FAITH IN FAITHLESSNESS
Epilogue: A New Enlightenment: The Second Wave
Dimitrios Roussopoulos
Enlightenment is a term used to designate a period in history of great intellectual advancement in the cause of general education and culture, including the self-emancipation from prejudice, superstition and convention. This movement touched Germany from the 17th century; it had roots in England and spread into France and Italy. It is also a term applied to the period of the Greek Sophists and in the study of the Renaissance. The impact of the Enlightenment was considerable in the 18th century into the 20th. Its influence also became a target for criticism,
We attempt here to go beyond the current public debate in a number of ways. In doing so we acknowledge the courage and foresight of the first Enlightenment beginning in 1700 with the founding of the Berlin Academy of Sciences to its halt in1799 with the seizure of State power by Napoleon setting humanity back. Humanism, within which the distinctiveness of atheism is found, was a cornerstone of the Enlightenment with new values of democratic and, in the 20th century, ecological dimensions.
Many of the intellectual giants of the Enlightenment were unknown by the vast majority in the 18th century. It was a period of verbal cacophony and paradox. In Berlin it was called Aufklarung, in Paris les Lumieres, in Milano it was illuminismo. The ideas emerged in different cities over a number of decades. The common denominator was, however a perspective that embraced rational discourse and critique, invariably hostile to and distant from superstition, intolerance, and traditional religion. The first notions of human rights were articulated in opposition to torture which had been conducted and justified by the religiously inspired, in reaction to fears and insecurity of those in power as they observed the shifting world of beliefs among the populace.
From John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding of 1690, to Voltaire's novella of 1758 Candide, Immanuel Kant's 1784 essay 'Was ist Aufklarung?' Of Crimes and Punishments by Cesare Beccaria, and then Jean Le Rond D'Alembert, Denis Diderot, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffron, Guillaume-Thomas, the editors of the Encyclopedie, Baron d'Holbach, to J.J. Rousseau and others the Enlightenment developed. Critical literature accumulated, reading became a passion as did discussion. Consider the atmosphere of intellectual excitement on the one hand and the tremendous insecurity among the ruling class of Church and State on the other, as a flood of periodicals, pamphlets and books in various forms matched innovations in printing technology. The literature crossed borders in an unprecedented way, creating a century which broke from the past with the winds of change.
Don't Think! Believe!
The exploration of the self and personal identity also began with a number of new insights and philosophical steps for individual and social emancipation. It was Kant who defined the Enlightenment as "man's throwing off his self-imposed immaturity," meaning man's inability to exercise one's mind without a reference to some outside authority and so he adds "Dare to know! Have the courage to follow your understanding!" His definition recognizes obstacles which are ever present even today, human cowardice and laziness. He points to people who take little initiative even with their own lives, allowing others to do the thinking and acting for them. Indeed, leading a life of such passivity, they have no need to seriously think for themselves even though they may cover up their passivity by pretensions. With this severe judgment he continues, noting that there are only a few people who have been able to free themselves and recover the use of their reason. Kant recognizes that this is difficult since surrounding society clamors for conformity, (calling it "responsibility") from the military to the tax department to the clergyman..
Everywhere there are artificial limits imposed on freedom, yesteryear and today. Kant proposes what is needed for the individual and society to counter these restrictions: the public use of reason which brings into play the public and private dimensions of the Enlightenment. The public use of reason is exemplified by the learned person in relation to the world of readers (Leserwealt). Private reason refers to the exercise of an office or profession, according to Kant, and here freedom has to have certain limits. A soldier must obey his superiors, although he should have the freedom to publicly display his disagreements.
Kant asks a question which is the heart of his essay: is there an enlightened age ? No is the answer, although the Age of Enlightenment exists; the obstacles are becoming fewer but there is a long road ahead. The growth of intellectual freedom can have a destabilizing effect on the State and society, so he declares that only by assuming limitations can the space for freedom be truly fulfilled, and with this he steps aside from the other major figures of the Enlightenment. Freedom of thought must not be pursued to its final consequence otherwise it will damage the order of society, was his position. To should be noted that Kant was a relative moderate in comparison to the more engaging and politically developed Parisian radicals of the Enlightenment.
The reaction to the growing influence of the Enlightenment was sweeping, and still is. No other time in history has had as great an influence on the moral values of our present Western society, except for the classical period of ancient Greece and early Rome. The Enlightenment was a philosophical and social movement: a case in point, it doesn't bear the name of any one person or singular moment in history. It is a movement and an epoch which bears a clarity of ideas.
These ideas, however, were seen by some parts of society as causes of evil. The dangerous 'unfettered' use of critical reason was of great concern to the Jesuits, for its effect on both religious and political life. They analyzed the Enlightenment as a period leading to chaos and weakening the Church and the State. The whole epoch was deemed devastating to religion in that it promoted tolerance which consequently put all religions on an equal footing. Thus 'truth' or 'falsehoods' were relative, and therefore the ultimate moral source becomes, us: humans.
For Hegel, critic of the Enlightenment, it was a failed attempt to close the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. He contended that it was a movement devoid of a set of beliefs because it positioned man as an end in himself, with an unfulfilled religious mission, an outcrop of the laws of nature, phenomena known only by humans. This line of thinking lay under the skin of the Enlightenment throughout its evolution into the 20th century, McGill university's Charles Taylor being its latest intellectual critic.
Others thought, from the mid-18th century on, that the Enlightenment was a conspiracy by philosophers who sought to attack religion and consequently was not historically grounded; instead it introduced thought that caused ruin and ultimately the French Revolution. The proclamation of the Rights of Man and Citizen, based on abstractions, was proclaimed by the revolution of 1789. Further, the revolution of 1792 abolished the monarchy, attacked the huge property holdings of the Church and created citizen assemblies in the Parisian sections that radicalized further the democratic definition of citizenship. This latter social revolution was just too shocking to the political order. Enter Napoleon who in 1799 took State power and who in 1803 attacked the philosophers of the Enlightenment for the use of "impious language that teaches the people to distain their fathers…teaches them to revolt against authority…a code of atheism…a code of immorality… ."
The Twists and Turns on the Road
There is an exciting sequence that runs through the Enlightenment. Two powerful currents flow through the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1792, and flow into the European revolts of the 1820s and 1830s, as well as the Revolution of 1848. One current was expressed by political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote down his worries about 1848 which, he predicted, would lead to an authoritarian turn and which was indeed, reflected in the ultimate seizure of State power by Napoleon III in 1852. The consequences and effects of the 18th century and the French Revolution, Tocqueville insisted, lay not so much with the philosophy of the Enlightenment but with the increased power of the centralized State, which grew unabated from the Ancien Regime into the resulting Revolution. This growth of the State, he argued, extinguished liberty. The political actors of the Enlightenment brought to power during 1789, having no practical experience in administration, quickly drifted into a vacuum responding not unlike many others before and since, by centralizing power and defending this turn through political terror. This Jacobin current was and is all too present in revolutions. Countering this current is that of a libertarian and democratic one which emerged in the Parisian sections of 1792, but at a time when exhaustion was everywhere, and when the prevailing contradictions did not allow enough time to develop strong new directly democratic institutions to be established which could have changed the fortunes of the Revolution and prevented the continuation of further dislocation ultimately opening the door to Napoleon.
The second current was reflected in the writings and political lives of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and William Godwin with his companion Mary Wollstonecraft . Wollstonecraft who emerged from a humble background was able through her writings to overcome the limits of her education. She became a journalist, reporting on the French Revolution, and also learned from the ideas of the Enlightenment which allowed her to earn an independent living. While she was the wife of the anarchist philosopher Godwin, ( tragically she died at the age of 38 in childbirth 1797), she wrote and published the celebrated Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792 which caused a furor and is still considered a feminist and political classic. In this text, the author compares the two very different kinds of education available to women and men. She urged her gender to overcome the limitations imposed by the prevailing environment, and went on to denounce the legal, financial constraints which created a form of slavery of women in the sense of a complete dependence and lack of rights. Wollstonecraft embraced the Enlightenment and its idea of universal reason; while pointing out that in practice it attributed different characteristics to the genders, she also pointed out that it was founded on ideas such as reason and virtue which were said to be innate in all humans. Rationality was what was denied women by Rousseau, and virtue for women was defined in a sexual sense and not much beyond. Therefore Wollstonecraft pointed out that such thinking could only lead to a dangerous moral relativism which would retard progress as envisaged by the Enlightenment. Her intellectual contribution was thus a brilliant contribution in saving the Enlightenment from the gendered biased contradictions between theory and practice.
Proudhon, Godwin and other early anti-authoritarians of the times described in some detail a society that could be based on a horizontal distribution of power in contrast to the vertical structure that existed before the Revolution and in most ways continued into the post-revolution period.
From the restraints of Kant, to the bold and imaginative advocacy of the radical Encyclopedists and the corrections made by Mary Wollstonecraft, the sweep of the Enlightenment laid the basis for the advances of science in the 19th century into the 20th in a number of crucial fields of human endeavor which substantially enhanced our understanding of ourselves, our society and the universe around us.
The 20th Century Critique
However, Europe especially, lapsed into a number of ugly, painful and cruel outbursts which undermined the progress of civilization in many ways. From the late 19th century into the 20th through World Wars I and II into the Cold War between nuclear armed super military empires we slipped into an unprecedented assault on Nature driven by an insatiable and predatory economy which eventually has caused us to question the basic premises of the modern era.
Small wonder German theorists like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in 1947 raised some difficult questions in their Dialectic of Enlightenment published in the aftermath of a devastating war and holocaust wherein they asked "why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism" .They went on to point to a paradox, namely that 'The Enlightenment had always aimed at liberating men from fear, and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully Enlightened Earth radiates disaster triumphant. The programme of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world: the dissociation of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy." They detected a fundamental flaw, that of the drive towards a cold reason, all other considerations aside, which created a general characteristic of a 20th century specifically leading to organizations and management styles based on a rational technological system with stark expressions: by "the administered life" and a "rational organization of men, nature and knowledge itself for the achievement of the objectives of this world."
Knowledge was being turned into a commodity as a result of its intense rationality, rationality very much conditioned by the dominant politico-economic system. Thus the needed connections among the 'production' of knowledge, truth and wisdom broke down. These critics said that "Once viewed as a commodity to be bought and sold, knowledge itself became merely a means to an end and culture became wholly a commodity disseminated as information without permeating the individuals who acquired it." Technology, a particular form of knowledge, was a specific culprit: "technology does not work by concepts and images, by the insight of fortune, but refers to method, the exploitation of others' work and capital. What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order to wholly dominate it and other men…on the road to modern science, men renounce any claim to meaning." This divorce with ultimate purpose, this mechanistic extrapolation from the humanistic ethos of the Enlightenment was questioned to devastating effect, by Horkheimer and Adorno's argument that knowledge now started to function as a specific form in the marketplace which ceased to be internalized by individuals but instead became externalities for manipulation for the ultimate purposes of greed.
Understandably an underlying contemporary emotion seems to prevail pushing people to turn to religions, not so much to a belief in god but because of a fear of modern science. The worry is that scientists and their employers are becoming arrogant, too powerful, playing with things we barely understand, such as the Earth's climate and our genetic code. The concern is partly about scientific ethics and a horror over anything that looks like genetic manipulation and eugenics. This view is hardly sustained by the profound ethical concerns that so marked the best writings of the Enlightenment. Science is a child of the Enlightenment, but it grew and developed in societies with State or market capitalism and the big State. This marriage is a marriage of Dracula and Vampira.
What happened? The liberality towards religion and the gradual growth of the benevolent State are two conspicuous examples of what occurred. A loss of ethical rigour overtook the Enlightenment's intellectual discipline. The building of the State was accompanied by a widely desired need for efficiency and for 'the even distribution of wealth.' On the one hand the thirst for security/stability in what seemed a chaotic world, was often accompanied by a deep ignorance of Nature on the other. We looked at the turbulent flow of ecosystems with little understanding that the ecological dynamics observed were more horizontal than hierarchical. Humans projected their hierarchical social structures onto Nature. The poorly understood 'chaos' of Nature contributed to an overwhelming need for order and security.
During this period another German theorist in disagreement with Horkheimer and Adorno, Jurgen Habermas offered another analysis. In 1962 he published 'The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere' in which he argued that building on the potential of the Enlightenment was still possible and useful, and that starting from Kant, the process needed to be completed. He contended that the potential for human emancipation from particularism was very present and was the basis of making us human, thus linking humans together by common values such as freedom, justice and a thirst for objectivity. Habermas assumed that there is universality in these values. However we know that there is a series of cultural distinctions born of differences of religion, language and ethnicity that stand in the way of these universalities.
What is striking about the Habermas contribution to this mid-20th century debate is his insistence that the Enlightenment created a 'public realm' as no other, where opinions are discussed and transformed partly because of the presence of books, newspapers, periodicals and currently the Internet , in what eventually becomes 'public opinion.' This in turn creates a means of freedom wherein individuals escape their prescribed roles as subjects and thus can become social actors articulating their own opinions and ideas. This Habermas interprets as a new culture, one which is conducive to historical analysis and which can have a positive moral role.
Habermas twins with Michel Foucault who also saw Kant's essay as an important point of evolution for the Enlightenment from which critical reason becomes an agent of change. Both thinkers agreed that the Enlightenment needed to be re-evaluated for the present.
Curious Contradictions
During the period ending with the Second World War, and following the Cold War and its aftermath, the political Left was seriously crippled by Marxist-Leninism and its different political parties, large or small, as well as its "fronts." During this period the so-called atheists of this school sought accommodations with one religion or another: recall the Marxist-Christian dialogue. When Roger Garaudy, a former theoretician of the Stalinist French Communist Party turned Christian, (and before he became a Muslim) came to Montreal, he met Canada's Marxist historian and one time Stalinist disciplinarian, Stanley Ryerson (who left the Canadian Communist Party only after the invasion of Czechoslovak in 1968). Ryerson invited me to his home to meet his Parisian visitor. I was both puzzled and reluctant to accept the invitation, but good manners prevailed and I came to a session of empty chatting. Is this what happens when men leave one orthodoxy to search for something else, I mused?
The social democrats are also well-known for their accommodations. Live and let live is their motto to the point of embracing eclecticism. It matters little where the source of our moral values comes from, the vote has to be brought out during elections, the ultimate objective being to strengthen the parliamentary wing of the party with the hope of eventually better managing the State.
The post-sixties Left has largely been individualized and organizationally fragmented. The career minded have been absorbed by the Academy, a cradle to grave welfare mini-state. To be sure, some are intellectuals and do honest labour and some stimulate public interest in this or that critical issue while helping young people think critically. Others have become professionals of one sort or another very much taken in by convention and the dominant consumerist drives of market capitalism.
Under the skin however a new set of protest movements has not only maintained its space, some have grown considerably; the ecology movement is clearly one of these. There is, in the last decade a convergence of the diversity of causes through the anti-globalization world-wide movement.
Open Letter to the Left: Come Out of the Closet
Within this mass movement the non-religious and religious often work together. Such coalition building among liberal religionists and non-believers, if it is to be politically useful, needs to address honestly two questions:
First, when and how are the fundamentalists to be confronted and returned to the box of the past? And how is this to be done? The struggle is not unimportant and we cannot pretend that it is marginal and will simply go away. It is after all, and to recap, the religionists who bang on our doors promoting their beliefs, seeking to convert the innocent and lonely; it is they who seek to promote their belief system in the schools, who rival each other to the point of condemning their fellows to death and damnation, and who promote the belief that without their book and its preaching, the streets would be overrun with endless sexual orgies, while the capitalist marketplace and private property would cease. The fundamentalists go so far as to insist that we must bow to their god, and that my sister should be killed if she is seen in public with a man who is not her brother. The poet Shelley called for the necessity of atheism and with good cause. We cannot and should not avoid taking a position, just as we must and can overcome our fear of death and the dark. It is bad enough to believe in a supreme god, it is even worse to wallow in the cult that the "Truth" has been made known to some and is to be interpreted by some select group to the rest.
Second, when are the atheists among the non-religious going to come out of the closet and say who they are and what they believe in, root and branch? We are here, working for fundamental social change in the here and now, and yes, we are prepared to work with some others who are different from ourselves, but this work should be based on honesty. The novelist Salman Rushdie, put it thus on U.S. television, ABC's "Nightline" February 13, 1989 with regard to his book The Satanic Verses:
My book says] that there is an old, old conflict between the secular view of the world and the religious view of the world, and particularly between texts which claim to be divinely inspired and texts which are imaginatively inspired…I distrust people who claim to know the whole truth and who seek to orchestrate the world in line with that one truth. I think that's a very dangerous position in the world. It needs to be challenged constantly in all sorts of ways, and that's what I tried to do.
In openly taking this direction we should be modest in that it has a long and distinguished pedigree.1 Everywhere religion is legitimized, theology is taught freely, and the fundamentalisms swirl around the monotheist religions with homes, institutions, and media access. The point of this book and this open letter is to add legitimacy to atheism, and to argue that it also has a rightful place that should be recognized, openly and frankly. We wish to defend the Western intellectual tradition of the right to dissent, even radical dissent.
What Are the Basic Tenets of the New Enlightenment? The Second Wave of the Enlightenment
This book is both a tocsin and a call for a second wave Enlightenment. In doing so we outline below some intellectual and philosophical parameters to consider as we engage in a public debate in a public place.
The new atheists have served us well. However is not religion the effect of much human suffering rather than the cause? The cause is insecurity, fear and ignorance. Religion becomes the justification, an ideology, proclaiming of the "Truth" that confidently justifies barbarism of all sorts. Thus the challenge should be that both the effect and the cause must be put in their places. What are the causes that lead to a tumor which in turn spreads like a cancer?
Atheism anchored in a humanist philosophy can be a basis of thought and action guiding those who have overthrown for themselves the supernatural, god, superstition, and religion. Human beings are accorded a primary place in the affairs of society always in balance with the natural environment. Gone is the notion of dominating and exploiting Nature for our selfish needs. The term atheism specifically reflects a naturalistic philosophy that rejects supernaturalism and relies upon critical reason and science, democracy and empathy.
As important as atheism is however, it is in itself a limited perspective. It should be the core around which humanism rotates. Humanism has many additional enriching tenets which are outward-looking, which are an integral part of a new politics. Some of the new atheists for instance have taken some very questionable political positions, and these inconsistencies with the larger humanist tableau have to be confronted, although this is not the place to do so.
The world view of humanism includes some of the following values:
>>Ethics--a pursuit of individual and social conduct which incorporates an ethics based on the common good, on the need to sustain and develop community, enhancing human well-being and individual moral and political responsibility , and a promotion of a strong and participatory democracy in its most authentic forms. This ethical sensibility is based on an ecological understanding of the natural environment which requires that we profoundly need a fundamentally new understanding of society's relationship to Nature, one that is balanced and not predatory.
>>Building a better society--with a conviction that with reason, an open exchange of ideas and debate, in a climate of individual and collective understanding, progress can be made in different areas of daily life which enhance a better world for us and future generations.
>>A concern for Life--a commitment to making life meaningful and purposeful, creating the conditions wherein every human being can maximize her/his potential through educating oneself and one another about our history, and its intellectual and cultural achievements, coupling this with a desire to understand the same of others. Thus life will be one of fulfillment, growth and creativity. Humanism is a philosophy of imagination, intuitive feelings, hunches, speculation, flashes of inspiration, emotions which, while not valid sources of knowledge can remain useful sources for some notions that can lead us to new ways of looking at the world. What is rejected in these sources and those of arbitrary faith, authority, revelations, and altered states of consciousness are that they are substitutes for critical reason and scientific inquiry.
>>The method in the search for truth is one with a commitment to the use of critical reason, factual evidence, and scientific methods of inquiry, instead of mysticism and faith, in seeking alternative values and solutions to those the dominant society promotes. Humanism is a philosophy for people who think for themselves. It makes no claims to possess or have access to supposed transcendental knowledge. It is a philosophy in constant evolution, and therefore more of a rushing river toward the sea than an enclosed lake. As such humanists take responsibility for their own lives and relish the adventure of taking risks and the adventure of being part of new discoveries, seeking new knowledge, new sensations and pleasures, exploring new options. Instead of finding comfort in prefabricated answers to the great questions of life, there is an openness to quest and the freedom of discovery.
>>Atheism is at the core of this philosophy as it is a direct challenge to all forms of mystification and authority. By its very nature it states defiantly "Neither God nor Master." Politically the defiance of religious and secular authority has led to more democracy, human rights and the protection of the environment.
Perhaps if humanity is to survive we will need to live in a world without the State and Capital, without classes, without sexism and patriarchy, and consequently at peace with each other, and with Nature.
But someone will say, religion has been with us from the start. Depending on your definition this is not quite true. There are many religions, for example those of the Far East, which have no need for a personal god. Apart from this, modern science has revealed that the naturalness of religion may be in the end a genetic predisposition for many. Prof. Michael A. Goldman, a biologist at San Francisco State University, says in reviewing the work of molecular biologist Dean Hamer:
Geneticists are the first to admit that genes don't explain everything, and that most important features of human behavior represent a complex interplay among many genes and the environment. Although we have now learned the most fundamental secrets of the human genome, and understand hundreds of Mendelian genetic traits in molecular detail, we have been far less successful in our studies of the traits and genes that are vastly more important from the medical, economic, social and intellectual perspectives. We have been gun-shy when it comes to dealing with questions about how genetics interprets cognitive ability, race, personality and behavior. Once again, National Institute of Health molecular biologist Dean Hamer fills the gap with a radical treatment of no less than the genetic basis for spirituality.
He draws a sharp distinction between spirituality, which is a personality trait that some of us have to a greater or lesser extent than others, and religion or belief in a particular god, which is a culturally transmitted expression of spirituality. It might be that some of that variation in spirituality is explained by genetics, although spirituality is probably a complex trait influenced by many genes as well as the environment. If there are genetic influences, ever-more sophisticated techniques in molecular genetics should be able to tease them out.
Religion down through the ages probably helped individual self-interest and collective survival by codifying its requirements and rules as morality. When inequalities of wealth and power developed, however, religion also extended moral codes to include obligations of dominance and submission. Today, facing ecological disaster, exhaustion of essential natural resources, and the proliferations of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, religion no longer provides a collective defense mechanism for the human species. Instead, the solutions religion provides have now become central to the problem of human survival.
On all these matters we have to speak out. The Left should take the lead.
Note
1. Recall that the ancient Greeks began to lay their Olympian myths to rest several hundred years before Christ, as their democracy strengthened. Epicurus of Samos [432-370 BCE] believed that the root of evil, which most religionists dwell on, was fear, above all the fear of death and the beyond. Death it was supposed was merely a long, untroubled sleep. Take away the fear of death by suggesting that there was no immortal soul to survive, and what prevents the enjoyment of happiness? This meant to Epicurus, friendship, and just dealing with 'Life quietly.' Pain could be endured. Ultimately chance ruled everything. The universe was composed of atoms whose random encounters produced life. It is much like a machine, neutral between right and wrong, without caprice or malevolence. As late as circa 200 CE, one of the longest and most elaborate funerary inscriptions, that of Diogenes of Oenoanda in Asia Minor included the creed 'There is nothing to fear in God. There is nothing to feel in death. Evil can be endured, Good can be achieved.'
There is a link from Greek mythology to us today. Such a link rarely, if every, is manifested in other cultures, and does not exist in the religions of today. Consider the character of Prometheus. He stands out because he was idolized by the Greeks because he defied Zeus. He stole the fire of the gods and gave it to humans. For this he was severely punished throughout continuing his defiance amidst his torments. Thus was born the fundamental challenge to authority. The next time we encounter a Promethean character is Lucifer in John Milton's Paradise Lost. But now the rebel becomes the Devil, and is evil incarnate. Whoever defies god must be the personification of wickedness. This illustrates all the difference at the core of religion. The Greeks did not agree; Zeus, for all his power, could be mistaken and even irrelevant.