No, It Was Not Mob Rule. It Was Civil Disobedience.

More responsive, as always, to their legislative overlords than to the students and public they purportedly serve, UNC system president Margaret Spellings and Board of Governors Chair Harry Smith issued the following statement concerning the toppling of Silent Sam on Monday night on the UNC Chapel Hill campus.

“We have been in touch with UNC-Chapel Hill Trustee Chair Cochrane and Chancellor Folt both last night and this morning about the removal of the Silent Sam statue on UNC-CH’s campus. Campus leadership is in collaboration with campus police, who are pulling together a timeline of the events, reviewing video evidence, and conducting interviews that will inform a full criminal investigation.

The safety and security of our students, faculty, and staff are paramount. And the actions last evening were unacceptable, dangerous, and incomprehensible. We are a nation of laws — and mob rule and the intentional destruction of public property will not be tolerated.”

The statement was circulated to the UNC, Chapel Hill community with the additional signatures of Chancellor Folt and Board of Trustee Chair Haywood Cochrane.

Leaving aside the laughable comment that the actions of Monday evening were “incomprehensible,” we should be clear that they were the antithesis of “mob rule.” To use an odious term our military likes to employ to show it is in full control of the mayhem it unleashes, the toppling of Silent Sam was “surgical.” It was obviously well-planned and carried out with care, resulting in no harm to anyone or anything except the statue itself. This was a disciplined collective act of civil disobedience, not mob rule. A mob would have broken windows, turned over cars, rampaged across campus and Franklin Street; a mob would have, in other words, acted indiscriminately.

The first statement from Chancellor Folt’s office about Monday evening’s action referred to persons “unaffiliated with the University”—the old “outside agitators” canard. Can we please recognize the irrelevance of making any distinction in this case between those officially connected to the university—as current students, faculty, and staff—and the general public? We are a public university. As such, we have no right to exclude anyone from walking on our campus or speaking their mind on its grassy lawns or (as happens every day) in the “pit” in front of the student union.

Furthermore, Silent Sam was a statue placed on the campus by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The university granted the UDC access to the campus; it did not erect or pay for the statue itself. It has always been unclear to me who actually “owns” the statue; there is no good case for claiming it is university property. Instead, we seem to have been its cooperating—and increasing troubled—custodian. As a target of protest or of support, then, it seems clear to me that the statue was fair game for all citizens, irrespective of their affiliation or not with the university, since the statue’s own “affiliation” is cloudy at best.

Civil disobedience entails breaking the law. It does so when the established modes of redress for a wrong have proved unavailing, and it does so in the name of a good that it claims the law is flouting. Law enforcement, the powers that be, can respond with outrage, insist that the majesty of the law requires these offenders be punished, and resolutely ignore the moral point the protesters are making. That becomes the ground on which the battle is waged.

At least Chancellor Folt acknowledges that the statue is “divisive,” and that what it stands for is offensive to some people. I assume that, in her case, the protestors’ actions were not “incomprehensible.” But she seems, for reasons I will not presume to speculate about, to have lined up with the decision to refuse to “tolerate” this civil disobedience and to conduct a “full criminal investigation.”

Civil disobedience always carries with it the recognition that laws are being broken and there may be consequences for that fact. Some writers on civil disobedience even claim that a willingness to submit to punishment is part and parcel of this particular type of action. It is certainly true that, in the past, the spectacle of the law coming down on the protestors has sometimes served the cause those protestors are trying to promote. In our polarized moment (much the same was true in the 1960s), I think it highly likely that sympathy for the protestors and the desire to throw the book at them will both be in ample evidence as this story unfolds.

However, in one way, Monday evening did not replay the 1960s. The police (like the crowd itself) showed admirable restraint. Obviously, a decision was made (by whom I do not know) that the welfare of a statue was not worth harming a single, real living human being. An admirable decision—and I took the occasion of thanking the first campus police officer I saw on campus yesterday for the way the whole campus force handled the evening. He responded that the safety and well-being of the people there was their chief concern, to which I responded: “Exactly. As it should be. Well done.” Unlike so many 1960s demonstrations, Monday evening did not turn into a riot.

The law is within its rights to conduct its full criminal investigation and to show that it places the destruction of public property [again, whose property is Silent Sam anyway?] above the welfare of the public who find it an insult (and worse). My hope is that if a decision to prosecute is actually made, that hundreds of those, like me, who sympathize with the protestors’ actions will step forward, say we were there that night and participated in its toppling of the statue, and insist on being held to account with all the others. That, at least, is my plan for myself as we wait and see what happens next. If they want to create martyrs, let’s give them bushels full.

Religion, Sect, and Party (Part 3)

Moving from religion to politics, in Slezkine’s The House of Government, basically entails moving the search for transcendence, the negotiation of the gap between the real and the ideal, from the difference between the profane and the sacred to the difference between the status quo and some projected (imagined) improvement upon the existing state of affairs. Institutional religion—the church—represents the more quietist approach: the acceptance of the imperfection of the fallen world along with the promise of a better world elsewhere coupled with structures and hierarchies meant to insure stability, peace, and order in the imperfect here and now. The compromises of the institutional church are always contested by impatient visionaries who long, with equal fervor, to create a utopian now and to punish those who stand in the way of achieving that utopia.

For Slezkine, the utopians organize themselves into “sects.” Following the work of Ernst Troeltsch, “the distinction between a church and a sect” can be stated as follows: “a church is an institution one is born into. . . . [A] sect [is] a group of believers radically opposed to the corrupt world, dedicated to the dispossessed, and composed of voluntary members who had undergone a personal conversion and shared a strong sense of chosenness, exclusiveness, ethical austerity, and social egalitarianism” (93). In Slekzine’s philosophy of history (I can use no other term for his wild—and world-weary—identification of a pattern he thinks repeats itself over and over) “the history of the new order [humanist post-Christian polities], like that of the old one [Christianity prior to the Reformation], is a story of routinization and compromise punctuated by sectarian attempts to restore the original promise” (107). Sectarians scorn compromise and institutions, are often galvanized into action by a charismatic leader, and embrace violence in the name of the good. When not fighting the reprobate, they are constantly in-fighting in order to insure that only the absolutely pure are members of the sect.

If revolutionaries are best understood as sectarians, Selkzine’s model explains a) their trust in and non-distaste [to use a weird double negative] of violence; b) their suspicion of and hence ineptitude in establishing institutions; c) their difficulty in sustaining trust and working, cooperative relationships once the movement grows beyond a “knowable community” (i.e. they are very bad at “imagined communities” because committed to the intense relationships of a shared oppositional—and doctrinally pure—set of beliefs); and d) their impatience with compromise and their fury when their utopian vision does not materialize (generating the frantic search for people to blame for that failure).

This, of course, is another way of saying that it is easier to be in opposition than in power. It seems fair to say that the Republican Party has become more and more sect-like over the past thirty years. Certainly it is much more prone to expel members who don’t toe the line (RINOs), and is hostile to compromise and to institutional structures/norms. Its contempt for the routines of governance makes it just about incapable of governing; it has ground legislative activity to an almost complete halt, while rendering federal bureaucracies increasingly inept. As many have noted, today’s Republican Party is not conservative; it is revolutionary reactionary. It is out to destroy, not to conserve.

The oddity is that its destructive urges are almost entirely negative. It is not driven by a positive vision, but mostly by a hatred of the elites it associates with anti-American values, tastes, and snobbishness. Yes, there is nostalgia for a certain kind of small-town American culture that was built on racial exclusion and post-War prosperity. But there is no serious—or even non-serious visionary—platform for reestablishing that world. Empty slogans suffice if the joys of hatred are allowed free expression. It really is as if the losers in this neoliberal universe will be content if given free rein to express the animus—most fully expressed in the death threats they love to send to people, but more mildly expressed in the various statements now deemed unacceptable in polite discourse—they feel toward the non-whites and the professional elites they cannot avoid in today’s business world and public sphere. In their heart of hearts, undoubtedly there are true believers who think deporting all the immigrants is a possibility, but surely they are a small minority of those who vote Republican. Similarly, those same voters know that the manufacturing jobs are not coming back.

Contrasted to sects (in Slekzine’s view) are parties: “Parties are usually described as associations that seek power within a given society (or, in Max Weber’s definition, ‘secure power within an organization for its leaders in order to attain ideal or material advantages for its active members’) (58). The key difference here is that the party accepts, has a huge amount invested in, the current institutional and political order. To that extent, parties are all conservative; they seek to preserve the current system—and are oriented to gaining power with that system as the means toward furthering the party’s particular ends. That’s why parties are the “loyal opposition”; they are not revolutionary, but are partners with other parties in the preservation of the current order.

Thus, today’s Republican Party seems to exist in some kind of uneasy (unsustainable?) tension between being a party and a sect. It quite obviously seeks power to gain advantages for its active members—the donor class to which it delivers the benefits of tax cuts and deregulation etc. But its appeal to its non-donor class voters is sectarian—and the result is that its elected officials include true believers who embody the no compromise hostility to institutional forms that is a large part of the party’s current brand. These radicals will cheerfully have the government default on its debts (to take one example) and are constantly at odds with the more staid party functionaries who are only interested in power within the current system (Mitch McConnell being the epitome of this kind of politician).

Because of its use of sectarian tactics (tactics which someone like McConnell thinks he can keep safely under control), the Republicans have clearly abetted (by authorizing) various kinds of hate crimes and violence, even as they have given us an authoritarian, charismatic President. The Party has moved far enough toward being a sect that its ability to actually govern is more than questionable, even as its attacks (voter suppression, harassment—and worse—of immigrants) upon outsiders to its “America” increase in ferocity.

All that said, it is hard not to feel nostalgic for a sectarian left. Sects make things happen in the world; I have just finished reading Maud Gonne’s autobiography (of which more in future posts) and she, as well as Slekzine, tells a tale featuring dedicated conspirators, people spending their whole lifetimes committed to a cause of radical change. A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin are American examples. In all these cases, from the 400 or so “Old Bolsheviks” to the 400 or so dedicated Irish nationalists to the 400 or so “race warriors” in the US, mountains were eventually moved. If there exists such networks in the contemporary world, I don’t know of them. Yes, we have the rightist militias. But what do we have on the left: the respectable organizations, the ACLU and the like, fine in their own way, but very much within the established institutional order.

What I guess I am saying is that I want sectarian dedication, single-mindedness and energy, without sectarian violence and constant in-fighting. After all, both Bolsheviks and the Irish revolutionaries, once they had succeeded in overthrowing the existing system, ended up fighting against one another. It is shocking—at least to me—to read anti-Treaty documents in 1922 that casually refer to the Free State soldiers and officials as “the enemy” when those numbered in “the enemy” were one’s comrades in the fight against the British in 1921. Yes, there was some hesitation at the start of the Irish Civil War about killing one’s friends and erstwhile comrades, but that hesitation disappeared with frightening, sickening, rapidity.

Maybe—and just maybe because I may be wildly over-idealizing here—one key factor (hardly the only one) involves careers. Today’s Republican Party reactionary revolutionaries can safely attack governmental/legal/political institutions because they are not threatening (in fact see themselves as reinforcing and protecting) the institutional structures of American capitalism. And it is well documented, there in plain sight for any operative to see, that the right has sinecures (in the think tanks, in lobbying organizations, increasingly in academia, etc.) readily available for those who do the party’s work. That’s one way of saying that the Republicans are between a party and a sect; they are attached to an existing structure that provides a ladder to climb, a route to riches, recognition, and security. It is just that that structure is, they like to believe, non-political, the “free market,” and thus enables a no-holds-barred hostility to political institutions.

The revolutionaries of the left—Lenin, Gandhi, Rustin—had no such safe perch, or secure position at which to aim. They were fully on the outside, existing in a no man’s land where recognition, money, and eventual success were never guaranteed and were (for years) withheld. They were stepping out into a void with no safety net. As I say, maybe I am wrong here, guilty of over-idealizing. I am hardly claiming these men did not have their faults—their vanities and their self-indulgences. But they did not exist within any kind of established institutional order that provided security. Only the intense relations within the sect offered some form of support.

Am I saying that existence within institutions stands in the way of being a true advocate for change? Certainly, concern for the preservation of one’s own slot, one’s own career, for the sources of one’s own income and status, are deterrents to devoting oneself wholeheartedly to a transformation of existing conditions.

I don’t see where the kind of sect, the kind of movement that enabled Lenin, Gandhi and Rustin to live almost completely outside existing political, economic, and social setups, exists on the left today. The Bohemian outside appears to have disappeared. Life in the US has become so expensive, especially housing costs, that the counter-cultural enclaves such as Brooklyn or the Bay Area are the playgrounds of the rich now. At the same time, increased surveillance (both physical and digital) gives a revolutionary counter-culture much less room in which to maneuver.

There is also the left’s almost universal repudiation of violence (the overblown existence of the anti-fa “movement” notwithstanding). Maybe it is hard to have a sect without some kind of commitment to violence. (I want to consider that idea in subsequent posts.)

Add the fact that being a sectarian is tedious. Mostly what the old Bolsheviks did was read, write, and have endless meetings—for which they then spent long stretches of time in prison. The hoped-for moment of transformation is endlessly postponed. How energy, passion, and hope are sustained over such long periods of time is a mystery and a miracle, much to be admired.

Maud Gonne’s life has much to offer in thinking about such issues. So I will go there next

Religion, Sect, Party (Part Two)

Having given you Taylor’s definition of religion last time, I now want to move over to Slezkine’s discussion of religion (which then bleeds over into politics) in The House of Government.

He offers a few attempts at defining religion, the first from Steve Bruce: religion “consists of beliefs, actions, and institutions which assume the existence of supernatural entities with powers of action, or impersonal powers or processes possessed of moral purpose. Such a formulation seems to encompass what ordinary people mean when they talk of religion” (73; all the words in quotes are Bruce’s, not Slezkine’s). If we go to Durkheim, Slezkine says we get “another approach. ‘Religion, according to his [Durkheim’s] definition, is ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things.’ Sacred things are things that ‘the profane must not and cannot touch with impunity.’ The function of the sacred is to unite humans into moral communities” (74).

Durkheim’s position is functionalist; religion serves human need, especially the needs of human sociality. Slezkine continues: “Subsequent elaborations of functionalism describe religion as a process by which humans create a sense of the self and an ‘objective and moral universe of meaning’ [Thomas Luckmann]; a ‘set of symbolic forms and acts that relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence’ [Robert Bellah]; and, in Clifford Geertz’s much cited version, ‘ a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these with such an aura of facticity that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (74).

In Bruce’s terms, I don’t think I can be considered religious, since I think morality is uniquely human; I don’t think there are impersonal or divine processes/beings that have a moral purpose and are capable of acting to further that moral purpose.

But the Durkheim/functionalist positions seem closer to home. What I have been worrying for months on this blog concerns the “sacredness” of “life.” Does taking life as sacred, as the ultimate value, as the thing that profane hands (the state, other agents of violence, the lords of capitalism) should not destroy or even render less full, fall within the realm of religion? It does seem to aim at some of the same ends—certainly at establishing a “moral community” united by its reverence for life; certainly in establishing a “moral universe of meaning” underwritten by the ultimate value of life; and certainly in paying attention to “the ultimate conditions of existence,” i.e. the drama of life and death, of being given a precious thing—life—that can only be possessed for a limited time.

I am never sure what all this (that is, the “formal” consonance of religion with humanism) amounts to. If it is something as general as saying that the question of meaning inevitable arises for humans, and that the ways they answer that question has inevitable consequences for human sociality/communities, then the resemblance doesn’t seem to me to have much bite. It is so general, so abstract, a similarity that it doesn’t tell us anything of much import. It is like saying that all animals eat. Yes, but the devil is in the details. Some are vegetarians, some kill other animals for food, some are omnivores.

All human communities must be organized, in part, around securing enough food to live. But hunter/gatherers are pretty radically different from agrarians—and all the important stuff seems to lie in the differences, not in the general similarity of needing to secure food. I suspect it is the same for religion/atheism. Yes, they must both address questions of meaning and of creating/sustaining livable communities, but the differences in how they go about those tasks are the significant thing.

More interesting to me is how both Taylor and Slekzine use Karl Jasper’s notion of the “Axial Revolution.” Taylor leans heavily on Max Weber’s notion of a “disenchanted” world; Slekzine is interested in how the Axial revolution displaces the transcendent from the here and now into some entirely separate realm. Or, I guess, we could say that the Axial revolution creates the transcendent realm. In animist versions of the world, the sacred is in the here and now, the spirits that reside in the tree or the stream or the wind. The sacred doesn’t have its own special place. But now it is removed from the ordinary world—which is fallen, in need of salvation, and material/mechanical. Spirit and matter are alienated from one another. The real and the ideal do not coincide.

For Slekzine, then, every politics (like every post-Axial religion) has to provide a path for moving from here (the fallen real of the world we inhabit day by day) to there (the ideal world of moral and spiritual perfection). He is particularly interested in millennial versions of that pathway since he thinks revolutionaries are quintessential millennialists. And he clearly believes that all millennialists promise much more than they can deliver—and then must deal with the disappointment that inevitably follows from the failure of their predictions to come true.

That’s where I retain a liberal optimism—which is also a moral condemnation of the pessimist. My position, quite simply, is that some social orders (namely, social democracy as it has been established and lived in various countries, including Sweden, Denmark, Canada etc.) are demonstrably better than some other social orders if our standard is affording the means for a flourishing life to the largest number of the society’s members. Measurements such as poverty and education levels, life expectancy etc. can help us make the case for the superiority of these societies to some others.

The point is that the gap between the real and the ideal is actual—even in the best social democracies. But the point is also that this gap is bridgeable; we have concrete ways to make our societies better, and to move them closer to the ideal of a flourishing life for all. Pessimists take the easy way out, pronouncing (usually from a fairly comfortable position), that all effort is useless, that our fallen condition is incorrigible. A humanist politics, then, aims to re-locate the ideal in this world (as opposed to exiling it to a transcendent other-worldly place), while also affirming that movement toward the ideal is possible—and should be the focus of our political efforts.

In these terms, the ideal is, I guess, transcendent in the sense that it is not present in the here and now. The ordinary does not suffice even within a politics that wants to affirm the ordinary, the basic pleasures and needs of sustaining life. But there is also the insistence that the ordinary supplies everything we need to improve it—and that such improvements have been achieved in various places at various times, even if we can agree that no society has achieved perfection. There is no need to appeal to outside forces, to something that transcends the human, in order to move toward the ideal.

How a society handles, responds to, the gap between now (the real) and the ideal seems to me an important way to think about its politics. Looking at 2018 America, it seems (for starters) that we have a deep division over what the ideal should be. The liberal ideal is universal flourishing. It seems very difficult not to caricature the ideal of liberalism’s opponents. I think it is fair (but they probably would not) to say their view is premised on the notion of scarcity. There is not enough of the good, life-sustaining, stuff to go around—which generates endless competition for the scarce goods. In that competition, there is nothing wrong (in fact, it makes emotional and moral sense), to fight to secure the goods for one’s own group (family, ethnicity, nation). A good (ideal) world would be one in which the scarce goods would go to those who truly deserve them (because hard workers, or good people, or “one of us.”) But the real world is unfair, all kinds of cheaters and other morally unworthy types, get the goods, so politics should be geared to pushing such moochers away from the trough. That seems to me to be the rightist mindset in this country these days.

But both sides seem to be humanists of my sort, since both seem to think politics can move us to the ideal in this world. There is not some hope in a transcendent realm—or an orientation toward that realm.

Religion, Sect, Party

Even before quite finishing one behemoth (two chapters to go in Taylor’s A Secular Age), I have started another one, Yuri Slezine’s The House of Government (Princeton UP, 2017). Surprisingly, they overlap to a fair extent. Slezine pushes hard on his thesis that Bolshevism is a millennial sect and that its understandings of history and society follow time-worn Biblical plots, especially those found in Exodus and the Book of Revelations. I find his thesis a bit mechanical and over reductive, an implausible one size fits all. The strength of his book lies in its details, the multiple stories he can tell about the core figures of the Russian Revolution, not in the explanatory framework that he squeezes all those details into.

But Slezine does offer some general speculations on the nature of religion, sects, and parties that I want to pursue at the moment. Taylor defines “religious faith in a strong sense . . . by a double criterion: the belief in transcendent reality, on one hand, and the connected aspiration to a transformation that goes beyond ordinary human flourishing on the other” (510). A fairly substantial component of Taylor’s argument is that most, if not all, people will feel a pull toward those two things; that settling for mundane reality and ordinary flourishing will leave people with a sense of “lack,” a haunting feeling that there must be more. He considers, very briefly, the idea that secularism entails people simply becoming indifferent to transcendence and some kind of transformation beyond the ordinary—and rejects the possibility that such indifference has—or even could—become common.

He pays more attention to the fact that the existence of a “transcendent reality” has simply become incredible to many people. But—and this is a major point for him—he insists that the evidence cannot (of science or of anything else) be decisive on this question, or that evidence is even the prime reason for unbelief in the transcendent. Rather, unbelief is underwritten by an ethos—one of bravely facing up to the facts, of putting aside the childish things of religious faith (the Freudian critique of the “illusion” that is religion).

I am not convinced. Am I full of contempt for the evangelicals who claim to be Christians, but are such noteworthy examples of non-Christian animus, gleefully dishing out harm to all they deem reprobate even as they accommodate themselves to the thuggery and sexual malpractices of Donald Trump? Of course. But Taylor has no truck for the fundamentalists either. His is the most anodyne of liberal Christianities; he has trouble with the whole idea of hell; basically (without his ever quite coming out and saying so) Taylor’s God does not consign people to eternal damnation. Instead, hell for Taylor gets associated with sin—both of them understood as the painful alienation from God that results from turning one’s back on the transcendent. Taylor, in other words, tiptoes away from judgment and punishment—believers aren’t supposed to be judging other humans or inflicting punishment upon them, and he is clearly uneasy with the image of a judging God. In fact, moralism (rigid rules of conduct) is one of his main enemies in the book. In its place, he urges us to Aristotelian phronesis, which insists that judgments always be particular, attending to the novelties of the situation at hand.

But back to me. Aside from my contempt for the evangelicals and their hypocrisies and petty (and not so petty) cruelties to others, do I harbor a Freudian contempt for the believer? Does my unbelief, the fact that I find the notion that god exists simply incredible (meaning there is no way that how I understand existence has room for a divine being) rest on a self-congratulatory idea of my “maturity” as contrasted to those childish believers? It doesn’t feel that way. I find most Christians harmless, and have no beef with practicing Muslims and Jews. It’s only the fanatics of all religions, but equally the fanatics of godless capitalism, that I abhor. And I share that sentiment with Taylor. So I just don’t see that it’s some basic moralistic distinction I make between believers and unbelievers that drives my adoption of unbelief. It seems much more obvious that my understanding of the world has no place for a god, makes the very idea of a god, if not quite unthinkable (because so many other humans keep insisting there is one), at least unimaginable. I might as well try to imagine, believe in, a world that contains unicorns. My “picture” of the world just can’t accommodate a god.

Taylor several times evokes Wittgenstein’s idea of our being held “captive” by a picture. But Taylor also eschews the notion that some kind of argument (like the classic ones about god’s existence) or some kind of evidence could change the picture of unbelief to one of belief. He is very much in William James territory. Basically, his position is that the facts “underdetermine” the choice between belief and unbelief, that materialist science is not conclusive, and so the materialist, as much as the theist, rests his case, in the final analysis, on a leap of faith. This is the Jamesian “open space” in which we all exist. And then Taylor seems (without being explicit enough about this) to say that the deciding factor is going to be “experience” (shades of James’s Varieties of Religious Experience), where what follows (in the ways of feelings, motivations, transformations) from making the leap of faith toward a god stands as the confirmation that belief is the right way to go. It’s the fruits of the relationship to a transcendent that Taylor wants to harvest, that make religious belief valuable in his eyes.

Here’s is where I wish Taylor had paid closer attention to James, particularly the essay “The Will to Believe.” In that essay, James says that choices have three features: they can be “live or dead” choices, “momentous or trivial” ones, or “forced or avoidable” ones. On this last one, James identifies the “avoidable” path as the result of indifference. If I say you must choose between the red or the white wine, you can answer “it’s all the same to me” or I don’t want any wine at all. You can, in short, avoid making the decision I am asking you to make. In the case of “live versus dead,” I can ask you whether you believe in Zeus or Zarathustra, and your reply can be “neither of those options is a true possibility for me; nothing in my way of life or my existing set of beliefs allows the question of believing in Zeus to be a real question for me.” Finally, “momentous/trivial” relates to what I think hangs on the choice; whether or not to have a child is momentous, with huge implications for my life and the life of others; what I choose to eat for dinner tonight is much less momentous, although not without some consequences (for my health, for the environment etc.)

I bring this up because the choice of believing in god is not, at this point in my life, a “live” choice for me. I have no more substantial grounds or inclination to believe in the Christian god than I do to believe in Zeus. Furthermore—I am on shakier ground here but think this is true—I don’t find the choice of unbelief momentous. It is just what I believe: there is no god. James in that same essay also covers this ground: most of our beliefs are not chosen. Even though I only have second-hand evidence of the fact (what is reported in books and the historical record), I am not free to believe that Abraham Lincoln never existed or that he was not a President of the US. I can’t will myself into not believing in his existence. Well, I feel the same way about god. I can’t will myself into believing that god exists. That there is no god is as settled a belief for me as my belief in Abraham Lincoln’s existence. And I don’t see that very much hangs on those two beliefs.

How can that be, asks the incredulous believer? But (and, again, I am following James here) I think the believer often has cause and effect backwards. Pope Francs has just declared capital punishment unacceptable to believing Catholics; Antonia Scalia, a devout Catholic, was an advocate of capital punishment. So it is hard to see how the belief in god is the source of the conviction about capital punishment. Something else must motivate the position taken. Or, at the very least, the fact of believing in god is pretty radically undeterminative; god’s inscrutability is such that humans have to fill in many (most?) of the details.

It’s the same as Taylor’s revisionist views on hell. Humans keep tweaking their notion of what god wants in order to fit human ideas of what an acceptable god would look like. Even if you want to dismiss that kind of debunking statement about humans creating the god they can admire/respect, many believers (obviously not fundamentalists) are still going to accept that god’s ways are mysterious and not easily known. In relation to that mysteriousness, that under-specificity of actual directives, I want to say choosing to believe in god or not doesn’t turn out to be very momentous—at least not in terms of giving us clear moral/ethical guidelines. Believers have disagreed vehemently about what the implications of their religious beliefs are for actual behavior. Skipping the whole choice, being indifferent to the question of god’s existence (and I think that kind of indifference, not paying much mind to the question of god, is much more common than Taylor thinks it is), doesn’t allow us to escape disagreements about good behavior, but doesn’t handicap us in any significant way from participation in such debates.

I don’t, in fact, think Taylor would disagree about this. He isn’t at all interested in a moralistic religion—and he is also not committed to the notion that atheists can’t be moral, that their moral convictions and commitments rest on air. Instead, Taylor argues that the choice is momentous because of the experience–of “deeper” (a word he uses again and again without ever really telling us what is entailed in “deepness”) meanings and a “transformed” relationship to life, the world, others–opens up, makes possible. Again, the specifics of the transformation are awfully vague. But the basic idea is clear enough; to those who open themselves up to a relationship to the transcendent, the very terms of life are different—and fuller, more satisfying, and more likely to answer to a spiritual hunger that lurks within us. So I guess Taylor’s advice to me would be: give it a try, see what changes come if you believe in god and try to establish a relationship to him. I am free, of course, to say “I pass.” What Taylor finds harder to credit is that my response to his offer could be indifference, a shrug of the shoulders. He thinks my rejection of his offer must be driven by some animus against the believer and some admiring self-image of myself as a courageous facer of the unpleasant facts of existence.

The funny thing about this is how individualistic it is, how much it hangs on the personal experience that belief generates. It is one of the key differences between James and John Dewey that James’s vision is pretty relentlessly individualistic, while Dewey is the kind of communitarian critic of liberalism that Taylor has, throughout his long distinguished career, been. In A Secular Age, however, Taylor is not interested in the community of believers. Yes, he sees the cultural setting (the “background assumptions” that are a constant in his understanding of how human language and psychology operate) as establishing the very conditions that make unbelief even possible in a “secular age,” but he doesn’t read the consequences of belief/unbelief in a very communal way. That’s because he has to admit that both believers and unbelievers have committed the same kinds of horrors. He is very careful not to make the crude Christian argument that unbelievers like Stalin will inevitably kill indiscriminately, as if there wasn’t any blood on Christian hands or as if there have been no secular saints. So he does not seem to say there is any social pay-off to widespread belief—at least not one we can count on with any kind of assurance. But he does insist on the personal pay-off.

Here’s where Slezine’s book comes in. The kind of millennial religion he ascribes to the Bolsheviks is all about communal pay-off; they are looking toward a “transformation” of the world, not of personal selves and experience. In fact, they are oriented toward a total sacrifice of the personal in the name of that larger transformation. So it is to the terms of that kind of belief—in the dawning of a new age—that I will turn in my next post.