if your ultimate meaning is derived from religion, you have less need of deriving it from politics or ideology or trusting entirely in a single, secular leader. It’s only when your meaning has been secured that you can allow politics to be merely procedural.
Instead of developing a relationship to God and a recognition of one’s own imperfection, we wanted our non-anarchist families and friends to develop their “analysis” and recognize their complicity in the evil of capitalism. These non-anarchist friends grew increasingly sparse the longer I was an anarchist. They didn’t see how terrible the world was, and they used problematic language that revealed hopelessly bad politics. Frustrated with them, I retreated further and further into the grey echo-chamber of my “chosen family.”
I recommend reading both essays in their entirety.
I think of major religions as having teachings in two realms. One realm is the self, and the other realm is the world at large.
In the realm of the self, the teaching is typically that as a human being you have weaknesses, flaws, and some inclinations that are evil. You are taught to acknowledge this and to strive to improve. These sorts of teachings make you somewhat hesitant and uncertain about claiming to know how others must live.
In the realm of the world at large, the teaching is that there is wickedness and injustice that we must try to correct. These sorts of teachings incline you to think that you know how others must live.
So there is tension between the teachings in the two realms. The teachings in the realm of the world at large incline you to be intolerant and authoritarian. The teachings in the realm of the self incline you to be humble. People have to find the right balance, so that they care about the world at large without becoming despotic in their inclinations.
But what if you have no religious affiliation, and instead you get meaning in your life primarily from your political beliefs? Political movements do not come with teachings in the realm of the self. Their entire focus is on the flaws that are in the realm of the world at large. There is nothing to hold you back from a righteous certainty that can justify violence and totalitarianism.
All well said. I agree with your characterization. I would add that the deleterious effects of the dual pursuit of realms — which comes from pursuing the “realm of the world” track — would be tempered by the existence of enough “religions” that none would see it possible or even advisable to indulge in too much activism, let alone aggressive domination. I think minority religions show that it has been the loss of the pursuit of the “self track”, and not an abuse of the “world track”, that has subtracted value to them and to society. I think this applies to those of the Jewish faith, (lets say, outside of Israel) for example. I think this is recognized, and I hope it triggers a revival of the “pursuit of the self”, without any need for “the world”, and certainly less of politics. This may also apply to Mormons.
Arnold,
Your framework is fresh and insightful—and disarmingly simple.
Two observations:
1) In the spirit of your framework, public intellectuals who wish to tame politics should espouse and advocate an ethos of cognitive humility, self-awareness, and charity in interpretation. This is plain in your work, and, I think, also in Bryan Caplan, Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Kahneman, and Philip Tetlock. Perhaps it’s no accident that wise psychologists are prominent among them? (Russ Roberts, too, advocates cognitive humility, but sometimes links it with his religiosity.)
2) Your framework captures a crucial mechanism in modern political psychology. A mechanism is a possible causal pattern, not a necessary one. Mechanisms often exist in contrary pairs; e.g., the underdog effect,/i> and the bandwagon effect. All of this to say, religion may tame politics (the mechanism you identify) or religion may inflame politics (think of the Wars of Religion in early modern period).
But what if you have no religious affiliation, and instead you get meaning in your life primarily from your political beliefs? Political movements do not come with teachings in the realm of the self. Their entire focus is on the flaws that are in the realm of the world at large. There is nothing to hold you back from a righteous certainty that can justify violence and totalitarianism.
But most people who derive meaning and identity from politics instead of religion do not condone totalitarianism or violence. In theory, there is nothing holding anyone back, but by the same token nothing is holding back anyone from killing someone or robbing a bank or whatever. Morality and goodness are largely innate, not due to religion imho
You really believe they are innate?
“You really believe they are innate?”
Yes, in Islam, it’s a basic tenet of the faith. A saying of the Prophet Muhammad:
“People are like gold and silver; those who were best in Jahiliyyah (Pre-Islamic Period of Ignorance) are best in Islam, if they have religious understanding; and the souls are like recruited soldiers, they get mixed up with those similar with them in qualities and oppose and drift away from those who do not share their qualities.”
So yes, moral character is innate. Islam, like Catholicism, requires both “faith and good works” (Protestantism says “faith only”) . Religion adds the “faith component”. The “good works” are already a part of good moral character. Even atheists can have good moral character.
The idea that morality is largely innate is part of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1763). Political scientist James Q. Wilson’s The Moral Sense (1993) did a lot to revive the tradition. Followed quickly by Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (1994) and Frans de Waal’s Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals</I (1996).
A lot of evolutionary thought nowadays concerns the question, "Humans are incredibly successful because they can co-operate. But there is always an incentive to "cheat", to "free ride", to "defect". Yet in successful societies, that incentive is often resisted. Why?" The answer seems to be some combination of genetic predisposition, social mores (which build off genetic predispositions), and institutions.
I know Arnold has promoted Kevin Laland's <Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind (2017)–and perhaps Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success (2015). Along similar lines is Morris Hoffman’s wide-rangingThe Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury (2014) and in a kind of backhanded way, Kevin Simler’ and Robin Hanson’s fascinating The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life (2018).
Another interesting aspect of practicing a religion is that when you belong to a congregation you are likely to get a certain boost to the “random component” of people in your social network. You come into regular contact with people you would not otherwise see very often.
It is said that you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your relatives. To a large extent you cannot choose your co-religionists or the members of your congregation. Individuals and families can and do “church shop” and look for a congregation or denomination that suits their needs and beliefs. But any congregation is likely to include people who don’t share your ideology and political beliefs, even if you join together to recite a creed. Your denomination / sect may have an established creedal test for membership, but you still don’t really all have the same view on every highly controversial issue.
Sullivan does a Claas Relotius on the Trump base. Yawn. How many times haven’t we seen this sort of smug sanctimony? He does a disservice to both John Gray and the late Christopher Hitchens by dragging them in. He is correct however that the Gray book is excellent even thought I disagree with Gray’s notion of the significance of human failing.
I will beat the drum again here for Roger Scruton who is superior in every respect to all of the above whom I hold in varying degrees of high regard. The Meaning of Conservatism casts a shadow over all these later noodlings on tribalism and the role of religion.
The Sad Radicals piece seems like it would be equally applicable to the anarchists’counterparts on the center left and right, even though the piece draws its persuasive power from its confessional nature. At any rate the number of people in such cults, both far right and far left, is vanishingly small in a country the size of the US. It does not seem appropriate to project what goes on in these situations upon the large population.
The bottom line is that Americans are being told they are tribabilists and the chattering classes are going to project that onto them no matter how they split their votes or switch voting from one party to the other, or how many dozen votes it would have have taken to switch an electoral outcome. In the end, the American voter is stuck with some horrendously awful political choices courtesy of the two-party system, winner-take-all system. Trying to blame them for the choices they have to make simply will not fly. It will take substantial constitutional reform to begin to model the United States into anying resembling a legitimate democratic republic. In keeping with Scruton’s conservatism, the constitutional levers already set in place must be used to preserve whatever heritage we have left in order to steer away from the black hole of totalitarian anarchy into which we are being swept.
This analysis misses two important elements about the potential socially moderating role of religion in public life, especially of overt, commonly held, morally-instructive, deity-based faiths. Critics of religion usually focus on Social Failure Modes that exist for all ideologically-based social phenomena even if officially atheist, for instance, Communism. But some religious social orders were able to leverage group spiritual beliefs to develop traditions and institutions to help mitigate these problems in the long term, which, it would seem to now, no secular system has discovered and which may indeed be a kind of social impossibility.
1. The role of God at the definitionally unachievable supreme top of the universal status hierarchy. In purely secular systems, might tends to make right as a practical reality, as the top position is beholden to nothing and no one, and the question of legitimacy of political power becomes one of easy manipulation through propaganda and control over information dissemination. In religious societies and systems, however, the narrative of legitimacy is less malleable and as a matter of widely-held public opinion even the highest emperor is still subordinate to God and constrained by God’s laws. That tends to moderate the human tendency towards obsession and even worship of the holders of temporal political power, allows for an external standard as a frame of reference and judgment, and sets the metaphysical foundation for social attitudes that enable the limited state and society of decentralized influences, instead of the total, plenary, centralized, authoritarian state, which otherwise will tend to grow as big, even-present, and all-encompassing as its wealth and technology permit (e.g., 21st Century China).
2. The moral orders of civilizations are organized around various constellations and evolving cultural ‘recipes’, as it were, of a balanced set of differently emphasized intuitions, impulses, and abstract principles of righteous behaviors tending to enhance one’s social reputation as to character, conscientiousness, piety, discipline, reliability, generosity, honor, trustworthiness, loyalty, and so forth. All the attempts to turn moral ideology into Geometry, and axiomatize rederive all the best recipes from first principles, end in farce or tragedy. As they must, because necessarily based on metaphysical constructs without any possible empirical anchor.
And just as people can compete for social status on the basis of characteristics such as wealthy, strength, beauty, intelligence, and power, they can also compete on the basis of righteousness or holiness, and will be keen on trying to impress and show off their commitment and display conspicuous signals of their righteousness.
But all those other features are mundane and worldly and are both susceptible to easy ranking and also impose natural limits that are hard or impossible to overcome even by extreme efforts or expenditures. That naturally tends to lead people to the one open door remaining for which only the sky is the limit: ideological morality.
And a common problem with human social psychology when there is too much socially-allowed opportunity and leeway to make such signals is that it sets up a rat race of competitive sanctimony. This will encourage people to lose all sense of judgment and balance, over-intellectualize and over-emphasize one particular holy principle or signal beyond the “safe operating envelope / window” of the original context of the functional and stable social equilibrium, and insist that it be maximized at the expense of every other consideration and over any objection.
This ‘Zeitgeist Morality’ can evolve as quickly as fashions for anything else, and leads right away to ideological and moral runaway. It will give rise to ideological entrepreneurs looking for a way to achieve their own 15 minutes of fame (and influence, power, allure, etc.) who will discover an endless sequence of one feature of social reality after another which betrays the perfect ideal and advocate for its rectification by collective, coercive action. These calls are hard to argue against, even with the best case, because after all, the subject matter is higher morality, which trumps mere pragmatic consequence: a price that it is always worth it to pay.
Eventually and inevitably, the implementation of these policies begins to make ordinary social life increasingly unpleasant, dysfunctional, precarious, and fraught with dangers and it’s only a matter of time before the reforms start to eat away at the foundations of the civilizational machines of prosperity, procreation, and progress.
This kind of tragic spiral has occurred many times in history and some of that may seem disturbingly familiar to our own time.
But what’s all that got to do with religion?
What an organized religion can do is provide an institution which operates as a real or de facto moral ‘magisterium’ as the ‘ministry of righteousness’ and the officially exclusive origin, adjudicator, instructor, and fixed and final authority regarding all moral questions. Anyone trying to publicly preach otherwise is in for a lot of trouble.
The magisterium, like a ‘court’ or any system or adjudication and interpretation, almost always relies on written rules and doctrine (often originally merely the capturing and memorialization of folk awareness of the balance of that’s culture’s moral constellation), and, to the extent it relies on the esteem and authority of the precedent of old decisions, tends to establish a structurally conservative framework that neutralizes the incentives that encourage people to keep pushing the edge of the Zeitgeist Morality, and holds those impulses in check, like the holiness signalling version of the old sumptuary laws.
It is thus no coincidence that the closest thing our secular society has to such an institution with effective social authority to pronounce upon inescapable moral matters is the judiciary. The problem is that even though Supreme Court Justices are legally supreme, and are theoretically beholden to precedents and the ‘holy scripture’ of the Constitution, they are in practice just as much a slave to the fashions of the high status Zeitgeist Morality as any other elites.
In such circumstances, there is little point to calling for radical and disruptive change in an effort to prove one’s moral bonafides and to signal that one is “holier-than-thou”.
Very roughly, in the Abrahamic spectrum, some religious traditions that have taken this approach are Rabbinical Judaism, Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, and Shiite Islam. They can be compared with Protestant Christianity and and Sunni Islam, with their tendencies towards quicker, more radical change, extremism, fissiparousness, and repeated splintering into variations and sometimes bloody schism into rival camps.
The trouble is the relationship between the moral magisterium and the state, and whether the two are fully integrated and symbiotic, or independent and potentially in competition and conflict. To the extent the ‘magisterium’ becomes disconnected from the state (or the main source of effective authority in some particular social setting) it is liable to lose its power to dictate norms, opening the door to the runaway process described above.
None of this is to so say that official moral institutions are not prone to various forms of corruption and their own particular set of Social Failure Modes, but without one rooted in religion, it is doubtful that any liberal order such as ours could long persist without falling into an ideological singularity of its own making.
In religious societies and systems, however, the narrative of legitimacy is less malleable and as a matter of widely-held public opinion even the highest emperor is still subordinate to God and constrained by God’s laws.
And in Stalin’s Soviet Union, he is still subordinate to history and constrained by dialectical materialism. I don’t think the “narrative of legitimacy” is any more malleable to him than to a king chosen by God, especially if the king also controls the church. The difference between Peter the Great and Stalin isn’t anything intellectual. It’s the technology of social control, the ability to run a big, bureaucratic government that Stalin had and Peter didn’t (and which 21st century China may be developing in a “kinder, gentler” way).
“And in Stalin’s Soviet Union, he is still subordinate to history and constrained by dialectical materialism.”
Stalin was a true believer in those things, but more importantly, he eventually consolidated authority into himself and seized the power of doctrinal interpretation, and he therefore got to dictate what dialectical materialism meant and required in every instance. Which was whatever Stalin wanted to do, at most requiring just a little hand-waving, which no one dared quibble with. Stalin got to define what a True Socialist was, and eventually made sure that nobody within his grasp could ever try to out-Socialist him ever again. Trotsky presented a frankly somewhat biased account of what transpired in The Revolution Betrayed, which itself was an attempt to out-Socialist Stalin, but which of course had to be penned from exile in Mexico, where Stalin had him killed with an ice axe.
Thus, his actual power was not, in practice, constrained by those matters, or anyone claiming that his decisions were not in true accord with the mandates of the holy ideological principles of Soviet Socialism. Because he made sure everyone knew that anyone that tried would very quickly cease to be a pesky bother to him anymore, one way or another.
I would encourage you to revisit that particular period of Soviet history to see why the example of Stalin proves the opposite of the point I think you’re trying to make here, and indeed serves as a particularly illustrative instance of the frequently observed endgame response and solution to a crisis of political instability generated by the runaway process I described above, and which Stalin once faced as a major risk. Other examples of cases in which opposition from all sides was crushed and ideological order was finally imposed via terror and coercion by strongmen include Cromwell, Napoleon, and even Mao.
The general trend is the coalition organizing and spontaneous coordination mechanism of “no enemies to the left, no friends to the right”, where ‘left’ is context-specific and doesn’t map exactly to our current political axis. But for the sake of explanation, ‘lefter’ is ‘more righteous’ according the the prevailing ideological principle of morality, such as ‘equality’. Any establishment figure whose legitimacy is at least somewhat based on being an enlightened, devoted believer and zealously committed to furthering the cause has an easy way to deal with opponents on his right, but profound difficulty preventing young upstarts from attacking him from the left in “live by the sword, die by the sword” style.
And this was precisely the situation that Stalin faced until he perfected the brutal and ruthless system of control such that nobody could get either to his right or his left – at least, not without risking their lives – and deployed the hideously enormous amount of cruel force and atrocity needed to finally bring Soviet society to heel to at least a level he could tolerate.
I don’t think the “narrative of legitimacy” is any more malleable to him [Stalin] than to a king chosen by God, especially if the king also controls the church. [from my comment above]
Perhaps I should have said that I don’t think a king chosen by God, especially if the king also controls the church, has any less power than Stalin to shape the “narrative of legitimacy”. As long as he controls a large, semi-omnipotent bureaucracy. (And being able to kill opponents in foreign countries also helps.) Neither is particularly constrained.
Stalin, as you point out, consolidated his power by “controlling the church”, making it clear that anyone who contradicted his interpretation of the theology and sacred scriptures would not survive.
Certainly, this was easier because “scientific socialism” was relatively new and had never been tried anywhere else, so the pool of potential heretics was relatively small.