Tina Beattie The end of
postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy
републикация
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/faith_ideas/the_new_atheists
The conflict between science and religion promoted
by secular intellectuals such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher
Hitchens is a smokescreen. Behind it, a far more important argument about
global power and justice in a post-postmodern age is becoming unavoidable,
argues Tina Beattie.
The Economist recently published a colour supplement titled "In God's Name: A Special Report on
Religion and Public Life" (3 November 2007). The accompanying
leading article included a rueful admission: "The Economist was so
confident of the Almighty's demise that we published His obituary in our
millennium issue." There is an almost palpable sense of discomfort at a
leading international journal finding itself confronted with the unexpected
resurgence of religion as a newsworthy topic which merits serious debate.
Tina Beattie is reader in Christian studies, Roehampton University, England. Among her
books are God's
Mother, Eve's Advocate (Allen &
Unwin, 2002) and New Catholic Feminism: Theology and
Theory (Routledge 2005). Her website is here
Tina Beattie's latest book is The New Atheists (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2007)
Also by Tina Beattie in openDemocracy:
"Pope Benedict XVI and Islam: beyond
words" (17 September 2006)
"Veiling the issues: a distractive
debate" (24 October 2006)
"Religion in Britain in the Blair era" (10 January 2007)
"Religion's cutting edge: lessons
from Africa" (14 February 2007)As
the article points out, much of this can be attributed to the upsurge in
various forms of religious extremism during the last thirty years, and the
recent atheist backlash by bestselling authors such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. If we are to understand this phenomenon and its social and political
implications, then we must go beyond the headline-grabbing confrontations
between religious and atheist extremists. We need to explore some of the
complex underlying reasons for the persistence of religion after a century in which
it more or less disappeared from view in western politics and public life, and
was banished by totalitarian communist regimes.
The wrong argument
We might begin by recognising that the concept of religion is misleading,
so that our discussions become mired in misrepresentations and
over-simplifications. Our modern understanding of religion is informed by a post-Enlightenment approach in which science, reason and progress have replaced religion as
the organising focus of western life, but the word "religion" also
has connotations associated with 19th-century western imperialism. The word
derives from the Latin religio. It has had different meanings through
Roman and then Christian history, but it acquired its present meaning during
the quest for objective, scientific knowledge and colonial conquest which
together shaped modern British history.
During the Victorian era, new "sciences" such as anthropology and
ethnology developed in order to study the "primitive" peoples and
societies whom Europe's empire-builders encountered in their travels.
Enthusiasm for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution meant that the study of religion came into being as a
way of ranking and studying other cultures in comparison to the defining norm
of western civilisation, by scholars who believed that the white western male
stood on the highest rung of the evolutionary ladder. The word
"science" also changed its meaning during the 19th century, from a
generic word used to describe all forms of knowledge including theology and
philosophy, to one more narrowly focused on an objective, rationalist approach
to knowledge based on empirical evidence alone. That is why the nature of the
current confrontation between "science" and "religion" is
so problematic, because we are dealing with two slippery concepts which come freighted
with a deeply ambivalent historical legacy.
The 19th-century confrontation between religion and science was largely
fuelled by a power-struggle between men of science and men of God, most of them
members of the Victorian ruling classes. Whereas the clergy and the Church of
England had previously ruled the roost of English public life, in the mid-19th
century the dynamics of power shifted, and scientists began to wrest much of
the authority from their clerical counterparts in shaping intellectual enquiry
and values. But just as this "war" masked a much more amicable and
creative dialogue between scientists and theologians in a society which was still largely Christian in its beliefs, so today the attempt to portray the
relationship between science and religion as one of irreconcilable conflict is
a distortion of a more pluralist intellectual and religious environment.
Many scientists see no fundamental conflict between science and faith, and
some argue that quantum physics challenges any attempt to maintain a strict
distinction between scientific and philosophical or theological knowledge. Some
scientists - such as the head of the human-genome project, Francis S Collins - have converted from atheism
to Christianity as a result of their scientific research. Many members of the
scientific community have sought to distance themselves from the
self-publicising polemics of Richard Dawkins and his fellow "new atheists", for they see the fact that Dawkins in particular has become so
dogmatic and ideologically driven in his militant atheism as a betrayal of the
very scientific values which he claims to represent.
The attempt to stage a war between religion and science - whether fuelled
by religious or scientific fundamentalists - is part of the problem and not part
of the solution with regard to the times we are living in. If we seek to
preserve our liberal western values, then we need to resist the spirit of
aggression and confrontation which is becoming increasingly characteristic of
public debate - in Britain and the United States especially - concerning the
role of religion in society.
With regard to debates about Islam, we must recognise how the portrayal of
Muslims as violent fundamentalists still resonates with those 19th-century
beliefs that white westerners are inherently superior to their savage and
barbaric counterparts in other cultures and religions. Also lurking within the
media treatment of religion today is a masked anti-Catholicism, for that too has been a feature of modern societies such as Britain and
America whose values have been largely shaped by Protestantism. Unless we are
attentive to these subtexts, our discussions about religion risk being vehicles
for unacknowledged prejudices and historical animosities which can only serve
to fuel conflict in these uncertain times.
The limits of rationalism
One way to understand the current crisis in values and beliefs is to situate
it in the context of late modernity or postmodernity, when the democratic and
scientific values which emerged in the various intellectual and political
revolutions of the 18th century are disintegrating. Today, we face a world of
complexity and plurality which some find exhilarating in its freedoms and
opportunities, but others find terrifying in its lack of certainties and
truths.
The term "postmodernism" is associated with Jean-François Lyotard's book, The Postmodern Condition, published in 1979, but the era of postmodernity had its genesis in the
aftermath of the second world war, when all the values which had sustained
modern western societies for two centuries were in meltdown. How could visions
of progress and the civilising power of reason survive two world wars and the
Nazi genocide? How could science provide answers to human suffering, when it had
provided us with such a devastating capacity for destruction and killing?
This uncertainty has increased as the full implications of the 20th century
have dawned upon us. Never in human history did so many people slaughter one another in the name of so many ideologies and visions of progress, all
of them informed by a post-religious secular ideology - whether it was the
quasi-paganism of Nazism or the atheism of the Soviet Union, China or Cambodia.
If the Enlightenment signified the liberation of western societies from the tyranny
of religion and theocratic rule, we discovered in the 20th century that the
cruelty of God-fearing societies might be rivalled only by that of godless
societies.
Although the new atheists are dogmatic in their refusal to accept that line
of argument, it remains the context in which we must situate our reflections on
the crises confronting us at the beginning of the 21st century. Those with
greater historical sensitivity and philosophical insight than Dawkins know that
the gulags, Hiroshima and the gas-chambers have cast a pall over western memory
and consciousness, and we are right to distrust the forms of knowledge and the
political systems in which such violence was able to take root and grow.
Contrary to what many people hoped, scientific rationalism did not deliver
us from the evils of violence, war and hatred, nor did religion wither and die
in the glare of the scientific gaze. Instead, religion has revived in virulent
new forms which are parasitic upon modernity, for religious extremism is informed
by the same ahistorical and literalistic understanding of truth which informs
scientific approaches to knowledge, with their shared resistance to ambiguity,
doubt and complexity in the quest for meaning. In both cases, the poetic and
holistic wisdom of past generations - much of it embedded in religious
traditions - is set aside in favour of an aggressive and one-sided dogmatism
which ruptures the fabric of human life in its communal and creative
dimensions.
But if modernity created the conditions in which religious and scientific fundamentalisms took root, it is postmodernity which has created the kind of volatile
social environment in which these opposing forces encounter one another with
potentially explosive violence. While postmodernism destabilises all claims to
truth and creates a widespread mood of doubt and scepticism, it also creates a
cultural vacuum in which every form of extremism and identity politics can
flourish, while sapping us of the collective vision and energy needed to
challenge corrupt and unjust political structures.
One of the great myths of postmodernism is its celebration of the death of
the "meta-narrative", its paradoxical claim that the only universal
truth is that there is no universal truth. But this is a lie, for never has
humankind been so dominated by a single meta-narrative as it is today, when
global capitalism threatens to eliminate every other narrative and every other
meaning from human life. While the histories and traditions which have bound
people together and conferred upon communities a sense of meaning and belonging
are under siege from all directions, a relentless and inhumane system of global
economics is sweeping away the last vestiges of human dignity and hope for
those who are exiled, exploited and commodified by the wars, corruptions and
burgeoning inequalities which our economic system brings in its wake. This is
the context in which we must situate our reflections if we want to ask why so
many people are attracted to rigid and dogmatic forms of religion.
A fury for certitude
Mark Juergensmeyer, in his fine study of religious violence, Terror in the Mind of God (2001), argues that religion is rarely in itself a cause of war and
violence, but it can provide a potent moral justification for violence as a
form of resistance to perceived injustices and inequalities. Thus the current
phenomenon of religious extremism must be understood in the context of the
widespread failure of secularism and the modern nation state in their inability
to challenge deprivation and injustice. Faced with the combined forces of
western military and economic power, disenfranchised and alienated groups begin
to see the West as the primary source of global injustice and moral corruption.
Also in openDemocracy on Europe's struggles with and over faith
Patrick Weil, "A nation in diversity: France,
Muslims and the headscarf" (25 March 2004)
Gilles Kepel, "Europe's answer to Londonistan" (24 August 2005)
Tariq Modood, "Remaking multiculturalism after 7/7" (29 September 2005)
openDemocracy, "Muslims and Europe: a cartoon confrontation" (6 February 2006) - a symposium
Roger Scruton, "The great hole of history" (11 September 2006)
Michael Walsh, "The Regensburg address: reason amid
certainty" (20 September 2006)
Faisal Devji, "Between Pope and Prophet" (26 September 2006)
Ehsan Masood, "British Muslims: ends and beginnings" (31 October 2006)
Faisal Devji, "Epistles of moderation" (18 October 2007)
Olivier Roy, "Secularism confronts Islam" (25 October 2007)
From this perspective, religious zealotry can be interpreted as the other
face of the metropolitan fancy-dress parade which constitutes the consumerist
lifestyles of postmodern urban elites, reflecting as they do the banality and
homogeneity of a global market which is no respecter of boundaries, cultures
and traditions. Instead of freedom we have choice, and instead of values we
have labels and lifestyles. We citizens of the western democracies have become
solipsistic consumers indifferent to the squandering of our hard-won freedoms
and rights by governments for which terrorism has become a byword for ever-more
draconian strategies of surveillance and control.
As democracy withers and the political forum is colonised by the
suave-speaking mediocrities of the soundbite era, as blatant self-interest on
the part of the world's most powerful nations becomes an excuse for every kind
of collusion in the politics of corruption and violence, we in whose names the
battles are being fought have allowed our horizons to shrink so that we see no
further than the nearest shopping-mall. And we are the privileged ones, the
citizens whose security merits any injustice, any violation of human rights,
against the immigrants, fanatics and foreigners who threaten our vacuous existence.
Should we be surprised that some of them are declaring war on us?
For many others, it is religion - particularly in its more dogmatic forms -
that offers a potent alternative; those drawn to it include people both
disenfranchised from the beginning because they are too poor or too oppressed
to participate in the postmodern shop-fest, and people who are afraid of what
they perceive as the moral meltdown of modern western culture. In these forms
of religion, people can find certainty instead of confusion, clear rules
instead of ambiguity, tight-knit communities instead of shifting and transient
relationships; and all this is presided over by a wrathful male God who hates
all the things they hate - particularly gays, feminists and libertarians of
every description - and who sanctions violence in order to keep His values safe
from corruption.
What vision of democracy?
On 9/11, the postmodern condition met its nemesis. When Osama bin Laden's suicidal supporters selected their targets, they were selecting symbols
which represent the west's economic, military and political hegemony with all
its corrupted values and degenerate politics. Living as we do in the swirl of history
which followed that event, we lack the critical distance to assess its impact
and evaluate its consequences. However, the shift in western attitudes from the
laissez-faire pluralism of postmodernity to the more hard-edged antagonism
of cultural commentators such as Dawkins, AC Grayling, Polly Toynbee and other guardians of secular truth has to be understood in that context.
If sufficient critical distance is not possible, it is possible to say that
since 9/11 we have gone beyond the postmodern condition; and that what we do
next will determine whether we discover in our new circumstances the abyss of a
violent nihilism and war without end, or the beginnings of a new and hopeful flourishing among peoples in
harmony with our natural environment, which is our only hope of redemption. The
latter would require that we recognise the awesome responsibilities which come
with our much vaunted values of freedom, democracy and human rights. In the era
of war without end in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, the contrast between the protests of the public and
the indifference of its leaders (as after the huge worldwide demonstrations of
February 2003) is a stark expression of how these values are routinely
traduced.
The most pressing question confronting us lies here: how to respond to the
slow death of democracy. The recent confrontation between religion and science
is in this context a smokescreen which is distracting us from much more urgent
political and intellectual issues. It allows the secular intelligentsia to hide
behind a convenient and inflated - where not fabricated - myth of religious
extremism which masks from us our own complicity in the murder and mayhem by
which western global supremacy and our own privileged status within that are
now maintained.
The Buddhist monks of Burma have shown us that religion is not always the enemy of freedom. Sometimes
it can inspire very great acts of courage in the name of democracy and human
rights. If religions have too often sanctioned killing in the name of God, they
also have the capacity to instil in their followers the understanding that
sometimes, there are values worth dying for. Let us listen to the silence of
those - for now - defeated monks. In our noisy and increasingly violent defence
of freedom, we must ask ourselves what vision of democracy inspired them to
protest in peace and to die in hope. I think it was Martin Luther King who
asked: "If there is nothing you are willing to die for, is there anything
you have that's worth living for?" The postmodern condition gave us
nothing to die for and nothing to live for, but it seems to have given us a
great deal we are willing to kill for.