open Democracy News Analysis - A secular age's bad faith, Mark Vernon - Comments

dohenyjc on "The bad faith of the secular age"

dohenyjc — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:13:54 +0000

The Brits have swallowed their pride at last! They've quit Basra, opening the way for Moqtada Sadr's militias (with full Iranian backing!) to fill the city's power vacuum that the toppling of Saddam left in its wake. Now we wait for the inevitable sanitizing crusade! Moqdada Sadr will soon prove himself to be a compulsive sanitizer in the same mould as Milosevic and Torquemada. And - let us not indulge in denial - that George W Bush's sanitizing obsession was the key that opened southern Iraq to Moqtada and his followers. Soon the ayatollahs will be celebrating in Tehran!

dohenyjc on "The bad faith of the secular age"

dohenyjc — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 19:15:03 +0000

From the standpoint of the pre-rational mind, the title of Mark Vernon's piece might be better worded as 'Bad faith in a sham secular age'. The West might appear to live in a secular (i.e. rational) age! But in many cases our political leaders merely use the trappings of rationality to mask their more sanguinary thought processes. Like the religious of all ages, they don't use concepts as such; they use concepts as symbols! "Jew" to the nazi zealot is not a concept, rather, he uses it as a symbol of evil. Likewise, "Heretic" to this day is still used by the Christian hardliner as a personification of abominable evil. Likewise too, "Muslim" continues to be used by diehard Serb leaders as a symbol of evil; and Muslim leaders in Kosovo see the Serbs in the same light. So wonder that the Kosovo problem is proving so intractable! Yes, and the Iraq problem too. Seems our political leaders need a few urgent lessons in pre-rational thinking - President George W Bush included!

dohenyjc on "The bad faith of the secular age"

dohenyjc — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 16:42:07 +0000

Pre-rational thinking is the royal road to understanding the motivational state of Osama bin Laden, Muqtada al Sadr - and George W Bush! Pre-rational thinking has a pathological extreme comprising a triad of interacting traits: (1) delusion of contamination; (2) obsession with purity; (3) purification compulsion. This lethal triad is the same for all sanitizing extremists - no matter what their cultural background or ideological hang-up. Adolf Hitler had them all! His 'Final Solution' was a sanitizing crusade. The Inquisition was a sanitizing crusade. Tomas de Torquemada (Spanish Inquisition) was a compulsive sanitizer. So was Slobodan Milosevic and General Ratco Mladic. Their orgy of ethnic cleansing was a sanitizing crusade.

dohenyjc on "The bad faith of the secular age"

dohenyjc — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 19:19:45 +0000

Perhaps Mark Vernon could write a piece more focused than the rambling effort above! If so, let him junk these two concepts - 'religion' and 'terrorism'. Nobody knows what religion is in the sense that one man's saint is another man's heretic. Terrorism likewise: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Ambiguties like these leave too much room for the writer to indulge in rhetorical ducking and diving. Mark Vernon is adept at using the technique to bamboozle the reader! Pre-rational thinking is about as unambiguous as a concept can be. To understand it, you have only to break it down into component parts. We in the West need unambiguous concepts if we are to keep one step ahead of the sanitizing mindset, whether it comes from Tehran as blatant jihadism or from the White House disguised as 'war on terror'.

dohenyjc on "The bad faith of the secular age"

dohenyjc — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:06:07 +0000

If you want an introduction to pre-rational thinking, ask yourself this question: "Why was President Bush so obsessed with toppling Saddam Hussein? From the standpoint of rational strategic thinking, Saddam was a bulwark against Islamism in Iraq. There were no jihadists active in that country until Saddam's downfall. Had Saddam been supported (albeit reluctantly) instead of attacked, he would still be holding the line against Muqtada al Sadr and Osama bin Laden - saving thousands of American lives and billions of dollars. So why did Bush want to get rid of such a valuable ally? President Bush is not a rational thinker. His ruminations are typical of the emotion-laden sanitizing mindset: Saddam was a murderous tyrant, an evil dictator. To rid the world of him would be just and holy work. Thus, Bush's obsession with the triumph of good over evil blinded him to Saddam's usefulness as an ally in the 'war on terror'. The invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with the so called war on terror; it had everything to do with the sanitizing obsession of the President of the United States! Like the man said - if you must lie, tell a big one! And the man from Texas sure knows how to tell 'em!

dohenyjc on "The bad faith of the secular age"

dohenyjc — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 22:34:24 +0000

"What has pre-rational thinkng got to do with an encounter between two people in 2007?" Depends how rational the protagonists are! Go amongst the jihadists and you will get part of your answer. Pre-rational thinking is emotion-laden, driven for the most part by an obsession with purity and pollution. The search for absolute purity motivates the hard-core zealot, be he Christian evangelist or Muslim fundamentalist. Contrast this intolerant state of mind with the rational scientist or theorist; you soon realize that the rational and pre-rational are deadly enemies. Problem is that America's pre-rational evangelicals have hijacked Bush's counter-terrorism policy. And the rational mind is caught in the crossfire. Most of us - without realizing it - have been recruited to fight a Christinan sanitizing crusade!

eric_5 on "The bad faith of the secular age"

eric_5 — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 10:14:06 +0000

Paul, What's wrong with this description of a well-known god, in your opinion? “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” The God Delusion Incidentally, the Midgley assertion that octopuses and elephants don't dance is myopic.

Dr Paul Miller on "The bad faith of the secular age"

Dr Paul Miller — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 20:12:12 +0000

And thirty years on from Dawkins' tub-thumping Selfish Gene, the limitations of his strictly materialist approach are evident. Dawkins mistook genes for clubs, with which he could beat his opponents over the head. Midgley on "Memes": So, apparently, if we want to study (say) dances, we should stop asking what dances do for people and should ask only what they do for themselves. We shall no longer ask to what particular human tastes and needs they appeal, how people use them, how they are related to the other satisfactions of life, what feelings they express or what needs cause people to change them, Instead, presumably, we shall ask why dances, if they wanted a host, decided to parasitize people rather then elephants or octopuses. You need to broaden your approach.

eric_5 on "The bad faith of the secular age"

eric_5 — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 19:57:50 +0000

What has pre-rational thinking got to do with an encounter between two people in 2007? Both should be equally able to do any sort of thinking required to discuss the issue before them. If an evangelical Christian and Dawkins are not on the same wavelength, it's not because the evangelical is a specimen of unevolved humanity. I would suggest the meeting of minds does not take place for similar reasons to those which operate in politics and personal life and many other fields, different upbringing and education, differences of culture, differences of temperament and intellect.

dohenyjc on "The bad faith of the secular age"

dohenyjc — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 18:02:46 +0000

Frankly, I don't need to "know much about Dawkins"! He has reduced himself to the status of a intolerant stereotype. I acknowledge his brilliance - but he should stick to evolutionary biology! He knows nothing about the origins of religion, or of the psychical forces that created it. He did a TV series on religion some time age, and it was cringingly embarassing to watch the great theorist blunder into one dragon's den after another, questioning religious extremist leaders and getting thrown out of one ( a Creationist setup). I would have far greater admiration for him if he took the trouble to study the psychology of pre-rational thinking before making a bloody fool of himself again. I emailed him after watching his TV series but it seems he does not communicate with the likes of me! I hate to see such a doughty defender of rationality treated as he has been by deluded zealots.

eric_5 on "The bad faith of the secular age"

eric_5 — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 14:56:07 +0000

I don't think you know much about Dawkins. "Richard Dawkins the ethologist rapidly mutated into an evolutionary biologist. In 1965, he hit upon an idea breathtakingly simple to understand but extraordinarily powerful in its implications. In essence, Dawkins argued for an ethology of the gene: How do genes communicate? How do genes behave differently in groups than they do as individuals? Why do genes cooperate? How do genes compete? The same questions ethologists ask about chicks and geese and chimpanzees are virtually identical to the sorts of questions they should be asking about the genome and its genes. Others had played with this notion before, but Dawkins made it his own and aggressively pushed it into the mainstream of science culture. As the first true ethologist of the gene, Dawkins de facto became an evolutionary biologist. How genes behave over time - which ones dominate, which ones die off, which ones cooperate, which ones compete, which ones change, which ones remain the same - is the very definition of an evolution based on the flow of information. When Dawkins published The Selfish Gene in 1976, the book further heated the debate over whether humans were ruled more by nature or nurture, a debate refueled by the emerging sociobiologists - notably Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson in his 1975 book Sociobiology. By proposing an ethology of the gene, Dawkins shifted that debate away from the individual animal as the unit of evolution to the nature, nurture, and behavior of the genes. With The Selfish Gene, Dawkins offered scientists a conceptual bridge between the reductionist imperatives of molecular biology and the taxonomies of zoology, psychology, and sociology. In other words, the metaphor of the selfish gene not only created an important context to explain human and animal behavior - it also created a framework for molecular biologists to examine the organic interactions of genes. The metaphor scaled from double helices to human interactions. But looking at the richness and complexity of life on Earth, Dawkins freely acknowledged that an ethology of the gene alone was simply not robust enough to explain evolution. So he applied a Darwinian view of culture, as well. Dawkins argued for the concept of memes - ideas that are, to use the felicitous phrase of William Burroughs, "viruses of the mind." Memes are to cultural inheritance what genes are to biological heredity. A meme for, say, astrology, could parasitize a mind just as surely as a hookworm could infest someone's bowels. Ideas - like genes - could compete and cooperate, mutate and conserve. They, too, are operated on by natural selection. Human evolution, Dawkins postulates, is a function of a co-evolution between genes and memes. Even that was not enough. Dawkins's intellectual adventure went well beyond the ethology of genes and memes to explore an even more radical insight into the nature of evolutionary dynamics. This idea, too, was astonishingly simple, but it offers a powerful intellectual framework for a new understanding of life as an information process. What do genes and memes have in common? Dawkins asked. They are replicators. Through various but distinct coded systems, they reproduce; they effect change in their world so they can propagate, just like viruses in either digital or organic form. Dawkins's most powerful paradigm is that the unit of evolution is not the individual - the gene - or the meme, but the replicator. "

dohenyjc on "The bad faith of the secular age"

dohenyjc — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 14:17:04 +0000

Yes, intuition is valuable. A flash of intuition ("the eureka moment") can send the researcher careering off in a new - and often very unexpected - direction. Dawkins hasn't got it!

eric_5 on "The bad faith of the secular age"

eric_5 — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 21:39:18 +0000

Outside the hard-core of the braindead, there are lots of people who will benefit from encouragement.

dohenyjc on "The bad faith of the secular age"

dohenyjc — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:20:04 +0000

Save your energy, guys and gals! Argument is futile. 'Religion' is nothing more substantial than pre-rational thinking institutionalized; it survives into the modern (rational) world because theologians and priests keep it alive!

eric_5 on "The bad faith of the secular age"

eric_5 — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:22:21 +0000

"We cannot ignore the fact that unscientific intuition is an inherent part of our personal makeup and scientists cannot deny that it contributes to scientific discovery." Fine. But you don't get a free pass on what emerges from your 'intuition'. Your intuition may tell you which horse is going to win the three-thirty race, but the result may prove your intuition wrong. Any hunch you, or anybody else, may come up with, is subject to argument as to its plausibility and the test of reality. Mystification and portentous rumblings will get you nowhere.

A secular age's bad faith, Mark Vernon

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 15:31:30 +0000

Recently, I spent an afternoon talking with someone about homosexuality. We had been brought together because of our opposing views. I am pro-gay, pro-civil partnerships, and pro-inclusion on gay adoption. He believes homosexuals are in danger of burning forever in hell. The odd thing about our difference of views was that we were otherwise pretty indistinguishable. My interlocutor was white, middle-aged, male and British - as I am myself. That we happened to be sitting in a teashop in Windsor, as he conjured up images of the flames of damnation, only increased my cognitive dissonance. He was a fundamentalist and yet, otherwise, almost entirely like myself.

This encounter illustrates what Charles Taylor, in his brilliant new study A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), believes to be the dominant feature of the contemporary west. The secular age is one of radical pluralism. We live in a world in which every day we rub up against people with very different worldviews to our own - theistic, atheistic, agnostic; Christian, Muslim, Hindu - and of every conceivable variety in between.

This ease of confrontation in itself would mark our age as challenging. It becomes threatening, and violent, since in the secular age it is also quite possible to imagine ourselves changing worldview. Before modern times, a Christian might have met, say, an atheist, but they could no more have thought of becoming one than changing their sex. Today, such radical changes are entirely viable. These cross-pressures are a defining characteristic of our sense of self. They are the pressures that are tearing the Anglican church apart. They are the pressures that have led the United Kingdom to breed its own suicide-bombers. They are the pressures that lead some to believe we are on course for a clash of civilisations.

A missing dimension

How has this come about? After all, with the Enlightenment, reason and prosperity were supposed to initiate a virtuous spiral of cooperation and progress. Taylor believes that what is at fault with such a vision is the theory of secularisation that lies behind it. It is a "subtraction" theory of secularisation - the idea that what science has achieved in the modern world is a stripping away of needless, primitive superstitions revealing the essential, rational core of humankind. This is wrong. Rather, says Taylor, secularisation is a paradigm shift. Its origins lie within religion itself, particularly in the Reformation drive to collapse the difference between the "higher flourishing", implicit in the religious lives of monks and priests, and the ‘lower flourishing' of lay people engaged in everyday life.

Mark Vernon is a writer. His most recent book is After Atheism: Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life (Palgrave, 2007). His website is here Also by Mark Vernon in openDemocracy:

"The politics of friendship" (29 December 2006)

"The life of the child: being friends, being good" (8 March 2007)

"Social networks: after privacy, beyond friendship" (24 October 2007)

To put it another way, the reformers were anthropocentric. During the 18th century this immanent dimension to life came to dominate, not least with the rise of deism that conceived of human beings living in a benign moral order designed by God. The central ethic of contemporary secular atheism, that rational individuals should constructively engage in a society of mutual benefit, is the direct successor of this optimism. The distant God of deism is easy to drop when the window onto transcendence has been closed.

However, religion lives on because people's desire for the transcendent is irrepressible. Consider the contemporary crisis of meaning, the modern malaise and arguably unique in history. (After all, in the pre-modern enchanted world, the problem, if anything, was an over-determination of meaning, what with spirits abounding and salvation to be won.) Now though, although much is compulsory in terms of our behaviour, little is genuinely compelling in terms of being experienced as an infinite inner demand, as the philosopher Simon Critchley has put it (see Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance [Verso, 2007]. Alternatively, in spite of being able to embark upon projects that are fulfilling in themselves - work, family, leisure - many people still feel something fundamental is missing. The crisis of meaning is at root a crisis of transcendence.

The various anti-humanist movements are as indicative of this as is the rise of conservative religion. They share, with atheistic humanism, the conviction that life and meaning must be found within an immanent frame of reference. But believe that the disciplining nature of Enlightenment life, and the demands of cooperation, are deadening of the human spirit. Hence, for example, Nietzsche celebrated the Dionysian. "Anti-humanism is not just a black hole, an absence of values, but also a new valorization of death, and sometimes violence", Taylor writes. "And some of the fascination it re-articulates for death and violence reminds us forcefully of many of the phenomena of traditional religion."In a fascinating and rich discussion, this analysis enables Taylor to account for many things. For example, how time has changed in the modern world. Before, time was hierarchical and gathered at special moments like holy days; time could also burst open with chaos at carnivals and festivals - feasts of social reversal. Now, time is linear and instrumental, and therefore readily experienced as flat and meaningless. Again as with transcendence, there is a nascent desire to regain a sense of shape and meaning in time. Hence the popularity, say, of history and autobiography, and the extraordinary outpouring of feeling in moments like at the death of Princess Diana when normal time appeared to be swept away.

Out of the tunnel

Charles Taylor writes as a Catholic philosopher, if one that Pope Benedict XVI would respect rather than embrace. For example, he thinks that sexual ethics have become such a point of contestation and resistance in contemporary religious life because in the secular age, religious authorities no longer exercise political power; they must focus instead on the personal.

But if his is a Catholic point of view, his aim is consolatory. At one level he can answer the questions of those who are either bemused by religious faith or find it abhorrent. To be religious may be one or more of many things, Taylor explains. But if atheistic conviction is less a set of doctrines about the world (such as that God is dead) than a set of powerful beliefs about the way the world is best viewed, so in the same way religious conviction is a sense that the world is best viewed from a transcendent, visionary perspective that requires the transformation of the individual.

What of the present confrontation between atheistic humanism and religious belief? Here again, Charles Taylor's book is refreshing in its radicalism. In short, the militant atheists, as much as the conservative evangelicals, have misconstrued the present situation. Many of the faults that one side finds in the other - such as that atheism is empty, or that theism is primitive - actually conceal the same flaws in the side being defended too.

To put it another way, the secular age is a context with which all people are still trying to grapple. The persistent pluralism of our times is evidence enough that no one worldview is universally satisfactory. But if we are together to make progress, avoid that clash of civilisations, and resist the destructive power of those cross-pressures, there is one thing to do first. Give up the bad faith implicit in taking pot-shots at opponents, that, after all, only disguise the inadequacies of our own analysis of the modern human condition.

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