Postmodernism, postcolonialism, and the private property society

27 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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capitalism, Critical Religion, power relations, private property

‘Religion’ is part of a classification system that appears to the secular liberal as neutral, given unproblematically in consciousness as corresponding to how the world is, independent of the discursive formations that constitute our collective inter-subjective apprehensions. Yet on the contrary, classification systems embody power relations. Critical religion proposes that religion is a power category that, in dialectical interplay with other power categories such as ‘politics’, ‘science’ or ‘nature’, constructs a world and our own apprehensions according to the interests of private property, and the various beliefs, institutions and practices that have come into the world to protect private property.

The right to the outright private ownership of the earth, including the right to buy and sell for purely personal gain, unencumbered by any effects the practice might have on the lives of other people or the environment, is a historically peculiar idea, one which would have been incomprehensible to most of the peoples who ever existed. And yet this masculinist fiction of the naturally possessive individual and his supposed rights of private ownership – rights for which women had to struggle for centuries to achieve for themselves – has been transformed into our dominant notion of ‘human nature’, and has become the globalising norm of the world order.

The category religion has a unique function in the way it enables the mythical basis of private ownership of the earth, and makes it seem normal and inevitable. The right to unlimited private accumulation of our common organic inheritance, regardless of the effect on the rest, is the default position of liberal and neoliberal capitalism. In putative contrast to the blind faith of ‘believers’, private ownership of the earth is celebrated by generations of secular liberals as an enlightened discovery, a sign of a higher stage of progress and development, our collective arrival at mature knowledge of ‘reality’, including what it means to be human.

Critical religion is a revolutionary practice that seeks to subvert the rhetorical illusions that transform a peculiar way of owning the earth into common sense normality, as though there is an inherent inevitability – betrayed by such common expressions as “that’s the way the world is”, “you can’t change human nature”, or “stuff happens” – that the land, the air, the water, the energy, and even the genes of our collective organic inheritance can be privately owned and privately profited from, with minimal if any responsibility for impact on the remainder.

It follows from this position that there cannot be a genuine postmodern or postcolonial consciousness at least until the modern liberal categories of the understanding have been critically deconstructed and the illusion that they are neutral and objective has been dispelled. To be postmodern and postcolonial is to be post the categories of secular liberal understanding. We are not there yet.

To faithfully pursue this process brings one up against the inflexible resistance of the liberal or neoliberal university and its structures and priorities. This critical challenge to the dominant norms does not win one many friends. The liberal universities within which we work reflect and reproduce these ideological priorities. This is a good reason why liberal academics cannot effectively stand up against the neoliberal transformation of universities into business corporations with top-down, anti-democratic managerial structures, and an obsessive reduction of all values to market commodities.

Religious education or indoctrination: an evening of lively discussion

24 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Critical Religion, religious education, religious observance, religious studies, schools, Scotland, University of Stirling

[Picking up on the debate at Stirling University on 23.10.14, the introductory blog to this topic by Alison Jasper and John I’Anson, the contribution by Sarah Clark, and the first comment piece by Russell Hunter, Tim Fitzgerald here offers our final piece on this specific event. We hope you have found all of these contributions helpful in thinking about the wider debate on RE in schools, and not just in the Scottish context. – Michael Marten, Editor]

The organisers should be thanked and praised as far as the idea of the forum is concerned. Clearly it was a legitimate forum for local teachers, parents, theology professors and Liberal Christian ministers to express their feelings and ideas about the goods and the bads of RE in school. The forum rightly included a representative of secular humanism. The problem for me is that secular humanists talk the binary reverse of what the religionists talk, and thus challenge nothing, because the circularity of the discourse is maintained. This binary discourse centred around ‘religion’ and ‘non-religion’ ensures the circular rehashing of the same persistent, un-deconstructed discourse whose deadening ubiquity stops us all thinking new thoughts.

Our very own Sarah Clark had something powerful and original to say, but the chair and the other speakers failed to pick it up. Sarah referred to the ‘cognitive dissonance’ she experienced between teaching RE in school and studying critical religion at Stirling University. This led her to make a career change. This significant content seemed to be of no interest to the chairperson or to any of the other speakers, despite the lavish praise and the mutual love-in and prize-winning ceremony at the end.

True, I am more on the academic side of the topic of ‘religion’, but, as a result of the urging of others, I imagined that this might be a forum where I could learn something and perhaps also make some useful connections between what we do in critical religion at Stirling and ideas about how RE in schools might be rethought to give it critical relevance. However I cannot in all honesty say that anything at all was advanced by this event – from my own perspective at least – and indeed it may have done some damage. I feel disappointed at the way this debate was staged and conducted.

Sarah received loud applause when she went to the podium to speak, yet none of the organisers or other speakers seemed alerted by this that a sizeable number of undergraduates, and several postgraduates and lecturers were present, or that we might have anything worthy to contribute. Two lecturers in particular – Alison Jasper and John I’Anson, have published interesting contributions to the topic of RE, but these do not seem to have been mentioned.

You cannot have everyone on a panel, and the organisers have the right to choose who they want to be there. Yet neither Alison nor John were acknowledged from the platform and nor were the rest of us from the Stirling religion subject area. The many religion students and lecturers in the audience seemed to be invisible and inaudible to those up on the platform and to those of the organisers who were sitting in the front row. I felt that I was intruding into someone else’s private assembly, and I began to wonder why my wife and I were there, and why I had urged my students and postgraduates to attend – some coming from as far away as St Andrews and Edinburgh.

Some people may now want to organise a counter-debate, preferable led by a combination of current RE teachers in schools and critical religion students at Stirling, especially those who, like Sarah, intend – or intended – to teach RE in school. Yes, we need all the constituencies to participate. It seems potentially more creative to try to bring the academic subject area and the school curriculum into some kind of direct, creative tension. After all, that is exactly what Sarah Clark was talking about: the dissonance between the two.

I believe and hope that what we do successfully in the religion subject area at Stirling is to deconstruct the empty and confused rhetoric around religion and secularity, and show how it serves wider power agendas that tend to remain half-hidden in the background. But I recognise the need for caution. I suspect that many teachers and parents, whose legitimate concerns are with the actualities of the school curriculum, will be puzzled by how we proceed, and slow to recognise the relevance of deconstructing discourses on religion. It would be unhelpful if the ‘lively discussion’ split into a false assumed dichotomy of realists and idealists – the idealists being those supposedly privileged academics like myself who live and teach abstractions that have no bearing on the supposed realities, and the realists being the teachers who do the immensely difficult job working within the externally imposed realities of the curriculum. This is, I believe, yet another of those either-or binaries that keep us stupefied and ensure that nothing new can be thought. I would not go cold into that forum. It needs to be prepared. A space could be made for what we do at Stirling, even if it is only trying to clear the conceptual rubble so evident that evening.

Critical Politics

07 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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categories, church, Critical Religion, economics, India, Japan, John Locke, politics, religion, secular

Our blog ‘critical religion’ receives contributions from many people, and they usually have the terms ‘critical’ and ‘religion’ in them somewhere. Some are much more clearly theorised than that. My own understanding of ‘critical religion’ is specific. For me, ‘critical religion’ is always about ‘religion and related categories’, because I argue that religion is not a stand-alone category, but is one of a configuration of categories. On its own, ‘religion’ has no object; it only seems to do so. Religion is a category that is deployed for purposes of classification, but it does not stand in a one-to-one relationship with any observable thing in the world. In modern discourse, ‘religion’ works as half a binary, as in ‘religion and secular’ or ‘religion and [secular] politics’. When we talk about religion today, there is always a tacit exclusion of whatever is considered to be non-religious. If, for example, we talk about religion and politics, we have already assumed they refer to different things, and to mutually incompatible ones at that. Politics is secular, which means non-religious. Religion is separate from politics. If the two get mixed up and confused, then there is a problem.

One thing to notice here is that there has been a massive historical slippage from ‘ought’ to ‘is’. What started in the 17th century as an ‘ought’ – viz. there ought to be a distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘political society’ – has long become an assumption about the way the world actually is. In public discourse we have become used to talking as if ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ refer to two essentially different aspects of the real world, that we intuitively know what a religion is and what politics is, and we imagine that if we wanted to take the trouble we could define their essential differences. And yet of course the rhetorical construct of ‘ought’ keeps appearing, as for example when we insist that a nation that does not have a constitutional separation of religion and politics is undeveloped or backward; or when Anglican Bishops make moral pronouncements that seem uncomfortably ‘political’.

But what does ‘politics’ actually refer to? If the meaning of a word is to be found in its use, then we surely all know the meaning of ‘politics’. We use the term constantly. We have an intuitive understanding about what politics is. If we didn’t, how would we be able to deploy the term with such self-assurance? How, without understanding the term, would we be able to communicate about our shared and contested issues? We discourse constantly about politics, whether in private, or in the media, in our schools and universities, or in our ‘political’ institutions – and we surely all know which of our institutions are the political ones. Careers are made in politics. We join political parties, or we become politicians, or we enrol and study in departments of political science, and read and write textbooks on the topic. How could there be a political science if we did not know what politics is? There are journalists and academics that specialise in politics, journals dedicated to politics, distinct associations and conferences for its study, and thousands of books written and published about politics. Historians research the politics of the past. There is a politics industry. There are commercial companies that analyse and provide data on the topic of politics. Media organisations employ many people to produce programmes dedicated to politics and to political analysis, discussion and debate.

Yet the ubiquity of politics is our problem. For politics and the political is so universal that it is difficult to pin it down. Are there any domains of human living that cannot and are not described as being political, as pertaining to politics? If we try to find some definitive use of the terms ‘politics’ and ‘political’ by searching through popular and academic books, newspapers, TV representations, or the discourses on politics on the internet, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that everything is politics or political. We can find representations of the politics of abortion, the politics of hunger, church politics, the politics of sectarianism, political Islam, the politics of universities and university departments, the politics of medieval Japan, the politics of the Roman or the Mughal empires, the politics of slavery, class politics, the politics of caste in colonial and contemporary India, the politics of Native Americans in the 16th century, the politics of ancient Babylon, the politics of marriage, the politics of Constitutions, and so on and on. And we surely know that politics is as ancient as the hills.

This apparent universality of the political, its lack of boundaries, seems to place a question mark around its semantic content. If we cannot say what is not politics, then how can we give any determinate content or meaning to the term? This lack of boundaries can also be seen in the problem of demarcating a domain of politics from other domains such as ‘religion’ and ‘economics’. If we try to find a clear distinction between politics and religion, we find a history of contestation, but one that only seems to go back to the 17th century – a point to which I return in a moment. We find claims that politics and religion have – or ought to have – nothing to do with each other, yet in contemporary discourse we find many references to the politics of religion, and also to the religion of politics.

The term ‘political economy’ also points us towards this problem of demarcation. Some universities have departments of politics, some have departments of economics, and some have departments of political economy. How are they distinguished? This is especially perplexing when one finds books written by specialists on the politics of economics, as well as on the economics of politics. Add in works on the religion of politics and the politics of religion; or the religion of economics and the economics of religion: we seem to have a dog’s dinner of categories. You notice these things when you read outside your normal disciplinary boundaries.

It is also of interest that all of these can and are described as sciences: viz. the science of politics, the science of religion, and the science of economics. We cannot in practice easily if at all distinguish between the categories on which these putative sciences are based. Yet all of them have their own specialist departments, degree courses, journals, associations and conferences.

Another point is that all these ‘sciences’, based on concepts so difficult to distinguish and demarcate, are ‘secular’, in the sense of non-religious. Describing a science or discipline as secular reminds us that we have another demarcation problem. If all secular practices and institutions are defined as non-religious and therefore in distinction to ‘religion’, we need to have some reasonably clear understanding about what we mean by religion to be able to make the distinction in the first place. Without such an understanding, how would we know what ‘non-religious’ means? This paradox is magnified when we consider that for many centuries ‘secular’ has referred mainly to the ‘secular priesthood’ in the Catholic Church, and the priesthood are hardly non-religious in the modern sense.

We thus find that in everyday discussions and debates, and also in the more specialist discourses, we deploy concepts with a largely unquestioned confidence that on further consideration seems unfounded. Speaking personally, I entered academic work through religious studies, also known as the science (or scientific study) of religion, the history of religions, or the plain study of religions. Yet I cannot tell you what religion is, or what the relation between [singular] religion and [plural] religions is. I have made it a point over many years of tracking down a wide range of definitions of religion, and found them to be contradictory and circular. There is no agreed definition of the subject that so many experts claim to be researching and writing about. I suggest this is the situation in politics as well. Attempts that I have read to define politics, for example in text-books written for students of politics, seem always to be circular in the sense that they define politics in terms of political attributes, just as religions are defined in terms of religious attributes.

I suggest that the perceived self-evidence of politics as a meaningful category derives from an inherent ambiguity – and in this it is a mirror-image to religion. On the one hand, the term ‘politics’ generally simply means ‘power’ or ‘contestations of power’, and since power is probably one of the few universals in human relations we can see why it might appear intuitively convincing. However, on that understanding, it is difficult to see what is not about politics, because it can surely be argued that all human relations have always been about contestations of power. We gain such ubiquity at the expense of meaning. Surely, political science has a more specific and determinate meaning than power studies? You might just as well say that the study of politics is the study of humanity.

Our sense that there is a more determinate nuance seems justified when we discover that the discourse on ‘politics’ has a specific genesis in the English language in the 17th century. Though we can find a few (probably very few) references to ‘politicians’ in Elizabethan drama, ‘politics’ is even rarer, and I cannot find a sustained discourse on politics as a distinct domain of human action earlier than John Locke’s late 17th century distinctions, developed in his Treatises on Government, between ‘man in the state of nature’ and ‘political society’. Here Locke explicitly distinguishes between man in the state of nature and political or civil society on the one hand; and also between politics and religion on the other. In his religion-politics binary, Locke links politics to the outer, public order of the magistrate and governance, and religion to the inner, private relation of the individual to God. (What he means by ‘god’ is itself a conundrum, for the evidence is that, like Newton, he was a heretic, either a Unitarian or a Socinian. ‘God’ is another of those endlessly contested categories. If you try to define ‘religion’ as ‘belief in god’, you find yourself in another infinite regress of meanings).

It seems significant that this politics-religion binary is a modern, Enlightenment one, because Locke was arguing against the dominant understanding of Religion at the time. For his own reasons he wanted to reimagine ‘religion’. When the term religion was used at all (rarer than today) it meant Christian truth, and there was no clear sense (despite Locke’s claims) that Christian truth was not about power, or that it was separated from governance. The King was the sacred head and heart of the Christian Commonwealth, and what fell outside religion in this dominant sense was not a neutral non-religious domain but pagan irrationality and barbarity. In other words, what fell outside religion in the dominant sense of his day was still defined theologically and biblically in terms of The Fall. His privatization of religion to make way for a public domain of political society was an ideologically-motivated claim about how we ought to think about religion, not a neutral description of some objective facts.

It was especially in his attempt to legitimate new concepts of private property, and the rights of (male) property owners to representation, that Locke needed to completely revise people’s understanding of ‘religion’ as a private affair of the inner man (women were not much in the picture), in order to demarcate an essentially different domain called political society. This new binary found its way into written constitutions in North America, and is now naturalised in common speech and common sense. Today it seems counter-intuitive to question the reality of politics as a distinct domain of human practice. But this rhetorical construction was deeply resisted. Even the French Revolution did not succeed in formally separating religion and the state until the end of the 19th century. England was an Anglican confessional state until well into the 19th century.

Locke’s formulation was thoroughly ideological but has become naturalised through repeated rhetorical construction until now it seems to be ‘in the nature of things’. I suggest that, whenever we use the term politics with intuitive ease we catch ourselves and ask, in what sense am I using the term? Am I using it in the universal sense of ubiquitous power and contestations of power in all human relations? Or as referring to a specific ideological formation of modernity underpinning a historically-emergent form of private property-ownership and representation of (male) property interests? The elided slippage between the historically and ideologically specific formulation, and the empty ubiquity of ‘power’ as a universal in all human relations, lends the term its illusory quality of intuitive common sense.

The breadth of Critical Religion

09 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Chicago School, Critical Religion, economics, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Polanyi, Ludwig von Mises, Naomi Klein, politics, The Shock Doctrine

We have asked Timothy Fitzgerald to write a short piece reflecting on why we want to broaden the Critical Religion work that we are doing, and so he seeks here to examine the wider significance of Critical Religion.

The relevance of Critical Religion

The first issue to mention is relevance: that ‘critical religion’ is not only concerned with ‘religion’ as a category, or with religious studies as a discipline. We are equally concerned with other leading categories such as ‘politics’, ‘economics’, ‘political economy’, and the ‘nonreligious secular’. In fact one element of our position is that these apparently separate categories are really parts of a system of representations which have no meaning in themselves, but rely on an under-lying binary construction with the religion-secular dichotomy as its constitutional expression. What we have developed is a theory, a method and an attitude towards the critical deconstruction of modern categories. We therefore claim relevance for interdisciplinary work throughout the arts, humanities and social sciences. This is because we are questioning the ideological components in the disciplinary structures of the academy as a whole, and the ways these act for the maintenance of liberal mythology more widely.

When someone says or writes that they are studying ‘politics’, for example, we have our own line of questions about what this could mean. The questions are rather similar to the ones we would ask if someone claimed to be studying ‘religion’ (or economics). This approach converges well with – but goes constructively further than – much critical and postcolonial theory. Yet it makes unwelcome reading (judging by some of the reactions which have been encountered) for those who are deeply invested already in the established disciplinary structures, and feel that their careers might be damaged if they question the basic assumptions which their discipline works with.

We have sympathy with academics in that position, but the logic of argument raises problems with the arbitrariness of many over-lapping domains. It suggests that the divisions which keep academics corralled in separate departments, journals, conferences, and professional organizations share at least one rarely acknowledged purpose, which is to stop us noticing each other’s work. Specialization, say between ‘religion’, ‘economics’ and ‘politics’, reifies segments as though each had an independent reality of its own, related by only by externalities, rather than by an organic encompassment of all analytical parts in the whole. We are thus encouraged to proceed in a way reminiscent of the Indian fable of the blind persons each holding one part of an elephant. The one holding the trunk or the tail or the hoof or the ear will imagine the whole in terms of that part. This presumably (and to stretch the metaphor) is what is meant by ‘the elephant in the room’, when all one has is the trunk or the tail or the ear or some other part of the joined-up anatomy of the organic whole in one’s hands.

A term like politics is sufficiently ubiquitous to appear as an intuitive reality of everyday life. Through the eyes of politics specialists, just about everything will seem political. To me the category looks like an ideological place-holder for whatever the dominant interests require from its deployment. By looking at the historical processes whereby the modern categories religion and politics were invented through mutual exclusion since the late 17th century, we can see how an illusion of positive knowledge arises. The emergence of political economy as a secular science complicates but adds additional force to our account.

We would therefore welcome contributions from colleagues in politics, or economics, or any other discipline such as International Relations to explore this. We are not looking for some kind of illusory feel-good victory, but for dialectical innovation through shared work with any colleague in any discipline who understands (but does not necessarily agree with) our paradigm.

Self-regulating markets, the All-Male Holy Trinity, and other Divinities

One feature of our own standpoint is that markets are the mystified objects of a faith-system not essentially different from what are typically classified as ‘religious’ beliefs. We agree with the position of activists in the global pressure group On the Commons, that the emergence of the myth of political economy as the ‘really real’ is a grave and present danger to global survival. The concept of self-regulating markets may be as incomprehensible to us as the Holy Trinity appears to have been to Isaac Newton and John Locke – both apparently anti-Trinitarians – even though to believers in both cases such doctrinal formulations have been inherited or adopted as the real truth. The theology of liberation through the self-regulating market – a theology represented (without a trace of irony) as the science of economics – requires for its self-realisation the methodical (or unmethodical) destruction of what Karl Polanyi referred to as the ‘social substance’. Polanyi published his book The Great Transformation in 1944, the same year as another important book, The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, which had such an influence on Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the IMF and so on. Neo-liberal readings of this and other works published by the Austrian school (see, for example the excellent Ludwig von Mises webpage) can be connected historically and theoretically to Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, whose activities have been described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine.

These books represent two powerful but very different readings of the historical emergence of liberal economic ideology. The central difference being that Hayek (unlike Polanyi) thinks markets are spontaneously emergent forces of nature which were ‘discovered’ by Richard Cantillon or Adam Smith sometime in the early 18th or even late 17th century. Polanyi instead narrates the often violent processes (very close to what Marxists mean by primitive accumulation) whereby powerful people passed laws which created artificial markets through dispossession of the means of subsistence. These processes continue today on a vast scale – some readers may have visited a country like India and witnessed its truly shocking disparities of wealth, and the huge social dislocations which have been occurring there as a result of the globalising mischief of market dogma and the ideological illusions that self-maximisers and self-regulating markets are the natural, rational, unavoidable and unstoppable conditions for progress and liberty. A central aim of this webpage is to identify and interrogate the globalising discursive mechanism behind the production of this naturalized orthodoxy.

What is ‘political science’?

01 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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David Wearing, Political Studies Association, politics, religion, terrorism

In my last blog posting, I addressed the question of the “world of politics” , relating to questions of arbitrariness, construction, and performativity. Here I want to develop thoughts on questions of the ‘science’ of ‘political science’.

The crib-sheet provided by the Writing Center at Chapel Hill that I mentioned in my last posting explains that the development of general principles and theories by political scientists reflects an attempt to describe and analyze in a neutral, objective and scientific way the struggles and fighting of interest groups:

Although political scientists are prone to debate and disagreement, the majority view the discipline as a genuine science. As a result, political scientists generally strive to emulate the objectivity as well as the conceptual and methodological rigor typically associated with the so-called “hard” sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, and physics). They see themselves as engaged in revealing the relationships underlying political events and conditions. Based on these revelations, they attempt to state general principles about the way the world of politics works. Given these aims, it is important for political scientists’ writing to be conceptually precise, free from bias, and well-substantiated by empirical evidence. Knowing that political scientists value objectivity may help you in making decisions about how to write your paper and what to put in it.

This assumption of scientific neutrality and objectivity is questioned by David Wearing, a political science writer in a 2010 Guardian newspaper article How scientific is political science?

The prevailing view within the discipline is that scholars should set aside moral values and political concerns in favour of detached enquiry into the mechanics of how the political world functions. This often involves borrowing the trappings of the natural sciences in attempts to establish generalizable theories of causation through the testing of hypotheses. To the extent that this activity has a purpose beyond the establishment of knowledge for its own sake, it is to place that knowledge at the hands of policymakers who, in the light of the political scientist’s advice, may then make political and moral judgements as they see fit.

Wearing here points to the problems with these claims, not because he denies the value of rigour and objectivity as far as one can attain it, but because in the final analysis he sees moral commitments and priorities inevitably entering into the equation:

I have yet to be convinced by the idea that the study of politics can be apolitical and value-neutral. Our choice of research topics will inevitably reflect our own political and moral priorities, and the way in which that research is framed and conducted is bound to reflect assumptions which – whether held consciously, semi-consciously or unconsciously – remain of a moral and political nature.

So the problem here is that the study of politics is itself political though it pretends not to be. Wearing gives as an example the field of terrorism studies and the way its practitioners focus on non-state rather than state actors, and define the problem in terms of madcap terrorists (frequently described and probably misdescribed by others as ‘religious terrorists’)) and not in terms of the moral culpability of western states. In the case of Iraq for example, Wearing points out that in the 1990’s the UK helped maintain a sanctions regime that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of citizens, around half of them children under the age of five. Yet out of many articles published in International Relations journals during this period, only three were concerned with the appalling effects of the sanctions. For Wearing,

It is difficult to see why choosing to investigate state terrorism would be ‘political’, while choosing not to would be non-political, or why discussing the effect of sanctions on Iraqi society constitutes any more of a moral choice than choosing not to do so. The suspicion must arise that, when some scholarship is described as too political or too polemical, what is really meant is that it is insufficiently consistent with, or too critical of, mainstream priorities and assumptions.

Wearing has made some important observations here about the problem of excluding value judgements from description and analysis. He also questions the restriction of the methodology of studying politics to a domain like the hard sciences, in which value judgements are typically deemed to be excluded. However, though Wearing intends to correct an error in the understanding of what ‘political science’ is, or what it can legitimately be, we can note that he is not questioning the discursive field of ‘politics’ or ‘the political’, or the validity of a political science in the first place. And why should he? He like many others might find the question counter-intuitive.

The theme for the up-coming 63rd Political Studies Association Annual International Conference in Cardiff (25 – 27 March 2013) – The Party’s Over? – “speaks to a number of senses in which assumptions and modalities that have hitherto underpinned political life, and political analysis, may no longer be sustainable”. This alarm note is unpacked by a number of more specific questions. The general thrust of these questions concerns the decline of European and especially US dominance and prosperity, and the rise of China and other emergent powers. This is obviously a theme of major significance, and one that needs the serious debate that the PSA are inviting. My own question, however, is whether ‘the party’s over’ for the very idea of a world of politics in the first place?

I am sceptical about the very idea of a universal domain of politics, and what it means to claim that such a world exists. I suggest that ‘the world of politics’ is as much a faith-imaginary as those beliefs typically attributed to ‘the world of religion’. Its mythical status is elided by an ideological illusion which I want to explore. In many publications I have raised mirror-image issues with a supposed ‘world of religion’ endlessly propagated by academics, the media, politicians and others (most recently in Religion and Politics in International Relations: the Modern Myth, Continuum, 2011). In what sense do these putative worlds exist? And how would one discriminate objectively between a religious and a political world? It is to these questions that I turn in my next blog posting.

What is politics?

11 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Aristotle, economics, John Locke, politics, religion

In thinking about politics, a chance encounter with an excellent pedagogical website at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, College of Arts and Sciences provides me with a starting point. In order to help students to write essays on “Political Science” and other topics, The Writing Center performs a valuable on-line service to pedagogy, a service which can be appreciated and profited from by readers, students and also lecturers such as myself in different parts of the world. Much of the practical advice on writing essays is excellent, and shows a high level of pedagogical competence. And they do this for a whole range of subjects, not only Politics. However, the advice given by the Writing Center embeds an uncritical and widely disseminated discourse about politics which in turn reflects the dominant structure of faculties in the university and the wider assumptions of modern America. These assumptions may be internalised and adopted by students in many different countries. My comments are not intended as criticism of the services offered by that webpage. My concern is both more general and more specific than this, with the theoretical and methodological problems in isolating and defining a domain of politics or political science in the first place.

The Writing Center at Chapel Hill has posted the following student-friendly hand-out on its webpage explaining what politics is:

At its most basic level, politics is the struggle of “who gets what, when, how.” This struggle may be as modest as competing interest groups fighting over control of a small municipal budget or as overwhelming as a military stand-off between international superpowers.

Politics is here characterized in terms of “struggle”, “interest groups”, and “fighting over control”. Political science is constituted by the description and analysis of such struggles. This summary of politics, necessarily brief given the practical task of essay writing, but one which might be reproduced in many student essays around the world, indicates a specific domain characterised by conflict and competition over resources which might have been the subject matter of economics, human geography, social anthropology, religious studies and other disciplines as well. Furthermore, this characterization of politics in terms of competition over scarce resources may imply an assumption about ‘human nature’ which could itself be contested. It could be, for instance, that some historically-identifiable orders of power and theories of the good life have legitimated practices which promote radically different conceptions of human flourishing. While it is probably true that human life has always been characterized by contestations of power and conflict over resources, it should be held as a possibility that the contemporary celebration of individualistic self-interest requires an ideological illusion to make it seem more credible than alternative systems of collective representations. We can observe this very explicitly in modern liberal economic ideology, which, by placing self-interest at the centre of its theorizations, seems to have greatly contributed to the very conditions of inequality, scarcity and want that economists hope to ameliorate. Its promotion of an ideology of individual self-interest, and the globalizing liberal belief that selfishness and greed promote an overall harmony of interests, may itself be partly the cause of the massive impoverishment of vast numbers struggling for survival in so-called developing nations, and the rapid degradation of the environment. Unfortunately, faith in progress acts as an ideological filter which makes the possibility of falsifying the paradigm seem counter-intuitive. It is in the context of these thoughts that I will go on in future blogs to ask why political theorists incessantly remind us that our ‘political’ categories come etymologically from Greek, and that Aristotle is the one who gave us the basis for modern political theory.

What then do political scientists do?

According to the advice given by the Writing Center at Chapel Hill,

Political scientists study such struggles, both small and large, in an effort to develop general principles or theories about the way the world of politics works.

This raises at least two significant issues. Firstly, we might ask: in what sense does such a world of politics exist? “The world of politics” is not itself an observable phenomenon but a more-or-less arbitrary demarcation of the spectrum of human agency. I say arbitrary, because – like the equally indeterminate ‘world of religion’, there are no boundaries to what can and cannot be described as politics. There are no objective limits, independent of the agent’s own imagined assumptions, which can tell you where a political practice ends and a religious or economic (etc.) practice begins. When I say ‘the agent’s own imagined assumptions’, I do not mean a purely subjective, solipsistic imaginary. I mean that there are no boundaries existing independently of what specific dominant interest groups and their control of media of communication declare there to be. For example, when Jefferson made his Declaration of Independence, it was precisely that, a declaration. He and a growing class of like-minded Americans were articulating an aspiration, not a fact. He was rhetorically promulgating a new imaginary world order. This new world order would be characterised by nation states protected from ‘religion’ by written constitutions which declare human rights. These human rights are part of the inherently rational order of the world, and are delivered to us through natural reason unfettered by traditional religious superstitions which deny such freedoms.

This Lockean imaginaire, which is encapsulated in his concept of ‘the state of nature’,* is essentially no different from a powerful myth which acts as a charter for action. So when political scientists claim to be describing and analyzing the world of politics, I take it that they too are really making a proclamation about a world which ought to exist, rather than making objective descriptions about a world independent of our desires and intentions. They are in effect inventing and re-inventing ‘politics’ as they speak about it. I feel the same scepticism about the existence of such a world as I feel when religionists claim to be describing and analyzing a world of religion. I have discussed many cases of these apparently factual descriptions about religion which, on closer inspection, turn out to be constructing the objects of their own research. Beneath the blarney of neutral objectivity and precise description and analysis, they are constructing and reconstructing the imagined objects themselves, a reified idealization ‘politics’ which depends on the (often unconscious) exclusion of a mirror-image construction of another reified idealization, ‘religion’.

The second significant issue that I want to raise here relates to the question of objectivity and the question of ‘science’. I will discuss this in the next blog posting. I also want to discuss the origins of ‘political theory’ in Aristotle, and why, despite the etymological connections which are incessantly flagged up by those looking for a respectable origin for their discipline, modern politics seems to have little to do with the Greek master.

* Locke develops his concept of ‘man in the state of nature’ in various works, especially his Two Treatises on Government (1688 [1690]). It is an exercise in theoretical abstraction intended to show that his own belief in the values of liberal individualism is justified within his interpretation of natural law and natural reason. In short, the liberal bourgeois myth of the rational individual as the source of all value is given narrative shape in the form of Adam and his descendants. Elements of the Lockean myth are derived from various empirical sightings of Native Americans and other colonized peoples about whom he speculates.

The myth of religion and the tyranny of Richard Dawkins’ discontinuous mind

16 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Christopher Hitchens, Critical Religion, nature, religion, religion-secular binary, Richard Dawkins

In his New Statesman article “The tyranny of the discontinuous mind” [NS 19 Dec 2011 – 1 Jan 2012] Richard Dawkins suggests how arbitrary our classificatory dividing lines are. And yet the substance of his arguments rests on precisely such a dividing line – the one between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ or, put in a different way, between ‘faith’ and ‘secular’ reason. The heart of Dawkins’ untenable position is that he imposes on his readers the tyranny of his own absolutist distinction between scientific rationality and religious faith. When Dawkins criticises our “need for dividing lines, black-and-white answers and absolute definitions” he is not, it seems, including the dividing line which he draws between ‘religion’ and ‘science’, or between ‘faith’ and ‘politics’. In his writing it is an ‘either-or’ situation. Creationist theories of evolution might look scientific, but its not ‘real science’. The Mullah might look like a ‘religious’ leader, but he’s really a politician.

My contention is that the essentialized distinction between religion and secular reason deployed by Dawkins and fellow travellers such as Christopher Hitchens is thoroughly ideological, but its rhetorical deployment has created the delusion that it merely describes the way the world really is. Some thing or agent called ‘religion’ with its absurd metaphysical fantasies interferes with nonreligious realities such as secular states and proper knowledge. But this narrative is itself a myth.

Religion is in effect no different from a Platonic essence in Dawkins’ theories

Dawkins argues that an uncritical belief in metaphysical abstractions or Platonic essences [“…one of the most pernicious ideas in all history…”] can provide a fictitious ontological legitimation for racist categories, making the arbitrary and contingent appear fixed in the nature of things. This seems like a valid point. In a similar way feminists have persuasively shown that the typical deployment of gender categories legitimates male power at the expense of women by making gender inequality seem ‘natural’, in the nature of things. Dawkins discusses the ideological imperatives that lie behind the classification of US leaders such as Colin Powell and Barak Obama as ‘black’, pointing out that such a loaded classification could never be neutral or merely descriptive. Yet unfortunately Dawkins’ arguments rest on a similar mythical dividing line represented by a series of either-or binaries: religion and nonreligion, the natural and the supernatural, faith and scientific knowledge, God and the world. However, there is nothing given in perception and empirical observation that corresponds to any of these binary reifications. These are mutually parasitic reverse-images which, when studied in the multiple contexts of their actual uses, can easily be seen to have no clear dividing lines between them. There is no possible authoritative pronouncement about what does or ought to fall on either side of the binary apart from an arbitrary exercise of power.

The distinction between ‘religion’ and the nonreligious secular is itself a pure abstraction with no basis in empirical reality and very little meaningful content outside the shouting space of public rhetoric. When courts have to decide if a particular group is eligible to be classified as a religious charity the results are arbitrary. To take one example, the Church of Scientology is a religion in California but not in the UK. But both the respective courts which made these different decisions are classified as ‘secular’. But then why is the realization of justice in our lives, and the faith we have in the solemn procedures of the courts, not itself a form of religious practice? Does Dawkins really imagine that sharia law is essentially religious but the judicial system in the UK is essentially secular?

Religion as a malevolent agent stalking the peace-loving secular state

The religion which Dawkins attacks from his base in secular reason, and which he and Hitchens seem to imagine as a purposeful agent, is not a real target. But it is required so that the equally contentless idea of a nonreligious secular domain appears as something essentially different from religion in the way that paranoid fantasy is different from sober reality. Belief that there is something clearly distinct in the world called religion disguises the ideological commitments of the classifiers behind a façade of apparently neutral, objective description. The ability to point at Muslims as religious fanatics is subtlety linked to a wider discourse in, for example, International Relations, that wherever we look religion stalks the globe like a malevolent agent intent on doing harm to the peace-loving and only reluctantly violent secular state. It provides an ideological legitimation for progress and the belief that ‘science’ and secular politics is what will save us. Science (and politics) is what religion is not, just as religion is what science is not. But this is to reify two domains which are both imaginary and to badly confuse the logic of the concepts he is deploying.

The religion about which Dawkins claims to be an expert does not actually stand for anything real in the world. It is a general category with a complex and contested history and I challenge him or anyone to come up with a satisfactory definition of what the term means. The religion which Dawkins and fellow traveller Hitchens despises is in effect no different from a Platonic essence in Dawkins’ theories, a Form which manifests in the different empirical ‘religions’ which he assumes without much thought are instantiations of religion itself. Dawkins’ notion of the relationship between religion and the religions is not much different from an incarnation or avatar theology.

Worse, by supposing an essential difference between religious faith and secular reason, secular science itself inevitably acquires an essence of its own, to distinguish it not only from religion but also from things that may look like science but are not real science.

Dawkins writes as though the natural world is available for empirical inspection, while the supernatural is a purely imaginary domain. But which world of nature is available for empirical observation? Where would you point if you wanted to show someone nature? ‘Nature’ has no clear referent. Terms like world and nature are general categories and if you eliminate the terms that give them a meaningful context there is no way any human can observe ’a world’ or ‘nature’. God might be able to see a world, I don’t know. But Dawkins and I most certainly can’t. And the interesting thing is that Dawkins’ category of nature and world is parasitic on a discourse about God and the supernatural. Just as the idea of ‘atheism’ is dependent for its intelligibility on the idea of ‘theism’, so also his claims about the essential difference between faith and empirical reason is essentially no different from an anti- theological metaphysics. Religion is Dawkins’ target because he needs it for self-definition. Dawkins is confusing his own subjective emotional needs for objectivity.

Dawkins needs a historical perspective

Dawkins works with a series of essentializing binary oppositions which are at the heart of his whole argument about the irrationality of religion and the rationality of secular science. In this he is not original, but on the contrary is blindly reproducing the framework of liberal capitalist ideology which underlies western public rhetoric and foreign policy since its birth during the era of colonialism

The essentialized distinction between religion and nonreligious secular domains such as science or politics seems to have been invented in the late 17^th century within the combined contexts of Non-Conformity and colonial interests, but has taken on the unquestioned appearance of inevitability. A series of other binaries step in as equivalences: the natural and the supernatural, spirit and matter, faith and knowledge, God and the world. One side of all these binary essentializations is rational and real; the other side is unreal and deluded. But this itself is as much a delusion as ‘the God delusion’.

Despite the argument that biological evolution has no direction, concepts like religion, secular, science, politics and the state are impregnated with ideological nuances which Dawkins seems unaware of. For example, as far as I can see, the earliest consistent usage of the term ‘politics’ as a domain separated from another domain called ‘religion’ dates to the late 17^th century. The reified opposition between religious and secular domains arose historically out of an Enlightenment myth of human progress from the darkness of religion and superstition into the light of scientific reason. And his unexamined presuppositions are not essentially different from the dubious secularization arguments that legitimate the social sciences. The latter have acted as ideological agencies which transformed the meaning of ‘society’ from identifiable relationships between specific people (‘I was honoured to be in the society of the King and many eminent philosophers at Christmas’; or, at a more generalized level “I am a member of the Royal Society”) to the globalised metaphysical abstraction ‘societies’ which are in principle countable and measurable like organisms. This is the world of abstractions in which we all feel intuitively compelled to think today.

Of course, without general categories we could not think at all. But there are relative degrees of disinterestedness and neutrality in the way we classify our world. The binaries that appear throughout Dawkins’ preaching against ‘religion’ and ‘superstition’ may use old words but the classificatory deployment – and therefore the meaning – is modern. They form a semantic configuration of categories which is profoundly different from late medieval and early modern meanings, and different again from the many complex collective representations of non-European peoples. But Dawkins writes and speaks as though ‘religion’ and its binary opposite the ‘nonreligious secular’ is an intuitive universal, applicable to all languages, peoples and power formations at all periods of history. That those people did not realize that they were in the grip of religious illusion is irrelevant. Now that Dawkins and others have finally attained the truly rational and the really real, they are in a position to make judgements about the predicament that the deluded are not yet ready to understand.

Cranes and sky-hooks

On the one hand, according to Dawkins, evolution proceeds through the on-going construction of cranes rather than by way of metaphysical sky-hooks; yet the idea that ‘religion’ (irrational faith) is something essentially different from ‘science’ (rational knowledge) derives from an enlightenment discourse on the progressive advancement of humankind from lower to higher stages. Dawkins may vehemently deny that evolutionary biology is akin to the myth of human evolution from lower to higher stages; yet though he has ostensibly dropped the purposive element of the myth, he has uncritically incorporated some of its fundamental mythemes. He has uncritically adopted a version of secularization which portrays the light of science as a doctrine of salvation by secular reason leading us out of the darkness of religious stupidity. And this self-serving ideology, heavily inflected with liberal Protestant supremacy, legitimized tutelage of non-European peoples by colonial civil servants, politicians, missionaries, and capitalists. Of course, Dawkins denies purpose or direction in evolution. Yet in his own evangelical texts, Dawkins is actually setting up the metaphysical parameters which he claims to want to expose as hollow.

What does ‘religion’ mean?

Since the Reformation the Anglophone term ‘religion’ (presumably much like the term in German, Dutch and French) usually meant Christian truth as distinct from pagan falsehood, and this distinction in turn was as much about dominant claims to Christian civility and rationality as it was about abstract theological disputes concerning ‘God’. Christian preachers have always been as concerned with whether women of a certain class have the right to wear large hats as they have been about the correct articulation of the Trinity. Protestant missionaries have been as concerned that the savage natives live in ‘proper’ houses and speak a proper language as they have been about defining the complex (and some would say polytheistic) Trinitarian and Incarnational doctrine which supposedly defines the nature of God for such Christians. Evangelical Christians today construct their own missions of conversion on the basis of this opposition between civility and barbarity. Religion in this more historically specific sense was not an object in the world to be researched, described and compared alongside other so-called ‘religions’, but the truth about the world, including the proper or improper disciplines of civility. In this older discourse there cannot be more than one ‘religion’.

But the historically more recent modern discourse on ‘religion’ – and ‘religions’ in the plural – has been reified and universalised as a generic category, lacking clearly specific content, opposed to the equally modern generic category the nonreligious secular. Terms which still have specifically Christian meanings in some contexts are being deployed by Dawkins (and many others) as though they are neutral, descriptive and self-evident.

Part of a wider ideological discourse

The mythemes embedded in Dawkins’ arguments for the supremacy of something called nonreligious secular science over another unanalysed abstraction called ‘religion’ are part of a much wider contemporary discourse which is being reproduced in one way or another by academics, politicians, media commentators, by courts of law, by constitutions and the general public. This discourse is now so dominant that to challenge its basic categories appears counter-intuitive and even eccentric.

This appearance of inevitability has been powerfully strengthened by its internalization and reproduction by leading members of those institutions typically classified as ‘religious’ themselves. A good case in point is the invention of ‘Tibetan Buddhism’ as a religion, and the relatively recent adoption of this global discourse by the Dalai Lama. Yet the news agencies report that the Chinese and the Americans differ absolutely on whether or not the Dalai Lama is a real religious leader who can safely visit Taiwan, or a political leader hiding behind the cloak of religion and therefore an agent of mischief. The success of Dawkins’ arguments depends on turning a blind eye to the historically contextualized, constructed and contested features of such powerful categories, and to the wider but not so obvious interests which they serve.

What is it that makes African witchcraft beliefs, Japanese public street festivals, Theravada meditation, Scientology, the Indian caste system, devotion to Elvis Presley, water divining, yoga, the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Catholic monastic communities, and Calvinist attitudes to work and productivity ‘religious’ or ‘religion’ according to very widespread contemporary usage? And why, given this eclectic bunch, should we exclude devotion to capital, private property, the accumulation of money, or the ultimate act of self-sacrifice for the glory of the nation state? Why do we lump together such a vast spectrum of human practices globally into this simplistic either-or binary opposition: it is either religion or it is science? It is either ‘religious’ or it is ‘nonreligious’? It is either religion or it is politics? It is either spiritual or material? These are the mythemes of modern ideology which Dawkins innocently spins, imagining he is telling it ‘like it is’.

The very idea of ‘religions’ in the plural suggests the sharing of a common essence ‘religion’. But that in turn implies that the ‘nonreligious’ also has an essential dividing boundary. The reifications that Dawkins’ has unconsciously adopted (though he certainly didn’t originate them) are the mythemes on which his essentializing discourse depends and which are being reproduced by a whole range of agencies including the State and its educational and legal systems. Dawkins is ideological state apparatus. His arguments against the irrationality of something called ‘religion’ do not only and heroically reproduce that abstract and invented object, but simultaneously reconstruct the equally mythical secular basis of his own rational superiority.

Critical religion and the religion-secular binary: a response to Richard Roberts

01 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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'the new rulers of the world', capitalism, Critical Religion, economic theory, managerialism, pseudo-religions, religion-secular binary, Richard H. Roberts, ritual, socialism

(Note that this posting refers directly to this blog entry by Richard H. Roberts, itself in part a response to an earlier posting of mine.)

Thanks to Richard for his thoughts on my work. The problem begins with his title, ‘Is there anything good to be said for ‘Religion’?’ This implies that one might find no value in any of that vast range of moral communities and their practices and that are typically classified by Euro-Americans as ‘religious’. This is a basic misunderstanding. My argument is that classifying such communities, and their practices and values, as ‘religious’ has the effect of marginalizing them from the mainstream of public debates on justice and the proper ends of the good life. Such classification has the effect of clothing secular reason with the misleading aura of neutral objectivity, as the central, fundamental and inescapable order of things, and disguising the metaphysical commitments and ideological value-judgments which underpin secular institutions.

This part of the argument does not come directly from Marx, because Marx’s vast and complex work contains ambiguities about both ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ science or politics. One aspect of Marx which I reject, but which was emphasized by Lenin in the foundation of the Soviet socialist State, was its phoney scientistic claims to objective knowledge of the laws of history and socialist economic theory. In 1905 Lenin clearly expressed a secular scientific standpoint as the basis of Revolution, and in the process reproduced a similar dichotomy between religion and secularity as that produced earlier in the 19^th century by the tradition of liberal economics. A.N.C. Waterman (2008) holds that Richard Whately, in his inaugural lecture of 1831 as Drummond Professor of Economics, was the first to claim that economics is a secular science essentially different from ‘religion’. Waterman’s purpose in his historical argument is to show how the basic presumptions of liberal economic theory derived quite directly from debates in moral theology since the late 17^th century. (However, I don’t assume that Waterman would necessarily wish to draw the same conclusions as Robert Nelson in his book Economics as Religion (2001), which also explores such issues).

I suggest that both socialist and liberal capitalist economics have been different stages in, and different forms of, the same processes which transformed the meaning of Religion from Christian truth to one of a large range of dubious practices that should be tolerated but marginalized. In both cases we find the mystification of secular reason and ‘progress’, and the reduction of alternative moral discourses which might challenge both state socialism and liberal (or neo-liberal) capitalism.

This positivistic tradition of interpreting Marx needs to be put next to other possible readings of Marx. One is the critical tradition of Marxism (on which I know that Richard is well-informed) which sees all knowledge as having an ideological component and function in the legitimation of a hegemonic worldview. My contribution to this important insight, pursued by Gramsci and also the Frankfurt school among others, is that the religion-secular binary is a foundational part of the naturalization of both ‘scientific’ socialism and ‘scientific’ capitalism.

Another, less critical position which I do not share is reflected in the habit of Richard’s mentor Ninian Smart and other writers to describe Marxism as a pseudo-religion or quasi-religion. By arguing that Marxism is a pseudo-religion, the assumption is introduced that it is not a ‘real’ religion. But what is a real religion?

My own argument is that, rather than searching for, or assuming the existence of, real religions as against pseudo-religions, we need to look at how the term religion has been used historically. What I believe to be the case is that, in English language at least (and I doubt if the case is much different in German, Dutch, or French) for several centuries since the Reformation the term ‘religion’ was used typically to refer to Christian truth, mainly Protestant truth, and that this dominant discourse on religion encompassed government and every other institution. In that context, ‘secular’ also had a profoundly different meaning from the one given to it much later by 19^th century writers such as Whately (1831) or Charles Holyoake (1851), or, in the early 20^th century by Lenin.

In the older paradigm of the meaning of religion as Christian truth, ‘pseudo-religions’ were the equivalent of paganisms, irrational substitutes for real religion (Protestantism). When writers like Samuel Purchas in the early 17^th century wrote about the religions of the world, my claim is that this was an ironic or parodic use of the term, even though such parodic observations on the foolish practices of heathens did represent a stage in the later, long-term development of the so-called scientific study of ‘religions’. Thus, while an important scholar like Max Muller was claiming that religions can be studied scientifically, he was simultaneously subscribing to the view that only Protestant Christianity was a fully fledged religion, and that Hindu practices were degenerate and irrational. This deeply ideological use of the term has passed into the foundations of religious studies.

Given these ideological uses of such a contested term, it seems difficult to understand how ‘religion’ could ever appear to be a neutral category useful for objective and empathetic knowledge. On the contrary, I hold that this duality in the historical deployment of religion, which is still powerfully evident, both elides its contentious value judgments and at the same time inscribes the conceits of the secular as the unavoidable ground of rational judgment.

In this context Richard’s title ‘Is there anything good to be said for ‘Religion’?’ seems unclear in its meaning. It partly depends on what Richard intends to mean by religion. Is he referring to the Catholic Mass? Or the Prince-Pope Pontifex Maximus? Or the ‘religious orders’ as distinct from the secular priesthood? Or the practice of Communion by English male elites in Parliament well into the 19^th century? Or the anointing of the Sovereign head of the Commonwealth, up to and including Queen Elizabeth II in 1953? Does it refer to Christian truth as distinct from Pagan superstitions, as contemporary evangelical missionaries have it? Does it refer to those practices and communities deemed in one powerfully-disseminated contemporary discourse as dangerous, irrational and with a special propensity to terrorism? Or does it refer indifferently to that vast range of practices, from witchcraft to Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika to the rituals of untouchability to ‘shamanism’, all of which are regularly classified as ‘religion’? Or does it refer to the worship of Mozart and devotion to the art of Opera? Why not classify Opera, football, or faith in ‘human progress’ as religious?

But it also depends on what readers mean by ‘religion’. Even if Richard is himself clear about what he intends to mean, there are multiple possible readings which can be taken away by other readers. We have little control over our own intended meanings once they are in the public arena. This is not to mention the problems of translation into non-European languages. One way or another, to suggest that something good or bad can be said for ‘religion’ misses the point about what is being argued.

Richard cites the late anthropologist Roy Rappaport that ritual is the basic social act. But this does not help us distinguish between a religious ritual and a nonreligious, secular one. If ritual is basic, then I would suggest it undercuts the religion-secular binary which can be seen as a historically modern, ideological imposition. I would hazard to say that the idea of a religious ritual – as distinct, for example, from Henry VIII’s discourse on ‘politick rites’- is itself a modern invention.

Furthermore, if I go by Richard’s admittedly and inescapably brief representation of Rappaport’s work, I would ask if ‘ritual’ is being used to refer to a sui generis kind of practice, essentially different from a large range of others, such as training, holding meetings, decision-making processes, editing footnotes and bibliographies, holding elections, participating in conferences, fighting wars, ballroom dancing, or news-reading? Where does ritual end and purely instrumental action begin (if there is such a thing)?

I regret Richard’s resort to the claim that questioning ‘religion’ could lead to the closure of departments and the loss of jobs. One of the things I most respect about Richard – in addition to his outstanding scholarly work – is the way he has stood up for the democratization of the work-place against the arbitrary and dogmatic authoritarianism of the managerial class, at some cost to his own career. But the managerial class are empowered by the capitalist state, and by the mystification of markets and capital. Is he now saying that academics such as myself should cut and trim their own modest search for truth about the human condition to the templates of the HRM? This itself seems to me to be a capitulation to the regnant ideology of managerialism which he suggests I am indulging. On the contrary, my project questions the way ‘religion’ acts as a discursive cover for the presumed superior rationality of the value of self-maximizing Individuals, and of secular markets and their devoted managers. We have more chance of focusing our intellectual critique and generating a democratic debate about the purpose of universities, and the critical values which they arguably ought to embody (or could embody), by fearlessly questioning the way ‘knowledge’ is constructed. I am rather surprised that Richard doesn’t find this line of thought congenial to his own original research into shamanistic practices.

For me, in my own life, the practice of meditation is fundamental. It has much to do with truth (if I can use that word without sounding pretentious) and is often deconstructive of ‘knowledge’, or puts knowledge in a less exalted and more tentative place. Meditation (for me, at least) undercuts its typical modern ideological classification as a ‘religious’ practice as distinct from a ‘secular’ one. Nor do I have any interest in describing it as ‘scientific’, for that would merely play to the same ideological binary. By classifying such a practice as ‘religious’, its epistemological and ontological implications get de-centred and quarantined, leaving the myths of secular reason and markets unchallenged. If I claim it to be ‘scientific’, then I am still in the contentious market-place of nomenclature that depends on the same stultifying binary discourse.

The widespread practice of classifying communities as ‘religious’ ensures that they will not be taken seriously by the people John Pilger describes as ‘the new rulers of the world’. If the representations of the many diverse communities around the world are to be heard, I think we should desist from committing this act of ‘epistemic violence’ – to adopt an expression from the British Sikh scholar Arvind-Pal Mandair (2010).

Questioning ‘the global resurgence of religion’

30 Monday May 2011

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Critical Religion, global, international relations, religion, secular

Scott M. Thomas has been widely praised for his book The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (NY & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2005). This is an ambitious book with many potentially fertile ideas. In his chapter in Fabio Petito & Pavlos Hatzopolous (eds.) Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile, (NY & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Thomas makes an interesting attempt to historically problematize the category of religion, with the added virtue of drawing on the insights of critical scholars from other disciplines, such as Talal Asad (2003:47), John Bossy (2003:47) and William T. Cavanaugh (2003:27) to name only a few. Referring to “the modern invention of religion”, he suggests that “[a]t issue is the meaning of religion in early modern Europe, and how we understand religion today” (2003:25). He refers to “the invention of religion as part of the rise of western modernity” (2003:28). He notices, I think rightly, that “the rise of the modern state is the other part of the story…” (2003:27). He claims that

Most scholars of early modern Europe now recognise that the confusion over the role of religion and other political and socio-economic forces in the debate on the Wars of Religion was based on retrospectively applying a modern concept of religion – as a set of privately held doctrines or beliefs – to societies that had yet to make this transition (2003:25).

That the author’s aim seems to be a radical and critical questioning of the ideological functions of the religion and secular politics binary and much else that hangs on it appears to be made clear in the opening paragraph of the first chapter of his book:

The concept of religion was invented as part of the political mythology of liberalism and now has emerged as a universal concept applicable to other cultures and civilizations. This understanding of religion is used to legitimate a form of liberal politics that considers the mixing of politics and religion to be violent and dangerous to reason, freedom, and political stability (2005:21).

Unfortunately Thomas continues the paragraph ambiguously, as though he is not quite sure whether or not he wants to critique the category of religion or simply make statements about religion as though religion had some objective existence in the world. Repeating the expression in his title, he continues:

The global resurgence of religion, however, challenges the concepts of social theory that interpret public religion in this way. It challenges the idea that secular reason can provide a neutral stance from which to interpret religion, and it opens up the possibility of multiple ways of being ‘modern’, making ‘progress’, or being ‘developed’… (2005:21)

The radical pronouncements that appear here and there suggest that Thomas is concerned with the challenge that problematizing ‘religion’ as a category implies for IR as a ‘secular’ discipline – a problem because if religion is a modern invention, as I think he rightly argues in places, then not only IR but everything that is conventionally (and juridically) placed in that category is logically and discursively dependent on ‘religion’ for its conceptualization. Thomas acknowledges the implications of this insight for the wider academy and much else (2005:17).

But for most of the book, far from treating ‘religion’ as a rhetorical invention with a crucial part to play in the “mythology of liberalism”, and far from critiquing an understanding of ‘religion’ that constructs it as a real and present danger to liberal reason and freedom, Thomas energetically re-inscribes the category along with its ideological binary ‘secular liberalism’ as a fundamental organizing principle of his book. Even in the paragraph just quoted, Thomas moves from saying “The concept of religion was invented as part of the political mythology of liberalism” to referring only two sentences later to “The global resurgence of religion”, as though there could be any such thing.

The author stays safely within the well-worn discursive conventions of the “mythology of liberalism” that he also wants to critique, and in this way contributes to the rhetoric on religion and its implicit distinction from secular reason. I would suggest that his position remains unresolved because the conclusions he must draw are too radical. Too much is at stake. For the problem of the retrospective application of a modern concept “as a set of privately held doctrines or beliefs” set apart from the non-religious state and so on, ineluctably implies the problem of the retrospective application of these other modern reified concepts such as “socio-economic forces” which the modern concept of religion has made possible. If the modern secular state has, as in my view the author would be right to argue, depended for its conceptualization on the related concept of religion as a private right of faith in unseen mystical powers separated from the state, then so have those modern discourses which construct “political and socio-economic forces”.

Religion and Politics in International Relations: the Modern Myth

21 Monday Feb 2011

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Critical Religion, global, international relations, politics, religion

One classic collection of essays by anthropologists on the definition of religion which was required reading in the course at King’s College, London on anthropology of religion was Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (1966) edited by E. M. Banton. Though this is now an old book it contains interesting and influential essays by Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, Melford Spiro and others which are still frequently referred to, especially the one by Geertz. However their overall effect has been, I would argue, to reinscribe and validate ‘religion’ into the general academic discourse on which they have had considerable influence. While raising and discussing many of the problems of applying a Europhone category in the context of radically different languages and cultures, these essays did not interrogate the ideological power dynamics behind the discourse itself. The category ‘religion’ and its demarcation from the social or secular was not systematically questioned; only the best way to define religion for research purposes.

For example, Geertz famously defined religion as “[1] a system of symbols which acts to [2] establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations…by [3] formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and [4] clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that [5] the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic”. But this definition arguably straddles all dominant ideologies, and does not tell us how a religious ideology differs from a non-religious one. Nor does it sufficiently draw attention to the power of dominant institutions (such as preaching, courts, persuasive theories by educated elites, advertising or the media) to protect these symbols, and to promote the sense of their inescapable reality. A powerful analogy may be from feminist analysis of the way dominant gender categories become transformed into inescapable facts of biological nature, disguising the power relations inherent in the representations. The assumption that there is some essential distinction between religious and non-religious domains – which is still today a globalizing discourse – is an ideological construct which takes on an appearance of naturalness and inevitability.

Spiro’s definition was a sophisticated reworking, in the context of his own interesting ethnography of Burmese Buddhism, of E. B. Tylor’s definition as belief in gods or superhuman agents. However, one of the problems with a definition in terms of gods or the supernatural or the superhuman is that these terms themselves are difficult to translate into many non-European languages. Even within European Christendom the meaning of God has been policed and contested by powerful theological agencies, and it is not at all clear that the Trinitarian God of the Aristotelian-Thomist synthesis is equivalent to what Calvin understood by God. The stretch may be even further to the conceptions of Unitarianism or Deism. Muslim theologians who believe in Allah have held that the Christian Trinitarian God is itself a form of idolatry.

What anthropologists and others now sometimes refer to as ‘gods’ has been used historically by Christians in the sense of false idols, pagan heresies, demons and devil worship. These theological misrepresentations of other people’s concepts do not engender confidence in their use as neutral descriptive and analytical concepts. This point is strengthened by the fact that, even today, some evangelical missionaries still hold these beliefs and still use this kind of language. For example, a Protestant mission in Mexico was motivated by the desire to save people from their pagan village economies and “raise the rate of return on conversions”.

To take just two examples of non-European languages, Sanskrit and Japanese: it is problematic to claim that gods provides a neutral translation for Indian categories such as Brahman, deva, devata or Bodhisattva; or into Japanese categories such as kami, hotoke, or bosatsu. It is equally problematic to attribute belief in the ‘supernatural’ and its supposed distinction from the ‘natural’ to non-European languages and cultures around the world. Some writers have substituted the term ‘superhuman’ as a way to resolve this problem of the ‘supernatural’ while retaining the term ‘religion’ as a distinct form of life. But if the term superhuman has any advantages, it tends to erode a distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ domains. In some Indian conceptions there is no ultimate distinction between the human and the superhuman, as the practice of kissing the feet of enlightened gurus and powerful politicians suggests. Many sadhus are believed to be ‘living gods’ in the sense that they have become one with the divine reality which permeates what we illusorily experience as a mundane world. This is not a pedantic distinction; the veneration given to a sadhu or a living bodhisattva is part of a total system of representations that defines the identity of billions of people.

It is astonishing that experts in International Relations believe they can classify these complex ideologies without any real knowledge in simplistic English categories and then advocate foreign policy decisions on their basis. In Japan the Emperor was ikigami (usually but perhaps misleadingly translated as ‘living god’) at a time when the Meiji Constitution of 1889 constituted State Shinto as the Japanese equivalent of the secular State. In 1946 the US Occupation forces rewrote the Constitution which declared that State Shinto cannot legally exist and that shinto is really a religion and should be classified as such; and that the Emperor is no longer Ikigami but something more like a British Constitutional Monarch. Here it is clear that power decides what gets classified as a religious belief and what gets classified as a secular one.

Extract from T. Fitzgerald, Religion and Politics in International Relations: the Modern Myth, (Continuum Press, 2011 forthcoming, hardback, paperback).

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