The Futility of Perfection, or the Two Secularisms

The religious and the secular left love perfection and perfectability, in the next world if not in this. I think we should blame the Persians and the Greeks equally for this dualist concept of perfection: Jesus as Apollo and Ahura Mazda, with all that evil neatly bundled into an alter ego called Satan. HaShem certainly wasn't perfect (all that temper).

My take is that there are two different types of liberalism, with different roots, and you can trace them back to the two definitive revolutions of the West, the English revolution (the 1688 compromise, rather than 1642) which in turn inspired the American, and the French revolution of 1789.

The tragedy of the latter is that the earlier attempt at a French revolution -the Fronde of the 1640s - failed and here the Cavaliers won. Louis XIV's autocracy, unlike previous divine right of kings, had a whiff of insecure totalitarian reaction about it. Couple that with Catholicism and a love of Rousseau, when the Revolution happens it takes the form of a Christian heresy. Progress, mediated by the State, replaces Christ mediated by the Church, seeking the perfectibility of man, a blank slate with only a few basic drives on which society can write its writ. It infected the Anglo Saxon world as well, in the form of Utilitarianism, the ideological root of capitalism. Let us call this hard progressivism, it encompasses liberalism with a small as well as capital L (and thus most modern so called conservatism, in thrall to capitalist ideology) as well as socialism.

The other tradition is sceptical, empirical, agnostic rather than atheist, and intuitively understands that perfection is an oxymoron and that paradox is human. It believes in human nature, and is sceptical but not despairing. It reflects the mentality of real science, but unsurprisingly has few intellectual supporters among philosophers: Locke and Adam Smith and even Kant to some degree, definitely Popper, but not even J.S.Mill (in thrall to Utilitarianism). Add Unamuno, Santayana and Montaigne from the continental tradition. It is embodied in both the British and American constitutions, even if the Founding Fathers were intellectually in thrall to hard progressivism (pursuit of happiness, my arse). It works, it picks up the pieces after hard progressivism and religious idolatry have wreaked their havoc, but it is uninspiring.

It reflects the findings of sociobiology in that there is a human nature, there is both original sin and original virtue and they evolved in man’s self interest; it does not reflect them, however, that unlike religious or secular faiths it fails to satisfy two dark residues of our primate ancestry: tribalism, and the fact that religion has clearly evolved as a highly successful meme to inspire group solidarity. Soft liberalism erodes that belief, not only because of scepticism about dubious mythologies, but also because if you realise that religion is a powerful meme for group survival, and that humans are good at mythmaking, surely that makes it hard to believe. It does not however substitute anything else, so nihilism and hedonistic materialism to pass the time.

Whether we like it or not, the capitalist game has another generation or two to run, until all those Chinese and Indian peasants are rich and bored , if it can be made environmentally possible (yes, it probably can). All the alternatives tried for capitalism in the last two hundred years have been even more disastrous. Meanwhile the West can still do something it is good at, which is creativity. If the East becomes materialistic, the West has a spiritual and ethical challenge. The problem now is not love and compassion – there is plenty of that around, in secular society – it is how to inspire, and how to manage our tribalism and the “faith” that underpins it. I fear that freed of Enlightenment shackles a Christian revival would be just as bloody as all the hard progressive -isms.

Two thoughts: the psyche works on stories, and there is a magnificent and mysterious tale in the evolutionary epic, as yet unexploited: only Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke seem to have attempted it. The other is to take a lesson from Buddhism, and cultivate insight to overcome the dark seduction of faith.

Doubt

Discussion on a forum between a committed Christian, expressing doubts, and an equally committed and far more certain atheist. Despite the fact that I cannot subscribe to dying-and-reborn gods, I felt much more empathy for the Christian

I think (for what it's worth) that doubt is integral to thinking western man. That is because critical analysis to arrive at an objective (Socratic) truth is core part of our culture. If doubt is not present then reason is merely the sophistry of the lawyer, which is what seemed to happen in the Agora before Socrates came along (and plenty since, as well). No wonder other Athenians found him insufferable.

Add to that scientific method, really a product of the modern West (Greeks would not have got their hands dirty doing experiments - slaves' work) and then all knowledge is provisional, until the next theory comes along which fits the data better.

I will agree on the following resulting from this long tale:
- science has created a history and explanation of the universe from 10^-33 seconds after the Big Bang which is far more persuasive than anything else on offer;
- "The God of the Gaps" is very 19th century. All that is left is why anything at all, and why are the laws of physics just right for life to exist;
- there is a core of morality that is from natural selection from our primate past (including altruism for other members of our group, but not for mankind or the universe in general) but it does not go very far. There is still plenty of room for variation in ethics;

I suppose one might accept on this basis the limited position of a Logical Positivist, in other words believe in what science tells you (but it's provisional knowledge, remember), all other questions including those referring to God are meaningless. That's not the same as denying the existence of God.

But on deeper examination it gets worse. The foundations of science are still shaky - despite lots of theoretical attempts little better than simple induction. Goedel's theorem suggests that any system cannot be explained entirely within itself but must have external axioms, and in the case of Western society this includes Judeo-Christian ethics, whether you are a believer or not.

We believe in science only because it works, so incidentally you cannot be a Creationist and use modern technology (or indeed an Islamist) without total hypocrisy.

But if something is true just because it works then it opens a Pandora's Box. Do I believe in something because it is on the winning side? In some areas, perhaps, but in ethics? Look at where that led Nietszche and his followers. For the past two centuries atheistic philosophies and cultures seemed to be winning, but now it is not so sure - so does one switch sides? Why do I find that immoral? Anyway there is no certainty what will win - most intellectuals in the 1930s were fascists or communists

My conclusion from all this is that agnosticism is the most science-compatible conclusion on belief, but it does not get you much further than logical positivism, and you need to be very strong willed. It has all the motivatory power of working on a supermarket checkout. A God who is crucified and resurrected is not excluded by induction - it is a one off event - but to me it still fails other tests, notably Occam's razor.

No logical positivist or purely atheist society has ever existed, they have served other goals, such as progress, historical necessity, nationalism or just satisfying the individual ego. These goals seem to be less empirically effective than God - and especially God seen as universal love. How this can be reconciled with science, we still do not know, but accepting mystical experience, even on an agnostic basis, may be a start.

P.S An exasperated friend once said "You do not know, but you will dogmatically insist that others don't know as well!" He may have had a point!

Thoughts on Evil

Cultures are competing groups, and each of them has an ethical system to ensure internal cohesion. Some ethics are common to our primate ancestry - all societies consider killing within a group (murder) as highly evil, but sanctioned killing outside the group (war) as meritorious, chimpanzees do the same. Mostly, however, each culture has its own definitions of good and evil based on its ethics. Thus for a medieval Christian and a modern Muslim it would be evil not to kill an apostate: for most of us today it would be evil to do so. The only objective measure of "good" and "evil" on this basis is cultural success or failure. Even today many Christians believe that virtuous unbelievers will go to hell, that seems a pretty evil idea to me.

Cultural competition is thus not different from a wider view than biological competition through natural selection, the latter shows altruistic behaviour as well as unspeakable cruelty. The world is amoral, there is not an ounce of justice except as created by our own myths.

Trouble is, if you believe this, you end up either a cynic or a fascist. Is there any way out? Possibly it seems in preaching universal love and damn the consequences, as Jesus and Buddha, and many mystics seems to have done. It doesn't work very well, but what other hope is there?

Religion and Reason

Religion is unreasonable? Muslims at least are honest about this, you do what Allah tells you. Christians and Jews claim to combine faith and reason, and Buddhism claims to be a rational faith.

Gödel's theorem - no system can be completely and logically described within itself. There have to be external axioms, which are taken as given, and the value of reason is to clarify these axioms ("faith") and follow through on their implications. At least Christians are honest about this, although what is annoying with many of them is that they will not actually debate i.e be willing to consider their own arguments, but are constantly trying to "save" the rest of us. There is also the annoying Abrahamic attitude of there being only one answer to the question - comes of having these male gods who are serial thinkers, I suppose.

Secularists are more disingenuous. Their ethical assumptions are clearly Christian, in the West (but not clear to most of them) or from the Judaic heresy of Marxism. Oh so rational Buddhists are no better - there is not a shred of scientific evidence for reincarnation or a law of karma.

If you cannot agree on axioms, then reason cannot settle the argument, only the brute force of which competing meme is more successful. The logical bases of the scientific method are decidedly dodgy- despite all the philosophers of science such as Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend we have not really got away from induction. But the thing about science is that it works, and one of its results is a history of the universe from 10^-33 seconds after the Big Bang which is far more persuasive than anything religion comes up with. It does not answer "Why?" but the mainstream religions are hardly more persuasive (Why did God decide on Creation? Why God? - infinite regress).

For several centuries now secular modernity has had the winning cards, but that may now be changing as secular society becomes more decadent and possibly more infertile as well . To change to the (possibly) winning side just because it is winning hardly seems to be ethical, however, and for being morally disreputable is roughly on a par with Pascal's wager (believe in God, just in case) . Just hope for a new synthesis which transcends all these partial answers, I suppose.

Religion, Trust and Capitalism

I don’t think capitalism has much to do with religion – Weber was wrong about capitalism and the Protestant ethic even when he wrote it, Catholic Belgium was the second industrial country after Britain. It does, however, have to do with social structure, and that is a legacy of history. Between being the author of the vapid “End of History” and being a neocon (Torment Be Upon Them), Francis Fukuyama wrote a very good book which was hardly noticed. In “Trust” he distinguishes between different types of capitalism, depending upon levels of social trust. · North and West Europe , Anglo-Saxondom overseas, and Japan are high trust societies. Basically one tends to trust strangers unless they give cause not to do so. Duty to the wider society overrides family solidarity. These seem to be the only societies which can develop and run well impersonal capitalist organisations: Sumitomo dates to 1653, and Siemens invented the electrical industry and is still alive and well. Interestingly these are all societies with a feudal history – there were lords and serfs, but even the lords had duties as well as rights, and the serfs were never fully slaves, they owned land and had some rights. America and Australai were never feudal, but inherited the social assumptions which underly e.g English common law. · Italy (never properly feudalised), China and India are a second group: arbitrary power (even the British, in colonial guise) but tough and tenacious family structures. This provides family firm capitalism: lots of creative firms, and everything that is not done at that level has to be done, not so well, by the state. Duty to the wider society does not override family solidarity, corruption is a social problem, but effective capitalism of this sort can take root · The Orthodox Christian world is heir to the arbitrary rule of Byzantium. You do what the Tsar says, unless he is not looking – in which case anarchy rules. Social and family solidarity are weak. You have to rule by state fear (tyrants) or private fear (mafias). Its fate to date, despite high culture and centuries trying to modernise, seems to be semi-development. The medieval West was never like Islam, because the Caliphate was not feudal and was more like Byzantium (which was, after all, the only model open to it). Like all sweeping models, there are bits that don’t fit, like Latin America ( a mix of all these elements, but mainly the second and third). German "mittelstand" companies are like Italian firms. Though still stuck in semi-development, Greece and Turkey are not Russia. South Korea has through intensive effort moved from being Confucian to an imitation Japan (but it is still a very stressed place). China seems to be able to run reasonably efficient state firms, while India cannot. But it explains a lot, such as relative economic success by country of east European countries post-1989. Just a thought - are clan based societies the least efficient of all (Arab societies, Africa): no allegiance to the state at all, but the social unit is too large to be as effective economically as the family. This implies that China has a good future as Greater Northern Italy, one of the most developed parts of Europe (southern Italy is Byzantine and poor). There will be storms on route, and I think a financial crash is almost certain at some stage, because overinvestment is producing assets which will never pay an adequate return. It won’t derail things for long though – the Asian crisis of 1998 did not. Politically I doubt if the highly intelligent Chinese will stand for their present system of governance for ever. The boom can continue for a long time, because there are still around 600 million poor peasants and it is the rise in productivity between farm and almost any form of industrial employment which produces rapid growth. During the "trente glorieuses" of 1945-75 there were an awful lot of European and Japanese peasants to take off the farm. Growth will shift to inland regions, but that mirrors the regional nature in capitalism in most big economies: European development started in the UK and hasn’t got to Montenegro yet. It has already started, with textiles (the low wage industry) moving from the coast to either Sichuan or Hunan, or to Vietnam. This is if there is not a major environmental crisis, a big if.

West v Islam: China Wins

It is pretty obvious that Islam v West will only accelerate the rise to dominance of China, just as WW1 did for America. "For three hundred years round eyes around the Atlantic have run the world - but now it is returning to normal"

For those (mainly American) arguing that the decline of Europe and its awful demographics is due to lack of religion, some thoughts. Yes there has been religion in China, but of the personal pick-and-mix variety closer to New Age than the patriarchal G_d of the Middle East. Meanwhile the state ideology/ethics was always pretty secular, Confucian gentlemen regarding Buddhism and Daoism as a bit vulgar

Confucian ethics did however focus on the primacy of the family, and the Chinese did not die out, indeed they bred at an indecent rate for most of their history. This does not affect China today - as the one child family policy is relaxed their demographics will still look bad, look at Hong Kong and Singapore today, but then there are an awful lot of Chinese . But does this suggest that a secular ideology that encourages reproduction may be possible? G_d or her absence forbid that we should all become Confucians, but the problem may simply be that liberal secular Western values are dysfunctional, but other secular ethics may not be.

We will still feel nostalgic for America when China takes over, however. At the moment it is the most successful fascist state in history (after all, what do you call a ruthless one-party state with a thriving capitalist economy? Certainly not communist). Even if democratic, China may still be a pretty cruel and amoral place, it has been for most of its history: obey your parents and the state does not leave much room for charity. There's something to be said for Christian ethics, even if you cannot believe in the stuff

Islamophobia

"Islamophobia" is the flavour of the month in Britain, especially since former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw criticised the wearing of the eye-slit-only niqab

I mentioned Oswald Spengler the German philosopher in a previous post. His namesake is a columnist on the Asia Times On Line, and a pleasure to read: reasonable reactionary intellectuals are even rarer than the left wing variety. This post is an intellectual tour de force, but like most theology, misses the point.

Islamofascism has nothing to do with religion. People will believe in any rubbish if they think it is a winning cause. The previous generation of Middle Eastern pin-up fanatics were secular marxist-fascists in the Baathist/Al Fatah mode. Extremist Islam is totalitarian nonsense just like Marxism or Fascism (or fundamentalist Christianity)

The niqab is not traditional Islamic wear over most of the Muslim world, and nor did any of the previous generation of immigrants wear it. It is an in-your-face (sorry about the pun) badge of rebellion and contempt for the host society. Meanwhile it is up to moderate Muslims to fight Islamists just as the democratic left fought Communism, and the democratic right fought Fascism.

Meanwhile the Islamists have one legitimate gripe: the decadence of the secular West. The combination of work-all-hours Capitalism and radical feminism means that the family is devalued and people will not or cannot have children. European demographics, as shown in the previous but one post, are a disaster. If secular society is finally overcoming its PC taboos on multiculturalism, thank goodness, then it also needs to reclaim the primacy of the family, and to stop uncontrolled immigration, and not leave them to the reactionary right.

Musings on God: half of Her is missing

I am not a theologian, and much of this post may seem pompous and amateurish, but here goes

There are two general attributes ascribed to God (as if He/She could be described…) – transcendence and immanence. I will call them the God of power/magic and the inner light, the God of love. Neither are in themselves good or bad. The abuse that can be made of the God of power is obvious, but , in modern business-speak, it’s no good having a strategy if you do not have an implementation plan. The inner light is more obviously appealing – but not if it leads to quietism and indifference, the two curses of Indian religions.

All the great religions have room for both attributes, although they come at them from different directions . At one extreme is Buddhism, so inwardly directed and seemingly without God that it is amazing that it could create gods of power – but that is what the boddhisatvas become in the Mahayana, because the faithful needed them to intercede for them.

At the other extreme is Islam. The warrior Prophet executing his enemies, and an uncompromising worldly theocracy, seems unpromising candidates for the inner light . Yet by the 9^th century, probably under the influence of contact with India, Sufism became established, and has been one of most powerful and beautiful mystical traditions of love for God and fellow man.

The old gods of power are obsolete – they have been superceded by science. It can explain everything except “why?” and the traditional religions are not much good at that either. Traditional Christianity, which tried to combine reason and faith, is merely dying as a result. Islam and Christian fundamentalism are both in denial (literalism cannot be reconciled with science: the order of creation in both Genesis and in the Koran is not in line with modern cosmology). One of the most tragic figures in Islam is Al Ghazali, the great 11^th century philosopher. He made Sufism acceptable in the Sunni mainstream, but he also discovered scepticism seven hundred years before David Hume. He concluded that God recreates the world each moment by acts of unconstrained will – there are no laws. End of Islamic science, which had been flourishing for three hundred years (Christians since Hume’s day took the opposite conclusion –there is no God; their natural laws work too well)

The other issue is that none of the three dynamically flourishing religions currently has any room for the inner light. Sufism is pretty moribund ( I think Spengler has a main post on this somewhere). Secularism has no problem with its God of power, and is not bereft of love and compassion for others, but it’s directed to greed and the ego, while the core of any belief which makes men alive and happy, is mutual love, and submission to, a higher power. Despite the “born again” phenomenon, the same narrow aim seems to characterise the Evangelical Christianity which Spengler puts so much faith in, greed being the besetting sin of Puritanism.

Apart from Oswald Spengler style resignation to History, what is to be done? The absence of the inner light is clear from the spiritual shopping in the East done by Westerners, but you cannot pick-and-mix from a tradition. Western Buddhism is just another Protestant sect, dedicated to self improvement, which misses the point.

A citizen of a great Western country - also a member of a zealous, exclusive, Middle Eastern faith which refuses to “integrate”, and whose violent rebellions are doomed to fail. He is caught between two cultures, at home in neither – and invents a great religion. Yep, that’s St.Paul. Perhaps his successor is already alive in Bradford or Corbeil-Essonnes today…. But no-one can consciously become a religious prophet.