The Secular Fundamentalist

Hypatia’s Ghost: The Decline of Modernism

(THE CRUMBLING EDIFICE)



In Alexandria, in 415 A.D., the renowned female mathematician, philosopher and astronomer, Hypatia, was brutally murdered by a Christian mob.  Christian patriarchalism, aggression against pagans (of which she was likely one), faith-based suspicion of science and the fraught politics of a rising church and a disintegrating Byzantine state support for classical pagan 'cosmopolitanism' and diversity toleration, combined to doom her.
 
Her death was a milestone in the passing of the classical age of antiquity and the beginning of a chaotic transitional period.  Much knowledge was lost.  The faculty of reason became chained to theology for the next eleven to twelve centuries, until the rise of cities and nation states, an intellectual renaissance of interest in the secular writings of the pre-Christian classical period, and modern industries, technology and science enabled the reclamation of its independence.

The global rise of religious fundamentalism everywhere in the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries parallels the situation in Hypatia’s time; the increasingly strident denial of science that conflicts with religious (or industry) claims; the re-assertion of values and practices associated with traditional patriarchal religious communities; the increasing militancy of religious sensibility; the decline of social governance within consumer and third world societies; and the increasingly unstable, conflicted and unsustainable character of the corporatized global order.

Just as in Hypatia’s time people found the ground beneath their feet starting to shift, so it is with us.

Richard Dawkins, in his recent book ‘The God Delusion’, mounts a spirited attack on the ideological pretensions of Abrahamic monotheism (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).  And while I heartily endorse many of his arguments and conclusions and share his horror at the extent of abandonment of reason amongst the pious, his work does not really confront the real issue.

Something big is going on and Dawkins et al haven’t put their finger on it.

Rebuttal of ascendant ideas is the lowest form of intervention against them because it has almost no impact on those who are already influenced and does not address what is driving them and giving them traction.  And to suggest, as Dawkins tries to do, that religion can be defined away as a wasteful, but nonetheless advantageous group strategy in the survival-of-the-fittest Darwinian struggle, merely threatens to pit one tendentiously speculative supposition with another.  Social Darwinism has a strong track record of descending into pseudo-science.

Trying to cram the sum of human behavior under the aegis of one theory screams pseudo science, every bit as much as it did when Marx and Engels tried to unify history under the 'scientific' banner of dialectical and historical materialism.  Darwinian theory is best left to paleontologists and biologists.  That is where the bulk of its power, research effort and scientific integrity lies, as does the fear and hate of its enemies.

This is not to say Dawkins’ book isn’t required reading for anyone preparing to fight off an attempt to ram into schools Intelligent Design theory, which is a transparently dishonest misrepresentation and travesty of science, used as cover to slip-slide-weave-’n-duck creationism into the local school science curriculum.

However, what is really interesting is not the ideological debate, but why it needs to be revisited at all.  After all, the evidence for Darwinian theory is so overwhelming, and it wasn’t so long ago that we seculars were confidently expecting traditional religion to molder into the cultural landscape until it was finally buried in the graveyard of history.  What happened?  Why the unexpected and aggressive resurgence of faith, irrationality and superstition?

More interesting still is the impression that it is Dawkins and his audience that are the ones in need of bolstering and self-reassurance.  Their faith protagonists seem so overwhelmingly confident and pugnacious.  Why wouldn’t a rational evidence-based intellect be shaken by the resurgence of ideas based on little more than fresh air?

They have good reason to fear the consequences of this change in the cultural fabric.  Nonsense can gain cultural and political traction very easily.  Come the crunch, rational debate and evidence-based argument can be all too easily suborned, circumvented or bulldozed out of the way.

And it should also be noted that it isn’t just religious fantasists that are doing this.  Anyone following anthropogenic climate change denialism can see exactly the same anti-science tendencies at work amongst threatened industrial lobbies and their social mainstream sympathizers.
 
Climatologists and the institutions they work in have found themselves under increasingly shrill attack by scientific nobodies with a very limited grasp of the climatological research effort, no record of involvement in its most recent projects, or recent peer reviewed published work in reputable scientific journals.  But they know how to get equal billing with the real climate experts in public ‘debates’, which allow them to weave pseudo-scientific publicrelationsspeak into scientific dialogue, that corrupts, as it corrodes as it undermines the integrity of public discourse.

{Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s book ‘The Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming’ (Bloomsbury Press, 2010) gives an extensive analysis of the genre.  Wikipedia gives a useful summary of the book, critical responses to it and a list of other writings of a complementary nature.}

And the 'progressive' left is not above using ‘science’, and institutional ‘scientific’ mouth piecing in its propaganda battles around its own ideological causes célèbre, particularly in the health and behavioral sciences, where it is much easier to front load unstated assumptions and agendas than science of the laboratory or modeling kind.  This is a subject that will be tackled in more detail later, when we look at how ‘science’ has been used as part of the sexual revolution in relation to abortion and homosexuality.

Courts are perhaps the only places left with enough perceived neutrality and authority to forensically cross examine bogus pseudo-scientism and the conflation of science, ideology and moral judgment, leaving none of the protagonists room to obfuscate and bluster their way through.  But it doesn't matter a jot to the believers how expertly pinioning the court judgments were or are.  They are not listening.  All they are interested in is fairy stories and ideological myths that tell them what they want, what they need to hear.

All that is necessary is some kind of disturbance within the economic or cultural infrastructure to unravel rational and critical thinking.  Getting a handle on that and addressing the issues it raises is the real answer to individual and collective fantasizing.  Irrational thinking only becomes a resort when what is currently on rational offer becomes inadequate, threatening or dysfunctional.

Dawkins et al need to take a good hard look at what has happened to secular society in the last sixty years.  The irrational forces he is confronting within modern life are just a symptom of foundational unsustainability shifts going on underneath, social governance crumbling in the walls and the existential collapse of the roof.  He cannot even begin to address irrational thinking until he gets to grips with just how dire the underlying condition of consumer societies has become.  He is not speaking from any sort of position of strength, for if the axis of faith and reason is breaking up into blind belief and rationalized irrationality, the analytical and synthesizing power and authority of reason and science just won’t carry enough weight.

We seculars have to be able to build cultural infrastructure that produces the kind of solidarity, security and richness of being which religions have traditionally done, because when one strips away the cosmological mumbo jumbo, that is what they deliver, when they are in reasonable working order.

It is some measure of the blindness and complacency inside secular society that no one has even considered this as an issue, let alone made a start on such a project that might compete with traditional religions for their adherents.  The rising power and aggression of religious feeling is a crie de coeur that cannot be argued away.  And unless something concretely changes, that cry will only get stronger and more insistent.

The bottom line is about social regulation and the secure reproduction of the values that will sustain societies into the very long term.  Almost nothing that is being done now is sustainable. This is not just an ecological matter.  A sustainable society is one that can go on replicating itself indefinitely, in everything it does, by delivering stabilized natural and existential environments, a realistically capitalized infrastructure for making that happen, and a vision of the model of social and economic production that it will reproduce into the future, to make us what we hope we can become and deliver us the kind of wealth that will keep us there.

The modern secular industrial society that emerged out of the World Wars is now as seriously damaged internally as the destruction it is visiting on everything else around it.  Irrational faith that something ‘out there’ will save us from the damning nature of what we are doing, seems entirely understandable and a truly accurate reflection of just how grave our condition has become.  But trying to force the school science curriculum into line with scripture is the desperate behavior of people who need help to rejoin the worlds of faith and reason, which have been split asunder by the times we live in.

Faith has become anything that looks like it might float on uncertainty and the fear beneath it. Reason is now a kind of ‘unsinkable’ Titanic that is heading straight for an iceberg, as we speak.

Survivability criteria insist on two things: firstly that faith has strongly rooted plausibly rational foundations; i.e., faith that is grounded at least to some extent on evidence that would reasonably justify it; and secondly, the social and economic expressions of our reason must be kept within an in-depth defensible and shock proofed infrastructure; i.e., whatever we do has to be able to withstand multiple adversities and assault  These are the twin basic requirements if we are to make it through the likely extremely difficult transition that will mark the end of modern times.

Nothing is going to get us, or even some of us, out of the trouble we are already in, except the vision, problem solving skills and self-belief that got us into this fix in the first place.  On the face of it, that might not seem terribly reassuring, but it is pure fantasy to believe that some Big Daddy in the sky is going to rescue us.  As a species, we cannot afford to lose our collective nerve when the going gets tough.

Notwithstanding any of this, people will continue to cling to irrational faith despite the fact that the language and thinking behind the biblical mind is obviously at variance with modern experience and understanding.  To come at it at all one has to completely suspend disbelief and most, if not all, of what one has learned about how the world and the universe work.  And despite the fact that its documentation was written before our species discovered evidence-based thinking, or the intellectual and observational tools that would inform it, or the data streams and technology it made possible, irrational faith continues to grow apace.

In this struggle of ideas, Richard Dawkins can order back the tide as much as he likes.  It is coming in, ready or not.  Building ideological life boats seems a better way of avoiding being drowned by it; or more likely murdered by the nasties that lurk beneath it, like poor wretched Hypatia, all those years ago.

And murder is on the agenda.

Islam is presently convulsing into a reformationary wave whose increasingly aggressive, well organized and violent disorders are not only spreading fear and uncertainty across the globe, but increasingly able to undermine secular states and worse, replace them.

The failure of Islamic societies to maintain their substantial material and cultural advantages in relation to Christendom at the dawning of the modern period meant they fell into a colonial and semi-colonial torpor that both provincialized and preserved Islam in a much more robust pre-modern condition than its Christian counterparts.  The very powerful secularizing forces embedded in emerging capitalism both transformed Christianity and increasingly marginalized and undermined its cultural dominion.

By the middle twentieth century, secularized Christianity was palpably losing the last of its grip on mass populations, just as European decolonization was occurring and paradoxically the last of the colonialist land grabs was pulled off in Palestine.  And Islamic states emerged with very unstable and narrowly based secular dictatorships, small modern elites in the cities and the rest starting to wake up to a brand new day, like ideological Rip Van Winkles, to find that some of their holiest sites had been ripped off them by their old crusader adversaries and ‘given’ to the Jews.

This almost pristinely traditionalist Islamism was confronted by not only this ideologically hostile takeover of part of its heartland, but the western powers proceeded into a consumerist cultural revolution that mortally offended every traditionalist sensibility.  While Christian traditionalist objections to the latter quickly collapsed, within 30 years, the Islamic anger and hostility towards the west coalesced with a puritanical rejection of cultural secularism, and broke out as theocracy in Iran and the beginnings of a successful insurgency against ‘Satanic’ socialists in Afghanistan.

For the first time in modern history, the secular paradigm was checked.  Since the 1980s, it has been all downhill for secularism, as the radical ideas from Palestine, Iran and Afghanistan percolated into new and intensifying conflict zones and onward into the metropolitan heartlands.  Nine eleven was just a straw in the wind, as the battle was joined not only for hearts and minds in existing Muslim communities, but new converts, the re-establishment of Sharia governance and the shaping of the beginnings of an idea of a global Caliphate, which could spread even into the very heartlands of secular capital.

And the prospects for these ambitions keep getting better as secular societies become so radical, narrow and lopsided in their economic intent, they leave swathes of civil population vulnerable, weakened, insecure, under-constructed and reduced to the crudest and most easily manipulable egoism.

What already is and likely to be increasingly dangerous for secular metropolitan societies, is the existential rage of Muslim converts and the adolescent young within more secular Muslim families, as very robust hard line traditionalism provides comparative referencing to just how badly secular societies are traveling, how meretricious much of their technological and product flow development really is, and how much they short change individuals and communities in terms of their existential and social software.

The Richard Dawkinses of this world simply have no idea how precarious the world they occupy is starting to become.  The secular ascendency is coming to an end and unless it comes up with a modernist counter-reformational alternative to the rising power of traditionalist ideology, the latter will win in the end; particularly as the ecological support beams for modern societies start to give way.

The appearance of the burqa inside secular modern societies isn’t just an expression of patriarchal ‘backwardness’ and a defiant flaunting of the repressive second-class status of women inside Islam.  Like the puritanical dress worn by radical protestants, this is an open declaration of hostility towards the dominant order, just as it was in the 50-100 years before the outbreak of the terrible wars of toleration that so blighted the seventeenth century.  And the women were every bit as into it as the men, as a lot of Muslim women are today.

In a society brought up on plunging décolletage, body clinging mini-skirts, g-strings and uber high heels, the wretched burqas are extremely confronting, without so much as a word or eye contact.  They say to men that they are infidels and to woman that they are infidels’ whores.

And the fact is that the status of women in metropolitan societies isn’t anything like as good as it has been cracked up to be.  More on that later, as we explore how secular society has to deliver on a whole range of critical bottom lines on this issue alone, if it is going to mount any kind of systematic and plausible counter stroke to the radical fundamentalist religious challenge that is already on its way.

Dawkins may live long enough to have one of his meetings broken up by a suicide bomber…..which brings me back to Hypatia….

Murder in the springtime
Moist with blood
Spattered on the walls and pavements
Gutters flood
Blocked by bits of clothing
Body parts and mud.

Red blossoms in the springtime
Stand in pools
Sprouting from the fallen crowd
Of blameless fools
Flung by the unseasonal storm
A giant's discarded tools.

Tender lambs in springtime
To the butcher's block
Indifferent eyes stare vacantly
Taking stock
Shredded in the grinding mill
That mauls them by the flock.

Murder in the springtime
The fanatics' chic
An expression of fashionable hate
And religious pique
Emboldened blinded youths explode
For the redemption that they seek.

Murder in the springtime
The martyrs' sleep
The killer and the killed alike
Gone in deep
Rebalanced in death's favor
The living left a whirlwind reap.