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I.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann
This is not the first time I have used this quote. The last time it came up, I was quick to point out that the horrible nihilism predicted by Nietzsche had not come to pass. That despite the predictions of not only Nietzsche, but many others, it is possible to be an atheist and still be good. But I was also quick to point out that this “goodness” was still largely derived from a religious foundation, and it’s unclear how long that foundation would last in the absence of a belief in God. Or to pull in another quote from Nietzsche:
When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.
Again, most atheists and even most intellectuals will argue that Nietzsche was once again proven wrong, that the “whole” of morality has not been broken. But it’s worth asking, as I did the last time around, is it possible that he was just premature in his pessimism? Is it possible that as we look at the fights over morality we’re having today, or the culture wars as they’re often called, that we’re finally seeing the realization of Nietzsche’s predictions.
To be clear, we have obviously been able to hang on to large parts of Christian morality, even without faith in God, the question Nietzsche asks and which deserves to be asked again, is have we been able to hang on to the necessary parts? For a while it appears we did, in part because genuine secularization at the level Nietzsche foresaw actually didn’t start happening until fairly recently. As an example, the percent of people who identified as religiously unaffiliated was flat at between 5 and 10 percent in the 20 years between 1972 and 1992 (it was 6% in 1991) before beginning a steady climb to 29% in 2018. It’s easy to maintain Christian morality if you still have a lot of Christians, but around 1992 (end of the Cold War?) it starts suddenly draining away, and it’s hard to imagine this will only affect the unnecessary bits. Christianity is leaving the stage, or being altered so completely that it can no longer fulfill its historical role, whatever that might be.
II.
From here I could go off on a jeremiad about the wickedness of the modern world, and certainly someone with the pen name Jeremiah should never shy away from that sort of thing, but in this post I want to go in a different direction. I don’t think there’s any question that Christian morality has been draining away, and many jeremiads could indeed be written on that topic, but the objective of this post is to point out the lesser known side effects of this decline, in particular how it affects the logistics of governing and of holding nations together.
To begin with, there’s the idea that all civilizations are inextricably intertwined with a specific religion. You may recall my post on the ideas of Samuel Huntington, in particular his book The Clash of Civilizations. At the time, one of the things that stood out to me about his thesis was the idea that you can’t have a civilization without having a religion to define that civilization. Or as he said:
Blood, language, religion, way of life, were what the Greeks had in common and what distinguished them from the Persians and other non-Greeks. Of all the objective elements which define civilizations, however, the most important usually is religion, as the Athenians emphasized. To a very large degree, the major civilizations in human history have been closely identified with the world’s great religions; and people who share ethnicity and language but differ in religion may slaughter each other, as happened in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia and the Subcontinent. [emphasis mine]
Hearing of this idea you may have several reactions:
- You may think Huntington is right and that by losing our link to religion we’re in a lot of trouble.
- You may think that Huntington is right about the importance of a religion, but that Christianity is no longer the religion of Western Civilization, and that therefore we don’t have to worry about its disappearance. We have a new religion, that of social justice or something similar, and that new religion might even come with a new, global civilization.
- You may think Huntington was right, but that he isn’t any longer. That something has changed recently either at a political, social, or technological level which makes his assertions about religion no longer valid, even if they were at some point.
- You may think Huntington is right, but only in a very weak, almost tautological sense. Maybe what he’s saying is something akin to, “A culture needs a culture.” In other words, how does this argument apply in a place like China? Is Confucianism really a religion? And if it is, are the Chinese actually believers in it in the same sense that people in America are believers in Christianity?
- You may think Huntington is just plain wrong. This is certainly possible, but he’s got a lot of evidence on his side and the point of this post is to martial yet more evidence in his favor.
Let’s take each of these reactions in order. The first is fairly straightforward. If you believe this then you’re on the same page with Nietzsche and Huntington and for that matter, me, and any further discussion of this would just be preaching to the choir.
As far as the second possibility, a replacement religion, I’ve already discussed it at some length, and there’s a lot of evidence that this might in fact be what’s happening. For one thing it also mostly follows the thinking of Huntington and Nietzsche. The key problem here is that I don’t think it avoids the “we’re in a lot of trouble” part from possibility one. You can read my previous post for a deeper dissection of this, but I’ve seen zero historical evidence that transitioning a civilization from one religion to another has ever been a peaceful or straightforward process.
For this possibility, the most charitable reading of history is that Western Civilization already abandoned Christianity around when Nietzsche said they would and successfully replaced it with enlightenment values. But as you may recall that transition was anything but smooth. And even optimists like Steven Pinker believe that enlightenment values are under serious attack.
Possibility three is perhaps the most interesting, that we needed religion, but we don’t any longer. Despite being interesting it has several things working against it. To begin with if you acknowledge that this is how things used to work, you have to come up with a credible mechanism for why things no longer work this way. Why politics and technology have somehow removed culture as a factor in maintaining a civilization. This becomes particularly difficult in light of the culture war we’re currently experiencing which has arguably been made worse by technology. To put it all together, you’re arguing that technology has made culture less contentious when the evidence all points in the opposite direction, and furthermore, in this argument the burden of proof would all be on your side of the argument.
In discussing possibility number four I offered up China as a counterexample, and I take it seriously. No one would describe China as a particularly religious country even if you grant that Confucianism is a religion, and at first glance this seems to seriously weaken Huntington’s argument (and by extension my own) but I believe there are some additional things to consider here. First and most obviously, no one would say, as protests in Hong Kong enter their 20th week that China is a model of cultural cohesion in the absence of a religion. Second, one would assume that if you have the all-encompassing top down dictatorship like China does, having a strong religion on top of that to fall back on becomes far less important. Or to put it another way, the fight over something like abortion looks a lot different in China. Something we’ll return to in a moment.
III.
This takes us to the final possibility, that Huntington is wrong, and refuting this possibility is where I plan to spend the remainder of the post.
As a foundation to that, I’d like to talk about Power Games vs. Value Games, I’m borrowing this labeling from the current series Tim Urban is doing on Wait but Why (which I’ve mentioned before in this space). Though you can find references to the overarching concept all through my work. But Urban’s definitions are more succinct.
The Power Games basically goes like this: everyone acts fully selfish, and whenever there’s a conflict, whoever has the power to get their way, gets their way. Or, more succinctly:
Everyone can do whatever they want, if they have the power to pull it off.
There are no principles in the Power Games—only the cudgel. And whoever holds it makes the rules.
The animal world almost always does business this way. The bear and the bunny from the beginning… found themselves in a conflict over the same resource—the bunny’s body. The bunny wanted to keep having his body to use for being alive and the bear wanted to eat his body to score a few energy points from his environment. A power struggle ensued between the two, which the bear won. A bear’s power comes in the form of being a big strong dick. But power isn’t the same as strength. A bunny’s power comes in the form of sensitive ears, quick reflexes, and running (bouncing?) speed—and if the bunny had been a little better at being a bunny, he might have escaped the bear and retained the important resource. [emphasis original]
As Urban points out this is how things are in a state of nature, and it’s mostly how things were historically. People and nations did whatever they wanted as long as they had the power to pull it off. But there is another way to resolve disputes, Value Games:
In the Power Games, people who have cudgels use them to forcefully take the resources they want. In the Value Games, people use carrots to win resources over from others.
The Value Games are driven by human nature, just like the Power Games are. The difference is the Power Games is what humans do when there are no rules—the Value Games is what humans do when a key limitation is added into the environment:
You can’t use a cudgel to get what you want.
If I want something you have, but I’m not allowed to get it by bullying you, then the only option I’m left with is to get you to give it to me voluntarily. And since you’re selfish too, the only way you’ll do that is if I can come up with a “carrot”—a piece of value I can offer—that you’d rather have than the resource I want from you.
I will add that one aspect of Value Games that Urban doesn’t pay a lot of attention to is that such games are a lot easier to engage in if people have many values in common. It’s one thing to offer people carrots if everyone loves carrots. It’s quite another if they don’t. Or to put it another way, imagine that instead of offering carrots you’re offering pork. Your ability to trade for things you want is going to be very different depending on whether the person you’re dealing with is Catholic or Muslim. Value Games depend a great deal on having common values. This becomes even more important when you’re talking about sacred values, i.e. a religion.
Furthermore, Urban didn’t spend as much time as I would have liked explaining why you wouldn’t be able to use a cudgel to get what you want. In truth the cudgel is always an option. It always hangs in the background. All Value Games have a bit of a Power Game in them. It’s just that you’re unlikely to bring out the cudgel if the carrot is going to be more effective. Also, the more sacred the value the more likely you are to use force to defend it, making shared religious values the most important shared values of all. But once religion goes away, once people no longer have faith that there’s some supernatural source of sacred values, that foundation of morality Nietzsche talked about, then inevitably (though not immediately) Value Games become harder, and Power Games become more likely.
IV.
Let’s look at some examples of this dynamic in action. You have almost certainly heard about the tweet Daryl Morey, owner of the Houston Rockets, sent in support of the Hong Kong protesters and the controversy it caused between China and the NBA. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that this is a Power Game. The Chinese can talk about their hurt feelings till they’re blue in the face, but in the end China wants something and they have the power to get it (withholding billions of dollars) so that’s what’s happening.
This part is straightforward enough. But dig a little bit deeper and a few other interesting points emerge. First, China is still playing Value Games with the protests in Hong Kong, they haven’t yet resorted to the cudgel. One Value Game is with the actual people protesting and another is with the international community. In contrast the way they manage their citizens who live outside of Hong Kong largely takes the form of a Power Game. On the other side of things while the NBA is playing (and apparently losing) a Power Game with China, what was it doing when it boycotted North Carolina in 2016 for the state law which was perceived to be biased against the LGBT community? And is it hypocritical as so many people have accused?
Now I suppose that you could argue that North Carolina’s law was so much worse than what China is doing in Hong Kong that in the one case a boycott was appropriate, but in the other a groveling apology was called for, but I don’t think anyone seriously buys that. No the difference is that in the case of North Carolina, we’re still playing Value Games. The NBA was hoping that by boycotting North Carolina that their values would shift in the direction of the NBAs values. (Or what they saw as the center of gravity for the whole country. The NBA is a business after all). When the NBA caved in to China it wasn’t because of their deeply held values. (Other than their deeply held avarice.) It was because China had the power to compel them to submit. Would the controversy have played out differently if China (or for that matter the US) was Christian? One would certainly hope so.
Let’s look at another example. I just finished reading the book Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age by Arthur Herman. I’ll do a more detailed review of it at the end of the month, but right now I want to focus on the independence negotiations between the United Kingdom and India. Certainly power played a large part in these negotiations, British military power and the power of the Indian masses which Gandhi was able to effectively marshall, but it’s remarkable to what extent Christian and Hindu values played a part as well. Gandhi was a huge admirer of Christianity and of the British in general. If he hadn’t he wouldn’t have attempted his campaign of passive resistance. If you doubt this just imagine how his campaign would have gone if he had tried it with the Nazis rather than the British.
But set aside all of that for the moment, the really interesting thing is that the two sides could sit down together. They could negotiate and reach an agreement, and this, in spite of ongoing atrocities that today are barely imaginable. When you imagine politics today, who do you imagine sitting down together? (Certainly not Pelosi and Trump.) It seems that the most alarming sign that Value Games are over and we’re in the realm of Power Games is the fact that the two sides of the current conflict can’t have those negotiations, in fact they can barely watch football together, if the recent dust-up over Ellen and Bush is any indication.
For my final example I want to revisit abortion where we appear to be on the cusp of transitioning from Value Games to Power Games. Let’s begin that examination by looking at how abortion is handled by some of the systems we’ve already touched on.
Religion- I’m not an expert on how various religions view abortions, but I’m reasonably certain that they all take a stand on it. In other words, to return to my primary point, Value Games work better in the presence of a religion because there is an agreed upon value baseline.
China- Given that China generally operates in a Power Game space with its population, they can basically dictate whatever abortion policy they want. At the moment it’s legal, but if tomorrow they decided to make it illegal would anyone be surprised? Would you expect massive demonstrations? I wouldn’t.
Switching to Enlightenment Values from Christian Values- What does The Enlightenment say about abortion? Is it pro-choice? I know that many people would argue that it is, but if so, it took a long time to get there. In fact, pro-choice organizations argue that abortion was basically legal everywhere until the enlightenment. After that initial rush of anti-abortion laws, it appears that the first place to make it legal in all cases was the Soviet Union in 1920 under Lenin. I don’t know about you, but I generally avoid using examples from the Soviet Union to buttress my case. After that the next place for it to be made legal was Mexico in 1931 and then only in cases of rape. It didn’t arrive in the US until 1967 when Colorado legalized it in cases of rape, incest and health of the mother. Needless to say it doesn’t sound like it was a big part of the core Enlightenment values.
All of this takes us to the battles over abortion we see today. As I said, up until recently these debates seemed to revolve around a discussion of values, but more and more they’ve moved into the realm of power. Who can do what. So far the Power Games are operating within the framework of laws, which are a form of values, but when you pay more attention to fighting over who can interpret those laws than the laws themself I think some important rubicon has been crossed on the power/value continuum.
As further evidence that we have crossed over from arguing about values to exercising power I offer up the venom present in the current debate, where even repeating Bill Clinton’s assertion that abortions should be safe, legal and rare provokes enormous blowback from the pro-choice side of things. Or to frame it another way. Gandhi and the Viceroy of India, Lord Irwin were able to sit down and negotiate despite excessive violence on the side of the British and mass uprisings among the Indians. Who can we imagine doing the same today?
V.
It’s important to note that to the extent that the West is “post-christian” it hasn’t been post-christian for very long, and it’s still unclear what system will come along and replace religion as a civilizational bedrock. Even if you don’t agree that it has to be another religion, I think we can agree that it has to be something, if we’re going to avoid slipping back into power games. And thus far the options do not appear promising:
To complete the circle, it should be noted that Nietzsche had a solution to this problem. It was the Übermensch, but it’s hard to imagine anything less likely to fill in as a core civilizational value in this day and age.
To continue with Nietzsche, people took a watered down version of his ideas, combined it with the ideas of progress more generally and came up with eugenics. And it’s hard to find a major figure who didn’t support it in the first half of the 20th century. Also, it should be noted, abortion was a major component of that movement.
It’d be nice to say that Christianity was still powerful enough that it put a stop to eugenics. It was not, it had much more to do with the evils of Nazism, but it is interesting to note that when the Supreme Court ruled that state laws requiring compulsory sterilization of the unfit were constitutional, that a Catholic judge was the only one to dissent, and he did so because of his religious beliefs.
For those celebrating the decline of Christianity. This has to provide a cautionary tale, and, further, a strong piece of evidence that abandoning religion is more difficult and error-prone than people think. In any case it is no longer a candidate as an alternative to religion.
Moving on, other people such as Steven Pinker put a lot of stock in Enlightenment values, but they’re not holding up so well either. (Which is part of the reason Pinker had to write a whole book defending those same values.) Certainly, as I pointed out above, they seem unequal to the task of solving the current crisis.
Still other people hold out hope that some entirely new civic religion will come along, and magically solve everything. And perhaps it will, but large failures like eugenics and smaller failures like the blind spots of the enlightenment should make us cautious about the effectiveness of reasoning our way into a cohesive set of effective values. And even if that’s something we can do, the transition might be brutal.
It would appear that a return to Christianity is the only thing that’s left, but of course that’s much easier said than done and I suspect the process is past the point of no return. It part it’s because they were right, all those people who claimed that it was possible for an individual to abandon religion and still be good. The part I think they and everyone else missed is how difficult it is for a civilization to abandon religion and still be unified.
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The problem with the quote above on Huntington’s view is that historically intra-religious fighting happened as often as inter-religious fighting. This isn’t specific to religious ideology, either. We saw the same thing in atheist states of the 20th century. I don’t personally think religion is as much a cause of conflict as people make it out to be. I think it’s more a just the proximal justification people make up as a shroud for deeper underlying reasons. We do this all the time with non-religious things, too; like using the potential for WMDs to justify a desire to take out a threatening Sadaam Hussein.
Thus, I’d probably sign on to #5 above, despite what you’ve presented here. Sure, a pro-life stance is often organized by religious groups, but that doesn’t mean it’s a particularly religious viewpoint. First, there are plenty of religious groups that don’t have a problem with abortion. That there are some who do doesn’t mean they came to that because of something they read in the Bible. Which verse, in particular, are they turning to? Thou shalt not kill, maybe? That’s not exactly specific to Judeo-Christian values. Much less so than other verses in Exodus 20 I might quote. So I think the perception of abortion as a religious undertaking is more because certain churches have taken up that cause, similar to how the NRA and gun rights are linked. Certainly conflict exists, and conflict among competing values has been part of social conflict for millenia. I’m sure shifting values – including those that are linked to a general religious shift nationwide – will be prone to generating new social conflict. But that’s something we’ve faced in the US and globally for centuries at least. I don’t see how the present moment is particularly worse than what we’ve gone through in the past – at least along this axis.
Do intra-religious wars happen as often as inter-religious wars? Are you sure? I get the sense that from around the time of the first crusade (and honestly even before that) through to the Barbary pirates Christianity and Islam were in a constant low-grade war with very little diplomacy. Even if you argue that intra-Christian war was also going on during that whole time, I think it had a very different character.
Christians fought other Christians all the time. Often the dividing line between one sect and another was whether they decided to fight each other, not doctrinal disagreements. The doctrinal bifurcation often followed the schism, instead of leading it – although the reverse was also sometimes the case. A great example was the sack of Rome, which was done by Christians who purposefully left holy sites unspoiled out of respect to those they fought. Yet the Romans chose not to view them as fellow religionists. Of course, there was also infighting among Muslims for the hundreds of years they were fighting crusades with Christians and for hundreds of years before/after that. That only covers two world religious traditions, and I’m sure we could go deeply into others and find similar patterns.
The crusades are a great example of my point here. In popular mythology they were all about Christians invading the Holy Land to try and fight “infidel” Muslims, but the actual history looks more like naked power struggles. Muslims moved into backward Europe, conquered a bunch of land, and the Europeans responded in a martial backlash. The religious justification for the wars was there, sure, but even for the famous crusades the roots of the conflict weren’t religious strife. The roots were economic and political in nature, dressed up with religious language after the conflict began. The same thing applies to, say the split between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, the various Protestant/Catholic fighting, Sunni/Shiite (to a certain extent – yes there are religious differences TODAY, but how much of that existed immediately after the schism or mattered to the people at the time), etc.
I’m sure there is an example in history of a purely religious fight, where a shared religion would have prevented war. But what was much more common was some leader or group waging war over resources/land/people as the root cause of the conflict, but using the rhetoric of religion to define the struggle. Sometimes the two groups started off with a shared religious tradition, but by the end of the struggle they ended up in two different religions. That’s not evidence to me that a shared religious tradition is either necessary or sufficient to prevent conflict.
I’m not claiming the people who actually engaged in the fighting were entirely cynical about using religion to achieve their aims. I’m sure many believed in their cause from a religious viewpoint, or that their opponents really were different from them religiously. You can always go back and say, “sure they say they believe in Jesus Christ, the resurrection, and the atonement, but they’re not really Christian because they don’t define those terms in exactly the way I do. Therefore this is a fight between us and heretics – which is even worse because they’re perverting the Right Way to Believe!”
Language is infinitely malleable and susceptible to personal biases. People and motivations are complex. But it’s a strong coincidence how often ideology aligns with economic interests, and how often it does NOT inversely align. Meanwhile, religions often start out aligned, until they aren’t because of conflict, which doesn’t support causation here. So whatever the claim about the causes of so many historic wars, the revealed behavioral causes appear to point toward economic/political interests over religious ones. Thus, I think it’s more important to figure out ways for diverse people to live together, than it is for people to figure out how to become less diverse in order to prevent conflict.
The rabbit/bear analogy oversimplifies human interactions to much for my liking. The more so when trying to make correlations to modern life. For one, interpersonal interactions are often governed by other types of hierarchy, not just dominance hierarchies based on power. Prestige hierarchies often loom larger in behavior but smaller in popular perceptions about how people behave. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065260116300144
Dominance is easier to analogize to, but also much less relevant to how we actually treat each other and/or think about our choices. You can easily say, “making the sale in business is like a bear trying to eat a rabbit, it’s all about power”, and that’s easy to imagine. But the connection doesn’t make any sense. A lousy salesman might be able to bully people into buying his product, but he’ll get few referrals and soon word gets around so people try to avoid him.
The problem with only thinking along dominance hierarchies is that you come to strange conclusions, like the one about the cudgel. Yes, in a dominance hierarchy the cudgel is always an option, but in a more common prestige hierarchy using a cudgel is actually counter-productive. It costs you more than you would stand to gain. A good salesman who tries to match the product to the customer’s needs might do worse over a very short term, but much better over the long term. That person gains success, notoriety, and people try to emulate them. We also think, “that’s the way to win in life” and give graduation commencement speeches about it. That’s still power, but it’s a different type of game. Human society is more often aligned with prestige than dominance hierarchies as a winning strategy – though in some cases we see a mixture of the two.
I think we see both values signalling and prestige/dominance hierarchies playing out simultaneously. Values often align along religious lines, but not always. And it’s entirely possible to be a Methodist who adheres to Left-leaning principles as to Right-leaning ones – or just about any other faith. Indeed, at the same time Romney was running for president and Hatch was among the oldest senators, Reid was leading the opposition party. All men shared the same faith. Also, the first Catholic president was a Democrat, despite the Church’s position on things like abortion and contraceptives. Values battles happen within faiths, not just among them, or among them and atheists. I see those battles as happening orthogonally to hierarchy, not as part of a continuum with it.
Edit: Obviously Obama was more appropriately the “Leader of the Democratic Party” during his years in office. However Harry Reid loomed large during the same period when Orrin Hatch was diametrically opposed to him at the highest legislative levels.
I have several problems with Urban value/power dichotomy, I think he lumps far too much into the value bucket, but as I’ve said repeatedly at some point if you can’t decide things any other way it’s going to come down to power and force. And I think people have largely forgotten that.
And yes Reid and Hatch were both Mormons, and yet on the opposite side of things, but my argument is more that values provide a floor to things. Christians may have fought other Christians, but they largely avoided making slaves of other (white) Christians. And the same could be said for the Muslims. Reid and Hatch disagreed about a lot of things, but they could still sit down and have a productive discussion. My contention would not be that a common religion solves all possible sources of disagreement, but rather that it puts a floor on that disagreement which makes it unlikely to progress to the extremes.
I think it’s remarkable how much of human society is NOT defined by power/force, or even the threat of force. I’m not saying force is absent, just that much of society isn’t driven by force. I would attribute a certain amount of this to the difference in behavioral requirements between prestige hierarchies and dominance hierarchies. And it’s probably true that if a prestige hierarchy fails entirely people will default to a dominance hierarchy, but that should point us to the importance of not allowing the prestige hierarchy from failing.
Despite our history of war, functional human society appears to be driven more by cooperation than by conflict. Thus, we shouldn’t see conflict as the default mode, but as the failure mode. I guess we’re not far from each other, other than in what we see as the causes of conflict and what prevents it.
I think people will always find reasons to be different from one another, and reasons to fight about those differences – whether they be based on religion, gender, skin color, etc. We minimize past distinctions, because they’re no longer relevant to us. They must not have been as big of a deal, or maybe we’ve forgotten them entirely, but there’s always some reason to divide human society.
Open, armed conflict is inherently highly risky. People don’t tend to resort to high-risk behaviors when there is a low-risk method of achieving the same goal. So open conflict, or even the threat of open conflict, is generally initiated by people whose other options are exhausted. This is why democracy has historically been unstable in larger political units, because majority rule tends to disenfranchise minority interests. Those minorities then have an incentive to fight against the majority, even if the split is 55%-45%, because they’re unable to work with them.
The genius of the American republic is that it attempts to guard against majority rule and protect minority interests, thereby preventing open conflict. The point was never to make a utopian paradise, but to create an enduring union among disparate interests. If we see open conflict developing, it’s probably because a majority voice is attempting to disenfranchise minority interests.
First, before “God died” “gods died”. Monotheism’s first battle was against the old gods so we have to ask did they die? The Bible seems to be full of railing against gods, monotheism winning, and not too long later people are believing in gods again. The belief in classical gods (Greek and Roman) does indeed seem dead yet there is no need to ‘replace’ them. Their influence on culture continues even though people reading Homer today are not viewing the gods the way ancient listeners probably viewed them.
Since the gods didn’t die then how could God die? I think at a bare min. for anything like this to happen, you would need all of humanity wiped out save for a long term isolated group (such as those who live on North Sentinel Island).
That reduces the question to will Nietzsche’s comments hold if people simply stop believing in God? What consequences were there to not believing in gods? Does this not seem a bit paradoxical? Are the beliefs of humans so important? If they are doesn’t that put humans in the place of gods?
Another issue here is China seems a bit strained as a counter example. Hong Kong is dramatic but is it really a lack of unity for China? How does that compare to Russia during the Revolution or America during the Civil War (both nations more unified by Christianity than China was ever unified by Confucius) ? Are China and Hong Kong trying to split into different cultures or does this simply seem like an attempt at political independence which the history books are littered with?
Also religion here seems to have a fractal impression. Go back a hundred plus years and most Americans would say there was a non-trivial difference between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Need we bring up the fact that despite surface shows of Christian unity, both Catholic and Protestant theologians view the LDS as pretty borderline Christian in its understanding of both the nature of Christ and God? On the other hand one could imagine during WWII many Americans looking askance at Japan’s religion(s) and possibly viewing the conflict as some type of unity of the 3 monotheisms against atheistic and pagan faiths.
These differences and unities seem much in the eye of the beholder and what the observer chooses to place emphasis on as it relates to his agenda and ideology. That is all well and good but not if you are trying to get at the truth with this analysis rather than simply buttressing the opinions you’ve arrived at using other methods.
I think unity is complicated than a single axis with low unity on one end and high unity on the other. Yes the Christian US fought a Civil War, but note both how respectful each side was to the other (Lee’s surrender is a fantastic example of this) and also note how well the country was reunified, as in it happened at all. Trade the South for China and imagine post war unity in that situation. You can’t it’s completely inconceivable.
Also note the difference between the US attitudes towards Germany and Japan. During World War II. Both we involved in the war, but the struggle was far more existential for the Japanese than the Germans. All of which is to say that there’s many ways for civilizations to interact, and assuming that either all interactions are good, or all interactions are bad misses the numerous vectors for interaction. Primarily I think that religion acts as the lowest level of these vectors that it prevents people from going completely genocidal, but at higher levels all sorts of things could happen and that foundation would still be there.
This sounds like reasoning by datum. Lee’s surrender? OK how about the lynchings soon after? How about Sherman’s March? Does this compare to Hong Kong, which has been mostly peaceful, but loud?
Agreed. The American Civil War was bloody and brutal. Sure, there were points of civility in some places, but I can’t see the justification in cherry-picking those examples and de-emphasizing others. Certainly having a JW Booth assassinating Lincoln – and being widely praised for his actions – wasn’t what I would think of as a smooth reunification. Nor would the following decades of reconstruction.
I know people in the South who still fly the Dixie flag and call it the War of Northern Aggression. That they celebrate the 4th of July is partly a function of how much the antebellum South revered the US Founding even as they left the union, and partly due to the intervening century and a half since the conflict ended.
Both sides of the conflict were avowedly Christian. Protestants on either side would cite their beliefs as part of why they fought the conflict (yes, Southerners very much did this; it wasn’t just a case of Northerners citing moral high ground on slavery; Southerners frequently cited their beliefs in the righteousness of their cause before God over that of the North as motivation for their struggle). If two groups of people divided by a common religion can fight the most deadly war in US history (for Americans) you have to admit that the thesis “religion protects against civil strife” is at best unconvincing.
(the “you have to admit” here is obviously aimed at Jeremiah; I think Boonton and I are on the same page here)