In my previous post, The problem with the Enlightenment, I set out my conviction that the Enlightenment had established a false view of the self, that I labelled Romantic, and that this false view had insinuated itself into modern religion as well as its discontents. (See The romantic Austen (IV) for a taster of more to come on this false view.)
I am not interested in stale and flogged-to-death arguments about whether the Enlightenment was a good thing, but to critique it. There is no question of either The Enlightenment or institutional religion going away any time soon. Anyone wanting a better world must seek to correct systematic misunderstandings wherever they crop up, but these misunderstandings will never be addressed as long as the conversation remains dominated by absurd, irrelevant and unresolvable debates about whether the world would be better off without institutional religion or The Enlightenment. Such disputes don’t further insight but reinforce prejudice.
I say this because I am going to further my critique of The Enlightenment to explain why religion has an important role to play modernity. (I recommend Rowan Williams’s 2002 Dimbleby Lecture, Nations, markets and morals for an entirely different perspective.) For many people, the point of The Enlightenment was that it was to make religion redundant, and for such people this post will be yet another provocation. My intention is not to provoke, but advance an important part of the argument, interconnected with the false view of the self I have touched on.
Religion is potentially valuable for several reasons. As I have said, it provides a framework for a meaningful life, but also a framework for self-development, including all the props that we associate with religion: precepts, texts, myths, exemplars, prayers, mythology, priests, places of worship, public ceremonies, philosophy and so on—precisely the things sneered at by the sceptics of institutional religion.
But, and this is my point, something of this kind is clearly useful. Set aside for the moment the issue of whether you think (say) the Christian framework will work for you. Does it make sense to say that it has never worked for anybody? I don’t think this is a very rational conclusion, asking us to believe that everyone who has ever happily partaken in religious practice has been either deluded about the benefits or else a fraud, and that all the exemplary practitioners, the Martin Luther Kings and Mahatma Gandhis, were actually bad people, or at least not especially exceptional people, or, when they say their lives and actions were rooted in their religion, dismissed as delusional or dishonest.
The point is that, regardless of whether one relates to the methods of a given religion or not, the idea of systematically engaging in self-development, with the idea of making oneself more patient, loving, compassionate, content, resilient, focused, wise, courageous, etc., is an important one (again I am thinking of the likes of Gandhi, MLK and Tutu, who actively pursued social justice). The Enlightenment gave us methods, tools and a whole way of thinking for developing egalitarian social structures, and this is an important development, but there is no reason that these developments can’t co-exist with the more classical ideas that emphasised self-development. But this is not what happened.
Instead an Enlightenment was proclaimed—away with the hard toil of self-examination, fasting, meditation, prayer: reason was to become the slave of the passions, our chains broken and freedom attained through the perfection of the republic, and knowledge abolished to make room for faith.
Critical for this project was the idealisation of the self, ‘idealisation’ in both sense of the word. In the common sense of the ideal, we are proclaimed to be contingently perfect. Not that it is ever said quite in these terms, rather any attempts to personally examine or address shortcomings are derided as following in the tracks of pessimistic and parasitic religion, out to maintain its power by lowering the self-esteem of the host off which it is determined to feed; instead we are presented with the humanistic, optimistic, kindly view of the essentially good person, merely requiring the right context to realise their potential.
I doubt if any major religious sect has ever advanced such a manifestly faith-based narrative that flies in the face of all the evidence.
All religion as far as I know, in one way or another, affirms our fundamental goodness, our divine potential, but emphasises that this is a potential that can only be realised through the action of the student or devotee (whether this ‘action’ takes the form of ‘works’ or ‘faith’ or both is not the point; authentic ‘faith’ should give rise to ‘works’ and vice versa).
The second technical sense in which the self is idealised is crucial for supporting the first. Hume somewhat crudely dissolved the self along with causation in his Thesis, but Kant was more subtle. By embracing epistemological scepticism he could declare the self as unknowable and thereby reify and idealise it, thus fixing it and taking it out of the causal, phenomenal realm. And having been shown the way the Romantics were free to construct whatever exalted self-du-jour the occasion required. (For more on the Romantic view of the self and how it contrasts with classical ideas, see The romantic Austen (IV).)
Again why have to go though the messy process of getting to know the self and then try and transform it into something more useful and less neurotic if we proclaim it to be whatever it needs to be. It is perhaps understandable that people would find it unhealthily pessimistic to dwell on the unhealthy propensities of the self if that were to fix it, but there is really no reason to believe this.
And here we come to the point at which modern Enlightened ideas may have caused as much trouble in religion as anywhere else. Why wouldn’t these ideas have a propensity to drive religious people to be just as pessimistic in their understanding of original sin, if narratives about the self are understood to be idealised and fixed, rather than reminders that there is always work to be done and no room for complacency.
Given that religions are supposed to be in the game of encouraging us to realise our perfection wouldn’t it make sense for them to start out by pointing out that there is work to be done. An instructor setting out to train a student in the use of a dangerous tool is going to start by spending time explaining just why the tool is dangerous and why it needs to be respected. To do so is not to advance some grand pessimistic theory about the bad nature of the tool in question, but to explain an important reality that may not be manifest, and is easy to forget. It is done precisely so that these nasty propensities can be avoided, and we should all agree that any instructor that dispensed with the safety warnings on the grounds of being too pessimistic should be sent back to instructor training school. Yet this is just the modern Enlightened approach to the self.
The point I am making is that we should set aside such confusion and take a more realistic view of the self, so opening the way to addressing the question of how to develop the self, to become aware of our strengths and weaknesses and reduce the former and strengthen the latter.
Of course the traditional religion has fulfilled this role, and it may continue to do so for some people, but for many the religious paraphernalia will be a barrier. A coherent set of ethics packaged without the religious paraphernalia but in such a way that they can be used as exercises, to not only help us comprehend in a coherent way our classical tradition of ethics, but also help us to realise our wiser, more just, patient and loving selves. This we can see in the novels of Jane Austen, starting with the publication of Sense and Sensibility.
Why religion is valuable
In my previous post, The problem with the Enlightenment, I set out my conviction that the Enlightenment had established a false view of the self, that I labelled Romantic, and that this false view had insinuated itself into modern religion as well as its discontents. (See The romantic Austen (IV) for a taster of more to come on this false view.)
I am not interested in stale and flogged-to-death arguments about whether the Enlightenment was a good thing, but to critique it. There is no question of either The Enlightenment or institutional religion going away any time soon. Anyone wanting a better world must seek to correct systematic misunderstandings wherever they crop up, but these misunderstandings will never be addressed as long as the conversation remains dominated by absurd, irrelevant and unresolvable debates about whether the world would be better off without institutional religion or The Enlightenment. Such disputes don’t further insight but reinforce prejudice.
I say this because I am going to further my critique of The Enlightenment to explain why religion has an important role to play modernity. (I recommend Rowan Williams’s 2002 Dimbleby Lecture, Nations, markets and morals for an entirely different perspective.) For many people, the point of The Enlightenment was that it was to make religion redundant, and for such people this post will be yet another provocation. My intention is not to provoke, but advance an important part of the argument, interconnected with the false view of the self I have touched on.
Religion is potentially valuable for several reasons. As I have said, it provides a framework for a meaningful life, but also a framework for self-development, including all the props that we associate with religion: precepts, texts, myths, exemplars, prayers, mythology, priests, places of worship, public ceremonies, philosophy and so on—precisely the things sneered at by the sceptics of institutional religion.
But, and this is my point, something of this kind is clearly useful. Set aside for the moment the issue of whether you think (say) the Christian framework will work for you. Does it make sense to say that it has never worked for anybody? I don’t think this is a very rational conclusion, asking us to believe that everyone who has ever happily partaken in religious practice has been either deluded about the benefits or else a fraud, and that all the exemplary practitioners, the Martin Luther Kings and Mahatma Gandhis, were actually bad people, or at least not especially exceptional people, or, when they say their lives and actions were rooted in their religion, dismissed as delusional or dishonest.
The point is that, regardless of whether one relates to the methods of a given religion or not, the idea of systematically engaging in self-development, with the idea of making oneself more patient, loving, compassionate, content, resilient, focused, wise, courageous, etc., is an important one (again I am thinking of the likes of Gandhi, MLK and Tutu, who actively pursued social justice). The Enlightenment gave us methods, tools and a whole way of thinking for developing egalitarian social structures, and this is an important development, but there is no reason that these developments can’t co-exist with the more classical ideas that emphasised self-development. But this is not what happened.
Instead an Enlightenment was proclaimed—away with the hard toil of self-examination, fasting, meditation, prayer: reason was to become the slave of the passions, our chains broken and freedom attained through the perfection of the republic, and knowledge abolished to make room for faith.
Critical for this project was the idealisation of the self, ‘idealisation’ in both sense of the word. In the common sense of the ideal, we are proclaimed to be contingently perfect. Not that it is ever said quite in these terms, rather any attempts to personally examine or address shortcomings are derided as following in the tracks of pessimistic and parasitic religion, out to maintain its power by lowering the self-esteem of the host off which it is determined to feed; instead we are presented with the humanistic, optimistic, kindly view of the essentially good person, merely requiring the right context to realise their potential.
I doubt if any major religious sect has ever advanced such a manifestly faith-based narrative that flies in the face of all the evidence.
All religion as far as I know, in one way or another, affirms our fundamental goodness, our divine potential, but emphasises that this is a potential that can only be realised through the action of the student or devotee (whether this ‘action’ takes the form of ‘works’ or ‘faith’ or both is not the point; authentic ‘faith’ should give rise to ‘works’ and vice versa).
The second technical sense in which the self is idealised is crucial for supporting the first. Hume somewhat crudely dissolved the self along with causation in his Thesis, but Kant was more subtle. By embracing epistemological scepticism he could declare the self as unknowable and thereby reify and idealise it, thus fixing it and taking it out of the causal, phenomenal realm. And having been shown the way the Romantics were free to construct whatever exalted self-du-jour the occasion required. (For more on the Romantic view of the self and how it contrasts with classical ideas, see The romantic Austen (IV).)
Again why have to go though the messy process of getting to know the self and then try and transform it into something more useful and less neurotic if we proclaim it to be whatever it needs to be. It is perhaps understandable that people would find it unhealthily pessimistic to dwell on the unhealthy propensities of the self if that were to fix it, but there is really no reason to believe this.
And here we come to the point at which modern Enlightened ideas may have caused as much trouble in religion as anywhere else. Why wouldn’t these ideas have a propensity to drive religious people to be just as pessimistic in their understanding of original sin, if narratives about the self are understood to be idealised and fixed, rather than reminders that there is always work to be done and no room for complacency.
Given that religions are supposed to be in the game of encouraging us to realise our perfection wouldn’t it make sense for them to start out by pointing out that there is work to be done. An instructor setting out to train a student in the use of a dangerous tool is going to start by spending time explaining just why the tool is dangerous and why it needs to be respected. To do so is not to advance some grand pessimistic theory about the bad nature of the tool in question, but to explain an important reality that may not be manifest, and is easy to forget. It is done precisely so that these nasty propensities can be avoided, and we should all agree that any instructor that dispensed with the safety warnings on the grounds of being too pessimistic should be sent back to instructor training school. Yet this is just the modern Enlightened approach to the self.
The point I am making is that we should set aside such confusion and take a more realistic view of the self, so opening the way to addressing the question of how to develop the self, to become aware of our strengths and weaknesses and reduce the former and strengthen the latter.
Of course the traditional religion has fulfilled this role, and it may continue to do so for some people, but for many the religious paraphernalia will be a barrier. A coherent set of ethics packaged without the religious paraphernalia but in such a way that they can be used as exercises, to not only help us comprehend in a coherent way our classical tradition of ethics, but also help us to realise our wiser, more just, patient and loving selves. This we can see in the novels of Jane Austen, starting with the publication of Sense and Sensibility.