In praise of treason
For the past fifteen years, I have been reading and interpreting thousands of pages of information to help me understand how and why human beings initially decide to adopt and to identify with some particular system of belief, such as a religion (a religious ideology) or a political point of view (a secular ideology). I have also focused on why many people then suffer from the inevitable disillusionment and despondency that takes place as soon as they discover that every “truth” in which they so fervently believed was in fact nothing but heteronomous hypocrisy. In the course of that effort, I published three books (“Taking the Lying out of Living”, “Universal Skepticism”, and “Billions of Big Babies”) as well as several articles on this subject, before starting this blog dedicated to the same goal, that I prefaced with a section outlining some of my own unpleasant ideological experiences.
This time out, I want to continue describing how my most recent readings on this emotionally difficult subject have influenced my own understanding of it. For example, in a French social-science magazine, I read a report on the findings of a psychological experiment carried out by British and Canadian researchers, Julia Shaw and Stephen Porter, that they initially described in a recent issue of “Psychological Science”. Those researchers discovered just how easy it was to convince dozens of students to construct “rich false memories” of committing a crime in their childhood that they did not in fact commit. This kind of research helps criminologists explain why all over the world, thousands of people over the years have confessed to committing crimes (including murder) for which they were in fact innocent, and not just because they were mentally browbeaten beforehand by overzealous detectives. It turns out that it often does not take very much psychological manipulation to get people to invent “memories” of their own “misdeeds”.
This reminded me very much of the famous Stanley Milgram experiment from the 1960s in which a large number of other people were just as easily induced by researchers to believe that they were justified in physically harming volunteers by mindlessly following orders given to them by a person playing the role of a psychological expert. (No one was actually hurt.) That American experiment was originally designed to bolster a theory about the influence of authority figures to explain ordinary German participation in the Holocaust, but it has also been replicated over and over again by other researchers in dozens of different cultures.
Those two experiments did not have the same methodology nor the same purpose (quite the opposite in fact), and by themselves do not constitute sufficient scientific proof about the origins or the development of psychological manipulation. Nevertheless, the findings of those researchers fit in quite well with all the other information that I collated and interpreted in my previous writings about how ideologies work in the real world. It seems to me that psychological manipulation of individual weaknesses is central to understanding how people come to identify with particular religious or secular points of view, losing all or part of their capacity to think rationally in the process.
I have also discovered that the nature of the ideology involved has no effect on the “brainwashing” procedure by which people come to believe completely in any necessarily limited point of view, nor in how many of them come to reject it later on. All kinds of points of view affect people in similar ways, whether they be religious beliefs (moderate or fundamentalist), or political beliefs (mainstream or extremist). They include all the different kinds of religions that exist, or ever existed, in human history, as well as all the different kinds of secular ideologies, along with every associated sect, branch, permutation and combination, whether they be normally accepted as legitimate by a majority of believers, or relegated instead to the outer fringes of society.
Even certain sciences are still dominated by highly prejudiced, pseudo-scientific people who substitute narrow ideology for the scientific method. One of the better-known current examples is the practice of mainstream economics, where under the influence of big business, neoliberal (laissez-faire) ideology is still considered by a majority of economists to be synonymous with scientific procedure in that field.
Even people who decide to believe in absolutely nothing at all, either because they claim to be completely scientific in their approach, or because they claim to be totally pragmatic instead, are usually individual believers in scientism or pragmatism instead. It seems that the human brain functions exclusively by metaphor, or association of multiple phenomena that are often mistakenly judged to be quite similar, or very different, by a particular brain composed of individual thought patterns and experiences. As a result, all humans construct their own specific interpretations of reality, almost always under the overwhelming influence of authority figures from the society that surrounds them, and are congenitally incapable of grasping what science-fiction writer Douglas Adams used to call the “total perspective vortex”.
Over centuries of social history, these metaphors coalesce into rival systems of belief, in which egotistical manipulators who desperately want to win friends and influence people regularly claim that they have developed a new explanation for everything, that outclasses and replaces (or should outclass or replace) every other system. Given the inherent incapacity of any particular system of belief to really cover everything that currently exists, and to anticipate everything else that may soon come into being, believers are obliged to fill in the gaps between ideology and reality by creating “false memories” of things that never existed, or ever will exist, in the real (monist) world.
In this manner, super-heroes are turned into polytheist gods, who are often then fused into one all-powerful Father-figure, while rival emperors simultaneously claim to have received competing mandates from heaven. Later on, multi-billion-dollar voting systems are invented to substitute corrupted representatives for everyday citizen participation in collective decision-making. (Not that such citizen participation would be easy to organize, nor necessarily result in better outcomes every time.) In the meantime, the extremely rich investors who control “our” elected representatives run around all over the place claiming to be the ultimate do-gooders, by “creating wealth” for everyone and not just for themselves.
An excellent example of how people try to project such wishful thinking onto the real world comes from sociologist Max Weber’s thesis about Protestantism and capitalism, that was originally conceived during the early part of the twentieth century. That thesis still has considerable intellectual resonance a century later, well-known philosopher Mark Alizart even contending that it helps to explain the religious connotations of today’s pop culture. Weber managed to combine modern developments in both the Christian religion and secular investment into one highly influential account about how the Protestant ethic was linked to the rise of modern capitalism.
According to him, the sixteenth-century preacher Jean Calvin inspired a huge increase in capital accumulation during the Reformation with his theory of predestination. Calvin contended that at the very beginning of the universe the Christian god made an arbitrary, a-priori decision, anticipating everything that every future human being would ever do from Creation all the way to Armageddon. For Calvin himself, predestination buttressed the Protestant desire to substitute faith alone for the good works that the Catholics had been insisting on until then as being the best way to get on good terms with the Supreme Being, and thus end up living with him in paradise for all eternity.
In Weber’s theory, ambitious Calvinists then came up with the Protestant ethic, exploiting everyone around them and saving every penny so as to make a lot of money. Their material success was somehow deemed by them to be “proof” of divine election to paradise of their own worthy selves. Weber’s thesis has often been criticized, not so much by those wanting to deny any ideological link between Christianity and capitalism, as for the considerably more interesting fact that in many parts of the world, Catholics participated in capital accumulation every bit as much as Protestants did.
Predestination has also been linked by other historians to nineteenth-century social-Darwinism, supposedly justifying not only huge income and life-style divisions between the social classes, but also legitimizing Western colonialism and racism. According to this extension of Calvinist theory, the rich are rich and the poor are poor because God decided at the outset (Genesis) that things should be that way forever, just like he also decided that white people have always deserved to dominate “people of color”. For such neo-Calvinist and/or social-Darwinist ideologues, any attempt to change that situation, such as by setting up the welfare state or by promoting racial equality, therefore becomes blasphemy in the eyes of the Lord.
In reality, however, it is the very attempt to justify material success or racial domination by using predestination that is genuinely blasphemous in this case. If it is true that a Heavenly Father really exists and that he committed himself to predestination at the beginning of time, then any attempt to fix things so that God’s decision would not be truly arbitrary and a-priori is inherently blasphemous. It indicates that those who organize their own lives for material success, as a way of gaining divine election to paradise, are in fact the real traitors to their chosen religion. There is no way that individualist or corporate attempts to make a lot of money at other people’s expense, or to impose capitalist imperialism on the rest of the world, would interfere with God’s original plan any less than collectivist interventions promoting social equality would also interfere with that same plan. If we look at things from a presumed God’s perfectly unprejudiced, non-ideological point of view, private enterprise is in no way preferable to government intervention.
Likewise, so far as today’s neoliberalism (free trade, laissez-faire, deregulation, globalization, international tax evasion, speculative investment) is concerned, the overall effect on society is not at all positive, as implied in the big-business slogan “consumer democracy”, but instead decidedly negative. Just before the onslaught of neoliberalism, during the “thirty glorious years” of 1945-1975, in the Western world but not at all in the Third World, democracy was somewhat less class-conscious than it has become nowadays. In those days, in that relatively small part of the world, the gap between the rich and the poor was declining instead of increasing, taxes on huge fortunes were much higher, free trade was largely ignored and social security was becoming stronger every day rather than weaker.
Democracy, in the sense of being rule by the majority of the population rather than rule by a very small part of it, only works at all when rich people find it difficult to control everything that moves. In today’s libertarian world, considerably less divided into distinct regions than before, only about one percent of one percent (one-ten-thousandth) of the total population is really involved in any serious decision-making. Propaganda aside, the vast majority of the population (poor and middle-class people), in every country, are not benefiting at all from the current situation. Most of the Western countries today are also not as democratic as they were for a time, just before the hegemonic onset of neoliberalism. On the other hand, some of the former Third World countries are somewhat more democratic than they used be in their often totalitarian past, but not nearly enough on a world scale to offset the decline in democracy in the West.
In this sense, so far as collective decision-making is concerned, genuine democracy and genuine communism are synonyms. By that, of course, I do not refer to the disgusting party-bureaucrat dictatorships that stood in for “communism” in the USSR (1922-1991) or in any of the so-called “people’s democracies”. At best, those state-capitalist governments only became more or less adept at using economic nationalism to prevent multinational control of their countries by immensely wealthy private capitalists. In other words, they managed for awhile to separate their part of the world from private control, at least partially freezing out the big owners of ultra-large business establishments operating from within the horribly misnamed “free world”.
In fact, genuine communism, like genuine democracy, has never existed anywhere in the real world, because the huge, ongoing gap between the social classes makes real freedom impossible for most people, even when that gap is declining slightly, albeit on a temporary, regional basis. So far as genuine rule by the majority of the people is concerned, it makes no difference whatever whether or not most people’s lives are run by private bureaucracies or by public ones, so long as all those different kinds of bureaucrats are working on behalf of ultra-rich, ultra-powerful, private and/or state-capitalist investors. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is one of the world’s best (or worst) examples of a country that has never been run by the majority of the people, before or since the death of Chairman Mao. The same lack of democracy also applies to countries like Canada or the USA, where private bureaucrats outnumber public bureaucrats a thousand to one, even at the best of times.
As for the centuries-old debate between economic nationalism and economic liberalism, often contracted into a debate between protectionism and free trade, unrestrained competition (the infamous “level playing field”) is really a form of protectionism for the strongest players. For the past two hundred years, emerging nations have been using the infant-industry argument to support protectionism for the weakest countries instead, but even then it was only designed to benefit local manufacturers. In those countries, the much larger social class of newly-created industrial workers are, or were, not often better treated by national bosses than by multinational ones.
Back in the early-modern period of history, the emerging nation-state absorbed opposing regions, often run beforehand by feudal lords (or warlords), into a national entity dominated by the rulers of a dominant region. This process, begun in Europe, gradually spread to the rest of the world over the past several centuries. Nowadays, however, laissez-faire globalization is going one step further, by making all the smaller nation-states gradually disappear, as in the European Union, if they are not big enough to withstand the power of today’s dominant “regions”, such as the USA, the PRC or the Federal Republic of Germany. Free trade and laissez-faire inevitably create or reinforce a pyramidal effect on society, that has recently resulted in a significant, overall social decline in liberty, equality, fraternity, solidarity and prosperity for everyone, not just for the privileged few.
One interesting example of all this took place recently in Canada, when the “separatist” movement in the province of Quebec tried to buck the trend toward ever-larger political entities by turning the province into a more or less independent nation-state. The often-elected Parti Québécois (PQ) started out as a sort of left-center-right, ideological coalition favoring political sovereignty for Quebec while still naively striving to maintain an economic association with English Canada. It twice (1980 and 1995) tried to get the majority of Quebec voters to go along with that proposition, and almost succeeded the second time around. However, its already ambiguous half-way position between independence and federalism was weakened a lot more after the first referendum defeat when the party leadership decided to support free trade and neoliberalism in general.
That curious strategy, aimed at saving Quebec from Canadian imperialism by allying it with American and European imperialism instead, ruined any chance Quebec may have had back then of uniting the entire province around political and economic nationalism. People cannot be persuaded to make the tremendous effort necessary to create a new nation-state when it becomes obvious to everyone that nothing substantial distinguishes the pro-independence platform from that of its steadfastly anti-independence rivals, except a largely symbolic desire to add a new flag to those flying outside the United Nations building in New York.
At the federal level of government, the various Conservative Party regimes, favoring asymmetrical federalism but also theoretically based on unflinching support for free trade and neoliberalism all over the world, soon made sure that the PQ strategy would become a total disaster for Quebec independence. The Conservative-PQ alliance against the highly corrupt, federal Liberal Party, which favored centralized federalism, largely succeeded in marginalizing that party’s previously interventionist governments. However, the end result for Quebec was to break up the PQ’s initial coalition for partial sovereignty and to make any future bid for real independence much more difficult.
A somewhat similar kind of dynamic, but on a much larger scale, also affected another kind of geographically-based ideology, that of native peoples liberation from their own foreign oppressors. Throughout the Americas, but also in Australasia, the violent and prolonged takeover of aboriginal lands by European immigrants, later joined by millions of African and Asiatic populations, took place in every colony in which the settlers eventually came to outnumber the original populations. Diseases imported from the Old World eliminated millions of natives, and millions more were deliberately eliminated through slavery, organized starvation and other such “successful” attempts at regional genocide.
As a result, the remaining native peoples were only left with very small parcels of territory scattered over very large regions, in a process replicated several centuries later in several more recent invasions in other parts of the world, such as the ever-expanding Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. For aboriginals in Canada and the USA, the cultural imperialism of residential (boarding) schools, in which native children were taken away from their communities in order to “civilize” them, started in the nineteenth century, like many similar attempts at native assimilation in other settler countries, but only ended about twenty years ago.
Unfortunately for some recent native attempts to turn a losing situation into a winning one, however, the anti-racist liberation movement has often indulged in reverse racism instead, attempting to solve native problems at “outsiders” expense. To be sure, acting in this way is not inherently native or aboriginal, the original invaders of native territory having previously used military oppression of colonial territory as a way of dealing with a relative decline in the rate of profit back in Europe, as well as with the problem of overpopulation in many of their homelands.
Nevertheless, in a process of reverse discrimination some native groups in the former settler colonies have recently succeeded in taking back small portions of real estate from outsider control. In so doing, however, they used the same kind of violence and intimidation that the invaders had used originally, although on a much smaller scale. Similar confrontations (also used by many other protest movements) have also involved blockades of roads, railroads and other methods of transportation, aimed at harming the entire non-native population rather than directing popular rage against the people in power (politicians and business executives). Other forms of reprehensible behavior, often occurring simultaneously across both native and non-native communities, include drug trafficking, international tax evasion, organized crime, ultra-macho wife-beating, murder and mistreatment of women and children, and community expulsion of women who marry outsiders.
This last kind of unacceptable behavior is particularly galling, given the fact that none of the native communities (or any other human communities anywhere else) are racially “pure”. Since the different aboriginal ethnic groups started interacting with outside invaders several centuries ago, any kind of purely biological “nativeness” has long disappeared. Even during the precolonial period, millions of captives of multiple ethnic origins were incorporated into warring tribes over and over again. Scientists nowadays are even positing the possibility that not all the original native populations even came from the same parts of the Old World, as was originally thought. Not to mention the fact that ever since aboriginal origins became less stigmatizing, following a decline in the most virulent kinds of outsider racism during the 1970s, even the number of people claiming to be native has increased dramatically. So trying to impose racial “unity” nowadays is especially abhorrent.
With native liberation ideology, the problem is not the fact that some native people often behave in the same reprehensible ways that some non-native people do, which is to be expected in any non-racist vision of the world. Racism, after all, not only includes rotten attitudes and behavior toward oppressed peoples, it also includes complicit condoning of rotten attitudes and behavior within those same communities. The problem here is that some native and pro-native ideologues often excuse such reverse-racism by blaming most of it on reaction to oppression of natives by outsiders. But as in dozens of other horrific cases all over the world, victimization of one group of people, even over a long period of time, is not a sufficient excuse for condoning or belittling reverse discrimination.
Nor is it a viable excuse for instituting a similarly oppressive pecking order inside local communities, in which the stronger members of the community mistreat the weaker members, in imitation or emulation of outside oppressors. In the case of men mistreating women and children, native communities may not just be imitating settler behavior, imported from the Old World, but may also be carrying on their own local “traditions” left over from the precolonial period. Unfortunately, almost every religion and ideology in the world has deliberately included mistreatment of women among its inherent characteristics, even in the relatively less sexist Iroquois communities. Once again, however, this kind of rotten behavior has also been condoned by the true believers in every other human system of belief. Even a large proportion of the people practicing such left-wing ideologies as anarchism and communism, that are theoretically supposed to be based on opposition to all forms of oppression, are still incredibly sexist.
But it would be another form of cultural imperialism to ignore an attempt at comparative evaluation when discussing native liberation ideology. In this case, it can certainly be shown that the outsiders (mostly of European origin) have done a lot more harm to native peoples over the centuries, even very recently, than native peoples have managed to harm the outsiders in return. But approximate quantitative evaluations like that one still do not make more palatable rotten native behavior toward outsiders, or towards each other inside native communities.
Nevertheless, it would be totally unfair to compare the two situations as if they were in any way quantitatively equivalent, the numbers of victims involved being much higher during the settler invasions. Even today, in spite of official propaganda campaigns focusing on tolerance, those invasions have never really ceased. One recent example is the exemplary role that many native communities have been forced to play in resisting the unbridled expansionism of extractor corporations in the mining and fossil-fuel industries.
A similar type of analysis can also be applied to the well-known example of the former white-racist regime in South Africa, of Calvinist origin, with its disgusting treatment of “people of color”, particularly during the apartheid period (1948-1991). Since it came to power in 1994, however, the African National Congress government seems to have done its utmost, not so much as to mistreat South Africans of European or Asian origin, following Nelson Mandela’s anti-racist rainbow concept, as to mistreat its own population in ways that recall the decades of apartheid. The new leaders and their clientele regime have set up a new ruling class, a kind of ultra-corrupt “Black bourgeoisie”, that treats the majority of the population almost as poorly as the Boer states used to do. The same observation can also be made about many other post-independence governments throughout Africa, not to mention those in Asia and Latin America, as compared with the even more disgusting colonial or settler governments that preceded them.
Another horrible example of this kind of effect is the very disturbing treatment meted out to multiple minorities in the USA, which includes not only the native peoples but also the African-American population. In that country, any person with at least one percent of African blood (such as the current president) is officially considered to be black, even though practically all of those people are once again of mixed blood. Most of today’s “Black” population suffered through slavery before becoming second-class citizens ofter the Civil War, a socio-economic condition that has persisted in more recent times. Nowadays, unequal treatment even seems to be gathering atavistic momentum, gradually repudiating many of the political improvements made during the 1945-1975 period.
Unfortunately, as in the case of the native peoples, today’s African-American communities suffer from similar kinds of behavioral “emulation” of their white oppressors, with drug trafficking, organized crime, macho treatment of women and abandonment of children topping the list. Once again, however, any attempt at approximate quantification of that situation would necessarily arrive at the same conclusion: the “White” majority has committed many more crimes against the “Black” population than the Blacks have committed against the Whites, and most of the crimes that some Black people have committed over the years have also been directed against their own people.
As mentioned earlier, in a much different part of the world, the Israeli regime since 1948 and several political movements inside Israel have also mistreated the Palestinians and other neighboring peoples a lot more than those peoples have mistreated Israelis during that same period. Nevertheless, as in the previous examples, the Palestinian governments and political movements, and similar forces inside Israel’s other regional victim-states, have also mistreated their own populations quite a bit more than they have succeeded in mistreating the Israelis. The only way to do “justice” to everyone in this kind of discussion is to make sure that every single kind of oppression known to mankind be underlined and evaluated, quantitatively and qualitatively, as thoroughly as possible. No one’s guilt should be under-estimated, but neither should it be over-estimated, something that is never easy to do properly.
Religious examples of this kind of misguided ideological behavior are every bit as frequent as the secular examples analyzed above. I already referred to the curious “miscegenation” between Calvinism and capitalism earlier in this article. But every religion in the world always functions in the same absurd ways as does every political or social ideology. Not to mention the fact that the “deep beliefs” that religious people claim exclusively for themselves are not in reality any deeper than any equivalent secular beliefs, as in the Chinese fixation on the thoughts of Chairman Mao.
The way that I look at it, this is what happens over and over again with every system of belief: true believers are always saying that they are either carrying out God’s will, or closely following the mandate of heaven, or obeying the dictates of market forces (consumer democracy), or defending their own ancestral territory, or organizing society exclusively for the common good, or whatever other slogan that they may choose to propagate. But in reality, most of the time they are merely following the path of individual egoism and personal corruption, instead. The religion or the ideology involved becomes just an excuse or cover story to make totally inadequate behavior look legitimate in the media projection of reality.
Over fifty years ago, at age fourteen, I taught Sunday school during one summer to a group of young children, endlessly repeating the usual Bible stories that I had learned about myself just before that. A few years later, however, I decided to read the Christian Bible from one end to the other to find out for myself if what I had been teaching had any connection with the real world. I soon found out that the goody-goody-two-shoes version of Biblical events and modern parallels that I had been dishing out to my younger victims were in total contrast to what most Christian people really spent their time doing or supporting, such as during the incredibly violent Vietnam War (1957-1975). (Not that any of the other participants in that war were any less hypocritical.)
All over the world, ever since Christianity became a religion separate from Judaism, people calling themselves Christians have been adopting completely opposite points of view on all sorts of particular subjects, which makes one wonder what all of those self-proclaimed Christians really have (or had) in common. A recent example of this kind of thing was the clerk in Kentucky, Kim Davis, who went to jail for a few days rather than sign papers authorizing same-sex marriages, or even let anyone else in her office do so. She justified her stand by talking about same-sex marriages as a heaven or hell issue, and avowed that her love of Jesus Christ made it impossible for her to support such a presumed abomination of Christian teachings. In this case, as in many other such controversies involving monotheist religions, it turns out that belief in God is the ultimate conspiracy theory, since people are always trying to justify just about anything in this way.
The most obvious comment to be made about controversies like this one is that millions of Christians agree with Kim Davis’s point of view on this subject, but millions more of them do not. So what is the link between love of Jesus Christ and same-sex marriage? The short answer is that there is no such link; it turns out that no one really knows what a good Christian ought to do in this case, or in any other case. I have not researched the New Testament to see whether or not Jesus, considered to be the Messiah (“the Christ” in Greek), was reported to have said something that may or may not indicate what he would have done in similar circumstances.
But my main point here is that no one can be certain what the historical Jesus, if such a person ever really existed, would have thought about anything at all. No one had a tape or a video recorder around two thousand years ago, which means that everything he said or did not say is subject to interpretation. The gospels themselves were not written down until several decades, or even centuries, after his death, and contain conflicting accounts not only about his life, but also about his thoughts when he was alive, and even his presumed manner of dying.
The same point applies to everything else that is written down in the Judeo-Christian tradition’s favorite book (the Greek word for book is “Bible”), whether in the Jewish section (the Old Testament) or in the Christian section (the New Testament). Even the separate chapters, or little books, included in authorized versions of the compendium of texts making up the larger book, were not considered to be definitive choices until several centuries after the presumed death of Jesus. The bishops who voted to include, or exclude, any of the texts being proposed, during any particular Christian synod, did so for political or polemical purposes that had nothing to do with what Jesus may have thought about their decisions. Even nowadays, some people are still debating the inclusion of currently approved texts over what are now officially considered to be apocryphal texts.
Similarly, the various Jewish authors of the Old Testament, starting with the five first smaller books, collectively known as the Talmud, wrote down most of their stories centuries after the events that they were supposed to be describing took place. Not only that, they included in those accounts of supposedly Jewish events various myths (such as the great flood and the story of Noah’s Ark) that were borrowed from other Middle Eastern civilizations. Most notably from the Sumerian (or Akkadian) story of Gilgamesh, the first recorded book every published (and not the Bible, as everyone used to believe).
Their narratives about the prophet Moses and his leading the Jewish people out of Egyptian bondage and back to the promised land, or of the founding of the kingdoms of Israel and Judea, under such leaders as David and Solomon, also seem to have been invented, or at least made to seem much more important at the time than they really were. Modern archaeologists, including dozens of Israeli teams, have so far been unable to find any definitive proof of the very existence of those particular people and their kingdoms. This in a region in which archeological evidence (even when deliberate destruction of such evidence is taken into account) of all the other great civilizations of the same period still exist in magnificent abundance.
This makes it extremely difficult for anyone living since ancient times, or even since medieval times, to base any of his or her own thoughts and actions on anything that may or may not have been said or done back then. Not only in the Middle East, but also in any other parts of the world, including Europe, India, China, Japan, Ethiopia, Polynesia or the pre-Colombian Americas. It is just incredibly foolish to deliberately ignore the existence of every human being’s capacity for critical thinking, and to accept as given any necessarily limited interpretation of events in which the authors are proclaiming that their vision of the world is the only one that everyone ought to be supporting.
Contradictions abound in every such belief system, including such obvious examples as the state of Israel’s current claim to absolute geographical hegemony in all the lands that used to be ruled by Saul, David, Solomon, or any of their presumed successors prior to the Babylonian and/or Roman invasions. The ultra-orthodox movement in modern Judaism is also quick to point out that Israeli nationalism is anathema for the Jewish religion itself, since the state of Israel was not supposed to have been reconstructed before the coming of the “real”, Jewish Messiah. As a result, these people often show up in demonstrations in support of the Palestinians and do not agree with the Christians that Jesus was any kind of savior, and certainly not the son of the god of ancient Israel. Moreover, Israeli nationalism owes an immense debt for its continued existence to the “Christian Zionists”, particularly in the USA, who foolishly believe that it is some kind of harbinger for the second coming of Jesus Christ.
These are some of the reasons why I also enjoyed reading a recently published book about atheism (“Traité d’athéologie”), written by French philosopher Michel Onfray. He lambasted the three most important monotheist religions from a philosophical point of view, coming up with a number of fascinating arguments, many of which were new to me. His main focus was on how any true believer in Judaism, Christianity or Islam could not possibly support any of the characteristics of the modern European Enlightenment, specifically directed against such long-outdated concepts as absolute monarchy and religious totalitarianism.
I found his treatment of monotheism to be quite useful when I also read many parts of the Koran for the first time, rather than just those few excerpts that other authors I had consulted before had brought to their readers attention. I certainly had to agree with Onfray, for example, when he argued that the two or three sentences in that book in favor of tolerance, respect for others and the refusal to impose religious ideas by force, were completely overwhelmed by hundreds of other sentences promoting entirely opposite attitudes instead.
Most of that text is written in an extremely militant fashion, totally focused in verse after verse on how everyone in this life who supports Islam will be rewarded by God for all eternity with every kind of pleasure imaginable, while those who refuse it will be cast into hellfire and suffer horribly, also for eternity. In other words, the message contained in that text resembles nothing more than a straightforward series of sermons very similar to the ones that can also be read in the Bible. Many of the chapters include extensive retelling of the stories about prophets like Noah and Moses, as well as several favorable comments about Jesus as one of the more recent prophets leading up to the most important monotheist prophet of them all, Mohammed himself.
From my cultural background, it also closely resembled the kind of preaching that used to be delivered in the American “Bible Belt” during the first half of the twentieth century. I immediately pictured Burt Lancaster starring as preacher “Elmer Gantry” in the 1960 American movie, which was based on the 1926 Sinclair Lewis novel with the same title. Lewis based his portrayal on several real preachers from that period, Gantry’s wife, for example, being based on the life of Aimee Semple McPherson (née Kennedy), an extremely popular preacher born in a rural town in Ontario, Canada, who became one of the most important founders of the Pentecostal movement in the USA. I also recalled reading the 1955 play, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, and seeing the 1960 movie adaptation, both called “Inherent the Wind”, about the famous 1925 “monkey trial” in Tennessee, in which modern evolutionary science clashed openly with “old-time religion”. The fundamentalist attorney in that trial, William Jennings Bryan, was vigorously supported at the time by such fellow-travelers as McPherson.
Fundamentalist Christian movements nowadays, as well as a hundred years ago, also resemble today’s fundamentalist Muslim movements, not only in their style of preaching, known in the USA as “fire and brimstone”, but also in their attempt to solve the practical problems of their flocks (believers only) by engaging in extensive charity and religious-based social-welfare programs. They make a feeble attempt at replacing the equally innocuous efforts of “sinful” organizations like national and regional governments in every country and every period of history (like the USA in McPherson’s time), that do not provide properly for the poor and the handicapped within their own populations. The popularity of such movements is therefore not just based on proselytism, it is also based on charity, similar to the approach previously adopted by the British-based Salvation Army that influenced McPherson in her younger years.
Another cultural reference that came to mind during my reading of the Koran was Harry McClintock’s 1916 poem, “Hymn of Hate”, that is often called the battle song of the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World. IWW organizers like McClintock particularly detested the “Starvation” Army and the other pro-capitalist Christian churches of the era, because like most of the other religious organizations in the world they fervently supported the most backward political regimes possible. The poem itself focused on the hate for capitalism generated by the killing of millions of ordinary workers because of the horrible working conditions, and the incredibly violent repression of strikes, imposed by millionaire investors back then. (Even though most industrial workers nowadays live in the former Third World, not much has changed since that time.)
At one point in McClintock’s poem, he added: “We hate your slave religion with submission for its creed.” Since the word “islam” itself means “submission”, a world traveler like him (Africa, China, the Philippines, etc.) would certainly have included Islam in his denunciation of ultra-reactionary religions. He also agreed with another famous IWW organizer, Joe Hill, who proclaimed in his 1911 song, “The Preacher and the Slave” (a parody on the Christian hymn, “In the Sweet By-and-By”), that the only thing that preachers could ever answer to grossly underpaid workers begging for food was “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”
To put it as succinctly as possible, the most outstanding characteristic of all religious ideologies is the huge contrast that always exists between what those movements preach and what they actually end up doing. In McPherson’s case, for example, the inherent pacifism of early Pentecostalism was rapidly replaced by all-out support for the American effort during the Second World War. The “Elmer Gantry” story also focused on how the ultra-conservative social principles of all the fundamentalist preachers are almost always contradicted by their own personal failings and subsequent falling from grace, once again as in Aimee McPherson’s case.
Nevertheless, secular preachers like the anarcho-syndicalist organizers did not always manage to avoid committing the same kind of hypocrisy as the religious ones did. Some of the IWW leaders who survived the First World War period of intense repression, such as William Z. Foster, went on to found the nascent communist parties in North America during the 1920s. Unfortunately, those Marxist-Leninist organizations soon became highly disciplined followers of the USSR, slavishly following Soviet policy through the constant zig-zags between ultra-totalitarian and slightly more liberal forms of “communism”. Many of them were also ardent misogynists, though perhaps not as often as the religious fundamentalists, whose outlook on women’s role in society was always ultra-conservative.
Moderate believers in any of these competing systems of belief, whether religious or secular, are sometimes like the doubting Thomas character in the New Testament, who realize at least part of the time that they are not in fact following the principles of their chosen path at all, before they are forced by tremendous social pressure to switch back to more orthodox ways of thinking. On the other hand, fundamentalist, or extremist, believers refuse to ever doubt anything at all, with the inevitable result that their own blasphemy, or treason toward their one true chosen belief, turns out to be even more pronounced than that of their more moderate brethren.
As I have often pointed out in my other writings, many fundamentalist forms of religion, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or whatever, regularly adopt laissez-faire (aka, neoliberal) ideology as well. Even though the basic principles of each of these religions seem to be in total contradiction with letting multibillionaires control everything that moves, most of the moderate as well as the fundamentalist factions within those religions end up imitating the neo-Calvinist, social-Darwinist movements of the nineteenth century, by inventing ideological “bridges” between the doctrines of each particular religion and those of private capitalism. For example, the Muslim refusal to accept usury, defined as charging interest when lending money, has been overcome by various ingenious subterfuges, even for organizations as theoretically fundamentalist as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. The current government of India is also led by a political party combining both so-called Hindu nationalism and a neoliberal approach to economic policy and foreign investment.
Every kind of religious fundamentalism has also succeeded in surmounting religious principles condemning gratuitous violence against innocent bystanders, and “justifying” terrorism instead. Ultra-Christian opponents of planned parenthood, for example, regularly terrorize patients and staff members in abortion clinics, occasionally murdering abortion doctors. Ultra-Islamic movements, often funded by Muslim billionaires, have also carried out much more murderous, and extremely well-publicized, terrorist attacks against presumed unbelievers and apostates in all the majority-Muslim countries, as well as in every country possessing significant Muslim minorities.
Once again, however, quantitative comparisons also have to be made in this case, since most of the very numerous Muslim victims were killed by state-sponsored terrorism, carried out by nominally Muslim governments or by Western military interventions. Even the United Nations economic boycott of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, between 1991 and 2003, resulted in the deaths of several hundred thousand ordinary citizens, most of them Muslim. Today’s enormous refugee crisis in western Asia and northern Africa, spilling over into most parts of Europe, also involves mostly Muslim victims fleeing from both “private” and “public” forms of terrorism. Many majority-Muslim countries, even more than some of the more conservative European countries, are also making the plight of the millions of refugees much worse, by refusing to take in more than a handful of those unfortunate refugees.
Rival groups of self-defined, radical Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, etc., also regularly attack each other militarily all the time, the most extreme groups within each religion also managing to find good reasons to wage war on each other as well. From their point of view, it is impossible to go too far in becoming a “good” religious fanatic; there does not seem to be any limit to how fantastically crazy those different kinds of true believers can become.
All the religious ideologies in the world are divided up into rival factions in the same way that the Marxist-Leninist organizations were always fighting among themselves in the twentieth century, each fraction of the whole always claiming to represent the one, true version of each separate system of belief. All the other secular ideologies (such as racism, nationalism, imperialism, liberalism, conservatism, fascism, social-democracy, etc.), are also divided up in similar ways. Every particular point of view in the world always splits up into dozens of little splinters or tendencies that fight each other all the time over ideological purity and hegemony, sometimes with words, sometimes with poison, or with guns, or even occasionally with weapons of mass destruction.
So, as Nikolay Chernyshevsky might have put it, what is to be done about all this? If the true believers in all these extremely popular kinds of belief are constantly fighting with each other about which is the one true belief system of all time, and are constantly falling off the wagon morally speaking as well, how do we get people to use the rational part of their brains more often, instead, and to gradually abandon all those manufactured beliefs?
Unfortunately, the simple answer is that human beings do not seem very willing to do that. The world seems to be going in exactly the opposite direction at the moment. True, modern science, aimed at honestly investigating the characteristics of the real world rather than inventing simplistic alternatives, has existed for several centuries now. In recent times, teams of scientists all over the world have learned how to use highly methodological observation and experiment, repeated hundreds of times over and over, to investigate reality. Then they spend the rest of their time debating with each other in innumerable conferences and written controversies, to make sure that everyone’s contribution is really out in the open and on the level.
These impressive collections of hundreds of thousands of scientists, in every imaginable field, are the closest thing that human beings have ever developed in order to approximate the truly neutral, non-partisan attitude that monotheists like to attribute to their fictional God. Philosopher Karl Popper’s suggested test for demonstrating conformity to problems based on the scientific method, the possibility of falsification, is also based on forever accepting the absence of absolute perfection in human endeavor. Science, in other words, is the only rational alternative to necessarily heteronomous ideology.
Nevertheless, science does not currently seem to be attracting ever larger numbers of admirers toward using critical thinking more often, at least not since the onslaught of neoliberalism. Perhaps one of the reasons for that has to do with what Thomas Kuhn pointed out originally in his 1962 thesis on scientific revolutions, that even people totally dedicated to science will fight tooth and nail against any scientific advancement that threatens their own sacrosanct careers. Popular identification with science is also regularly challenged whenever journalists manage to expose collusion between some corrupt scientists, and the big governments and big corporations that employ most of them. Proven examples of fudged results do not help much, to say the least.
And as I pointed out earlier, some of the sciences focused on human activity rather than on investigating physical reality, such as mainstream economics, are even more corrupt simply because they deliberately refuse to be politically neutral. My own discipline, history, is also dominated by practitioners focusing much more often on propagandistic heritage than on ideologically neutral, scientifically justified, versions of history.
Most people are also extremely uncomfortable with the uncertainty of scientific investigation, particularly since probability theory replaced positivist science during the first decades of the twentieth century. The kind of immense universe depicted by recent scientific discoveries, in which human beings have lost their previously presumed position at the center of creation, do not appeal to people’s favorite ego projections at all. For egotistical reasons, hundreds of millions of people much prefer believing in a world that revolves around them, their entirely illusory “spiritual needs” taking precedence over philosophical rationalism (based on hylozoic monism).
The constant revival of old-time religious ideologies, of every possible denomination, often funded by manipulative billionaires from every possible country, makes the advent of rational thinking on a massive scale, even more difficult. So does the constant revival of all sorts of prejudiced secular ideologies, especially neoliberalism (laissez-faire) but also including racist forms of nationalism and the current rise of neofascism all over the world. By far the most popular system of belief nowadays, neoliberal laissez-faire, has been particularly reinforced by the recent capitulation of most of the world’s formerly interventionist governments. Most of the relatively recent examples of ideological treason (aka betrayal or blasphemy), come from all those established religions and secular ideologies that have decided to support the privatization of all levels of government, rather than to continue supporting public solutions for public problems, like some of them used to do in the past.
Under the influence of big business, millions of ordinary people all over the world are now supporting the very billionaires that many of them used to rail against. The best recent example comes from Donald Trump’s campaign to win the Republican nomination for president of the USA. Apparently, many of his supporters believe that he is the most honest politician in the USA because he spends his own billions on his campaign, rather than spend funds coming from occult sources such as political action committees. As if political corruption could be eliminated by getting every ignorant, ultraconservative billionaire to corrupt himself straight out by becoming his own favorite candidate, rather than let someone else do it!
This has got to be one of the stupidest observations every made since time began. With people like that in every country prostrating themselves in front of such obvious demagogues (another example: France’s Marine Le Pen), is it any wonder that rationalism is retreating rather than continuing to advance? Do Trump’s supporters genuinely believe that he could have become a billionaire, more than once, without exploiting underpaid workers in his hotels and other properties? Do they not realize that most of those workers come from the same illegal immigrant populations that their “independent” candidate pretends to so thoroughly despise?
In the final analysis, I doubt very much that there is much hope these days for any revival of popular interest in rationality and scientific methods of thinking. This is one of the reasons why I also have to reject the opinions expressed by Francis Dupuis-Déri and Thomas Déri in a book on anarchism that I also read during the past few weeks, “L’anarchie expliquée à mon père”. This little book gives dozens of examples of anarchist movements that have existed over the years all over the world, even though the authors curiously leave out any mention of anarchist influence within the Canadian New Left, including inside their own home city, Montreal. Their best contribution to political analysis was in explaining how elected representatives in “democratic” countries always manage to betray their ordinary constituents and to obey the occult instructions of their ultra-rich masters instead.
But I cannot for the life of me figure out how anyone who knows anything about politics, past or present, could possibly agree with their utterly naive belief in a future anarchist world. Following some combination of Earth-shaking events, they want everyone to believe that the local anarchist councils that would presumably be set up in every little community, belonging to enormous globe-spanning federations of such councils, would always remain faithful to the wishes of their local supporters and forever resist every attempt on the part of those same federations to corrupt them! Just like all the other preachers in all the other systems of belief, they use critical thinking and the reality principle when criticizing what everyone else proposes to do, but forget all about rational methods when describing their own proposals.
If eternal vigilance really is the price of liberty, then surely eternal skepticism is the price of rationality. Which is why everyone also ought to refuse the arguments of all those pundits who claim that no one has the right to criticize anyone else’s point of view in a given situation, without coming up with a plausible solution. But there are literally thousands of particular problems in which none of the current participants will ever accept any solution that does not provide them with total victory, the famous two-state “solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict being the most obvious. In fact, even in ordinary life everyone knows at least a few egotistical monsters who will never accept any reasonable solution, to any situation, that does not feed into their overwhelming desire to always control everything that moves.
So the inevitable pattern of religious or ideological ego-projection is always the same. First, in the interests of what is called social harmony, the preachers from some belief system or another call for what in reality amounts to identification with the aggressor. Then, social laws of correct behavior, such as the current hypocritical campaigns against rape culture on many university campuses, are set up to make people feel safe (without anyone actually becoming safe). Then all those social laws are regularly broken by all those individualist sociopaths who never believe in society as an entity, but only as a collection of individuals divided into winners like them and losers (everyone else).
Then the prevailing belief system in any given case uses the argument of social harmony again to get all the victims back onside, so that they can be successfully exploited, and mistreated, once again. Then the social boundaries are fixed once again, perhaps slightly differently from the time before. Then the egotistical monsters break all the rules again, then their friends in the belief system get everyone onside again (“peace in our time”), and so it goes on and on forever, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
