My theme is once again the crossover between religion and politics. Rather than face the issue head on I approach it sideways through the contemporary debate about the proper role and the actual role of religion in the political sphere. Some influential thinkers place religion in a sphere of the irrational, whereas politics is a sphere of the rational. For them politics makes ordinary common sense and serious, informed and intellectually conscientious persons do not have to subscribe to strange and unusual beliefs to engage in it. They think that if religious actors want to contribute to political debate they had better adhere to the agreed rules of reasonable argument.
This is an area where the analytic, the descriptive and the normative are entangled, and the tangle only grows worse when the participants in the debate have incompatible understandings of religion. Given this awkward entanglement, I ought to show my own hand, and say I have some sympathy with a modest version of the secular approach. When it comes to the legal and institutional forms of the state, with regard (say) to what people shall wear or the role of women, I do not want these institutional forms influenced by some fundamentalist lobby reading off the answers from revelation. On the other hand, I think that religion involves matters much more profound than detailed regulations about how people should comport themselves. At least in its origins Christianity is not a legalistic faith based on regulations promulgated by religious experts. That is how I read the New Testament strictures on the letter that kills and embrace of the spirit that gives life, and on the relation between the law and Christian liberty. So much, then, for the problem posed by what some influential voices take to be the irrationality of religious actors in public debate, and so much for my own position. My interest here is solely in using the debate to question the supposed rationality of politics and to look at common features characterising politics and religion alike.
One way of confronting the notion that religion brings irrationality into public debate is to deny the premise, and to claim that religious actors, or at any rate some religious actors, engage in a rational mode of debate. Instead I ask just how rational politics really is by bringing out the non-rational aspects of religion and politics alike. I am not for one moment denying that politics is driven by interest and versions of reasons of state, but that is also true of religion insofar as religion is a system of power as well as a system of meaning. In that respect the politics of religion are on all fours with politics in general. What the Russian Orthodox Church does in Russia and the Near Abroad of the Russian Federation obeys the usual imperatives of power. All that I take for granted. My object here is simply to draw out and illustrate the way politics is governed to a remarkable degree by images and narratives that have much in common with religious images and narratives.
For example, politicians engage in ritual anathemas in a modern version of Greek public theatre where the antagonists and protagonists strive for rhetorical victory as well as devising sensible means to deliver desired consequences. There are times when politics takes on the shape of a phantasmagoric drama. Its ritual performances are a form of stylised role-play requiring a willing suspension of disbelief in order to keep the show on the road. No doubt technical rationality plays a major role when it comes to concrete measures, and we can take it as given that a politician had better be competent (say) in market economics, as well as accounted politically righteous and doctrinally correct. Nevertheless, correctness construed as doctrinal rectitude and manifested in what I call political righteousness – especially in the deployment of the language of condemnation and commendation, blessing and cursing – is hugely important. We are quite literally governed by broad swathes of sentiment, many of them with a borrowed religious resonance. One can easily suppose that politicians are relativistic pragmatists shifting position as political opportunism requires, and Pope Benedict in particular expressed anxiety about the philosophical relativism all around us. But pragmatic relativism is only half the story. In the articulation of our sentiments we have become relativists in one mode only in order to be dogmatic in other modes. Some of the more obvious examples might be sentiment centring on the natural world and the animal kingdom, or un-negotiable affirmations about the dignity of man and of woman.
I need to make clear the assumptions that underlie my argument. The first is obvious. When I refer to the similar structure of both religious and political myths I am bracketing the issue of truth. Myths are governing ideas that propel movements forward and mobilise people to achieve social and political ends, and maybe it helps if they have at least some plausibility – but that is not the issue here. Myths may even incorporate well-established facts. For example, history as taught in schools is infiltrated by potent myths, but no sane person outside France doubts that between them the British and the Germans won the Battle of Waterloo.
My other assumptions are rather different. Whatever the structural similarities between the mobilising ideas and images of religion and politics, I do not believe they are the same enterprise pursued in different modes. Moreover, it must already be clear I do not believe religion is a kind of cloudy poetry which has eventually to be translated into rational and empirical prose. It may well be that religion more often exhibits the poetry of the transcendent while politics often has a more prosaic, immediate and mundane focus, but that does not mean the religious mode is just waiting to be collapsed into the political. There is no once-for-all secularisation of religious poetry into political prose, and that includes any once-for-all translation of religion into the poetics and the rhetoric of nationalism. I put a fundamental question against the idea that modernity is defined by such once-for-all secular translations.
Let me put it in another way that is directly relevant to current debates over the secularisation thesis. Secularity is not built a priori into the definition of what we mean by modernity. Religion, political ideology and nationalism flood into each other, even though they are different. For sure, there are major mutations in the way they relate to each other. Very important mutations have occurred, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the different Enlightenments and the varied forms of Romanticism; but religion does not empty itself into nationalism and it is not waiting to be collapsed into political ideology.
I need to extend that. There is a poetry of the transcendent that resists translation and engenders its own distinctive and irreducible language, even though it has manifestations in the here and now. You find it, for example, in the beckoning image of a future New Jerusalem or shining city above. Ronald Reagan was fond of invoking the ‘shining city’, and I refer to Reagan here because we are talking about raw politics, not about airy-fairy notions. The word ‘above’ is crucial because though the New Jerusalem is thought of in Scripture as ‘coming down’ from heaven, its plenitude is not emptied out in mundane reality. It achieves momentary and partial realisations in our sublunary world, for example the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers.
But there is always a surplus of what I have to call ‘glory’ in language of religion which never becomes fully present in an imperfect reality. Beckoning images of this kind hover over the mundane world and are earthed and birthed within our everyday existence – but as glimpses, intimations, markings. Above all they are realised in dramatic liturgical enactments of celebration and inclusion, of sharing and nurture though the distribution of our daily bread; through the offer and reception of signs of peace; through recognition of breakage of fellowship followed by reconciliation and forgiveness; through love tempered by judgement; through acknowledgement of profound loss edged with the hope of glory. Perhaps it appears surprising that a sociologist invokes the action of the Eucharist so directly, but it was a very distinguished anthropologist, Mary Douglas, who pointed to the profound concentration of meanings and signs in the short span of liturgical space.
What St. Paul calls ‘the perfect’ does not come down in spite of the ability of an anticipated advent to move the hearts of people and to become ‘a movement’. In part that is because the arrival of the perfect ends history, just as the arrival of what in musical theory is known as the perfect chord ends the music. The music of time only moves at the behest of imperfection and under the impetus of jarring notes that imply the possibility of resolution. Take but disharmony away and nothing follows. If that sounds much more like theology than sociology, I am suggesting that our fundamental assumptions – for example about whether religion is or is not poetic fantasy destined to be emptied out into prosaic political reality – are beyond the reach of any straightforward empirical and historical adjudication.
All the elements I invoked as found in liturgical enactment are also hinted at in the Gospel story of the banquet to which everyone is invited. And yet, as I have also indicated, they are also half realised or overheard in everyday manifestations of what the anthropologist Victor Turner calls liminality and communitas. The spirit of communal sharing takes over in a temporary epiphany, as it took over in the Orange Revolution or in the events in Tahrir Square, Cairo, before corruption in some form or other resumes its usual reign. Revolutions, including the initial and paradigmatic Christian revolution we see unfolding in the New Testament, are always being confiscated and then renewed in first, second and third awakenings. Once the cycle has been started and a tradition of revolution established, fresh revolutions become necessary to restore the pristine vision of the first. They all require a narrative; they need immediate and long-term objectives; and they are likely to find an emotional focus around an icon, like the innocent young woman killed in Tbilisi in 1990 when the Russian soldiers occupied the central square, or the innocent young woman shot down in the Green Revolution of 2009. Revolution requires a designated malign other, a sacred history of suffering and an assurance of victory after tribulation.
Maybe I am not really talking about religion as such. For much contemporary scholarship religion as such is a dubious catch-all category. I am mostly talking about Christianity understood as a distinctive repertoire of related motifs selected from according to social and historical context. I am talking about Christianity understood as a distinctive articulation of the relation of the transcendent to earthing and birthing, and of faith to the quotidian world. No doubt that repertoire and that relation of faith to the world overlap the repertoires of other religions, but the grammar of Christian motifs is distinctive. If Christianity is a particular inflection of an even deeper mythic structure, I am not obliged to pursue that question here.
Islam, Christianity and nationalism all share the concept of martyrdom, but the understanding of martyrdom differs. In Christianity there is a singular emphasis on humility and a lack of code of honour which results in odd compromises once a Christian veneer is adopted and forcefully propagated by elites for whom honour is all. There was very little non-violent humility in Capetian France, eleventh-century England or Norway, or Renaissance Italy. Yet an insidious seed of doubt about honour and the feud had been sown in Christian preaching about the innocent man enduring shame and buffeting at the hands of men who were nevertheless forgiven because they ‘knew not’ what they did. That revolution could hardly be more fundamental because it trans-values the normal hierarchy of values and reverses the ‘instincts’ of the natural man.
Given what I have just argued with respect to modernity and the specificity of Christianity, I shall be taking my initial examples from the USA, which is a society profoundly infiltrated by the Christian repertoire and a society at the forefront of modernity. I am not here concerned with the well-trodden paths of voting behaviour, religion and party affiliation, or analyses of how religious pressure groups operate in Washington. Instead I want to canvass broad governing narratives, images and frames of reference that I see as flooding across the conventional boundaries of the religious and political.
I shall begin at the highest level of generality because that level infiltrates all the more specific, lower levels, whether we are dealing with religion or politics. It is also the least immediately obvious because these are the assumptions we take for granted. This is the frame of reference that hides itself as we focus on the action of the central figures in the picture. The obvious is virtually invisible.
Both the religious and the political realms share a sense of forward movement or telos. I have already pointed to the importance of a narrative, and revolution in particular needs a forward-looking narrative of eventual triumph after trial. Once there was a time of original and authentic being which then suffered degeneration and oppression until there came a time of redemptive suffering and eventually a longed-for liberation when original authentic being shall be restored. There is therefore a backward and a forward look in both the religious and the political realm and it is peopled by exemplary figures, both prophetic and redemptive. In practice it may well be that at the religious end of the spectrum reference is made to a larger and more universal story, whereas at the political end of the spectrum reference is made to a more particular story, even though the more particular story may still carry religious resonances and exhibit structural similarities. For example, religion is replete with precursors of revelation, and politics replete with advance guards of revolution. To give another example, politics and religion, revolution and revelation alike engage in the construction of sainthood. In both exemplary suffering plays a redemptive role. John Paul II exercised power in part because he, and Poland with him, had suffered; likewise Nelson Mandela.
I now turn directly to the images and narratives as they are found in the USA, such as the idea of providence, the ideal retrospect and prospect, and the construction of icons of sainthood. When I lived in Dallas, Texas, I encountered a remarkable illustration of the intersection of the larger religious narrative with the more immediate political narrative. An American told me he was engaged in a programme to educate inmates of American prisons, for which purpose he was using Renaissance techniques of memorisation. When I asked about the content of his programme he said it covered ‘all the events of world history from the Resurrection to George Washington’.
In case that illustration should seem slightly lunatic, I back it up with two further illustrations: one provided by a respected political figure who was an American ambassador, and the other by an influential American theologian. Both of them were Catholics and therefore people one might expect to be immune to messianic expressions of nationalism, let alone manifest destiny. The ambassador asked me why my belief in God did not entail belief in the United States. To me these were very different kinds of belief, as well as utterly disconnected; but they were not that different to him.
We were jointly celebrating and commenting on the 200th anniversary of the American Constitution in Williamsburg, Virginia. The sometime American ambassador was unhappy that in my presentation of the social preconditions of the American political epiphany I had offered so many contingent and accidental reasons. For him the ideas were primary, but for me there were all kinds of circumstantial factors why the ideas of the American patriots had the opportunity to mature and eventually to triumph in the promulgation of the Constitution. His concern about the role I assigned to luck and contingency was entirely on all fours with the way the American Enlightenment, like the British Enlightenment, maintained a belief in Providence and a secularised telos. America was the happy recipient of the special favour of Providence. End of story.
The comments of the Catholic theologian were equally obvious to him and startling to me. He explained that in the contemporary USA you found migrants from all over the world seeking a promised land of freedom. This mixing of ‘all nations, tribes and tongues’, to quote the New Testament, presaged the universal realm of God’s coming kingdom on earth.
This Catholic theologian also believed that legalised abortion in the USA amounted to murder on such a scale that it arguably released him from loyalty to any state that permitted it. One might think the two positions contradictory, but that is exactly how such high-level background assumptions work. You appeal to one assumption in one context and to another assumption in another context. As the American poet and celebrant of the American dream Walt Whitman put it, ‘I contradict myself. So I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.’
We are dealing in metaphors and imprecise images capable of absorbing whatever people may project upon them. Our references back to the mythic past or forward to the mythic future – whether in the larger religious frame or the more immediate political frame – relate to resonant images, not to clear and distinct ideas. The Tea Party movement in contemporary America simultaneously refers back to God’s own country and to a mythic tale of its liberation from British oppression, now reapplied to the aim of getting God’s country ‘back’ on its rightful track. Huge swathes of political emotion are mobilised by potent images and mythic histories relating the dream time of the birth of the nation to its present perils. When Ronald Reagan appealed to manifest destiny in the form of images of the shining city set on a hill, he held up an icon which religious people in the States filled in with their own interpretations, and he promised a future where America and the world could begin again de novo. Beginning de novo through revolution is important since, like conversion, it enables one to slough off the accumulated moral burden of the past and to transfer it to the scapegoat. Revolution is first cousin to the Christian idea of New Creation, in the world around us and the world within us.
The American myth embraces most parts of the political spectrum and was vividly illustrated in the course of the election of Barack Obama. During the 2008 election Obama acquired messianic stature as the one who would fulfil and redeem the delayed promises of the ‘American dream’. Obama clearly realised he now carried a religious freight dangerous to his long-term credibility, as he clearly indicated by explaining he did not walk on water and by the deliberately modest tone of his inauguration speech. Expectations infiltrated by religious resonances are built into the rhetoric of American culture, which means that icons are set up for deconstruction, apart from Washington and Lincoln. These are Founding Fathers needing to be placed on pedestals beyond reach, else the foundations of the republic are themselves endangered.
That brings us to the construction of secular sainthood. Washington and Lincoln are as God the Father and God the Son in the salvation history of American liberty. Washington was the Father of the nation, while Lincoln the Beloved Son fulfilled part of the American promise in his role as the Liberator of the slaves. He died after several hours of agony caused by the assassin’s bullet on Good Friday 1865, and was immediately translated to a higher realm. Of course, the script is accidental, but it could have been taken from Scripture, in particular the halo of the holy that surrounds the innocent person martyred for a cause. Lincoln, the murdered secular saint, now has his temple at one end of the sacred field in the centre of Washington.
Honest Abe was a typical Protestant saint, without strong institutional attachments but alone with the Book and speaking in a manner saturated in biblical rhetoric. He was also the quintessential American in his rise from log cabin to White House, thereby consolidating and propagating the dream of American social mobility. Yet there was a darker side to Lincoln that only intrepid blasphemers care or dare bring out, because it reveals him not only as a very pragmatic politician but someone who believed in the superiority of whites. To be pragmatic and to obfuscate the issues is part of any politics aiming at modest real achievements rather than at fulfilling righteousness. But the explicit embrace of white superiority and of a plan to expel blacks to some colony elsewhere than America was not a necessary part of political subterfuge, even then. Early on, Lincoln’s aim was to safeguard the westward settlement of white farmers from the competition of the slave system, and that objective was a crucial factor in the events leading up to Civil War. It was a war on an industrial scale and pursued by Lincoln to the point of destroying much of the South. None of this means that Lincoln was other than a very great man, but the need I feel to reassure you on that point suggests this is territory where you tread delicately.
Of course, most revolutionary anticipations end in disillusion, just as the vast majority of political careers end in failure. That is because politics is not an arena where you triumph because you have successfully completed a sensible and limited programme; nor is it a matter of realistic assessments carried out by designated experts. Politics calls up and calls upon imagined scenarios invested with a transcendent surplus. It invokes and it evokes. People cherish a hope of the one who will maintain personal and doctrinal purity to the end, and who will not sell the soul of the country or the soul of the revolution for a bowl of pottage.
I give examples. One after another politicians have emerged in British politics carrying the burden of such hopes. One after another they have been crushed by the burden of the expectations that brought them to power. They have been cast out with political anathemas as betrayers, at best self-deluded, at worst self-serving hypocrites. Tony Blair is only the latest in a long genealogy of saviours turned traitor. His election victory in 1997 was treated in some parts of the media as an epiphany, especially as the epiphany of a new generation. Ten years later his name was ritually cursed and his icon spat upon. The election of Kennedy in the USA, though very much a matter of money and political rough trade, was also treated as an epiphany of the new, though the ritual curses were delayed and still remain muted on account of his assassination. In all these instances there is a hint of corruption by ‘the world’; and corruption is one of those words that straddle the spectrum of religion and politics, referring to our generic sin in Adam and the dissolutions of physical and spiritual death, but also to specific practices of political malfeasance and taking your ‘cut’.
Not only is politics invested with providential hopes and brief epiphanies, but one also finds discernible traces of the Elect Nation defined, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, as the ‘last, best hope of mankind’. We find such language acceptable and even normal because the idea of a nation which carries a hope for the good of others is written in to our civilisation. Perhaps it is just as well such a notion inhabits our subconscious because it spurs at least some people to embrace historical privilege as including moral responsibility. Patriotism does not necessarily mean ‘My country, right or wrong’, and the original Jewish paradigm of election in the Hebrew Scriptures makes it clear in at least some of the prophetic books that divine goodwill depends on fulfilling that will.
The historical genealogy of America’s election to a glorious destiny was received from the original Scottish, Scots-Irish and English Puritan settlers, and election becomes particularly seductive when the ‘last best hope of mankind’ is cast in universal terms. In that most acceptable and therefore most dangerous form it can easily be translated into a responsibility to pass on your own special gifts to others less enlightened even if initially they are too backward to appreciate them. The British were deluded in this way in India and it needed the Indian Mutiny in 1857, now known as the first war of national liberation, to apprise them of the condign costs of such cultural interference; though it did not inhibit them from building railways, even across the sacred Ganges, to unify the subcontinent and ensure more effective control. British beliefs in an imperial mission were perhaps tempered by the way subject peoples objected to being simultaneously improved and exploited. All the same, British delusions are not quite as undiluted as American ones, because the national myth is divided between the seventeenth-century English Republicans, who passed it on to British North America in the form of resistance to monarchical tyranny, and the figure of the martyred king, virtually sainted because he died nobly on the scaffold outside his own banqueting hall in Whitehall in January 1649.
The trouble with election to historical responsibility is not merely the existence of alternative authorised versions within a nation, but the geopolitical consequences of rival versions between nations – for example between the USA, France and Russia, and their rival exemplary revolutions. Providence decreed that an American leader, Ronald Reagan, would anathematise Russia as ‘an evil empire’ and that a Russian leader, Nikita Khrushchev, heir to a long tradition of religious messianism as well as secular historical metaphysics, would tell the Americans ‘We will bury you first.’ Faith in the triumph of Russia as the spearhead of the last and best hope of revolution was maintained against all the evidence by a large section of the intellectual representatives of political rationality in Europe.
The most dangerous moment of historical hubris arrived when the Americans won the contest with Russia, and some Americans concluded that the rest of history was little more than a cleaning up operation. Hope was on the dizzying verge of realisation. The problem here is that the universal mission – in its American, French, British or Russian forms – rapidly confuses or fuses national interest with doing good to benighted others, either by forcibly helping them on their way or else misunderstanding their hopes as a local version of one’s own. When the Statue of Liberty was raised as a sacred icon in Tiananmen Square it was easy to suppose the authors of these events were replaying western revolutions rather than demanding that communism should live up to its promises.
The American experience of global hostility has not generated a coalition of all potential rivals; but it does show how rapidly the universal liberator can be identified as a universal oppressor responsible for all the ills afflicting the planet. That is not simply an observation within the remit of political science: rather, it is about a moral dynamic in which the polyvalent notion of corruption plays a key role. There is a binary opposition of Liberator and Oppressor, and an elect nation can very rapidly lose the role of Liberator to acquire the role of Oppressor precisely because of the eschatological surplus that has built up around the idea of liberation. The case of modern Israel is rather special because the age-old status of suffering nation was briefly exchanged for the status of liberated nation before a series of victories over enemies created the spectacle of the oppressor nation.
The Jews are a people empowered and even granted a limited moral franchise by their terrible suffering; but that franchise has also become a moral burden because they are now a people whose use of power is judged by a higher standard than we ask of others. We suppose that they above all should be equipped with moral imagination and able to go beyond the exchange of anathemas based on who is to be identified as the real and original culprit blocking the way of lasting peace. Victories like that achieved by the Israelis in 1967 entail long-term moral costs in terms of the loss of honour imposed on a defeated enemy. Only the Egyptian successes in the war of 1973 made possible the peace accord with Israel.
Who wields the power bears the blame, and the expensive role of moral policeman to the world exposes one to blackmail, for example the constant assistance demanded from the Americans by the corrupt regime in Pakistan. It also leads to resentment at your importunate interference with other people’s corrupt and tyrannical business. Your flattering self-portrait leads to any number of disappointments and delusions: you are disappointed by people’s lack of gratitude, which can be particularly glaring when the debt is real; and you are deluded about the motives and consequences of your own actions, as when George Bush declared that America had only ever intervened in the cause of liberty.
The USA illustrates two basic versions of the notion that there was once a golden time of original and authentic being. One version is found in the Jeffersonian ideal of the sturdy independent farmer retaining the right to bear arms. The other is located in the wisdom of the Native American understood as the incarnation of the noble savage and bearer of an uncorrupted wisdom from the primeval dream-time.
The American case is not at all unique. Most countries provide local illustrations of these two basic versions. The English Revolution of 1642–49 was in part empowered by the mythic invocation of Saxon liberties wrongfully abridged and annulled by the Norman yoke. Up to this day the Magna Carta, or Great Charter of 1215, is the marker symbolising the restraint of monarchical power, and the Kennedy Memorial is placed in close juxtaposition to the meadow of Runnymede where it was sealed. In England there is both the notion of the sturdy yeoman defending his native fields and the idea of a pre-Christian relationship of Man to Nature which involved mutual respect between hunter and animal, and a harmony without exploitation.
In Germany too future glories were prefigured by the idealised retrospect. There was the guildsman of the medieval city. Then there was the man of the primeval forest who, like Arminius when faced with the Roman imperial intrusion, resisted the slavery of incorporation in a sophisticated but alien regime. No country, however small today, is without this kind of retrospective glance to a past glory. In Lithuania the intelligentsia invokes the unfettered paganism of the Grand Duchy before Teutonic knights forcibly included the country in Christendom. It is nearly always the intelligentsia, the self-appointed guardians of reason, who create these potent myths; and it is the people who are elected in poetic imagination to carry them and bring them to fruition. Few nations are without a poet to frame the burden of its historic destiny: Walt Whitman in the US, Taras Shevchenko in Ukraine.
Luther is the quintessential instance of a religious figure who is also a political icon borne aloft for various purposes for very different ends. Before the First World War Luther was often presented as the fearless Reformer who freed the German people from Roman domination and the country from the control of the Church, as well as consolidating the language through his classic translation of the Bible into the vernacular. With defeat in 1918 Luther’s reputation as the greatest German suffered, but it could be rehabilitated in part by political conservatives who regarded Weimar as dominated by Catholics and Socialists, and sought to restore the glory of the Protestant Reich. But there are other points of symbolic reference apart from historical icons like Luther. There is the idea of the medieval guildsman celebrated in Wagner’s Mastersingers of Nuremberg. This can be linked to the great period of the Holy Roman Empire, centred on Germany and by extension to the promotion of the modern German nation. Then there is the idea of the Forest in Germany which can easily intersect both with the idea of blood and soil and with the idea of ‘Wanderbirds’ free to wander wherever they wish. Such images are ubiquitous.
The idea of nature and the natural as it passes through all kinds of mutations up to its apotheosis in the Romantic period rarely loses its political potency. It might seem such large-scale and generalised myths rarely interact with immediate questions of political decision-making, or indeed questions of great political moment. But one only needs to think of issues like the industrial ‘rape’ of Mother Nature designed to exploit resources to feed the inordinate greed of oil-guzzling societies to grasp the emotive resonances. This is where modern politics have become more sentimental, in the strict sense of governed by sentiment, than was once the case. There are rational arguments, at least in the short term, for the exploitation of the earth, and there are sentimental objections calling on primordial imagery. A least since the Romantic period politics has been thoroughly infiltrated by sentiment about Nature, and were I to extend the analysis I would also argue that politics has been infiltrated by religious sentiment about Human Nature and Dignity.
Sometimes there are paradoxical consequences of our sentiment about Nature. Hunters in the pristine Far North are close to Nature and are believed to regard it with the appropriate respect required by the holistic vision; but maybe they also profit by the fur trade, which depends on a slaughter of the natural denizens of the untouched wilderness. The abolition of the fur trade might then drive the sometime human inhabitants of the wilderness to work for companies exploiting natural resources for profit. They might themselves become greedy consumers seduced by refrigerators and modern medicine. In this type of scenario it is traditional ways of life going back to the times beyond human memory and embodying accumulated wisdom and experience of the texture of living according to Nature that triumph over modern enlightenment and progress. Enlightenment triumphs in one context and accumulated Tradition in another.
The Beatles, notably John Lennon, were religio-political myth-makers in just the primordial vein just canvassed. One the one hand they expressed their contempt for the corrupt religious and political institutions of the past and tradition, and claimed that their fame was such they had even eclipsed Jesus. On the other they invoked a more ‘natural’ state of being where there was nothing to fight for and nothing to die for. All you needed was love. That means they looked forward to a time when love conquers all and naked humanity is at one from pole to pole, except that the entrenched forces and interests of ‘the world’, including the hypocritical powers of institutional religion, stand in the way. Lennon looked down on the struggle from his rich apartment block in Central Park, but few accused him of hypocrisy; and when he was murdered candles blew in the wind from New York to Liverpool, and beyond.
So the unifying vision of Humanity at last at one with itself, present in the Beatles, creates a binary opposition between those who possess authentic knowledge of the truth and those who are entangled in the regime of the Lie and of lies. The agents of that regime infiltrate everywhere. In the image of the world fostered by the Beatles, the partisans of love engage in a paranoid identification of the sources of malignancy that combines the myths of left and right. From a right-wing perspective it may be the New World Order or backward ethnic intruders and aliens, while from a left-wing perspective it may be the political frontmen of the capitalist world and their inordinate greed. Few notions carry a more obvious religious weight than the notion of the inordinate. The antithesis of the ordinate is the daemonic. The corrupt, the inordinate, the daemonic: these are at the heart of the political as well as the religious lexicon. When we contemplate what happened in Bosnia, the only shorthand we have available is the daemonic.
Of course, this is not to say that all the myths are straightforward untruths. The issue of truth has to be put in brackets in any discussion of the mobilising power of myth. Rather, it is to say that religion and politics alike, whether we speak of the politics of nation or of ideology, have a pervasive mythic structure marked by retrospective and prospective visions, and by ways of identifying the prime suspects standing in the way of recovering the idyllic past and reaching forward to the promised world of authentic being.
There is also a pervasive recourse to common metaphors. The rhetoric of Enlightenment appropriated the Christian metaphor of light and the Christian contrast between the light of the world and the powers of darkness that prowl around, full of menace. The light was first anticipated in unrecognised or martyred torchbearers. It then overwhelmed the entrenched powers of tradition which have had their bright brief day and are now for the dark. These metaphors of occluded and then universally recognised light, and of resistant darkness and sinister forces, are unselfconsciously built into religious and political rhetoric alike. The myths of dawning light and resistant darkness, of golden retrospect and ideal prospect, of precursor and incarnation, of interim and realisation, of suffering and liberation, and finally of exaltation have not been banished from discourse or deprived of power by the myths of the triumph of technical reason or of enlightened rationality. The realms of the political and the religious are different; but the capacity of the religious to flood across the different borders with the political we erect to indicate that difference remains undiminished in our contemporary modernity.