Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis (31 page)

If the political religions of the last century renewed Christian beliefs, secular humanism today is no different. Darwinist thinkers such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are militant opponents of Christianity.
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Yet their atheism and humanism are versions of Christian concepts. As a defender of Darwinism, Dawkins is committed to the view that humans are like other animal species in being ‘gene machines’ ruled by the laws of natural selection. He asserts nevertheless that humans, uniquely, can defy these natural laws: ‘We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.’ In affirming human uniqueness in this way, Dawkins relies on a Christian world-view. The same is true of Dennett, who has spent much of his career labouring to show how scientific materialism can be reconciled with a form of free will – a project that would scarcely occur to someone from a culture not moulded by Christianity.

Pre-Christian philosophers such as the Epicureans speculated about free will. But it only became a central issue in western philosophy with the rise of Christianity and has never been prominent in non-western philosophies that do not separate humans so radically from other animals. When secular thinkers ponder free will and consciousness they nearly always confine themselves to humans, but why assume these attributes are uniquely human? In taking for granted a categorical difference between humans and other animals these rationalists show their view of the world has been formed by faith. The comedy of militant unbelief is in the fact that the humanist creed it embodies is a by-product of Christianity.

Showing the origins of humanist beliefs in Christianity does not
prove they are mistaken, but it is not only humanist beliefs that are derived from Christianity. It is the whole framework of thought, and when the claim that humans are radically different from other animals is wrenched from its theological roots it is not just indefensible but virtually incomprehensible. Modern humanists think they are naturalists, who view all forms of life – including the human animal – as part of the material universe; but a genuinely naturalistic philosophy would not start by assuming humans have attributes other animals do not. Its point of departure would be that the evolutionary laws that govern other animals also govern humans. What ground – other than revealed religion – could there be for believing anything else?

Contemporary atheism is a Christian heresy that differs from earlier heresies chiefly in its intellectual crudity.
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This is nowhere clearer than in its view of religion itself. Marx held to a reductive view in which religion was a by-product of oppression; but he was clear it expressed the deepest human aspirations – it was not only the opiate of the masses but also ‘the heart of a heartless world’. The French Positivists wanted to replace Christianity by a ridiculous Religion of Humanity; but they understood that religion answered to universal human needs. Only a very credulous philosopher could believe that showing religion is an illusion will make it disappear. That assumes the human mind is an organ attuned to truth – a quasi-Platonic conception that is closer to religion than science and inconsistent with Darwinism. Yet such seems to be the view of contemporary unbelievers.

The chief significance of evangelical atheism is in demonstrating the unreality of secularization. Talk of secularism is meaningful when it refers to the weakness of traditional religious belief or the lack of power of churches and other religious bodies. That is what is meant when we say Britain is a more secular country than the United States, and in this sense secularism is an achievable condition. But if it means a type of society in which religion is absent, secularism is a kind of contradiction, for it is defined by what it excludes. Post-Christian secular societies are formed by the beliefs they reject, whereas a society that had truly left Christianity behind would lack the concepts that shaped secular thought.

Like other ideas, secularity has a history. Pre-Christian Europe lacked the distinction between the secular and the sacred in much the
same way that other polytheist cultures do. The world itself was sacred, and there could be no question of confining religion to a private sphere – the very idea of religion as a set of practices distinct from the rest of life was lacking. A domain separate from the sacred was recognized only when Augustine distinguished between the City of Man and the City of God. In this sense secular thinking is a legacy of Christianity and has no meaning except in a context of monotheism. In East Asia, polytheism has lived side by side with mystical philosophies in much the same way that the two coexisted in pre-Christian Europe, and the clash between science and religion that has polarized western societies has not taken place. It is no accident that Darwinism has not triggered culture-war in China or Japan.

As used by many of its contemporary advocates secularism is not so much a view of the world as a political doctrine. In this sense a secular state is one that banishes religion from public life while leaving people free to believe what they like. Secularism of this kind is consistent with religious belief, but it is mainly defended nowadays by rationalists who lament the renewed strength of religion in politics. They seem to have forgotten the political religions of the twentieth century and cannot have reflected on the fact that in the United States, a model secular regime, religion and politics are intertwined more closely than in any other advanced country. The unreality of this secularist stance does not come only from an ignorance of history. Those who demand that religion be exorcized from politics think this can be achieved by excluding traditional faiths from public institutions; but secular creeds are formed from religious concepts, and suppressing religion does not mean it ceases to control thinking and behaviour. Like repressed sexual desire, faith returns, often in grotesque forms, to govern the lives of those who deny it.

It would be comforting to think that the perversion of politics by repressed religion occurs only in totalitarian regimes. Yet democracies have displayed very similar tendencies. Even more than despotic regimes, liberal states have tended to see the violence they have inflicted as morally admirable. Tzvetan Todorov, the French historian who grew up in Stalinist Bulgaria and has written illuminatingly on the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps, has noted this tendency in the context of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

Atomic bombs killed fewer people than the famine in the Ukraine, fewer than the Nazis slaughtered in the Ukraine and Poland. But what the bombs and the slaughters have in common is that their perpetrators all thought they were but a means to achieve a good. However, the bombs have another feature: they are a source of pride to those who made and dropped them … whereas totalitarian crimes, even if they were considered by their perpetrators to be useful and even praiseworthy political acts, were kept secret … Both the Soviet and the Nazi leadership knew that the world would damn them if it knew exactly what they had done. They were not wrong, because as soon as their crimes were revealed they were treated as the emblems of absolute evil. Things are quite different in the case of the atomic bombs, and for that very reason, even if the crime is less grave, the moral mistake of the people who killed in the name of democracy is greater.
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The loss of life inflicted in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not the largest in the Second World War – more civilians were killed in the fire bombing of Tokyo than in either of the cities on which atomic bombs were dropped, for example – but it illustrates Todorov’s point. Liberal democracies are not only willing to commit acts that when perpetrated by despotic regimes are condemned as signs of barbarism – they are ready to praise these acts as heroic. It may be that such attacks on civilian populations can be justified if they shortened the war and contributed to the destruction of abhorrent regimes. Historians differ on their effects; the issue remains open. But if an attack of this kind can be defended it is only as a hideous necessity, not a triumphant display of higher virtue.

Liberalism is often described as a sceptical creed. The description hardly does justice to the missionary zeal with which it has been promoted. Liberalism is a lineal descendant from Christianity and shares the militancy of its parent faith. The ferocity with which liberal societies have treated their enemies cannot be accounted for in terms of self-defence alone. Liberal societies are worth defending, for they embody a type of civilized life in which rival beliefs can coexist in peace. When they become missionary regimes this achievement is put at risk. In waging war to promote their values actually existing liberal societies are corrupted. This is what happened when torture, whose prohibition was the result of an Enlightenment campaign that
began in the eighteenth century, was used at the start of the twenty-first as a weapon in an Enlightenment crusade for universal democracy. Preserving the hard-won restraints of civilization is less exciting than throwing them away in order to realize impossible dreams. Barbarism has a certain charm, particularly when it comes clothed in virtue.

During the past twenty years western governments, led by America, have tried to export a version of liberal values to the world. These policies have been distinguished by the nebulous grandeur of their goals, but the overall aim was a mutation in the nature of war and power, which would come about as a result of the universal adoption of democracy. The attempt to remake the international system has had effects similar to those of previous Utopias. The disaster that continues to unfold in Iraq is the result of an entire way of thinking, and it is this that must be abandoned.

New thought is needed, but it must renew an old tradition. The pursuit of Utopia must be replaced by an attempt to cope with reality. We cannot return to the writings of the realist thinkers of the past with the hope that they will resolve all our dilemmas.
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The root of realist thinking is Machiavelli’s insight that governments exist, and must achieve all of their goals in a world of ceaseless conflict that is never far from a state of war. Despite the distance between Renaissance Italy and the present, this continues to be true; but the implications of Machiavelli’s insight change according to circumstances, and
even in their time the realist theories of recent generations were seriously flawed. Yet it is from realism more than from any other school that we can learn how to think about current conflicts.

Realism is the only way of thinking about issues of tyranny and freedom, war and peace that can truly claim not to be based on faith and, despite its reputation for amorality, the only one that is ethically serious. This is, no doubt, why it is viewed with suspicion. Realism requires a discipline of thought that may be too austere for a culture that prizes psychological comfort above anything else, and it is a reasonable question whether western liberal societies are capable of the moral effort that is involved in setting aside hopes of world-transformation. Cultures that have not been shaped by Christianity and its secular surrogates have always harboured a tradition of realist thought, which is likely to be as strong in future as it has been in the past. In China, Sun Tzu’s
Art of War
is a bible of realist strategy, and Taoist and Legalist philosophies contain powerful currents of realist thinking, while in India, Kautilya’s writings on war and diplomacy have a similar place. Machiavelli’s writings were a scandal because they subverted the claims of Christian morality. They have not had the same explosive force in non-Christian cultures, where realist thinking comes more easily. In post-Christian liberal democracies it has been political and intellectual elites, more than the majority of voters, that have favoured war as an instrument for improving the world; but public opinion still finds realist thinking distasteful. Can the task of staving off perennial evils satisfy a generation weaned on unrealizable dreams? Perhaps it prefers the romance of a meaningless quest to coping with difficulties that can never be finally overcome. But this has not always been so, and only a couple of generations ago realist thinking enabled western governments to prevail in conflicts far more dangerous than any they have yet had to face in the present century.

It was realism rather than secular faith that allowed liberal democracies to defeat Nazism and contain communism. The long secret telegram that George F. Kennan sent to Washington in 1946, which shaped the policy that averted nuclear disaster during the Cold War while preventing the expansion of Soviet power, did not seek to work up a frenzy of rectitude. It urged that the Soviet system be studied ‘with the same courage, detachment, objectivity and the same
determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it’ as a doctor studies an unruly and unreasonable patient. It did not take for granted that the Soviet elites were ruled by ideology, or always reasonable. Instead it warned against being infected by their irrationality: ‘The greatest danger that can befall us … is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.’
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Though the dangers are different, Kennan’s style of thinking is urgently needed today. Dealing with terrorism and proliferation is not a job for missionaries or crusaders. The heady certainty of faith, which sees every crisis as a heaven-sent opportunity to save humanity, is ill-suited to dealing with dangers that can never be defused. In times of danger, stoical determination and intellectual detachment are more useful qualities, and at its best realism embodied them.