Hurrah for Disempowerment
Heinz Schlaffer takes on some more theist misrepresentation – the familiar old ‘we are a beleaguered minority’ schtick. Would that it were true.
What? Belief is being ostracised? But it’s en vogue! Whether or not God exists can’t be decided intellectually; but it can be observed that he’s back in fashion among intellectuals…Literary historians like George Steiner and Roberto Calasso read the fictions of the poets as factual proof of the existence of saints…In the institutions of liberal culture, religious statements are being treated as a novel charm, and increasingly gaining the power of conformity.
This is what I keep saying (and tiresome people who disagree with me say Nuh uh). Religious, or ‘spiritual’, statements are being treated as fun new items on the menu, and are gaining the power of conformity. This is not a good trend.
Because such simplifications dominate intellectual discourse today, it’s necessary to recall the historic reasons and the ongoing achievements of the Enlightenment critique of religion – reasons and achievements which may be forgotten and rendered banal today but have not been opposed or nullified. It is still generally taught that scientific discoveries since the 16th century have demonstrated numerous “truths” of Christian teachings to be errors, for instance that the earth is the centre of the cosmos…For as long as it was possible, the church tried to repress the new appearance of the visible realm. When it was forced to give up its fight, it returned to the invisible, to those “truths” that are less easily subjected to verification.
That’s where the fluffy nonsense about non-overlapping magisteria comes from – from the fact that the church lost that particular fight, so has fallen back on the kind of whimsical speculation that can’t be falsified. Okay, they can do that, but intellectuals shouldn’t label that a ‘magisterium’ when it’s just mental invention. Intellectuals shouldn’t take it seriously.
“How far we are from this gloomy world,” the new belief-seekers and belief-finders will say of this historic review and glance at the current situation. They are right, because it was only after Christianity had been disempowered by the Enlightenment that it became civilised, friendly and modest enough that its adherents could find joy in it and its opponents no longer had to fear it. It isn’t Christianity that forms the basis of modern Europe but rather the disempowerment of Christianity, the Enlightenment.
And what a good thing it does, and let’s hope it can survive the current upsurge of the other thing.
It isn’t Christianity that forms the basis of modern Europe but rather the disempowerment of Christianity, the Enlightenment. We don’t have the popes, monks and priests to thank for democracy, equality in the law and individual freedom, tolerance and the right to criticise, but Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu. The world in which we live is the enlightened world in which even those who oppose it would like to live.
If it had been up to the popes, priests and monks, we still wouldn’t have individual freedom and the right to criticise. We’d have bags of solidarity and community, and no freedom or rights. You can keep that world.
It is strange that blogs I empathise with – progressive, not moonbat, rational – tend to be atheist and hostile to Christians. I think of normblog, though he is very gentle, johann hari, christopher hitchens, harry’s place and, of course, your esteemed site, on whose hospitality I am trespassing. Conservative blogs are more welcoming of Christians, though I find the politics and world-view harder. This is strange, as most practising Christians I know from churches tend to be progressive in outlook. After all, most NGOs, are rooted in faith.
You assert that we don’t have Christianity to thank for democracy, equality in the law, etc, but the Enlightenment. That is actually wrong. Christianity has always seen a separation between State and Church, going back to Christ Himself. The Church always demanded of rulers conditionality and opposed, while it could, hereditary rule. The Enlightenment thinkers did not come from nowhere, but out of centuries of Christian debate and scholarship.
I think it is possible to be a believing Christian on good historical and rational grounds, that most orthodox Christians are not fundamentalists and do not understand why people see a conflict between belief and science.
I also agree that assigning people to categories such as ‘Muslim’ or ‘Sikh’ or ‘Christian’ is plain wrong. It is a convenience that suits people who wish to arrogate power and authority to themselves over others: an authority that they would not receive through elections, and which works through fear.
I don’t know why more progressive politicians don’t see this. Talking to self selected representatives of ‘Islam’ just feeds a monster.
Best wishes
Jeffrey Mushens
You’re not trespassing on anything, Jeffrey! The door’s wide open.
I don’t think I’m hostile to Christians, except for aggressive ones. I’m hostile to Christianity, but that’s a different thing.
Most Christians you know from churches tend to be progressive – yes but you must realize there are other churches where that’s not the case? That’s why Jimmy Carter left the Southern Baptist Convention: because it had gotten so much more hard-edged and conservative than it had been.
I didn’t assert that we don’t have Christianity to thank, I was quoting. But on the other hand – ‘The Church always demanded of rulers conditionality’ – the church demanding things of rulers is not entirely consistent with the separation of church and state.
‘The Enlightenment thinkers did not come from nowhere, but out of centuries of Christian debate and scholarship.’
I don’t think so. I don’t think most of them were terribly interested in those centuries of Christian debate and scholarship. Centuries of debate and scholarship aren’t inherited, after all, so however many centuries there may have been, it is always open to people simply to ignore the lot and get their ideas elsewhere. Enlightenment thinkers were vastly more interested in Greek and Roman scholarship and debate than they were in the Christian variety.
‘I think it is possible to be a believing Christian on good historical and rational grounds’
Well, that’s where we differ, I’m afraid. Ditto on the conflict between belief and science. Sorry! But, though people have tried hard to convince me of what you say, I have yet to hear anything that I found convincing.
But I do agree about the categories, and that it’s way past time for progressive politicians to figure this out.
Anyway, stick around, and none of that ‘trespassing’ stuff.
I think that there is merit in the deep point about Christianity’s conception of church/state difference, but it is something to be acknowledged as an element of historical specificity, not a particular virtue of Christianity per se. Europe just got lucky in that regard. Ironically, mostly because Judea was under the pagan Romans — why ‘render unto Caesar’ unless Caesar is outside your religious framework? Likewise I suspect that it is the later extreme centralisation of Roman Catholic power which encouraged people to think about placing themselves outside its frameworks. The history of C20 Islam might be very different if the Caliphate had not been abolished after WW1 — it might look less appealing as a goal if it were an actual institution…
On the point about what frames of reference people use to think with, it always needs to be born in mind that, prior to the C19, the running of institutions of higher education, and the subsequent leisure to study ‘professionally’, was almost a clerical monopoly, and that, furthermore, a non-religious frame of reference for, eg, cosmological questions was almost entirely absent. Modern science started within a religious framework, because there was nowhere else to start at the time. That doesn’t mean it is ‘rooted’ in Christianity in anything more than a contingently historical sense — it does mean that scientists had to think their way out of the Christian perspective on, eg, the geological age of the Earth, but once they did, they were ‘out of’ it, and could start to base their reasoning on evidence, not a priori assertions.
I suggest that Jeffrey has, like most of us at some time, muddled cause with co-existence. Newton was a Christian, as was Darwin, but their religion had nothing at all to do with their sceintific work.
One big difference, historically, between Christianity and Islam is that the former did not in the end have the power to prevent the rise of rationality in its area of influence whereas the latter did.
On that last point, I think ‘did’ overstates it. There was at least as much rationality in the Islamic world as the Euro-American one for most of the C18, C19 and C20 — partly due to colonialism , but also due to indigenous histories of rational enquiry, etc — did not the Renaissance, to go a bit further back, come from Arabia?
Arab politicians — Nasser, Assad, even S Hussein — followed effectively westernising, ‘scientising’ paths through the 1950s-1970s. The PLO was a Marxist/nationalist organisation way back when. What happened after that is another story, but it is one about a period of time no more than a generation long — Islam as a culture is not ‘fated’ to be backward, whatever we may think of Islam as a religion.