Atheism and the authoritarian state
Authoritarian states repress. That's what makes them authoritarian. The degree to which a state represses is therefor the degree to which it is authoritarian. Further, one can say that a state that represses religion must be an authoritarian state. For a state to declare itself explicitly atheistic (more than merely secular) is to repress religion at least somewhat, so it's pretty much logically impossible for an atheist state to not be authoritarian.
So, saying that atheist states have a history of authoritarianism is something of a tautology, and applies to any state expressing any positive position on religion. As with most such pat chains of reasoning, of course, it elides some important distinctions. Norway is nominally Lutheran, for example, but it's difficult to really call it authoritarian, as the state works hard to avoid enabling Lutheran domination. Meanwhile the repression of any ideology that might conflict with "communism" in Poland was both brutal and onerous. The degree of interference with civil rights makes a big difference. In the very history of explicitly atheist states, of course, there are few examples of Norway equivalents and many Polands.
Is this because atheists naturally gravitate toward authoritarian states? Considering that most of the atheistic states in question were clients of the Soviet Union, it's hardly surprising that they were all avowed socialist/communist states, which cannot operate except on an authoritarian basis. There's really no example of an atheist state coming about without demagogue-orchestrated communist populism borrowing directly from Marx and his heirs. Lenin's elitist stamp on all of 20th century communism certainly didn't help.
So the closest thing we have to naturally occurring atheist states are countries like Japan and perhaps the Netherlands. Since abandoning the ambulatory phase of Shinto/Buddhism that gave rise to early 20th century nationalism, they've not been particularly authoritarian, especially compared to far more religious neighbors like Taiwan and South Korea. The Netherlands is only incrementally more atheist (55% describe themselves as Secular Humanists as opposed to 25-40% in the rest of Western Europe) than its neighbors, but it's also incrementally more libertarian than its continental neighbors - especially socially, but also economically. The UK's economy is considerably more economically libertarian, of course, but England's entire industrial-age experience has been radically different from the rest of Europe's.
Two counties are at best anecdotes and I don't really see any reason to believe (naturally) atheistic countries would be any more libertarian than theistic ones, but the reason I see for the obverse doesn't really pay organized theism any compliments.
Essentially, powerful churches see the addition of powerful non-sectarian states like the addition of a second tiger to a hill (and vice-versa in the former communist countries). Churches (and other reified religious structures) are by their nature methods of centralizing authority (except in cases like the Quakers). One need only read the newsletters of old-line churches bemoaning the rise of "interfaith" churches to see desire to monopolize their control on their congregations. Another excellent example is Orthodox accusations against the Vatican of "poaching" their congregations. These are not people interested in competing openly in the marketplace of ideas, and libertarianism is a way to prevent state competition therein.
And of course, failing to control the message the children of the faithful receive is rightly perceived as a threat. Lancelot Finn, for example, worries that merely "conveying a vague sense that the whole world can be explained without reference to God" is sufficient to "turn my son into an atheist". Well, he's right. My grandfather, who is a very religious man as well as a chemist, accidentally triggered my "conversion" to atheism simply by explaining to me Occam's Razor. As time has passed, the percentage of atheists in the world has grown despite the much lower birth rates among the secular, showing that despite the lack of any missionary apparatus, atheism has been easily the most successful religious stance in the world as measured by conversion.
Now, many want to explain this in terms of the government acting as a missionary proxy for secular humanism, but it seems religious belief has actually fared worse in industrialized states with official religions. Really it seems to be most closely related to the degree of higher education in the general populace, whether religious or otherwise. Likely this has something to do with the much greater pedagogical weight the atheistic elite wield in academia. If one wants to find examples of secularists intimidating theists, that's certainly the place to look. Even granted that such intimidation is widespread and overwhelming (which I only do for the purposes of this essay) I very much doubt that intimidation-based conversion lasts very long after one leaves the intimidating environment, if one's earlier upbringing was notably religious. As the Jesuits (or Loyola) were once reputed to say "give me the first six years of a child's life and you can have the rest."
I think the persecution complex evinced by so many Christians is really an excuse explaining away the long-term decline of their faith. Ditto the Islamic fantasy that the entire Western world is arrayed against them.
Of course, with traditionalist Christianity in the ascendancy in the US, the fundamentalists risk radicalizing formerly-moderate secularists that have so far taken for granted that whatever aggravating things religious conservatives might say, their fundamental rights were not in real jeopardy. Believe it or not, I think criticism of the religious right has so far been relatively muted. Witness Andrew Sullivan's about-face as a public example of what I hear expressed more and more by my personal friends. My brother was once disgusted by the Log Cabin Republicans because he felt they were too liberal, but has become a committed enemy of the GOP because it's no longer possible to deny how much control the religious right has over it and how ambitious their goals are. Another libertarian friend of mine who used to weight economic freedoms much more heavily than social ones has also changed her mind and is now voting a straight Dem ticket. All in all, the percentage of "soft secularists" will still be much smaller than the evangelical legions, but look for it to become a more organized, outspoken and important force as former moderates begin to speak up and drown out the lunatic fringe of the left that has always been our embarrassment.
And then what happens? Will the US mirror Europe's religious decline? It depends on how authoritarian the US becomes about legislating religious morality on the nonreligious. Personally, I'd rather that *not* be the path, as the intervening time will be painful for everyone. I'd much rather traditional religion decline slowly with everyone's freedoms intact than be discredited by destructive interference in government.
None of which is amenable to the viewpoint of the traditionally religious, but it's how I see things. Now, for the nontraditionally religious, it need not be very scary, as most of them are quite happy to let people arrive at their various beliefs about the metaphysical universe independently.
My friend Sarah is an excellent example. She's quite religious in her way, but she combines a wide variety of different traditions together after trying them out and seeing how they fit her life. She certainly believes in a higher power of some sort, but neither would does the prospect of a secular education at all worry her. After all, it didn't turn her into an atheist automaton. Meanwhile, I went to a Protestant preschool, said grace before every family meal and so on, yet my theism died before I was ten. Now, had I continued to a sectarian primary school, the story might have gone differently, but speculation doesn't count as evidence.
All of which leads one to the suggestion that secularists are somewhat overafraid of the rise of religious schools. Sarah didn't become an atheist automaton and neither do parochial school students necessarily become theist clones. Stifling the marketplace of ideas typically only slows improvement; it doesn't easily stop or reverse it in the long term. We are not headed toward Margaret Atwood's theocratic dystopia.
That doesn't mean I look forward to the slowing of progress or the painful continuing conflict between champions of tradition and progress. I also hope to make some use of the advocacy by the religious of libertarian principles to counterbalance the socialist tendencies in my own set. Perhaps in some far future, atheism will hold the kind of demographic dominance that religious belief has enjoyed for most of human history, but mostly I just wish for the dismantling of all sorts of authoritarianism. If everyone became like Sarah, that would work just as well.
So, saying that atheist states have a history of authoritarianism is something of a tautology, and applies to any state expressing any positive position on religion. As with most such pat chains of reasoning, of course, it elides some important distinctions. Norway is nominally Lutheran, for example, but it's difficult to really call it authoritarian, as the state works hard to avoid enabling Lutheran domination. Meanwhile the repression of any ideology that might conflict with "communism" in Poland was both brutal and onerous. The degree of interference with civil rights makes a big difference. In the very history of explicitly atheist states, of course, there are few examples of Norway equivalents and many Polands.
Is this because atheists naturally gravitate toward authoritarian states? Considering that most of the atheistic states in question were clients of the Soviet Union, it's hardly surprising that they were all avowed socialist/communist states, which cannot operate except on an authoritarian basis. There's really no example of an atheist state coming about without demagogue-orchestrated communist populism borrowing directly from Marx and his heirs. Lenin's elitist stamp on all of 20th century communism certainly didn't help.
So the closest thing we have to naturally occurring atheist states are countries like Japan and perhaps the Netherlands. Since abandoning the ambulatory phase of Shinto/Buddhism that gave rise to early 20th century nationalism, they've not been particularly authoritarian, especially compared to far more religious neighbors like Taiwan and South Korea. The Netherlands is only incrementally more atheist (55% describe themselves as Secular Humanists as opposed to 25-40% in the rest of Western Europe) than its neighbors, but it's also incrementally more libertarian than its continental neighbors - especially socially, but also economically. The UK's economy is considerably more economically libertarian, of course, but England's entire industrial-age experience has been radically different from the rest of Europe's.
Two counties are at best anecdotes and I don't really see any reason to believe (naturally) atheistic countries would be any more libertarian than theistic ones, but the reason I see for the obverse doesn't really pay organized theism any compliments.
Essentially, powerful churches see the addition of powerful non-sectarian states like the addition of a second tiger to a hill (and vice-versa in the former communist countries). Churches (and other reified religious structures) are by their nature methods of centralizing authority (except in cases like the Quakers). One need only read the newsletters of old-line churches bemoaning the rise of "interfaith" churches to see desire to monopolize their control on their congregations. Another excellent example is Orthodox accusations against the Vatican of "poaching" their congregations. These are not people interested in competing openly in the marketplace of ideas, and libertarianism is a way to prevent state competition therein.
And of course, failing to control the message the children of the faithful receive is rightly perceived as a threat. Lancelot Finn, for example, worries that merely "conveying a vague sense that the whole world can be explained without reference to God" is sufficient to "turn my son into an atheist". Well, he's right. My grandfather, who is a very religious man as well as a chemist, accidentally triggered my "conversion" to atheism simply by explaining to me Occam's Razor. As time has passed, the percentage of atheists in the world has grown despite the much lower birth rates among the secular, showing that despite the lack of any missionary apparatus, atheism has been easily the most successful religious stance in the world as measured by conversion.
Now, many want to explain this in terms of the government acting as a missionary proxy for secular humanism, but it seems religious belief has actually fared worse in industrialized states with official religions. Really it seems to be most closely related to the degree of higher education in the general populace, whether religious or otherwise. Likely this has something to do with the much greater pedagogical weight the atheistic elite wield in academia. If one wants to find examples of secularists intimidating theists, that's certainly the place to look. Even granted that such intimidation is widespread and overwhelming (which I only do for the purposes of this essay) I very much doubt that intimidation-based conversion lasts very long after one leaves the intimidating environment, if one's earlier upbringing was notably religious. As the Jesuits (or Loyola) were once reputed to say "give me the first six years of a child's life and you can have the rest."
I think the persecution complex evinced by so many Christians is really an excuse explaining away the long-term decline of their faith. Ditto the Islamic fantasy that the entire Western world is arrayed against them.
Of course, with traditionalist Christianity in the ascendancy in the US, the fundamentalists risk radicalizing formerly-moderate secularists that have so far taken for granted that whatever aggravating things religious conservatives might say, their fundamental rights were not in real jeopardy. Believe it or not, I think criticism of the religious right has so far been relatively muted. Witness Andrew Sullivan's about-face as a public example of what I hear expressed more and more by my personal friends. My brother was once disgusted by the Log Cabin Republicans because he felt they were too liberal, but has become a committed enemy of the GOP because it's no longer possible to deny how much control the religious right has over it and how ambitious their goals are. Another libertarian friend of mine who used to weight economic freedoms much more heavily than social ones has also changed her mind and is now voting a straight Dem ticket. All in all, the percentage of "soft secularists" will still be much smaller than the evangelical legions, but look for it to become a more organized, outspoken and important force as former moderates begin to speak up and drown out the lunatic fringe of the left that has always been our embarrassment.
And then what happens? Will the US mirror Europe's religious decline? It depends on how authoritarian the US becomes about legislating religious morality on the nonreligious. Personally, I'd rather that *not* be the path, as the intervening time will be painful for everyone. I'd much rather traditional religion decline slowly with everyone's freedoms intact than be discredited by destructive interference in government.
None of which is amenable to the viewpoint of the traditionally religious, but it's how I see things. Now, for the nontraditionally religious, it need not be very scary, as most of them are quite happy to let people arrive at their various beliefs about the metaphysical universe independently.
My friend Sarah is an excellent example. She's quite religious in her way, but she combines a wide variety of different traditions together after trying them out and seeing how they fit her life. She certainly believes in a higher power of some sort, but neither would does the prospect of a secular education at all worry her. After all, it didn't turn her into an atheist automaton. Meanwhile, I went to a Protestant preschool, said grace before every family meal and so on, yet my theism died before I was ten. Now, had I continued to a sectarian primary school, the story might have gone differently, but speculation doesn't count as evidence.
All of which leads one to the suggestion that secularists are somewhat overafraid of the rise of religious schools. Sarah didn't become an atheist automaton and neither do parochial school students necessarily become theist clones. Stifling the marketplace of ideas typically only slows improvement; it doesn't easily stop or reverse it in the long term. We are not headed toward Margaret Atwood's theocratic dystopia.
That doesn't mean I look forward to the slowing of progress or the painful continuing conflict between champions of tradition and progress. I also hope to make some use of the advocacy by the religious of libertarian principles to counterbalance the socialist tendencies in my own set. Perhaps in some far future, atheism will hold the kind of demographic dominance that religious belief has enjoyed for most of human history, but mostly I just wish for the dismantling of all sorts of authoritarianism. If everyone became like Sarah, that would work just as well.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home