WHY DO I FIND IT HARD TO WRITE THE NEXT LINE?:

The Politics of Meaninglessness (MICHAEL A. CASEY, 5 November 2003, Sydney Institute)

We are not very clear in our society about the relationship between truth and freedom. We are not clear about whether truth exists at all, and we think of freedom, following Hobbes, as absence of impediment. On the one hand we rather lazily assume that truth and freedom have nothing to do with each other, and that in any conflict between them freedom must trump truth. On the other hand we still have a lingering sense that knowledge in some way or other helps to make freedom possible — that the truth will set us free. The freedom that knowledge of the truth brings is important not just for individual fulfilment, but also for the well-being of a community. A community that attempts to resolve the inevitable conflict of preferences and interpretations that characterises every human interaction by reference
to some concept of the truth, however imperfectly or incompletely or even erroneously understood, is better able to preserve cohesion, generate consensus and maintain public confidence in its institutions than a community where this conflict is resolved more or less arbitrarily through the strategic control of institutions. In its modern form democracy has always been understood as a realm of freedom. But freedom never exists by itself. It is always accompanied — either by power or truth. We use it to assert ourselves against others, or we use it in the service of others and the common good. If democracy is to flourish as a realm of freedom it needs more people who, in one way or the other, choose to live their freedom in truth rather than live it as power. If the proportions are reversed the formal arrangements of democracy can very easily come to be used as cover for thinly-disguised forms of coercion and domination.

Of course it is often said that the real liberation democracy brings about is precisely liberation from the truth, especially religious truth. A related claim is that genuine democracy can only ever be secular democracy. But are these assertions true? In a situation of meaninglessness many things
become distorted, not least the need for meaning itself. This distortion extends even to the religious impulse, which might properly be described as the highest form that the need for meaning takes. We flatter ourselves that we are over religion, and until recently this conceit could anchor itself to the concept of secularisation, which presumed that modernity brought with it a steady and irreversible erosion of religious belief and affiliation. But the sociological evidence no longer supports this claim. Far from slowly withering away as it was supposed to, religious belief in its traditional forms has revived dramatically in Latin America, the United States, Africa, the Muslim world, east-central Europe and in parts of Asia like South Korea. But even in what remains of the "secular" West, religion is by no means a spent force, although it has sometimes taken surprising forms.

The Italian political theorist Emilio Gentile argues that, far from eliminating the "problem" of religion, the sheer scope and pace of change modernity has wrought has created a situation of "crisis and disorientation" which has led directly to "the re-emergence of the religious question". At the beginning of the twentieth century the philosopher Benedetto Croce claimed that the problem of modernity is above all a religious problem. Religion arises from the need for meaning, the need for "orientation" in relation to life and reality.

Without religion, or rather without this orientation, either one cannot live, or one lives unhappily with a divided and troubled soul. Certainly, it is better to have a religion that coincides with philosophical truth, than a mythological religion; but it is better to have a mythological religion than
none at all. And, since no one wishes to live unhappily, everyone in their own way tries to form a religion of their own, whether knowingly or unknowingly.

Modernity has not been the end of religion. Rather it has demonstrated the tenacity of the religious impulse, both in the persistence and growth of traditional religions and in the appearance of new religious forms. As Max Weber predicted, the gods have not been destroyed by the modern world. They have merely assumed some new guises.

The most important new form the religious impulse has assumed is that of secular religion. In its more extreme forms we can trace this back to the godless religion of the French Revolution. In the twentieth century this particular form of secular religion reached its apogee in the great totalitarian ideologies, and right up to the fall of the Soviet Union Marxism continued to provide some people with a type of religious faith. These particular forms of secular religion had several important features in common, including adherence to the myth of revolution as the source of regeneration; the sanctification of violence; the conferral of sacred status on an entity (the proletariat, the volk, etc.) making it the absolute principle of collective existence and the main source of values for the
individual and the masses; and an integralist concept of politics which sought to bring about a harmonious, unitary and homogenous community. A key feature which this particular form of secular religion has in common with its more moderate forms is what Gentile describes as "the sacralisation of politics". This is not the same as the politicisation of traditional religion or the sacralisation of political power (for example, in the concept of the divine right of kings). Instead the sacralisation of politics entails conferring a more or less sacred status on some sort of secular
entity or value, so that it becomes the principle source of orientation for collective existence.

What typifies the less extreme forms of secular religion is the freedom of the individual from the collective. Examples include the "civic creed" or civil religion that informed the foundation of the United States; nationalism in its milder forms; and Green politics in general. But perhaps the most important form of secular religion in the West is the cult of secularism itself. It looks mild and friendly, and there's no doubt that the recent focus on Islam has certainly revived secularism's stocks. But as Kenneth Minogue remarked recently, behind Western secularism's moderate and
reasonable facade is "a universalism that yields nothing in conviction and determination to Islam itself". It sustains itself with the conviction that the secular individual is liberated from "the superstitions and prejudices inherited from less enlightened times", the prime example of which is always religion. Instead of the tyranny and division of religion, secularism claims
to bring tolerance as the means of ensuring social peace. But it is increasingly tolerance of a narrow kind.

The reason that suchtolerance is no narrow is because, despite its claim that the truth is unknowable, it is premised on the belief that peace is the end toward which human society should aim, that peace itself is our highest value. This too is an assertion of truth and so the "tolerant" have a vested interest in crushing every competing truth.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 19, 2003 8:36 AM