10.22.08
Society without Spinozists
The Dawkins site has an article on a book by Phil Zuckerman, Recommended Reading: Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment.
I haven’t read this book, and would be delighted to probe further the sociology of Scandinavian cultures, but it seems quixotic, as typical with the New Atheist movement’s gestures on theology, to propose a simplistic correlation of secularism=??godlessness and contentment as a recommendation for social change. But, even so, the spectrum of cultures we see in the world are not going to succeed in imitating these models if they do so on the basis of trying to bait the god-obsessions of atheists with some abstract called ‘contentment’ (utilitarianism?). It would be nice to see some more specific data.
But more generally moving past ‘god’ is not a general ‘social aim’. The best that can be hoped for is a passage beyond the traditionalist religious institutions that have fallen into a kind of social rigor mortis, so many centuries from the Reformation. We can’t resolve the god question, and if missionary New Atheists got their chance to Swedenize us, they would produce something else, a monstrosity of Social Darwinist Darwinian fundamentalist scientism, which would generate a violent revolutionary reaction.
We have to study the full spectrum of social passages in the wake of the Reformation (and an equal study of Catholic modernization would of course be included, a massive study) to see why Scandinavia developed the way it did, ditto for all other cases, and then we can see that the future of religion is still unclear. And that the passage from our past to our present is not easy to manipulate with a one-variable question such as the god question. The correlated social variables in the transitions to modernization were far more complex than that. Moral: secularism is not the same as atheism.
Quite apart from any of the above, atheism is based on a word ‘god’, and its negation is dangerously ambiguous, witness the slanted meanings in that arch-secularist Spinoza who proposed secularism, post-Biblical beliefs, and atheism/theism all at once in his universal materialism. Then look at the Pantheist debate, and then Hegel/Marx. The Feuerbachian outcome to all that on the left was left stranded with a cultural paperbag of nothing much, thus the resurgence of fundamentalism. That doesn’t invalidate their contribution, but it does show that the course of secularism is not easy to define, and needs something new to redefine its meaning. One can only recommend a post-Darwinian foundation for that. The New Atheists are very similar in their progression along a tangent, not because they are atheists, but because the social and scientific constructs behind that have already been tried and were found wanting.
The term ‘god’ is only a word. Drop the word and demand those who use it be alert to what they mean by it. Otherwise attacking the god idea is as dangerous, thus, as fundamentalist fanaticism.
There is a better way to bypass the god-obsession, without passing into the godless-obsession, via someone like Kant, whose work (unfortunately for many secularists with a new form of ‘god’ thinking tacked onto his critical philosophy) pointed to the real problem: our propensity for egregious metaphysics. His moral religion, after passing through the destruction of theology (de facto atheism, if not atheism pure and simple) was to reinvent moral theology, still with that word ‘god’ reinvented from scratch. That may not appeal to later secularists, but the word ‘god’ is (looking over my shoulder at stickler Kantians) egregious in that case, with its focus on the complexities of, not utilitarian contentment, but of ‘moral religion’.
In any case, the New Atheists are starting to look pre-fanatical: it seems only a matter of time before their ‘jihad’ ripens to something dangerous. At that point, they are left with the question: should Spinozists be put to the sword, on the grounds of his theism, or left to the Al Quaeda, on the grounds of his atheism, deus sive natura?
(Meanwhile the study of Scandinavian societies might well teach us something, I was proposing their study all last week on other grounds, starting with social democratic economics, whatever the case with theological non-issues)