Good in the name of God

I have to say, this Ian Buruma op-ed, Religion as a force for good, read my mind in relation to the events of the past few days. Another rebellion civil society against an autocracy coalescing around the predominant religion of a society. What's surprising? The Iranian revolution against the Shah, the Christian led protests against the dictatorship of Syngman Rhee (himself a Christian) in South Korea, Buddhist protests against the persecution of the government of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, the role of liberation theology across Latin America. The list goes on. Of course, religion has also been implicated in horror, and given the imprimatur of godliness to abomination, whether the accusation was infidel, apostate, takfir or heathen.

Religious institutions are universal. Even cultures which we perceive to be rather secular, such as that of China, has had a ubiquitous religious dimension. The last sacrifice to Heaven by the Emperor occurred early in the 20th century, continuing a tradition which spanned over 2,000 years. It should not be a surprising that when concerted social pressures or changes occur they often are most quickly and powerfully channeled through religious avenues. In Evolution for Everyone David S. Wilson made a sharp distinction between the "horizontal" and "vertical" aspects of religion. As an atheist Wilson praised the horizontal aspects, social cohesion, within (and sometimes without) group altruism, the maintenance of community. Nevertheless on factual grounds he can not sign on to the vertical dimension, the attachment to supernatural powers as the raison d'être of the whole system. Rather, Wilson favors the emergence of social institutions which offer the benefits of the horizontal dimension of religion without the necessity of the vertical. I am skeptical of the possibility of this because one of the major movements which seemed to have been able to successfully mimic, at least for a time, the social power of religion was Communism, and that movement too tended to have a vertical aspect. Only this time the "higher power" was the inevitable forces of history which lead to the proletarian utopia. Until that utopia could emerge of course the prophets of the cult would hold the levers of power and make the appropriate compromise with the world as it was (e.g., the deemphasis on international Communist revolution in order to focus on the Soviet model). Though the vertical dimension of Communism was not supernatural, it certainly had a metaphysical, almost god-like quality. Though men like Stalin or Lenin were not theoretically gods, the cults of personality came to resemble the adulation given to the sacerdotal kings of old (Kim Jong-il's birth supposedly heralded the blooming of flowers in winter!).

The point is that you can't get something without offering something. Radicals of all stripes tend to be enraptured by the vision thing; sometimes the vision is divine, and sometimes it is corporeal. Often the boundary between heaven and earth is transcended. The same cognitive elements are likely operative with only minor modifications whether the object of worship is heavenly or earthly. Just as the religious will defy incredible odds which seem to verge on insanity, so political radicals may enter into quixotic quests which no one in their right mind would dare risk. Like a million flowers blooming and dying most of these shots into the dark fail & fade from memory, but some few take hold and catch fire and sweep across the ages. Questing in such a manner is not rational, practical or even necessarily sane, but I would hold that in such behavior lay the seeds of much of our species' greatness. I have already stated that religion, and ideological surety of any sort, tends to increase the deviation from conventional behavior, whether for good or ill. Men have been enslaved and freed in the name of God; workers have been sent to the gulag or uplifted in the name of the revolution. Though the mean may not change, cultural evolution often needs the impulse of perturbations and shocks, so perhaps one might wonder if change is the rational outcome of our irrational impulses.