The reemergence of religion into the public space

By: Douglass Carmichael

The reemergence of religion into the public space is a cultural shock to many. We thought we lived in an increasingly science based secular world, and that the enlightenment was still penetrating the few remaining shadows of old myth, verbal ritual, blood and despair.

The overwhelming movement of the West since the middle ages is probably the confluence among technology, power, capital and status. The ruling class has been able to keep control, more or less, of this ensemble for its own benefit. The industrial phase required a larger middle class of well paid managers to keep this ensemble and its emerging complexity flowing and efficiently productive. The digital world, for its technology and the consequences, seems to imply that we need fewer managers, as coordination technology allows lower level workers to cross coordinate.

We are beginning to see that there is an inexorable flow to the techno-economic that is sensed by almost everyone. Mary Poovey has creatively called it the Axis of Finance. Capital congregates around a few places, and globalization is the extension of the exploitation of resource, but not of real economic power, to more and more of the world. Elites in new countries are paid off for delivering their populations to the megamachine. Law and regulation support the movement into ever more skewed distributions.

But disgruntlement has had a hard time focusing itself because of the distractions of war, from the rise of Napoleon, his attacks forcing the militarization of first Germany, then Japan, first and second world wars, and the cold war. There are those who want to keep our attention focused on external things to fear rather than to fear the direction of the economic technical system with its concentration of money and power. This prevents politically powerful criticism of the technical-financial axis its negative impact on family, community and the environment, while seducing us towards still producing children beyond sustainability. (the ensuing tensions among increasing populations are good for markets: energy, weapons, drugs).

  The tendency of "the system" to turn into a well coordinated machine owned by a few is making everyone nervous. The progressive professional class want peace and reason, but to still develop expensive careers and keep using new technologies that can be assimilated by society at a non-destructive pace. The tendency of that group has been to see the others, the fundamentalists, the Bush supporters, as mere primitives. But there is good evidence that the "right" in the US have maintained a resistance to modernization that goes back to the puritans and the counter reformation.

  America was in the 1700's a refuge from Europe, to avoid the powers of change and hold on to ancient ways. Jefferson's Notes on Virginia and the earlier History and the Current state of Virginia by Beverly both portray an asylum from emerging European culture and the trends of modernity. What Jefferson saw as potentially free from European oppression. Many in America then and now believed, "Just leave us alone and let us be on our own land." This is not new, but deep in the American experience, and taught by texts for two centuries.

The progressives are against what the right seems to want, but have no real alternative beyond a kind of center right posture that is somewhat anti-war, but hardly asking for justice for the bottom half of the population.

The inexorable, but maybe not inevitable, tendency for concentration and coordination to make a single world of secular non-humanistic technocratic realism married to market fundamentalism and Lockian private property fundamentalism, will eventually lead more and more people (the numbers already might be quite high), to use what ever means they can to say “no” to the official future and hope for some emerging alternative. The uni-bomber and the Okalahoma bombing are hints we should not neglect.

Michael Powell, just finishing his term as head of the FCC said a few days ago,

"I'm incredibly optimistic, bullish and excited. There's another player in the room and it's called technology. It's not a person, it doesn't have a soul, and it doesn't care that it's ripping up the way we've done it. And there's nothing to stop it. The laws of physics keep tearing things apart, and I don't think that [regulatory] change is dependent on lawyers. We do need some [regulatory reform] but even if we did nothing the world is going to change anyway. -- it's an innovator's paradise. You can either catch the wave, or get run over by it."

  This kind of sadistic identification with destruction by the winners will be seen as excessive and unfeeling. It has some truth, but not that much. Insensitivity is worse than lack of irony. The culture will react back against the excessive identification with change and its destructive force (Schumpeter's "creative destruction.") as inhumane, and off center. Will that reaction itself be more humane, or a descent to Rwanda like entropic soup.  

In the context of resistance to change in the direction of increasing fragmentation., alienation and loss of power, we might see – even if we did not expect - some surprising changes, such as the reemergence of religion as a powerful public force. The reaction of the world to the death of the Pope hints at this. The Pope, in his humanism (which in many aspects was real) has come to stand for an alternative to the mega-machine tendencies of the techno-capital axis. The arch bishop of Canterbury said yesterday, "Religion is the counter culture. ..the opposition to the way of the world.. The church of God is a community of people called to live at a cost, called to live at times to stand against what seems to be the received wisdom, what seems to be the obvious way of living in the world around, called to lead a transfigured life, a life that is visibly different in its quality of love faithfulness and hope, never mind what the price is."

The emotionality in reaction to the Pope's death I think was hinted at earlier by the death of Princess Diana and the deep feelings for her based on her anti-bomb crusade and other good works. The death of the younger John Kennedy struck a similar chord of world wide sympathy looking for belief in goodness.

  The promise of science as a force for good has long been lost as it has shifted from a beneficial addition to humanity to being a driver of wealth, creating effects that work against people and the environment, leading increasingly to the suspicion that the economy is doing well but the people are doing badly.  

That a secular humanism, skeptical, compassionate, environmentally sensitive, could lose out to a religious view of the world, was almost unthinkable a few years ago. What we failed to consider was that the secular humanist world was really a cover story for the technocratic corporate world. The alternatives, we thought, were between science and religion. But the real choice came down to supporting a technocratic societal tendency run by elites, or religion as the only alternative mobilizeable social force to put the breaks on.  

To the extent that religion does emerge as a new public center of power and persuasion, the dangers of demagoguery are probably even worse than for the bureaucratizing capitalism of modern society. This because religion tends to authoritarian and rhetorical rather than to the reasoned and parliamentary style of persuasion. People in churches are fairly benign, though exclusionary. People led by religious leaders outside church tend toward crusades.  

But those who are more sensitive to the humanization issues, compassion, justice, environment, much face up to the act that the technology and science that was meant to benefit mankind got stolen by careers and money and lost its human centered values. (which, since Francis Bacon tried to persuade the king of the value of science and the Royal Society to the empire, has always been a mixed story, if we had looked.)  

The two choices we though we had: modernization vs. fundamentalism, turn out to be three: technocratic centralism, humanizing reform, and religious zeal. A compromise might be a revaluing humanity through religious influence, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist…) with the better use of technology to support people and the environment, and an effective business sector that was aimed - by values and regulations, to make a better world and replace the game of private profiteering. I say compromise because it is clear that the victory of one, or even two of the tendencies over the third would probably lead to a new kind of totalitarianism, brutal, harsh, and control oriented.  

To create that compromise we need a view of the future that allows for good lives in the present and works toward:  

1. Providing reasonable security through world cooperation;
2. A vigorous economy that creates jobs and is less exploitative of the environment;
3. The integration of civilization into the landscape;
4. Increasing decentralization as the new peripheries become stable and responsible;
5. Capital decline in power, as financial instruments, up to and including interest, are de-legitimated, and we have better public accounting (one trillion unaccounted for in the Pentagon);
6. Bringing corporations back under meaningful state charters;
7. Taking children and their parents very seriously as the major method of producing the core of society: the next generation;
8. An over-arching vision that is simple.
 

For many reasons, Garden world is what I favor. The Japanese countryside gives us a hint at what a well treated environment can look like. Fredrick Law Olmstead in creating Central park and many others set an American Model for city-rural integration that is design based and organic. The environment, through agriculture, is probably the key infrastructure for our population, much more important than energy. A garden world is attractive, healthy believable and possible.  

Garden world is the only viable alternative to the Buck Rogers sci-fi techno-dominant world that is our current official direction. Garden world allows the humanists, the religious, and the scientific to have a shared goal of a realizable better world. Without such a goal, we will see increased refusnik terrorism, where each new freedom fighter embraces a last and self annihilating action in a social field of utter despair. A person only becomes a suicide bomber when they feel that to not be also destroys them and their loved ones.   

We are dealing with meanings, which the progressive professional technocratic class forgot to cultivate beyond a scientism that was serving masters they didn't care to recognize they worked for . There are great traditions of science, art, governance, and yes religious thought, and only by integrating them in a new and tolerant way can we avoid factionalism and what the founding fathers feared, "Interests."   

Besides, it is a beautiful vision, and worth all our talent to work for.  

Notes:  

The very word, seemingly coined by Cicero, just says re-tie as in what coheres. Religion is a reflection of the human tendency to organize perceptions into wholes that confer meaning on actions. In this way (and others) science too is a religion, as is humanism.  

See McNeil, The Rise of the West, a very helpful large picture. Second edition revised . Realize that the normal flow, hunter-gather to agricultural to industrial to digital is the technical level. On top of this is the level of ownership and governance which shows strong continuity across the phases. This strong continuity of elite management is at least as important as the technical level if we are to understand the current world dilemma.  

See Raymond Williams The Country and the City for an analysis of elite continuity as England shifted from agriculture to Industry.  

See the extensive literature on network theory, for example Castels, the Rise of the Network Society, Howard Rheingold Smart Mobs, David Skoble, forthcoming.  

See Mary Poovey's extraordinary book, The History of the Modern Fact, and the more recent paper, where the phrase is used, Can numbers insure honesty? Unrealistic expectations and the US accounting scandal.  

A simple comparison across years of the wealth of the Fortune 400 shows increase faster than that of GDP. There is much evidence of the wealth and income skewing, with an emerging consensus that the effect is increasing.

The Civil War in the US was a similar “distraction” as the US economy was industrializing, and corporatizing. The Civil War led to the bureaucratization of the Federal Government, and standardization in manufacturing. But overwhelmingly the difficulty of assimilating the amount of death and crippling, added to the messy post slavery issues, scrambled everyone’s mind.

I am playing off of Immanuel Wallerstine’s research on The World System, but could also start with Braudel’s history of capitalism and commerce in the Mediterranean.

See for example Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden. He wrote about American culture from his position as history professor at MIT.

See the very important and helpful book Phillip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: how economics became a cyborg science. He shows how technical specialties added together to crate systems science for the support of the technocrats running WW2, and how that base was used to set the US research agenda after the war. Further he shows how the logical tendency within economic theory, especially on the math and systems side, is to regard the entire economy as s single machine. The problem with it being single is that the only real game in town (the world) is who owns it.

Locke’s key move was to state that private property was the basis for legitimizing and safeguarding the responsible self. He was no democrat. See the Article on Locke

Q&A With FCC Chairman Powell

See for example IOANNES PAULUS PP. II essay on work.

Phrase used by Lewis Mumford in his book by that title.

Christopher Lasch, in his The Only True Heaven, provides a history of social criticism in the US, and each generation the critics get I right, and it makes no difference. The system rolls on. He shows why the lower middle class, working class are turning against the democratic-technical- bureaucratic consensus.

The history of science is going through some remarkable growth. The books mentioned earlier by Poovey and Mirowski show this, as does the broad and fundamental work of Bruno Latour.

The simple story is that the Middle East was swamped by struggle for empire from 3000 BC till Christ. Who ever won was assumed to have the better god, and my god was better than yours. This lasted down till our own times. But there are some details. The Jews, feeling the oppression of the connection between the city and the cosmos, walked out, and declared that god’s relationship was with the tribe. The dialectics of this led towards a more universalistic humanism, with humor and compassion. But the politics forced Israel towards kingship. The prophets, more rural, rebelled at this. Jesus emerges as a new kind of leader saying, “ah ha, the relation is just god to tribe, but god to individual.” Christianity spread through the marginalized people of the ME and the eastern Mediterranean, till Constantine, for political reason took on Christianity as a religious system of meaning to lend coherence to the declined roman Empire. The marginalized in the ME found themselves now facing a Christianity aligned with empire and political power. Mohammad was the new reformer who asked for simple justice in exchange for a simple belief in god. Christianity went on to form the soul of the West, and the world’s marginalized people could either sign up, or chose Islam. The Enlightenment and science emerged as an alternative for an intellectual, not financial, elite.

That world leads to the Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Taintor, or Collapse, Jarrad Diamond. All hope for science, technology and civilization would be lost is a sea of blood and resistance.

Douglass Carmichael
doug@dougcarmichael.com
www.dougcarmichael.com
blog at http://bubbler.net/dougcarmichael
Posted by Jock Gill at April 6, 2005 2:47 PM | TrackBack