Wrested from the bitter reactionary grip of religion
We had a good time (I did anyway) with Roger Scruton’s review of Anthony Grayling’s new book, so now let’s have a different but related kind of good time with another look at Anthony Grayling’s review of John Gray’s latest book. I flagged it up here last month but it’s so relevant to the Scruton review that I feel like flagging it up again.
Now let us ask whether secular Enlightenment values of pluralism, democracy, the rule of independently and impartially administered law, freedom of thought, enquiry and expression, and liberty of the individual conform to the model of a monolithic ideology such as Catholicism, Islam or Stalinism. Let us further ask how Gray imagines that these values are direct inheritances from Christianity – the Christianity of the Inquisition, which burned to death any who sought to assert just such values. Indeed, the history of the modern European and Europe-derived world is precisely the history of liberation from the hegemony of Christianity. I shall be so bold as to refer the reader to the case for this claim in my forthcoming full-length discussion of it, Towards the Light.
The very book Scruton tried so hard to patronize the other day.
As to the weary old canard about the 20th-century totalitarianisms: it astonishes me how those who should know better can fail to see them as quintessentially counter-Enlightenment projects…They were counter-Enlightenment projects because they rejected the idea of pluralism and its concomitant liberties of thought and the person, and in the time-honoured unEnlightened way forcibly demanded submission to a monolithic ideal…Most of what was achieved in the history of the West from the 16th century onwards – most notably science and the realisation of the values listed above – was wrested from the bitter reactionary grip of religion inch by painful and frequently bloody inch. How can Gray so far ignore this bald fact of history as to make the modern secular West the inheritor of the ideals and aspirations of what it fought so hard to free itself from (and is still bedevilled by)?
Having a book contract probably helps with the ignoring.
It has always seemed to me that ‘the 20th-century totalitarianisms’ were – if anything – more religions than anything else, especially when their doctrines tended to run counter to reality, and they – like all other religions – presumed it was reality that was in error rather than the doctrine or creed.
I think we may be deemphasizing some of the other values inherited from Christianity-or at least the Protestant versions thereof, namely the value of the individual soul. A philosophy not common to many religions?
I’m not an expert, but this is a very crude approximation of the argument, I believe? Feel free to expand thereupon or demolish as appropriate. :)
Individual “souls” as the made-up entities that are “saved” may be valued in some peculiar fashion in Christian theology, but substantive individuality is not. A religious tradition in no way values the individual – mind, body or soul – when it actively discourages or outright forbids basic self-development such as working towards truths for yourself rather than acceding authority, and making your own path through life and forging your own meaning from it – as opposed to following the One True Path(tm) for all humanity. And I won’t dwell overmuch on how much self-loathing Christianity teaches – original sin, the body and sexuality is EEE-VILL, etc. Institutionalized self-loathing does not value the individuals it demands loathe themselves.
Protestant reformers like Luther and Calvin did not in any slightest way care about or promote the welfare of individuals or individuality. Luther wanted to put the authority of the Bible over the authority of the Church, but his vision of an individual’s relationship with God was hardly positive or life-affirming. He insulted reason and exalted blind faith in obscenely anti-human doctrines. And the less said about Calvin, the better.
Any positive values – individualistic or otherwise – advanced by religious thinkers have largely been advanced in spite of their theology, not because of it.