Part 2: Religion, Politics, and Beyond

Religion is the crux. It's been a major feature of every human culture that's ever existed, and, apart from the notion of "culture" itself, it's the broadest, most inclusive cultural category available, spanning nations, languages, and ethnicities. Those within its embrace vary in the degree of their belief ("faith") or involvement, but for them all, it's much more than the simple credulity that is often all that outsiders can see. It's an entire imaginative world, that includes all forms of human creativity, calls together regular communal rituals and gatherings, marks and celebrates the cycles of nature and life, and is both embedded in concrete, practical life and gives form to the abstractions of right and wrong, purpose and meaning.

But, some five centuries or so ago, there began a process that has eroded this imaginative world in the culture of the West, or so it's widely seen -- substituting, for the first time in history, a largely non-religious or secular culture for religion's over-arching capstone. This happened because a system for acquiring or constructing practical knowledge -- what eventually became science, in other words, and its associated application, technology -- detached itself from that capstone and achieved remarkable practical success.

But then what became of the imaginative strand of the capstone -- art, ritual, community celebration, not to mention the abstractions: good, bad, purpose, meaning? In part, its components also detached. Art that wasn't simply decorative, for example, has gone through a long period of self-questioning regarding its now isolated status -- is it its own end, or must it pursue "the new" as an end in itself? The abstractions devolved to individual choices, though it was hoped they'd be guided and still unified by those practical hallmarks of science, reason and evidence. And community, ritual, celebrations, life and natural cycle markers all came under the aegis of a new claimant to the cultural capstone, the secular state.

In fact, it was politics, with its Platonic ideal of the State, that combined with science-technology to form an alternative to religion, as a totality combining imagination and practice, and generating a new orthodoxy bearing an ironic resemblance to the older religious forms it usurped. It's the state now, not the Church, that is a major patron of the arts, and it's politics, not religion, that is a common theme in contemporary artistic expression. It's the state again, rather than the Church, that is the primary registrar of births, marriages, and deaths, and the state that sets national holidays marking the cycles of the year, or events of general importance. And it's the politics of the state, not the authority of the Church, that many now use to define and assert moral issues, as well as to find meaning and purpose in their lives.

This is the result of a process some centuries in development. Its first formulations appeared in seventeenth century Europe, and first open contestation between state-politics and religion in the continental Enlightenment, certainly in the French Revolution. Through the nineteenth century, both bourgeois democracy and socialist statism swelled in influence in the West, as traditional religion shrank into pockets of personal belief. And the twentieth century saw an apotheosis of the state-politics faith, in the form of grand Utopian-totalitarian efforts to force humanity to fit political designs at any cost. The cost, as we all know now, was vast, almost beyond belief. So those efforts failed, but the bourgeois democracy thread of the development took on some of their elements and prospered -- democratic processes proved to be an important safety valve, allowing an ameliorated state to be extended into ever more aspects of its citizens' lives, trading regulatory protection and various "free" goods and services for discretionary individual decision-making power. The contemporary Welfare State has thus become the new authority in all aspects of Western culture, to which religion, in any of its traditional forms, can only acquiesce, or at best offer forlorn and private resistance.

It's tempting, after noting how well this State resembles the functions and authority that used to characterize the Church, to think of expanding the idea of religion in order to include the new orthodoxy. It lacks a God as such, but if we take religion to be a system of moral order and meaning relying primarily on belief or assertion, then the faith in the State and its associated system of politics would qualify. This would certainly help explain the quasi-religious aura of piety and sanctity, of shame, indulgence, and conspicuous virtue, that surrounds the political orthodoxy's embrace of selective oppressions or eco-apocalypse as new causes to sustain it. But, for all of that, this risks obscuring the gap in modern culture left by the collapse of the traditional religious capstone. State-politics functions as only a stop-gap replacement in this condition, and its inadequacies have long been recognized as a malaise of the modern condition -- lately, they've become the basis of a widespread popular rejection of the orthodoxy and the elites that maintain it.

We've seen this sort of reformist rejection of elite institutions before, on scales large and small. The religious reformation against Papal elites in the seventeenth century, for example, or the French overthrow of the Ancien Regime in the eighteenth, are large-scale, and there are numerous lesser examples of movements ousting a sclerotic Establishment. These days, such struggles are often labelled "populist", but that can understate their significance -- their persistence and appearance across national boundaries suggests something deeper and more widespread than the periodic appeals of a charismatic politician. If that's so, it would be important to know what that "something" is -- and here, I want to propose the possibility that it represents finally an overt recognition that the long-standing attempt to substitute politics for religion as a cultural capstone is coming to an end.

What then is, or are, the alternatives? As you might expect, things get complicated at this point, but a couple of broad directions can be discerned. First, of course, is just a rejection of the rejection of religion -- that is, a re-assertion of the primacy of religious, rather than political, belief and its associated institutions in determining the structures of morality, meaning, and purpose. But this, given the overwhelming cultural dominance of the Orthodoxy in education, media, entertainment, and elsewhere, is sufficiently difficult that it practically forces those choosing this option into counter-cultures that reject the whole of the modern world. Without such a renunciation, the faith of those attempting this re-assertion tends to be thin, a kind of willed patina over the swirl of the everyday, rather than the deeply embedded way of life that religion used to provide. Many churches in the West these days, of course, simply follow the moral lead of the Orthodoxy in its political enthusiasms, and the various manifestations of latter-day spirituality are too diffuse and personal not be either co-opted or dismissed by that Orthodoxy. Still, even a patina provides some insulation from the swirl, and hence some chance at an alternative to those wavering enthusiasms. So the social phenomenon of religion, and not only in its fundamentalist forms, can still exhibit resistance to the encroachment of state politics on the cultural domains of meaning, value, and purpose.

But another direction is simply to deny the need for a unifying cultural capstone of any sort, whether political or religious. This is, after all, just the default position of most of us anyway -- we live, work, and dream with ordinary goals and attachments, not worrying about how to bring abstractions like practice and imagination into a meaningful harmony. And that's the case for the many who simply fall in, more or less unconsciously, with whatever passes for the orthodoxy of the time. But for those resisting the current orthodoxy, this simple default is more difficult, since now the questions involving meaning, purpose, and so on, must be confronted without the aid of an overarching cultural institution, whether Church or State. That is, this option of Reform requires a conscious refusal of both religion and state-politics as moral unifiers, often forcing its adherents to embrace versions of a heroic individualism, asserting personal codes of ethics and meaning in the face of a cold, inhuman, meaningless universe. And for many, that is not only sufficient, but admirable. For others, it appears a bit like whistling in the dark -- a posture, in other words, that can't be sustained, dependent on inherited cultural meanings that themselves are subject to the same erosion that's afflicted religion.

So, to summarize:

Religion, the cultural capstone that once held human collectivities together by fusing imagination and practice, has slowly collapsed with the development of a purely practical system of knowledge and technique. In place of religion and its associated institution, the Church, there appeared politics and its associated institution, the State. But these have been more like stop-gaps than real replacements, since politics, despite some terrible attempts, was never able to form the deep and complex roots in the human imagination that religion did. So, despite great material improvement, and a state ameliorated by democratic processes and welfare protections, there has arisen a widespread Reform movement in opposition to state-politics Orthodoxy. One strand of that opposition tries to re-assert the primacy of religion as a cultural capstone, while another strand simply rejects the need for a capstone at all, whether religion or politics, Church or State.

This leaves one further possibility for the Reformist alternative to Orthodoxy: accepting that a cultural capstone of some sort is both good and in the long term necessary, as the means of holding collectivities together on both practical and imaginative levels, but that neither Church nor State can provide that function any longer. And that, of course, leaves the question of what such a capstone might be. What follows are speculations.


First, it should be immanent.

Focused on this world, the only world -- where "this world" just refers to the sensuous world of perception. Among other things, this dispenses with the distinction between the perceived world and an external world -- the latter would simply be conceptual structures built on top of, or on the basis of, perception, and assessed in terms of their utility. And human nature is understood as simply a material system, like all such systems within this world -- in particular, as an evolved species like all such species, its primary distinctive feature being the complexity of its sound-based communication, on the basis of neural structures that knit individuals into cultural collectivities. This is the necessary support for the practical pillar of the capstone.


Second, it should be imagined.

That's not quite the right word, but others have other drawbacks. ("Aesthetic", for example, carries too much the suggestion of tasteful design or museum objet.) What's needed is some combination of dream, myth, and art -- private fiction, collective tapestry, and conscious/unconscious public creation. The key comes from art -- the idea of the frame. Whether literal or metaphorical, it's the frame that distinguishes art of any kind from the practical or usable surroundings, and in this way, it provides a critical feature for the imaginative pillar of the capstone.


Third, it should be encompassing.

Think again of the frame that defines art, lifting it out of its practical context. And then imagine expanding that frame so that it surrounds you, the observer -- transforms you, in fact, into a participant. Is that too hard? Consider the game -- like art, it's another example of an imaginative construct, but unlike art this one includes you, and requires your practical engagement. Of course, games are mere pastimes, temporary and unserious. But couldn't we imagine something like a game, or even a set of games, that, like art, has acquired a deeper meaning? What if it were mutable and on-going, extending across communities and generations? An "infinite game", perhaps? Such a thing, if it existed, might again be a cultural connection between everyday practice and imaginative meaning.


And fourth: it should be Utopic.

Not Utopian -- Utopic. Utopia, in whatever guise or level, appears only and ever on the imaginative horizon of the Utopic, something that recedes as it's approached. It's needed there -- it provides the vision that gives meaning to the structure as a whole. But the Utopic provides the much larger web of narrative and practice that provides value and purpose, unifying the whole as a cultural capstone. Stories of quests, struggles, mysteries, dragons, rituals of creation and play, gatherings in competition and cooperation, markers of natural cycles, and much more -- all are related and integrated through the imaginative construct of an idealized collectivity (and through its opposite, the dystopian sub-category, a nightmare collectivity).



Addenda:


On politics:

Politics is a crux too, of another kind than religion. It refers just to the machinations of power in human groups, meaning anything from a couple to a family, a workplace, a community, or a nation -- and as such, it's inevitable and inescapable. But it's not, or should not be, a substitute for a belief system. When it tries to become one, as it has by orthodox default with the ebbing of religious belief, then power and its machinations, just as inevitably, swells and spreads into ever more reaches of human reality. Ordinary affairs of life become subject to suspicious calculations, unique individuals are crammed into faceless identities, loves and hates are at the mercy of abstractions, and the cultural imagination of the collectivity as a whole is, to say the least, stunted. Better we try to face our lives without the support of any cultural unifier than we accept the political default of the Orthodoxy.

But better still might be to seek out a new structure, an immanent, encompassing ideal, say, that can provide the basis for a fusion of imagination and practice once again, as a space within which we can live, play, and work. What separates the Utopic from utopianism is precisely its refusal of politics.


On the natural and the artificial:

Conventionally opposed, these become nested categories in an immanent view. That is, the artificial is also natural -- just as ant hills or bird nests are natural products of natural species, so are human cities. In the human realm, nature in one aspect is contained within the artificial, in that it's managed or curated, as we see in the garden, the park, or the conservation area. But nature in its other, fuller aspect is the container, referring to everything that is outside of human management and control at any one time. It's nature in this sense that has the ultimate say, not just on all human designs and projects, but all human values and meanings as well. That's because everything human just is natural, as embedded in nature as any other natural phenomenon, and therefore subject to the same inexorable selection of what works, and what works better. This is the final determinant, in fact, even of the great moral abstractions of right and wrong, good and evil -- just as nature always extends beyond the limits of our knowledge at any one time, so does it exceed our moral consciousness at any one time. Our struggles within the limits of such finite awareness define what could be called not a Divine but a Darwinian Comedy.