Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis (34 page)

Myths are not true or false in the way scientific theories are true or false, but they can be more or less truthful in reflecting the enduring realities of human life. Most of the myths by which humans have lived have not been historical narratives of the sort that govern Christian and post-Christian cultures. The promise of liberation from time
in Plato and eastern religions is also a myth, but one that dispels the hope of a final triumph of good of the kind that has had such a baleful impact on the modern West.

Secular myths reproduce the narrative form of Christian apocalyptic, and if there is a way of tempering the violence of faith it must begin by questioning these myths. In secular thought science has come to be viewed as a vehicle of revelation, a repository of truth rather than a system of symbols that serves the human need to understand and control. Post-modern philosophies that view science as just one belief-system among many are too silly to be worth refuting at length – the utility of scientific knowledge is a brute fact that is shown in the increase of human power. Science is an instrument for forming reliable beliefs about the world. Religions are also human instruments, but they have other goals. The ideal goal of scientific inquiry may be an end-point at which human beliefs mirror the world in an all-embracing theory, and in science this ideal may be useful (even if it is also illusive). But why should religions aim for consensus? While true beliefs may be useful in our everyday dealings, doubts are more to the point in the life of the spirit. Religions are not claims to knowledge but ways of living with what cannot be known.

The collision between science and religion comes from the mistake that both have to do with belief. It is only in some strands of Christianity and Islam that belief has been placed at the heart of religion. In other traditions, religion has to do with the acceptance of mystery rather than catechisms or creeds. Science and religion serve different needs, which though they pull in different directions are equally human. In the contemporary world science has authority because of the power it confers. That is why fundamentalists ape its claims to literal truth – as in the cartoon science of creationism. Yet creationism is hardly more ridiculous than Social Darwinism, dialectical materialism or the theory that as societies become more modern they become more free or peaceful. These secular creeds are more unreasonable than any traditional faith, if only because they make a more elaborate show of being rational.

The most necessary task of the present time is to accept the irreducible reality of religion. In the Enlightenment philosophies that shaped the last two centuries, religion was a secondary or derivative aspect
of human life that will disappear, or cease to be important, when its causes are removed. Once poverty is eradicated and education universal, social inequality has been overcome and political repression is a thing of the past, religion will have no more importance than a personal hobby. Underlying this article of Enlightenment faith is a denial of the fact that the need for religion is generically human. It is true that religions are hugely diverse and serve many social functions – most obviously, as welfare institutions. At times they have also served the needs of power. But beyond these socio-political purposes, religions express human needs that no change in society can remove – for example the need to accept what cannot be remedied and find meaning in the chances of life. Human beings will no more cease to be religious than they will stop being sexual, playful or violent.

If religion is a primary human need it should not be suppressed or relegated to a netherworld of private life. It ought to be fully integrated into the public realm, but that does not mean establishing any one religion as public doctrine. Late modern societies harbour a diversity of world-views. There is little agreement on the worth of human life, the uses of sexuality, the claims of non-human animals or the value of the natural environment. Rather than tending towards a secular monoculture, the late modern period is unalterably hybrid and plural. There is no prospect of a morally homogeneous society, still less a homogenized world. In the future, as in the past, there will be authoritarian states and liberal republics, theocratic democracies and secular tyrannies, empires, city-states and many mixed regimes. No one type of government or economy will be accepted everywhere, nor will any single version of civilization be embraced by all of humanity.

It is time the diversity of religions was accepted and the attempt to build a secular monolith abandoned. Accepting that we have moved into a post-secular era does not mean religions can be freed of the restraints that are necessary for civilized coexistence. A central task of government is to work out and enforce a framework whereby they can live together. A framework of this kind cannot be the same for every society, or fixed for ever. It embodies a type of toleration whose goal is not truth but peace. When the goal of tolerance is truth it is a strategy that aims for harmony. It would be better to accept that harmony will never be reached. Better yet, give up the demand for
harmony and welcome the varieties of human experience. The
modus vivendi
between religions that has flourished intermittently in the past might then be renewed.
²⁰

The chief intellectual obstacle to coexistence among religions is a lack not of mutual understanding, but of self-knowledge. Matthew Arnold’s once-famous
Dover Beach
(1867) speaks of the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of Christianity – as if that meant the end of religion. The Victorian poet underestimated the urgency of the demand for myth. The Utopias of the past two centuries were deformed versions of the myths they denied, and if the last of them has perished in the deserts of Iraq it need not be mourned. The hope of Utopia spilt blood on a scale that traditional creeds cannot match, and the world is well rid of it.

The danger that goes with the death of secular hope is the rebirth of something like the faith-based wars of an older past. A renewal of apocalyptic belief is underway, which is unlikely to be confined to familiar sorts of fundamentalism. Along with evangelical revivals, there is likely to be a profusion of designer religions, mixing science and science fiction, racketeering and psychobabble, which will spread like internet viruses. Most will be harmless, but doomsday cults like those that led to the mass suicide in Jonestown and the attacks on the Tokyo subway may proliferate as ecological crisis deepens.

If the scientific consensus is accurate, the Earth may soon be different from the way it has been for millions of years, certainly since the appearance of humans. In one sense this is a genuinely apocalyptic prospect: while humans are unlikely to become extinct, the world in which they evolved is vanishing. In another sense the prospect is not apocalyptic at all. In wrecking the planetary environment humans are only doing what they have done innumerable times before on a local level. The global heating that is underway is one of several fevers the Earth has suffered, and survived, during its history. Though humans have triggered this episode, they lack the power to stop it. It may mean disaster for them and other species, but in planetary terms it is normal. This is likely to be too much reality for most people to bear, and as climate change runs its course we can expect a rash of cults in which it is interpreted as a human narrative of catastrophe and redemption. Apocalypse is, after all, an anthropocentric myth.

Happily, humanity has other myths, which can help it see more clearly. In the Genesis story humans were banished from paradise after eating from the Tree of Knowledge and had to survive by their labours ever after. There is no promise here of any return to a state of primordial innocence. Once the fruit has been eaten there is no going back. The same truth is preserved in the Greek story of Prometheus, and in many other traditions. These ancient legends are better guides to the present than modern myths of progress and Utopia.

The myth of the End has caused untold suffering and is now as dangerous as it has ever been. In becoming a site for projects of world-transformation political life became a battleground. The secular religions of the last two centuries, which imagined that the cycle of anarchy and tyranny could be ended, succeeded only in making it more violent. At its best, politics is not a vehicle for universal projects but the art of responding to the flux of circumstances. This requires no grand vision of human advance, only the courage to cope with recurring evils. The opaque state of war into which we have stumbled is one such evil.

The modern age has been a time of superstition no less than the medieval era, in some ways more so. Transcendental religions have many flaws and in the case of Christianity gave birth to savage violence, but at its best religion has been an attempt to deal with mystery rather than the hope that mystery will be unveiled. In the clash of fundamentalisms this civilizing perception has been lost. Wars as ferocious as those of early modern times are being fought against a background of increased knowledge and power. Interacting with the struggle for natural resources, the violence of faith looks set to shape the coming century.

1.
Joseph de Maistre,
St Petersburg Dialogues, or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence
, translated by Richard A. Lebrun, Montreal and Kingston, London and Buffalo, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993, p. 145.

1.
E. M. Cioran,
History and Utopia
, London, Quartet Books, 1996, p. 81.

2.
Norman Cohn,
The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages
, London, Secker and Warburg, 1957; completely revised edition, London, Paladin, 1970. Cohn’s interpretation of medieval millenarianism has been criticized by David Nirenberg,
Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages
, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1996, pp. 3–4.

3.
R. H. Crossman (ed.),
The God that Failed
, New York and Chichester, Sussex, Columbia University Press, 2001; first published by Hamish Hamilton, London, 1950. The book contained essays by Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, André Gide, Louis Fischer and Stephen Spender.

4.
See the brilliant study by Jonathan Spence,
God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdomof Hong Xiuquan
, London, HarperCollins, 1996, p. xix.

5.
ibid., p. xxi.

6.
See Michael Barkun,
Disaster and Millennium
, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974, for a study of millenarian movements as responses to a breakdown in normal patterns of perception.

7.
The literature on Christian origins is vast and highly controversial. However, a profoundly learned and authoritative picture of Jesus as a
Jewish charismatic teacher can be found in Geza Vermes,
Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels
, London, William Collins, 1973, republished by the Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1981. For an examination of Jesus’ birth, see Vermes,
The Nativity: History and Legend
, London, Penguin, 2006. A. N. Wilson presents a view of Jesus similar to that of Vermes in his excellent book,
Jesus
, London, Pimlico, 2003. The central role of eschatological beliefs in the teaching of Jesus is shown in Norman Cohn,
Cosmos, Chaos and World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith
, 2nd edn, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1995, Chapter 11.

8.
Albert Schweitzer,
The Quest for the Historical Jesus
, New York, Dover, 2006, p. 369. This passage from Schweitzer is cited by Philip Rieff in his brilliant posthumously published
Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How it Has Been Taken Away from Us
, New York, Pantheon Books, 2007, p. 69.

9.
For the possibility that Zoroaster may have believed the outcome of the struggle between light and dark to be uncertain, see R. C. Zaehner,
The Teachings of the Magi
, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976.

10.
Hans Jonas,
The Gnostic Religion
, 2nd edn, Boston, Beacon Press, 1963, Chapter 13, pp. 320–40. For other authoritative views of Gnosticism, see Kurt Rudolph,
Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism
, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1987; and Elaine Pagels,
The Gnostic Gospels
, New York, Random House, 1989.

11.
For an overview of the heresy of the Free Spirit, see Cohn,
The Pursuit of the Millennium
, especially Chapters 8 and 9. Cohn’s account of the Free Spirit has been criticized in Robert E. Lerner,
The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages
, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1991.

12.
Cohn,
The Pursuit of the Millennium, p.
13.

13.
F. Dostoyevsky, ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, in
A Gentle Creature and Other Stories
, trans. Alan Myers, Oxford, Oxford University Press World’s Classics, 1995, p. 125.

14.
I. Berlin, ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will’, in
The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas
, London, John Murray, 1990, pp. 211–12.

15.
David Hume, ‘The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, in Henry D. Aitken (ed.),
Hume’s Moral and Political Philosophy
, London and New York, Macmillan, 1948, p. 374.

16.
See Gustavo Goritti,
The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru
, Chapel Hill NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

17.
Ernest Lee Tuveson,
Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role
, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1968, pp. 6–7.

18.
Christopher Hill,
The World Turned Upside Down
, London, Temple Smith, 1972, p. 77.