Religionized versions of secular ideas
Is this true?
What is missing from the book is much sense of what a world without religion, or one that had not had religion in it, might look like. Lots of the principles that Mr Hitchens holds dear, like tolerance and justice, are secularised versions of religious ideas.
Are tolerance and justice secularised versions of religious ideas? What does that in fact mean? I suppose that the ideas originated in religion and that no one ever thought of them independently of religion, though they have now become partially secularized, but only partially since there are always people saying they are in fact religious. But is that true? I don’t believe it. I think people were able to and did conceive of ideas like tolerance and justice for secular reasons. I also think religions have not historically been particularly concerned with either tolerance or justice, so it’s not clear to me why they have this reputation for being the original source of such ideas (or those of equality and individual worth, either, which are also often attributed to religion).
It also seems fair to say that the process works at least as much in the other direction – that religions have adopted some political and moral ideas that are much more favoured now than they were historically, thus borrowing some of the moral prestige of what are basically secular shifts in attitudes.
Well, to start to untangle concepts of ‘justice’, you’ve got to go back at least to the Greeks and Romans, at which point religious observance, household economy, and the organs of the state are so entwined that one can’t really think about them in modern terms at all. So, on that level, the dude is right. OTOH, one might as well say that chemistry and physics are just secularised forms of alchemy. Which they are, and yet, at the same time, quite evidently aren’t, because they’ve evolved far beyond that origin. Like modern notions of justice. However, since justice is a human, interpersonal concept, and essentially contestable in many of its aspects, unlike, say, valency or the Planck constant, it is always going to have a more fluid relation with the various historical traditions from which it is derived.
On your last point, about secularised religions – those are surely the ones that the noisemakers within religious traditions are always complaining about. Sure, there may be episcopalians of various stripes out there sticking up for gay rights, but there are lots more evangelicals and presbyterians saying the episcopalians are hardly real Xians at all…. And within the C of E, quite a few episcopalians with the same view.
Ah, so “tolerance and justice are religious ideas”?
Tell that to the Cathars, or the Dutch, or the Irish and Scots, or the people of Salem, or the Sunni/Shia, or …….
For complete codswallop in one simple sentence, that first one must be close to the prize!
Well, I’m not so sure about the Greeks and Romans. I think some Greek and some Roman thinkers did think about moral or political ideas in secular terms – Thucydides for instance; Euripides; Cicero; Seneca.
No great surpirse – I like their country reports and economic reporting, but when they get on to culture, etc the Econ. are pretty “Establishment”.
It is intriguing to wonder just how ‘atheistic’ the upper echelons of Roman society, in particular, had become, as they fed on their own debaucheries. But what we do know is that, out of that society and its slow decline, came a wave of salvation religions – Isis, Mithras, and of course that funny guy with the holes in his hands – suggesting that whatever the ‘thinkers’ were up to, it didn’t stick.
“suggesting that whatever the ‘thinkers’ were up to, it didn’t stick.”
Well, the merits of secular thinking in general may not have stuck, but I’m not sure it follows that ideas about justice and tolerance therefore became religious ideas. And Seneca and Cicero were in fact very influential once the classical revival got going.
Ophelia, I had exactly the same reaction when I read that. Obviously, the reviewer didn’t give Hitchens a very careful read. Hitchens makes the point of arguing that the Jews had no idea that it was wrong to steal, murder, and commit adultery before Moses delivered them the ten commandments?
When you boil it all away, we’re pack animals and it behooves us to behave in certain ways (often in the short term)in order that the pack might survive.
At any rate, when it comes time to implement those ideals of tolerance and justice, all we have to do is see where the respective camps have placed themselves on the battlefield throughout history.
Which, really, is the entire point of Hitchens’ book.
There were a few ancient philosophers who devoted some of their thought to values like these.
Not much is known about Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 544-c. 483), but we do know that he was an atheist, and that he opposed the traditional unwritten law championed by the aristocrats, and advocated written law established by the state. Presumably, this advocacy stemmed from his thinking about justice.
Another atheist, Democritus of Abdera (c. 460-370), inclined towards antique democracy and opposed the slave-owning aristocracy.
And then there’s Lucretius (c. 99-55), who was essentially an atheist. I got this from Answers.com:
“Religion, says Lucretius, has been responsible for such monstrous acts as the sacrifice at Aulis of the pitiful Iphigenia, young daughter of King Agamemnon. The fear of death and of punishment after death is the cause of avarice, ambition, cruelty, and other forms of wickedness.”
I think it’s safe to say that humans have been thinking about justice and tolerance for millennia, and certainly not all of them were applying a religious framework.
yesbutnobutyes, a philosopher here, a philosopher there, who knew? Like I *said*, if the ancients had had an atheistic conception of the good society up and running, why did those pesky Xians spread like pubic lice across Europe in the second millennium AUC? eh? eh?
Dave:
It’s because the wise, like you and me, have always been scarce.
To argue that tolerance and justice are religiously inspired ideas, you have to account for an awful lot of anthropological literature demonstrating that groups of humans with no contact with any of the big world religions spend (spent) much of their time worrying about these issues.
You don’t even have to hypothesise (as I do) that the reason we are all so concerned about the subjects is because we evolved to track honesty and expose cheaters.
Actually, now I’ve read the article, its not so clear to me that the author necessarily meant that sentence the way you imply. I would rather take issue with the next bit, Religious folk often do the right thing for what Mr Hitchens would call the wrong reasons. Taking faith away would in many cases take away the will to do them. That last sentence is far too sweeping and unsupported. “Might in some cases” I could cope with.
I tend toward the idea that the first glimmerings of the concept of justice begin with reciprocal altruism.
I picked the fleas off him, but he didn’t return the favour. That just ain’t right.
I think you’re right, Don. Recent primatological research by Franz de Waal and others very clearly shows that even old world monkeys have an innate conception of fairness and get angry when it is violated. Not chimpanzees and gorillas, mind you, but relatively small-brained primates such as capuchin monkeys!
Thank, G, I hadn’t come across de Waal.
Don, G – yes, absolutely, that’s what I was referring to in the bit about tracking honesty and exposing cheaters above. Another book you may be interested in is Marc Hauser’s “Moral Minds”; and that’s just a recent addition in (now) quite a long line of scientists suggesting how our moral sense evolved.
Matt Ridley’s Origins of Virtue also good.
I’d recommend _Cheating Monkeys and Citizen Bees: The Nature of Cooperation in Animals and Humans_ by Lee Dugatkin. (Matt Ridley has a blurb on the back cover.)
Damn, just when I thought I’d got my reading list under control.
Well, the picking fleas line was brilliant, so the least it deserves is a new reading list.
There’s a terrible, terrible scene in one of Jane Goodall’s early popular books on the Gombe chimps, to do with the ethics of grooming. After a polio epidemic which killed several chimps and partially paralysed others, one of the older males (David Graybeard I think) was left with a useless arm, which made all the other chimps leery of him; they avoided him. One day there was a party of them sitting in a row on a branch, each grooming the one in front. DG slowly and painfully with huge effort climbed up to the branch; he was exhausted by the time he got there, and sat down with an audible sigh of relief (and perhaps anticipation); he presented himself to be groomed – and all the chimps simply got up and left. I think Goodall commented that at that moment, almost uniquely, she hated them.
Hugo van Lawick shot DG soon after that. They gave him a hard-boiled egg and he was eating it blissfully in his final moment.
“Are tolerance and justice secularised versions of religious ideas?”
No, they are human versions of human ideas. They will be included in ideologies as content. Small children will be kind (and cruel) to each other entirely ignorant of the claims of religion to have created those character traits in them.
Those nasty secularists, next they will be claiming that it was them and not the faithful who invented breathing!
(Is religion theologised stone-age hunting skills?)
To be fair to the “Economist”, the reviewer nails Francis Collins.
It is good to know that justice is just the secularisation of a religious idea. I had forgotten this central fact when I read (http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1180527966693&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull) that “there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings” . After all if some people in a city launch rocket attacks on civilians outside the city then “the entire populace is responsible because they do nothing to stop the firing of Kassam rockets”, so ‘”[i]f they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand,” said Shmuel Eliyahu. “And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.” ‘
On reflection I must never have understood justice.
I suppose ‘justice’ as a metaphysical abstraction is dependent on the notion of an external authority that serves to define it, but as for tolerance, how on earth is that a concept borrowed from religion?
Quote-mining the scriptures. Jesus supposedly said ‘love thy neighbor’? Well, that settles it, religion invented tolerance.
Never mind that most of the actual history of religion involves a whole lot of killing and enslaving your neighbors. It’s the thought that counts.
Ah, more of this “everything that is good or important started in religion” idea. That’s why I can’t read Mircea Eliade any more.
The people who make this argument almost always miss a very important point. That is, when they comb through religious texts looking for passages they take to be about social justice, or compassion, or other nice things, they are reading the text from the perspective of someone living in a liberal civil society, and are backreading the values of that society into the text. The peoople who wrote the texts simply wouldn’t know what they were talking about. When Moses speaks of freedom in a Promised Land, he’s speaking of freedom for Jews, not for everyone. Moses would have been baffled and angered by our modern concepts of religious freedom and universal human rights.
The folks who make this argument rightly think that freedom and justice are important and good things, but they don’t get that the reason they think that has little to do with the influence of religion. In fact, these values were developed n spite of religion, and could only be fully worked out after the secularization of society. And that is the most ironic thing about all of this – the fact that the triumph of secular liberal ideals causes them to mistakenly assume that history’s religious leaders would share their values, when they would in fact be openly hostile to them.
Phil
I see a lot of people on internet forums and discussion sites who take liberalism for granted. They’ll say “well, I’ll believe my thing and you believe yours” or “all religions are valid to the person who believes them” or some other wishy-washy nonsense. At that point I feel compelled to remind them that the ability to make a statement like that and not be tortured, exiled, ostracized, or killed is a relatively new feature in human societies.
And while you’re at it, remind them that it’s also a relatively local feature in human societies – it doesn’t apply in Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran…