance and a theory of the 'natural', not the naturally pre-defined person (neo-pagans are as likely to adopt very fluid notions of identity as to follow the norms of Assatru) but of a natural world which provides us humans with meaning and order. If anything, this is a mode of resistance to social order and can present itself in terms of either the Right or the Left as traditionally understood. It tends to be passive rather than active but will engage in the world to protect, conservatively, its own - generally a locus or an 'environment' - from intervention. It is a proto-barbarian element in dialectic with the proto-Rome of the European Project.

Strand Six - The Shamanic

Finally we find ourselves in the lowest stratum of all. There may be a rich Eurasian shamanic tradition - the manipulative magician as community catalyst through altered states - but this has been culturally pushed to the periphery of the Continent. What has happened instead is an importation of indigenous peoples' shamanic experience through anthropology and the revived interest in psychedelics via the United States and it is this that has tapped into the oldest strata of all within the European cultural tradition. This is a culture of potential resistance to excessive order and, if you spend time observing it, one of withdrawal from elites and also a determination to defend place and person against authority much like Strand Five. It is anarchic but not in the destructive meaning of the term. It sits waiting to undermine fixed identities and beliefs through instant personal revelation and a direct communion with other realities - delusory perhaps but not much more so than the hyper-reality of post-modernism.


If we go back to Breivik, he looks, in his Christian political eschatology, more like the last brutal gasp of a decaying unified vision of Europe as a Christian Continent than the precursor of meaningful revolt. The Far Right (or at least an important faction of it and its populist element) is clinging to the Christian myth as political tool and to create a bulwark against the most significant 'other' - Islam - but they have lost the plot under conditions where a majority of Christians think in more socially liberal terms and where the most recent Pope has had to re-fashion his rhetoric in this liberal direction in order to hold on to his base.

Our model of contemporary Europe is of a flailing empire trying to maintain order with no clear authoritarian ideology to support it - beyond a sort of vaguely Kantian ideology of liberal rights and a collapsing 'peace' ethos driven from above by the elites themselves. There is no Cult of the Emperor, no belief in King and Country, no belief in the Dictatorship of the Proletariat than can push all rival political ideologies to the margins or into private life and even silence. Tolerance means maximal variation (which is creative but chaotic). This is what most of us rather like because it gives us the freedom to have a private life and yet to try to drive our world view into the political process by stealth and in a free competition within shared rules. But it also means that the political elite becomes an alien bureaucracy that looks weak and ineffective when it can do nothing or little about those who break or do not share the rules - just as the rule breakers are increasing in number.

There is no stasis in culture and politics. All systems that degrade like this either collapse (the European Project is undergoing an economic, security and political crisis all at the same time) or a crisis transforms the system into a new system with new rules and new structures of power - much as the Roman Republic transformed itself into the Roman Empire or the British Empire into a multicultural airstrip and banking quarter. We might oversimplify the strands we have identified into 'Roman' (that is Empire and Order) or 'Barbarian' (that is Freedom and Self-Determination) models by suggesting that the first three strands (a closed civics, universalism backed by force and the ideal of a service elite) are being challenged and contested by the last three (the politics of language and place, the defence of the individual and the tribe from authority and the primacy of personal revelation). The challenge and the contest will be, eventually, political involving some form of armed force either as repression or rebellion.

Judaeo-Christianity remains a formidable force for Order (as we are seeing in the return of the conservative Right in Spain) and is even hegemonic in some parts of Europe, notably Poland, but its power should not be assumed to be hegemonic across Europe. Even active Judaeo-Christian political forces can speak in secularist terms - such as in terms of support for or migration to Israel or defensive demands for protection from criminal Islamists. The Charlie Hebdo revolt was, we must not forget, about the right to be blasphemous as much as a populist negative revolt against the claims of radical Islam. This gives the European Union the character of the Roman Empire before Constantine - a fracturing culture maintained by a fractured political authority with the old religions no longer able to provide the necessary cohesion. If a cultural revolution takes place it is unlikely to come from the Vatican,. We cannot know what such a revolution will be if it does come but either an assertion of a European ideology of order, a sort of fascism-lite with added Kant, or an accommodation with radical liberal, tribal and even libertarian populism seem to be the current probable trajectories. We'll see.

The Importance of Secularism In Defence of Freedom

Freedom to choose one's pattern of relationships, lifestyle and sexuality self-evidently requires freedom from the dictates of others with different views on such things. Since religion is historically a business of dictates (this is unanswerable), there is no freedom for many people without freedom from religion.

We may choose not to be free (to accept dictates) or we may find a religion whose dictates accord precisely with our own preferred patterns of relationship, lifestyle and sexuality (not an impossible aspiration) but if we choose to accept dictates that go against our very nature then we must choose not to be free freely and not impose our choice against freedom on others.

Or perhaps we can turn a religion into freedom by demanding that it no longer dictates anything - in which case it is no longer a religion of commands and orders but a community of spritualised individuals. No world religion has ever been this and only this and no other.

The Sacralisation of the Real

So much, so simple since religion is not the same as political order. Political order can be maintained without recourse to the supernatural. The decisions of secular order may be hard to stomach sometimes but they should not arise from an elaborate extension of the mental states of the few over the many, ones not based on the hard facts of the matter.

Political order is what it says on the tin - a matter of order even if the question is begged for whose benefit the order exists. If a political order adopts a religion for the sake of social order, as Constantine and innumerable other world leaders have done, then the question is part-answered - the order is not for the benefit of those whose freedom is to choose a particular private life.

Personal freedom, including the freedom to believe what one will, is thus ineluctably bound up with secularism. Faith-based communitarian interventions in the condition of the people must always be viewed with suspicion as failures in the ability of secular power to maintain good order and as potential oppressions against the person.

When the secular power can no longer cope with change or the hegemony of its ruling elites are threatened, religion can often present itself as a quick fix, turning the need for psychic order and discipline and the special interests supported by communitarian values into a social police force to be directed against the free person ... and so innumerable Dark Ages begin. We may be in such a time. 

Outside the power play, with religion as the tool of order, the sacralisation of reality is a wholly private matter for adults, those who can choose to associate with others of like mind but who cannot and should not coerce those who are discovering themselves for themselves or are vulnerable to coercion.

This prejudice towards freedom is not a prejudice for bad manners but manners are not to be imposed by the institutions of the community. Good manners are set by example. Texts cannot bind a person, only a person can bind a person to texts. To let a text bind you is like letting a person other than oneself bind you - a form of slavery. Unthinking belonging to texts is slavery.

On The Sanctity of the Vital

Where a religious sensibility has value is when it moves from text and command (as in Judaism, Biblical fundamentalism, Papal pronunciamento and Koranic determination) to one of principle that requires no supernatural or God-like element but perhaps, at most, only an added agnosticism about what we can call the natural.

Oddly, the bete noire of many resentful of religious claims, Catholicism, may have the most effective 'fundamental principle' in its notion of the sanctity, meaning the profound value, of all human life from conception to death. This value might be extended to animal, alien and AI but the core principle remains - the value of the vital expressed as the person.

Catholicism takes a wrong turning in embedding this value in a God and in an Afterlife  - and in the exegesis of cumulative texts - and in failing to discriminate adequately between the consequent relative value and potential of lives once the core value is accepted.

But the insight is definitely there - that personal existence and self-creation in the world overrides any social or economically determined value to others or the convenience or self-determined devaluation of oneself or others. We are sacred - not the planet, not the church, not the race - us as persons.

Difficult Issues

This means that euthanasia, eugenics, the death penalty and abortion are not either/or issues against the Church but are battlegrounds where social order and personal aspiration really do contend over ground contested with a Church which has something to say even if its rigid position does not say all that there is to be said.

The secular moral position must be that euthanasia, eugenics, the death penalty and abortion cannot be treated in themselves in an absolutist way (as the Church would) but that the implementation of such policies need to be considered with high seriousness in the context of the principle of the value of the vital. This high seriousness about life is what we must concede to the Vatican.

This applies to sexual choice, not in the sense that free adults should not be free to do what they will but insofar as sexuality is highly charged in its effects on persons. Value vitalism requires seriousness in considering the balance of interest between persons, steering between the Scylla of solipsism and the Charybdis of another's psychic vampirism.

In this sense, the free should only associate with the free or at least only with those who clearly crave freedom. Those who prefer 'slavery' should be permitted to submit - so long as a door can always be left open in case they change their mind. There must always be an unlocked door to the outside.

Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body

This sense of responsibility is profoundly different from that of, say, Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body because it is existential: it refuses to let an institutional arrangement or a command to dictate moral choice but, on the other hand, it recognises that sexual activity remains a moral choice of sorts.

Pope John Paul II asserted that extra-marital sexuality falsified the language of the human body and he spoke of total love. But this is a totalitarian love that idealises human sexuality beyond its ability to keep to the ideal. Ultimately, it is cruel and the novels of Western literature are often a testament to that cruelty. I recommend Anna Karenina as the standard answer to cruelty.

The Pope denied two general possibilities - that the approved institution of marriage might become the holding bay for controlling and cruel instincts that merely masquerade as love and that a person can give reverence and love to more than one embodied person or 'incarnate spirit' at the same time and even in the same place (the 'polyamorous option' so to speak)..

For a culture of faith, the lack of faith in the possibility of extended love is quite remarkable. As we have seen in the posting on PB Randolph, who tried to extend the language of sacred sex under Victorian conditions, his idealism of control and harmony, of sacrifice and totalitarian commitment, is well within the ideological framework of Pope John Paul II.

Religion as Sexual Regulation

Islam, of course, is different again because sexuality is essentially treated here as a problem of social order and of regulation. In this respect it is brutally honest about its purpose and perhaps that should be respected. The result is yet another Iron Age cultural model imposed on a very different world but at least Christian idealism is displaced here by a practical, almost cynical, commitment to the social.

In practice, this determination on communitarian social order (with property ultimately underpinning the model) can result in oppressions of sexual preference and freedom more awesome in their effects even than those proposed by the other religions of the book though the complexity of this 'order' is often underestimated.

All this is a matter of cumulative traditionalist interpretation by clerical legislators of laws as God's Will rather than the fruit of an idealism that is supposed to replace human nature entirely. We see something similar, despite the myths in the West, in mainstream Hinduism which is stunningly prudish by modern Western standards.

This difference is important - asserting sexual behaviour by traditionalist authoritarian command is unpleasant but perhaps less creepy ultimately than expecting sexual compliance through a totalitarian ideology. Tradition at least arises out of some sense of a past need for order in conditions of scarcity. Modern totalitarian sexual restrictions have no such excuse.

Spiritual Liberalisms

We can contrast totalitarian and traditional authoritarian models of sexual conduct with the permissive value-driven approach of the Unitarian Universalists which retains the ideology of sexual value but re-interprets it to permit same sex marriage, moderated abstinence programmes based on 'full information' and personal choice as to conduct and orientation.

The Buddhists, meanwhile, practice a sort of avoidance strategy where sexuality is quite simply diminished as 'carnal' and so as a distraction from the spirit. Buddhism is, as we have often pointed out, a religion of the death instinct, of negation, where even Catholicism appears ideologically progressive about life itself. Pope John Paul II himself castigated Buddhism for this quality.

But theory is different from practice and Buddhist avoidance strategy has the excellent effect of removing sexual regulation from religion entirely, returning it perforce to the struggle between individual choice and social norms.

The link between Buddhist ideology and sexual pleasure in the West and in Japan are thus convenient constructions out of this neglect but the Buddha himself advised his followers in strong terms to avoid unchastity 'as if it were a pit of burning cinders'. Enough said!

The Neo-Pagan Revolt

This leads us inevitably to the neo-pagan revolt against Judaeo-Christianity but, even here, things are not simple. Neo-paganism seems sex-positive and often is but it is also a mish-mash of reconstructed traditions and beliefs often with an underlying essentialism about male/female 'polarities' or about the 'mother'.

Someone like Starhawk can sound as po-faced about social norms as any rabbi or Catholic intellectual but the over-sacralisation of sexuality in general seems to be more a determination to compare and contrast with Christianity than an effort at existential liberation from spiritual ideology and social norms per se.

The best that can be said about neo-paganism is that it offers a set of safe havens for 'differently cultured' persons, giving a community and a spirituality that the other Great Religions have denied them.

The Great Rite itself is simply the transposition of the ideology of PB Randolph into a new cultural environment and is either performed figuratively (which hardly seems the point, almost seeming a little cowardly) or it reverts back into the private domain where it can become as much bedroom performance art as spiritual act.

Conclusions

Neo-paganism as a spiritual practice is liberatory for many but it cannot and should not be confused with the liberation of the person as person. Yet it is probably the most advanced way-station to trans-human liberation available within the ideology of spirituality, especially with its permissive 'an it harm none, do as thou wilt' (the Wiccan Rede).

But the essence of all these restrictive views on human conduct is that they should remain voluntarist and private. The successful attempt of the religious to impose its sexual values more widely on society at large often becomes an anxious obsession amongst its adherents. This must be resisted at every level, including attempts to control the means of education and information.

Nothing is more important for freedom of all types than that the political order should be and should remain secular!