The reemergence of religion into the public space – a way of saying “no”?

By Douglass Carmichael

July 2005

Is The reemergence of religion into the public space in large part a reaction to modern and post modern trends to which normal politics – the Republican and Democratic parties – provide no real alternative?

The reemergence of religion into the public space is a cultural shock to many. And I would include myself. We thought we lived in an increasingly science based secular world, and that the enlightenment was still penetrating the few remaining shadows of old myth, verbal ritual, blood and despair. Yet we were also bothered by the misuse of “rational” in the irrational trend of replacing goals with means, and the tightening connections of capital with technology and power.

The overwhelming movement of the West since the Middle Ages is probably the confluence among technology, power, capital and status. The ruling class, loosely defined by ownership, political connections, and education, has been able to keep control, more or less, of this ensemble for its own benefit . The industrial phase required, until recently, a larger middle class of well paid managers to keep this ensemble and its emerging complexity flowing and efficiently productive. The digital world, with its technology and the consequences, seems to imply that we need fewer managers, because coordination technology allows lower level workers to cross coordinate.

We are beginning to see that there is an inexorable flow to the techno-economic, and that it is now sensed by almost everyone. Mary Poovey has creatively called it the Axis of Finance. Capital congregates around a few places, and globalization is the extension of the exploitation of resource, but not of real economic power, to more and more of the world. Elites in new countries are paid off for delivering their populations to the megamachine. Law and regulation support the movement of capital and ownership into ever more skewed distributions.

But disgruntlement has had a hard time focusing itself because of the distractions of war, from the rise of Napoleon, his attacks forcing the militarization of first Germany, then Japan, 1st and 2nd World Wars, the Cold War, and Iraq. There are those who want to keep our attention focused on external things they encourage us to fear rather than to fear the direction of the economic technical system, with its concentration of money and power. This prevents politically powerful criticism of the technical-financial axis, with its negative impact on family, community and the environment, while we are seduced toward still producing children beyond sustainability. Not only does this keep us distracted, but also the ensuing tensions among increasing populations are good for markets: energy, weapons, and drugs.

I am inclined to look at Iraq, Bolton, Social Security debate, and all the minor provocations forwarded by Bush as distractions, keeping the Center-right and left fragmented in not so important pit bull fights. Meanwhile the distribution of real power narrows, not between countries, though that is true for some, but from economies to elites within all countries.

The tendency of "the system" to turn into a well coordinated machine owned by a few is making everyone nervous. The progressive professional class wants peace and reason, but while still supporting expensive careers, and using new technologies that can be assimilated by society at a non-destructive pace. The tendency of that group has been to see the others, the fundamentalists, the Bush supporters, as mere primitives. But there is good evidence that the "right" in the US have maintained a resistance to modernization that goes back to the puritans and the Counter Reformation.

America was in the 1700's a refuge from Europe, to avoid the powers of change and hold on to ancient ways. Jefferson's Notes on Virginia and the earlier History and the Current state of Virginia by Beverly both portray an asylum from emerging European culture and the trends of modernity. What Jefferson saw as potentially free from European oppression was a widely shared vision of the American future. Many in America then and now believed, "Just leave us alone and let us be on our own land." This is not new, but deep in the American experience, and taught by texts for two centuries.

What is striking is the degree to which Bush has been able to keep the resistant traditional part of the population while forwarding a rich guy policy. The democrats have failed to offer an alternative except what is perceived as professionalization and bureaucratization that is insensitive to local and traditional values. The “value proposition” of the Democrats – concern for peace, poverty, quality of life, better education – is lost. The Democrats are much more likely to be at home with Silicon Valley than with unions or the bottom half of the population.

The progressives, seen and self-identifying as left, are against what the right seems to want, but have no real alternative beyond a kind of center right posture that is even divided on the Iraq incursion, but hardly asking for justice for the bottom half of the population. In fact, no one seems to have an answer to the larger issues of designing a quality of life with the good use of technology, the environment, with education for all, reasonable rewards for high performance, the use of capital and governance responsive to real issues. In the absence of something to say “yes” to, “No” emerges with increasing power.

So I am proposing that there is a deep continuity between reversion to traditional, even fundamentalist systems of belief, terrorism, and upper middle class depression. Most people are deeply concerned, and either discouraged, cynical, or scared.

The inexorable, but maybe not inevitable, tendency for concentration and coordination to make a single world of secular non-humanistic technocratic realism married to market fundamentalism and Lockian private property fundamentalism, will eventually lead more and more people (the numbers already might be quite high), to use what ever means they can to say “NO” to the official future and hope for some emerging alternative. The uni-bomber and the Okalahoma bombing are hints we should not neglect.

Michael Powell, just finishing his term as head of the FCC, said a few days ago as I write,

"I'm incredibly optimistic, bullish and excited. There's another player in the room and it's called technology. It's not a person, it doesn't have a soul, and it doesn't care that it's ripping up the way we've done it. And there's nothing to stop it. The laws of physics keep tearing things apart, and I don't think that regulatory change is dependent on lawyers. We do need some regulatory reform but even if we did nothing the world is going to change anyway. -- It’s an innovator's paradise. You can either catch the wave, or get run over by it."

This kind of sadistic identification with destruction by the winners will be seen as excessive and unfeeling. It has some truth, but not that much. Insensitivity is worse than lack of irony. The culture will react back against the excessive identification with change and its destructive force (Schumpeter's "creative destruction.") as inhumane, and off center. Will that reaction itself be more humane, or a descent to Rwanda like entropic soup?

In the context of resistance to change, motivated by increasing relationship fragmentation, alienation from meaning, and loss of a relationship to those with power, we might see – even if we did not expect - some surprising changes in the political landscape. Rereading American History reminds us that the passions of American politics have been deep and always mixed with religious thinking. Issues like slavery, the gold standard, silver parity, paper money, westward expansion, and the wars (all of them) have always had traditional values against “the money interests.”

So we should not be so surprised by the reemergence of religion as a powerful public force when general dissatisfaction is increasing. The reaction of the world to the death of the Pope hints at this. The Pope, in his humanism, which in many aspects was real, has come to stand for an alternative to the mega-machine tendencies of the techno-capital axis. The arch bishop of Canterbury said yesterday, "Religion is the counter culture, the opposition to the way of the world. The church of God is a community of people called to live at a cost, called to live at times to stand against what seems to be the received wisdom, what seems to be the obvious way of living in the world around, called to lead a transfigured life, a life that is visibly different in its quality of love, faithfulness and hope, never mind what the price is."

The emotionality in reaction to Pope John Paul’s death I think was hinted at earlier by the death of Princess Diana and the deep feelings for her based on her anti-bomb crusade and other good works. The death of the younger John Kennedy struck a similar chord of world wide sympathy looking for belief in goodness. The role of television and the Internet in creating these reactions is obvious, new, and powerful. It hints at a world wide socialization to prefer peace and softness to war and authoritarian bullishness.

The promise of science as a force for good has long been lost as it has shifted from a beneficial addition to humanity to being a driver of wealth, creating effects that work against people and the environment, leading increasingly to the suspicion that the economy is doing well but the people are doing badly. I recently read a biography of William Law Olmsted, designer of Central Park, the entrance to Yosemite, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the Boston Fens, and may others. What is clear in his life is the sense that whatever good is created will be quickly spoiled by small minded opportunists. Thinking about the whole is a very rare human quality.

That a secular humanism, skeptical, compassionate, environmentally sensitive, could lose out to a religious view of the world, was almost unthinkable a few years ago. What we failed to consider was that the secular humanist world was really a cover story for the technocratic corporate world. The alternatives, we thought, were between science and religion. But the real choice came down to either supporting a technocratic societal tendency run by elites, or religion as the only alternative mobilizeable social force to put the breaks on.

To the extent that religion does emerge as a new public center of power and persuasion, the dangers of demagoguery are probably even worse than for the bureaucratizing capitalism of modern society. This is because religion tends to the authoritarian and rhetorical rather than to the reasoned and parliamentary, as a style of persuasion. People in churches are fairly benign, though exclusionary. People led by religious leaders outside church tend toward crusades and demand blood in the name of belief.

But those who are more sensitive to the humanization issues, compassion, justice, environment, must face up to the act that the technology and science that was meant to benefit mankind got stolen by careers and money and lost its human centered values. Since Francis Bacon tried to persuade the King of the value of science and the Royal Society to the empire, has always been a mixed story we could have learned from, if we had looked.

The two choices we though we had: modernization vs. fundamentalism, turn out to be three: technocratic centralism, humanizing reform, and religious zeal. A compromise might be a revaluing humanity through religious influence, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist…) with the better use of technology to support people and the environment, and an effective business sector that was aimed - by values and regulations, to make a better world and rein in the game of private profiteering. I say “compromise” because it is clear that the victory of one, or even two of the tendencies over the third would probably lead to a new kind of totalitarianism, brutal, harsh, and control oriented.

To create that compromise we need a view of the future that allows for good lives in the present and works toward

1. Providing reasonable security through world cooperation

2. A vigorous economy that creates jobs and is yet less exploitative of the environment

3. The integration of civilization into the landscape.

4. Increasing decentralization as the new peripheries become stable and responsible.

5. Capital declines in raw power, as financial instruments, up to and including interest, are de-legitimated, and we have better public accounting (one trillion unaccounted for in the Pentagon)

6. Bringing corporations back under meaningful state charters.

7. Taking children and their parents very seriously as the major method of producing the core of society: the next generation.

8. An over-arching vision that is simple.

If you think of your own most cherished values, something like this list will probably emerge.

And since we have no political party or well known public spokespersons for this humanizing civilizing goal, people look for old language to express their discontents.

A solid alternative, vital, alive, aesthetic, humane, respecting the need for beliefs and meaning, with a desire for a quality of real lives, is necessary. With such a vision we could bend the current world trend towards a better future, and if we can’t create such an alternative, the current trend, unsustainable, probably breaks into a much rougher world, or, if it coheres, will be in a tighter more controlled world.

To create a vision that includes at least the elements in the list. To get there I keep working the elements, and playing with alternative scenarios. Here is the frame that has provided some insights, and I find audiences of many kinds like it.

Let’s start with a pair of the largest unknowns:

1. Will we solve the major problems? Environment, population, war, education, families

2. Will we do this with large globalizing institutions, or with smaller, regional and local ones?

This generates four different outcomes, if we move towards the paired extremes.

First is that we will solve the problems (or at least keep them managed) with large organizations. This is a kind of official future describing the way Europe, the United States and Asia seem to be moving.

Second, that we will solve the problems, but with smaller, local and regionally focused efforts. We can call this the Jeffersonian scenario.

The other two, which I call Fascism and Mafia centered, you can work out.

The major result from these is to notice that the managers and owners that are propelling us toward the Official Future really prefer the Jeffersonian. They want semi-rural lives, even if just for weekends and vacations, and they would like their children to live in a detached house surrounded by trees, and even “acreage”, with a school they can walk to and a dog that can roam with them. This suggests that polarizing between the Official Future and more regional and local development is not smart. That a policy of blending the two with mixed strategies, social policies that support some degree of globalization, but with renewed focus on local and regional development, would pull most people together. If they find themselves in conflict, the result will be to increase policing and isolation, and to shift the emotional climate towards the fascist/mafia outcomes.

The scenarios can be summarized in a diagram.

The way to achieve this complex mixed strategy is to realize that regional and local development requires a more equitable distribution of resources, and the education at local levels to make sense with those resources.

This approach, blending globalization and local developments, in order to bend rather than break, requires that we all learn to deal with complexity and compassion – capacities we are not good at.

For political dialog, with its need for simplification, memorability, contrast with other views, and attractiveness to the ear and mind, this alternative needs a name. Major political symbols are evocative of deep meanings. Democracy, Socialism, Freedom, Rule of Law, Nation, Community all have complex resonances, sometimes positive and sometimes negative. Evocative symbols are necessary for the dialog.

For many reasons, Garden World is what I favor. It cuts to the core. It has high contrast with alternatives. The Japanese countryside gives us a hint at what a well treated environment can look like. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon could even help integrate our friends in the Middle East, helping to revive this great tradition. Fredrick Law Olmstead in creating Central set an American Model for city-rural integration that is design based and organic. The environment, through agriculture, is probably the key infrastructure for our population, much more important than energy. A Garden World is attractive, healthy believable and possible. It uses the technical, but in the service of the humane and organic. It offers quality of life for rich and poor.

Garden World is the real contrast to the Buck Rogers sci-fi techno-dominant world that is our current official direction. Garden world allows the humanists, the religious, and the scientific to have a shared goal of a realizable better world. Without such a goal, we will see increased refusnik terrorism, where each new freedom fighter embraces a last and self annihilating action in a social field of utter despair. A person only becomes a suicide bomber when they feel that to not be also destroys them and their loved ones.

We are dealing with meanings, which the progressive professional technocratic class forgot to cultivate beyond a scientism that was serving masters they didn't care to recognize they worked for. There are great traditions of science, art, governance, and yes religious thought, and only by integrating them in a new and tolerant way can we avoid factionalism and what the founding fathers feared, "Interests."

Leo Marx, while professor of history at MIT, wrote The Machine in the Garden, showing how deep is the American desire or the garden world, and how reality of economic interests and perceived benefits kept collapsing us towards the machine world. He shows that “in between” the urban and the wilderness, the garden, is what the real reformers had in mind. My own view is that we are no longer viewing two futures, but looking at the machine reality for its already realized problems, the garden world alternative is worth a new look, with deeper appreciation. People are ready, with the ugliness in front of them, rather than just anticipated.

Bend to the Garden World rather than following the current path of axis of finance, or break. Give the religiously inclined a way to participate in a better future rather than using their own religious beliefs as a way, out of deeply felt frustration, of saying “no”. Provide the technically and scientifically inclined a real possibility that their creativity will build a better world. Besides, Garden World is a beautiful vision, and worth all our talent to work for.