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Critical Religion and Economic Discourse

06 Monday May 2013

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In Britain and throughout much of Europe, the “age of austerity” persists. Likewise in America the economic future remains enveloped in political turmoil and fiscal uncertainty. It appears that the western world has begrudgingly entered a new economic age. The ever-changing predictions of economic advisers and politicians have in many cases proven to be little more than fruitless surmising.  Like Samuel Beckett’s Estragon, who removes his boot anticipating some hidden object to appear from the emptiness within, politicians in Britain and America have desperately sought to relieve themselves of the collective weight of national deficits and public spending only to find that despite these efforts—“There is nothing to show.” As difficult economic decisions are contentiously deferred in the hope of better times to come, it is perhaps worth considering the possibility that like Godot the economic stability we long for is not destined to arrive. Notwithstanding our present difficulties, now is not the time to adopt a position of economic apocalypticism.

While political factions in Britain and America struggle to reassert the social and economic hierarchies of the past, scholars from numerous disciplines have begun to vigorously investigate alternatives to the prevailing ideologies which have underwritten western society’s approaches to managing the costs of existence. If scholars working in the humanities have something to say about cultural production and the values of contemporary society, then it seems more than reasonable that they may be capable of making important contributions to current economic debates. Critical Religion may be able to offer certain intellectual resources for critiquing the political and economic models which are currently being outstripped. But in order to open up the field of economics to alternative modes of discourse, it is necessary to challenge the intellectual and disciplinary boundaries which have historically served to distance modern socio-economic theory from other forms of intellectual inquiry.

In an essay entitled “Knowing Our Limits” (2010), Rowan Williams suggests that executing a theological incursion into the field of economics entails a critical investigation of the language and epistemological assumptions which constitute the study of economics:

In asking whether economics and theology represent two different worlds, we need to be aware of the fact that a lot of contemporary economic language and habit doesn’t only claim a privileged status for economics on the grounds that it works by innate laws to which other considerations are irrelevant.  It threatens to reduce other sorts of discourse to its own terms—to make a bid for one world in which everything reduces to one set of questions (2010, p.20).

Williams’ assessment of the totalizing force of economic discourse may just as easily be applied to his own discipline of theology—formerly known as the “The Queen of the Sciences”. To avoid a mere inversion of the relationship between economics and theology, the notion of Critical Religion provides a vital starting point for examining the heterogeneity that exists between seemingly disparate modes of secular and religious discourse. One way of challenging the privileged status of economic theory is to excavate the theological and religious principles upon which this supposedly secular science has been established. In doing so it may be possible to uncover the ways that religion and secularity are at times complicit in western society’s efforts to construct and justify social and economic hierarchies.

It is not coincidental that the field of Critical Religion has emerged during a time of religious as well as economic crisis. Times of crisis have the potential to instigate positive cultural and intellectual transformations. Presently, the absolute triumph of so-called secular reason over religious faith has not only failed to come to pass in western society; religion and secularity have found themselves in a common state of disarray. Over the past decade, the secularization thesis has not been proven false because religious thinkers and secularists have somehow made peace with one another; instead, the economic and political foundations underlying the conflict between these mimetic foes have shifted dramatically.

Influential thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas and numerous others have already begun to explore the notion of post-secularity as a way of describing not simply the historical epoch which has followed postmodernity, but rather the specific challenges that religious and secular institutions currently face as they renegotiate their claims to moral truth and political authority. Noting the frustration which many theorists, critics, philosophers, and economists experience when faced with the problem of religion’s survival, Hent de Vries argues, “The post-secular condition and its corresponding intellectual stance consist precisely in acknowledging this ‘living-on’ of religion beyond its prematurely announced and celebrated deaths” (2006, p.7). Because religion survives within contemporary society in increasingly spectral forms, De Vries suggests that “In order to track its movements, new methodological tools and sensibilities are needed” (2006, p.7). In his recent book On the Sacred (2012), Gordon Lynch takes up the task of elaborating a new approach to detecting the continuing presence of religion in society. Lynch reconfigures the traditional opposition between religion and secularity by arguing that various manifestations of the sacred form the basis of all social life. The sacred, according to Lynch, may be defined “by what people collectively experience as absolute, non-contingent realities that exert unquestionable moral claims over the meaning and conduct of their lives” (2012, p.32). He argues that human rights, the responsibility of caring for children, and nationalism, may all be considered sacred forms which are common to both religious and secular life.

However, the category of the sacred does not simply represent that which society seeks to protect or preserve—as the work of René Girard has so effectively evinced, the sacred also represents that which is unquestionably sacrificable. In a sacrificial economy, the individuals who are most likely to suffer at the expense of prevailing notions of the sacred are those who exist on the margins of society. The practice of Critical Religion not only offers certain intellectual benefits which comes from exploring the boundaries between various disciplines; but it also offers an opportunity to respond to a pressing social responsibility to critically question the strategies by which religious and secular communities have sought to secure for themselves a tomorrow which is less than certain for many. By acknowledging the heterogeneity of religion and the ambivalence of so many cultural manifestations of the sacred, Critical Religion is capable of bringing to light the myths and rituals which underwrite our most problematic forms of economic decision-making.

In his contemplation of the future of religious poetry in a post-secular age, the poet Michael Symmons Roberts suggests that the intellectual relativism that characterized much of the literary and academic discourse of postmodernism has declined in recent years—“Politically and financially the world is a volatile place, and relativism will no longer do. Above all, perhaps, our exit from the hall of mirrors is driven by ecological concerns. Relativism simply collapses in this context” (2008, p.71). Moral and intellectual relativism is of course not the solitary contribution of those various strands of cultural and critical theory which have come to represent postmodernism. However, Roberts’ larger point remains important: the most significant epistemological questions of our time are inspired by all too real ontological challenges. In this regard, the field of Critical Religion is uniquely positioned to apply the modes of critique and cultural analysis, which are the legacy of postmodern discourse, to the task of elaborating alternative ways of inhabiting a world where existence costs.

The Squaring of Zero, Part II

09 Monday Jul 2012

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(This is Part II of a blog entry from last month. Comments are welcome below on both Parts.)

So where then does the symbol of zero enter our Western world? If we turn to the etymology of the word “zero” we will find a telling trajectory of its history. And the origins in fact turn out to be not from the West at all, but from the East. This perhaps should not surprise us, since we know that both Hinduism and Buddhism are much more embracing of the notion of nothingness or the void. The notion is built into the very roots of their thinking, since all reality first stems from and then returns to the void. We might even say that coming to terms with this void is the heart and soul of these systems of thought and practice, even in all their variations. Take for instance the Atman, the supreme principle of the universe in Hindu belief. This principle, as a total and all-encompassing infinity, is in effect identical with a pure nothing, since it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. In coming to terms with this nothing one comes to term with both self and universe.

In India, the Sanskrit word for “empty” or “blank” is sunya. This sunya is transliterated, within the Indian system of numerology, as the idea of zero and indeed the symbol “0” as we know it today. If we think about the round circle, it suddenly takes on an appropriateness to the notion of nothing, even pictographically. For at the centre of its circumference is a blank, a void, an abyss. It as if we are peering into an empty chasm, brought into greater relief by the circumference, but of course a relief that is an inverse relief, with an infinite inversion.

This symbol and its idea then begins to move West. Sunya is transliterated in Arabic as çifr. The Islamic world picked up the zero form of O when they conquered India in the 8th century. From there they passed it on to the West. This development, one might argue, is one of the most essential and primary dividing lines between the Western and Arabic worlds, but one that is rarely if ever understood or acknowledged. For in accepting and adopting the concept of nothingness from their contact with India, the Arabic people, and the Islam they espoused, was in effect rejecting the Greek heritage. They were gainsaying the idea of logos and its conceptual tradition built up by the august Greeks, and gainsaying what came to be the ruling Aristotelian cosmological view, which had rejected any possibility of the void (even if, ironically, it was through medieval Arabic scholarship that Aristotle was re-introduced to the West). Islam could reconcile the idea of the nothing with the Abrahamic notion of void as it is presented in the first creation story of Genesis (the Elohimic tradition), without having to accept the Logos tradition that Christianity later appropriated from the Greeks, as in John’s reworking of Elohim’s void in John 1.1: “In the beginning was the Logos”. In permitting the void conceptually, there was thus little resistance to its use as a written symbol, and hence the zero entered into the Arabic system of numerical notation. This is the system the West inherited to replace the Roman numeral system, and still uses today. But the inheritance was not without its misgivings: originally zero, as “0”, was called the “infidel symbol”, since it admitted a concept that defied Christian orthodoxy. It was only after accounting systems required more sophisticated notation – and the rise of capitalism is extremely significant in this regard – that Western Christian resistance to the “0” eventually breaks down.

Finally, in its etymological development, çifr gives way to the Latin cifra or ciphra, from which we get our word “cipher”. From cipher we get zefiro or zephiro, which in turn, through cognate Latinate languages (French, Italian), becomes “zero”. (Connected to cifra is also the French word chiffre, which means “digit”.) Nothing then becomes official, at least in terms of accounting. And it becomes acceptable, at least in terms of a workable, if still dangerous, concept.

So from both the symbol and the word, we can see that zero is not something indigenous to the Hellenised West. Moreover, the passage back to its Eastern roots is one often fraught with tension and unease, or even, as we continue to see in today’s geo-political and geo-theological world, with division and conflict.

 

(To follow up in greater detail on the idea and history of zero, there are four key texts, all of which have helped to inform the discussion here: Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (Macmillan Press, 1987); Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of O (London: Oxford University Press, 1999); Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (London: Souvenir Press, 2000); and John D. Barrow, The Book of Nothing (London: Vintage, 2001).)

Note that due to holidays, it may take time for comments to be approved and responded to, but it WILL happen!

 

The Squaring of Zero, Part I

13 Wednesday Jun 2012

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(This is Part I of a two-part posting. Part II will appear early next month, when the opportunity for comments will be made available.)

We have been thinking in past blogs about the nature of negation, and how it has ascended into the imagination of our culture and society not necessarily as something to be scorned or regretted, but as something with which to be, in some cultural, philosophical, or even religious form, reconciled. Of course its primary symbol, in terms of production, is the figure of zero. But before we can understand how this figure might work its way into and through our present world, we need first to ask, whence zero? For its history is by no means one we might expect.

If we go back to the beginnings of scripted language and numerology, zero was not necessarily there at the outset. The ancient Egyptians developed a system of accounting based on a pictography – notation in pictures. Of course with pictographic language, a positive referent is needed to which one can point in the world. But when it comes to an understanding of nothing, pictography is ill-suited. For how does one picture nothing? The whole point of nothing is that it cannot be seen. To envision it, it must be turned into something abstract, like a concept, beyond pictures. Now we know the ancient Egyptian civilization was famed for mathematics – their pyramids proved their excellence at geometry, the configuration of shapes through mathematical precision. And yet in all this excellence, they never required zero in their computations, and therefore never developed any corresponding symbol. This says as much about their cosmological and theological understanding as it does about their mathematical acumen. For from the Book of the Dead we learn that death was not about returning to an abyssal place of nothing. Significantly, the ferryman who transported the dead soul across the river to the netherworld denied passage to anyone “who does not know the number of his fingers”. This showed the importance of accounting: as accounting was important for the Pharaohs who exacted some form of taxation upon their people, so too in death it is important to know how to account for oneself. (One must be counted, it appears, even in the afterlife.) And so there was a deliberate avoidance of nothing, because nothing troubles the system of accounting, whether financial, philosophical or religious. It is therefore not surprising that the Egyptians developed such a sophisticated technique of bodily preservation upon death. Mummification, we might say, is a gesture against the void, or it is a gesture of containment and preservation against that which negates us. The pyramids, we remember, functioned as tombs. So it is that the shape of O, as zero, figures neither in the pyramidical shape nor in the afterlife. Zero would be a perilous ticket for the ferryman.

The ancient Greeks too did not have a symbol for zero. This might seem even more incredible, since they had a distinct predilection for conceptualising. But as early as the Presocratics, those philosophers who preceded Socrates and Plato, there was a general repulsion to the concept of nothing. Parmenides, for example, talked much about the concept of a changeless One, but was adamant about the impossibility for “what is not” to exist, or even to be thought of. He therefore instructs us not to think on it. And for the most part the Greeks heeded his instruction, and shunned thinking about the nothing altogether. If we consider Greek thinking from the Presocratics onwards, we know that so much emphasis is placed on ratio, on ordering things in relation to one another. This is inherent in their term “logos”, which is accompanied by the notions of rationality and proportionality. (Ratio is part of the rational.) Reality then, underwritten as it is by logos, must remain accountable, or countable. The Pythagoreans were extreme in championing countability, to the point where reality in fact becomes number. But zero does not figure in this reality. In Greek logic (the logic of logos) zero cannot be a number as such. For the “0” introduces a void, and voids, by definition, cannot be counted. It is void of all quantification. If the cosmos is structured upon the logos, even a quasi-divinised Logos, which allows us to think rationally about it, to speak of it and (ac)count for it, it must remain positive. The idea of the nothing or of the negative cannot be part of the equation or the calculation. Thus like the Egyptians, the Greeks also did not develop any symbol for the naught in their numerology.

Nor did the Romans. Having been Hellenised by the Greeks, the Roman numeral system developed conspicuously without any figure for zero. And this from an empire who took accounting, and indeed taxation, to new and perfected heights across an extraordinary range of geography and peoples. This absence is felt throughout Roman culture, even in something as functional as their clocks: the Roman sundials were without a zero point, which means time was always positive – a god, in fact, like the Greek’s Chronos. This despite the fact that the sundial’s circular path outlined an “O”, the figure used elsewhere for the sign of nothing – a sign of the times to come, we might say, when the Roman numeral system proved inadequate, and the West had to turn and face its own nothing.

The O of Giotto

15 Tuesday May 2012

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There is a great story about the Renaissance painter Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337) who is said to have won a Vatican contract from Pope Benedictus XII by submitting nothing more than a perfectly executed hand-drawn circle. The circle became famously known as the “O of Giotto”, and remains to this day part of artistic lore. But it is not famous for its realism; realism, as an aesthetic pursuit, was not yet a virtue in Giotto’s time, even if Giotto did much to usher that virtue in. It is famous, rather, for its symbolism: the idea of perfection. The perfect circle, we know, has had a long history of expressing the perfect, the ideal, and thus the divine. Giotto’s O becomes emblematic of a Renaissance obsession with symmetry, with the aesthetics of geometry, with the unity of the whole, and with the spiritual features of the circle. And we can see this worked out in the many Roman arches and halos that Giotto painted for churches and ecclesiastical patrons. But it was more. It also became emblematic of the human aspiration to master an ideally integrated world, one in which the divine imprint on the created order not only could be perceived with the eye and the mind, but also – and this the Renaissance championed most expressly – could be replicated by an aesthetic gesture. This gesture, perfectly rendered, is what so obviously endeared Giotto to the Pope, and allowed Giotto his celebrated career. His O was an immaculate sign of a higher order – indeed, the highest.

But of course, this side of the Enlightenment, and with all our scientific advance, we have become more skeptical. We are first compelled to ask whether there is ever such a thing as a perfect circle in the natural world. And even if we admit the possibility, we preclude the chance it was made by a human hand, at least one unaided by instrument. But we go further, and ask can any symbolism be pushed beyond the platitudinous use we still find, say, within a wedding ceremony, or with such phrases as “the winner’s circle”. The question is quickly dismissed if we try to extend it to more ideal, or heavenly, spheres. For us moderns, the symbolic ideal of a perfect circle has become antiquarian, and we see it for what it always was: a doctrinal construct, a theological hope, a philosophical dream, or some form of a utopian wish. In the pre-modern West, the perfect circle found its representational power within a large schema of unity and oneness. In such a schema, which went by the name of a cosmology, the circle was a pure symbol of the one true divine perfection, not only reflected in the heavens and their movements, but also resident as the ultimate Sovereign in those heavens. So that by drawing freely his circle, Giotto proved not only his technical prowess but his theological acumen. But with the coming of modernity, we lost that ruling sense of one, or the One. It fell victim to irreparable division. It is not just that, in the Renaissance, the perfect circle was applied to humanity, as in da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian drawings. Nor was it simply that the Catholic Church lost its catholicity in the upheavals of the Reformation, and in the bloody wars that swept across Europe in their consequence. It was also that the true and perfect circle was finally seen for what it was: a spiritualized aesthetic.

The development of modern science had much to do with this shift in perspective. In the 17th century, Johannes Kepler, for example, a man who was not without a deep sense of the spiritual, wrote with great implications for the future understanding of circular movement, and any attendant symbolism:

For if it was only a question of the beauty of the circle, the spirit would decide with good reason for it, and the circle would be suitable for all bodies, principally for celestial bodies, since bodies participate in quantity, and the circle is the most beautiful form of quantity. But since it was necessary to rely not only on the spirit but also on natural and animal faculties to create motion, these faculties followed their own inclination, and they were not accomplished according to the dictates of spirit, which they did not perceive, but through material necessity. It is therefore not astonishing that these faculties, mixed together, did not fully reach perfection.*

Kepler, of course, figured for us this “material necessity” in the form of the ellipse. And to arrive at the ellipse we must distort the circle. The etymology of Greek ellipsis already shows us the radical consequence: a “coming up short”, most egregiously of perfection itself. Only a spiritualised circle can remain purely whole, as a visionary reality. As a factual reality, the phenomenal circle remains bound to “quantity”. That is, it goes beyond the singular, the unity, the idea of ultimate oneness. As Kepler says, with ramifications he probably did not intend, spirit and nature divide, and therefore so does the symbol, as the sign is rent from any divine signified. In modernity, the circle can no longer point to the One, or the One is no longer at its centre. “The centre cannot hold”, wrote Yeats in this oft-repeated quote from his “The Second Coming” poem.

In an earlier blog I had written about the slow but inexorable encroachment of the concept of nothing into our modern sensibility. I can now say that the coming of this nothing is not without its own symbols. Yet ironically, its most prevalent and persistent symbol is one that it has appropriated from its ostensible opposite: the circle that had come to represent the divine perfection in its wholeness, unity and oneness, virtues that so impressed Benedictus XII in the O of Giotto. The “O” becomes hollowed out by modernity, we might say, and in that hollowing arises the nothing that is “zero”. It is not that the symbol of “zero” entered our thinking by means of some modern form of numerology. (The symbolic notation of zero has a very different history, as we’ll see in my next blog.) It was rather that the circle had lost its symbolic sense of unity and wholeness, even in the very sphere where it once held sovereignty, the heavens. The appearances – deviation from circular perfection – no longer needed to be saved, because now science could account for them efficaciously and comprehensively. But the knock-on effects back down on earth, the material necessities that rendered the divine ideal lost to the centrifugal pull of a space emptied of cosmological unity, led to a breaking apart of the wholeness on every level. Division entered our world to a degree not seen in a millennium. And it continues to reside in our present world as a commonplace. Today we have many circles, many centres, many Os. Like Kepler’s ellipse, the O is no longer one, no longer truth with a single and perfect centre, no longer One. Its spirit has absconded, chased away by the material purpose of scientific or instrumental rationality. We must do our calculations, and we must do them now with a zero that is both functionally and conceptually necessary. We can still marvel at Giotto’s O in our museums and churches. But we marvel at a bygone theology, as much as a bygone aesthetic. The question for us now is how, in the many Os we might draw, and in the many circles we form on a daily basis, we negotiate our way across the empty spaces and the deep chasms they inevitably bring into our view. Yet Giotto’s legacy is not all lost: he at least tells us that something, even if that something is a “nothing”, remains there for our creation.

 

* Johannes Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, eds. W. Von Dyck, M. Caspar, et al. (Munich: Beck, 1938 et seq.), Vol.7, p. 330, as translated by Fernand Hallyn in The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler (New York: Zone Books, 1990), p.213.

 

The Role of the University Amplified

21 Tuesday Jun 2011

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I return to the topic of the role of the University, addressed in my first blog (31 January 2011), because of several recent events. The first gave me reason for great applause: the 2011 Gifford Lecture (31st May), in the form of one-off public seminar entitled “The Role of the University in the 21st Century”. The second gave me reason for great pause: last week’s announcement of A.C. Grayling’s new private university in London.

The first, made up of a panel of five speakers within the academy, finally began to address and debate the fundamental question of the University’s identity in our present culture and economic climate, precisely the question I had been calling for. Since others have given a synopsis of this event (see http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/14887, e.g.), I will not go into further detail here. But it was clear in talking to colleagues and panel members afterwards that this was only a start. No solutions were proffered, no blueprints for the future drafted. This was simply an opportunity to get the central issues, beyond just the headline tag lines of cutbacks and pending HE white papers from governments, out on the table for scrutiny. And I was delighted to see such strong and passionate discussion in the form of a much needed diagnostic.

The second, Grayling’s announcement of his New College of the Humanities, an independent, elite, for-profit university, employing high profile lecturers across a select range of disciplines and charging fees (£18,000) double the highest rates to be charged in England under the coalition government’s recent tuition fee ceiling rise, has provoked an intense reaction from those within and without academia, and not least from those at Grayling’s own institution, Birkbeck College, University of London. There is much one could say about the reaction alone, and Grayling’s own defence, as chronicled in the Guardian. But the principle of moving towards the wholly private university here in the UK does raise some concern. The idea of an independent university is not inherently wrong; one can see many good reasons for wanting to get out of reliance on public funding and government control, especially with the growing attitudes we’ve seen in Westminster over the last several governments (regardless of party). But the long-term consequences, as we can see from the American model, would be significant: the idea of the world-renowned British university education, which has maintained some relative degree of consistency, would give way to a great disparity in HE offering, far more than what is being threatened with current coalition policy. The elite institutions would become more elite, and infinitely more expensive, while the lesser institutions would become more parochial, and more interest-driven. In America this has led to a vast institutional difference in quality between degrees with the same name, but here in Britain it would also lead to a further classism. The quality of one’s education would be so much more dependent on the money one has before a degree is even started. As much as Grayling’s new model tries to encourage equality through competitive means-tested scholarships, we all know how these work, especially in a for-profit structure: privilege begets privilege, and means-testing becomes so quickly adjusted to the higher scale of those who have gained the competitive edge through previously having more than others. Grayling’s elite college will simply become an independent Oxbridge, a Harvard or Princeton only the wealthiest can afford. This may be what Grayling wants: a place to produce the cultural elite. But if we exclude Oxbridge, the cultural elite is not what the publicly-funded British university system was ever intended for. Its strength, at least until recently, has relied precisely on the fact that it provided a more equitable opportunity for all its citizens to be grounded in some form of tertiary education. And no more than in Scotland, where undergraduate education is still offered for free.

Of course, as I suggested in my January comments, the democratisation of HE on an economic model – the university understood primarily as an engine of the economy – has become self-defeating. If the State wants to invest in universities because they are seen as the chief provider of the workforce for a knowledge-based economy, then it will naturally demand more control of its output, and impose greater and greater pressure to corporatize and managerialize their systems. And by doing this, it quantifies education: in operational terms, accountability becomes predicated upon (fiscal) efficiency, while in pedagogical terms, learning and teaching become predicated upon professional ends alone, particularly towards the attainment of a sufficient enough salary (£21,000, under the government’s new regulations) to begin paying off the massive student debt accrued while gaining a degree. Here, economisation begets economisation: a student has no choice but to think of her or his education solely in terms of the market. But if everyone is doing this, then a simple undergraduate degree, in supply and demand logic, will begin to mean very little. The system implodes upon market saturation. And we are back asking the question: what good is a university degree for? And more fundamentally, what good is a university for?

We need to get beyond the paradigm of the university and its degrees solely as an economic good. But I am not convinced privatisation is the way forward, especially in Britain, where classism requires much less excuse to recrudesce, and would wring its hands at the thought of more private elite academies. How might the governments of the British Isles continue to think about universities in terms of publicly-funded institutions, without burdening them further with the task of chief contributor to economic development and sustainability? How might governments justify funding the HE sector, without requiring corporate accountability that necessitates fiscal streamlining and only economically viable subject areas? How might governments give back the university its historical autonomy, while still being convinced that such autonomy is a good, sound, even if not immediately quantifiable, investment?

I want here briefly to suggest four ways in which governments and academics alike might rethink their view of the university’s role, towards a more robust understanding of what overall purpose tertiary education might serve in today’s (Western) world. Each of these ways has an analogue in government thinking and policy that exist already, but thinking and policy not directly intended to maximise national economic interests. If governments would be willing to place the university under these analogous policy approaches, we might extricate ourselves from the self-defeating path the present policies on HE are doomed to follow.

The first is heritage. The university has long been a place, and creation, of heritage, of preserving what has been passed on to us, and what is valuable in and of its own right. Just as the monasteries, from the 6th C onwards, and out of which the idea of a medieval university eventually grew, were the preservers of ancient texts, and the developers of skills and practices that not only aided in that preservation, but allowed the old to be appropriated in new contexts, so too our universities have been the preservers of much of our most cherished knowledge, whether textual or otherwise, and have gone out of their way to allow the old to be appropriated in the new. What if governments looked at the universities as heritage sites? The British governments fund and support heritage sites around the UK not because they produce economic wealth (though income generated from tourism is not negligible), but because they have intrinsic value that goes deep into what it means to be British (Scottish, English, Welsh, or Irish), and what it means to have a rich and unique culture. What if governments took UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention mandate – “nature conservation and the preservation of cultural properties” – and applied it to universities? Here both the sciences (natural and social) and the humanities (along with the arts) would be seen as having intrinsic worth for their own cultural sake, and not because they necessarily add to economic prosperity.

The second is cultivation. The analogue to agriculture is obvious: every nation is highly invested in developing, sustaining and renewing its natural resources, primarily to furnish its own people with the necessities for living – food, clothing and shelter – but also to bolster its own GDP through exports. In the turn towards knowledge-based economies, governments have increasingly seen the mind as a natural resource, cultivated in the classrooms of primary, secondary and tertiary education. And the mind is certainly something to be cultivated, whether for professional means or otherwise. But with growing ecological concerns, development is now having to be balanced with sustainability and renewability. Nature, we have come to realise, is not a place for pillaging or exploiting without some serious deleterious consequences. Neither is the mind. Its development needs to be balanced with ideas and skills that are not strictly for instrumental and economic ends. Think of climate change: governments invest a lot of time and money fashioning and signing treaties to limit factors seen to damage our environment, at some cost to their GDPs and GNPs. The mind, too, needs to be seen with such balance. It is not just about cultivating a task-oriented faculty, employable only in prescribed contexts with quantifiable output. It is also about cultivating an intellect and an imagination, renewable in different contexts, perhaps even at the cost of immediate quantification and utility. The Germans, those masters of instrumental engineering, but to whom we also owe the invention of the modern university, have a wonderful word for this kind of comprehensive cultivation: Bildung. It can mean not only education, but a cultivation of an inner sense of what it means to be a human being physically, psychologically, morally, and spiritually, and a social sense of how that human being should engage with the world. It links cultivation and culture through creating, shaping, maturation and harmonization. The university needs to be seen once again as a ground for this kind of cultivation, now with a certain “intellectual ecology” in place.

The third is critique. This is perhaps the least expected way to conceive of the university, but in many ways the most immediately imperative. The university needs to remain a place of critical reflection on the ways we are told reality has been in the past, reality presently is today, and reality ought to be in the future. To do this, it must retain a strong degree of autonomy or “liberation”, i.e. freedom from control by the state, business and any other extrinsic seats of authority (church, international organisations, etc.). In this sense, we need to be able to speak of the “liberal sciences” as much as the “liberal arts”. If we relinquish this autonomy, as we are being forced to do under the economisation model, what space is left to challenge the very assumptions that are being imposed upon us, that we are expected to take for granted, including the assumption that the principle role of the university is to be an engine of the economy? The site of this very blog, Critical Religion, is a good example of attempting academic critical exploration: it is not a matter of exorcizing religion as an out-moded way of thinking or practice, but on the contrary, of exercising our very conceptions of religion to see how certain thoughts and practices, which may have once been seen as exclusively religious, are entwined with other modes of thinking and practice in today’s complex world. The analogue here to government might seem difficult to ascertain, for what government invites constant critique of its own operations? But, outside of dictatorships, most governments operate with precisely such mechanisms in place. In our own parliamentary system we have an official opposition party, who sits directly opposite the government to call its thinking and policy to account. The best governments, we know, are those not with an unrestrained mandate to do whatever they wish, but those held in check by strong and responsible opposition. What, then, if governments saw the universities as a kind of shadow cabinet on world affairs, past and present? Such a cabinet may not, and perhaps should not, have direct control over those affairs, but it should have much to say about the state of their health, and should influence them accordingly.

The fourth is creativity. Here the analogue is straightforward: governments invest much in national arts organisations. And at least here in Britain, governments do not expect to have direct, or even indirect, influence on the creative processes of those organisations. What if Westminster dictated to the National Theatre exactly what kind of plays it must commission or mount each season, or restricted BBC television to shows that in no way challenged or satirised the ruling culture? We are not naïve to think there is no influence whatsoever with state-run arts in the UK. But its governments know that in granting their funding they must also grant a great deal of autonomy to each organisation, if they are to survive the market. For the creative world is not about legislation and order. It is about allowing the artist’s voice to come forward in whatever creative form he or she feels most relevant, most powerful, most penetrating. The university has always been a place of immense creativity, not only within the arts, but within all manner of disciplinary enquiry. Scientists tell us some of the greatest breakthroughs in research come through creative moments that are not hypothesised or predicted. The arts are continually reliant upon people educated in humanities subjects that have no direct utilitarian purpose, other than to expose one to aesthetic or philosophical traditions (among others) and to then encourage the development of new creative traditions, or expressions, or ways of thinking. All governments know the arts are a crucial part of the cultural fabric of any society, and British governments especially are willing to take a loss, as it were, to ensure such fabric remains rich and variegated. What if the universities were seen as part of this same cultural fabric? They might generate certain “industries” with economic benefit; but their real benefit lies in the on-going creative energy and spirit that contribute to a much wider cultivation we spoke of above. As others have said, “That capability that leads to economically significant outcomes is derivative from a deeper creativity.”♦ The sooner governments can understand and accept this, the sooner the university can function to the full extent inherent in its very name: a universe undergoing constant re-creation.

This fourfold way of rethinking the university and its purpose cannot, by any means, be exhaustive. But perhaps it might be a start for those in offices of power, and who control funding from the public purse, to understand the university beyond the restrictive, and ultimately self-defeating, parameters set by the economic and business paradigms. After all, their own governmental structures and policies allow for interests well outside the immediate generation of measurable wealth. The university needs to be part of these interests. The poets, the theologians, the philosophers, even the pure mathematicians, all keep telling us there are some things that cannot be measured. We need to safeguard, as our public duty, and not merely as our private privilege, the place where such voices can still be heard, studied, and inflected.

 

(♦ Geoffrey Boulton and Colin Lucas, “What are Universities For?” (September 2008). After I had written my January 2011 blog with an almost identical title, someone pointed out to me this article, written two and a half years earlier, and under the auspices of LERU, the League for European Research Universities. The authors are from the University of Edinburgh and of Oxford respectively.)

Churches, marriage and same-sex relationships…

22 Sunday May 2011

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This week, the Church of Scotland will be discussing a specially commissioned report on Same Sex Relationships and the Ministry at its General Assembly in Edinburgh. Essentially, it will be seeking to reconcile the unavoidable fact that a number of its clergy live in gay relationships they’d prefer to acknowledge openly, with its public and theological position on sexuality.

The Churches face a problem of course. Whilst our civil institutions become ever more scrupulous about anything that could constitute an obstacle to the legitimate aspirations of gay people, they remain guardians of a tradition steeped in patriarchal structures and heteronormative metaphors that raise – for those they marginalise – deeply painful issues concerning authority, identity and belonging.

In the context of much larger questions concerning the global capitalist exploitation of our environment or our failure to eradicate material poverty or even to ensure everyone has access to clean water, it is perhaps not surprising to find many people – both outside and inside the Christian community – impatient with such a ‘non-issue’. The question of whether it is right to ordain a man or woman who seeks to live openly in a stable, supportive same sex relationship seems irrelevant to the big questions. But, of course it is a significant point, touching as it does on the ordering of human relationships; a fundamental question of great moment in any society. In the United Kingdom and large parts of the western world, Christianity has provided the framework for domestic and sexual relationships for hundreds of years in such a way that, until very recently, people have really not had to give it much thought. Though critics from Harriet Taylor and J S Mill in the 19th century onwards have called marriage a form of female slavery, it has remained the default domestic position. More recently, legislation has loosened the bonds of women, taken away male prerogatives and allowed for an increase in non Church weddings, contenting itself with the more neutral territory of registration but, until now, civil society has not suggested anything substantially different from what the Church has itself prescribed. Recently, attending a lovely family wedding at a registry office in London, I was struck by how far this wedding followed the pattern of the Church weddings I’ve attended – it was a life-long, exclusive partnership in which reference was made to having and raising children. There were rings, bouquets, bridesmaids, a best man and photographers.

Yet In spite of the ritual similarities between registry office weddings and Church weddings, there are differences of course. Churches refer to ‘holy matrimony’ and seek to give significance to heterosexual relationships in very particular ways, claiming, for example, that it has been ‘instituted of God’ (Canon 31:1 of the Scottish Episcopal Church, or set up ‘for a remedy against sin’ (Book of Common Prayer, 1662). It is in the words of the canons of the Church of England, “…according to our Lord’s teaching … a union permanent and lifelong, for better for worse, till death them do part, of one man with one woman, to the exclusion of all others on either side, for the procreation and nurture of children, for the hallowing and right direction of the natural instincts and affections, and for the mutual society, help and comfort which the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.” (Canon B 30).

Arguably, then, marriage as it exists across most of the western world today is still thoroughly bound up in a specific vision of social relations that might or might not be exclusively Christian in origins but which have been thoroughly Christianised. This prescribed form of human relating brings together sex, property and children under a heading of heterosexual – and thus, historically at least, hierarchical – partnership, and promotes this as the premier form of mutual human support. Other potentially supportive relations, including same-sex partnerships are bracketed off as, at best, insignificant and at worst, a matter for shame and guilt.

Yet Christian churches clearly can change as new priorities emerge. In Sweden, for example, a proposal first brought forward in 2003, that marriage should be open to same sex couples was initially rejected by the Central Board of the Lutheran Church of Sweden on the traditional grounds that it could only denote a relationship between a man and a woman. In 2009, however, the Theological Committee of the Church changed its view and recommended that gay couples should be allowed to marry and that priests of the Lutheran Church of Sweden could perform such weddings in their churches (see Svenskakyrkan Church Synod Liturgy Committee report 2009:2 Wedding and Marriage).

The Lutheran Church of Sweden was, of course, responding to pressure– to the changing legal position in Sweden on marriage as a civil institution. It courts criticism from Christians who believe there is a deeper or eternal order existing beyond the realm of changeable human being – beyond changes implemented in response a secular government to reflect its secular concerns – to which biblical language and the traditions of the Church point. Yet Christian theology and Church order have been marked from the beginning by manifestly human heteropatriarchal social structures, inherited from the cultural milieu of the early Christian Church. Moreover, in taking such a radical step the Swedish Church has arguably put itself in a good position to act as a positive force in society, underpinning and supporting trusting relationships rather than undermining them. This too is surely something that could be aligned with the Gospel – perhaps with its refusal to make idols out of conventional family ties and responsibilities.

Patriarchy, Patrimonialism – and Paradigm Change

08 Sunday May 2011

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Following some years in so-called early-retirement it was with much interest that I nervously ventured out once again to a mainstream academic conference: that of the Sociology of Religion Research Group of the British Sociological Association held at Easter in the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham. This BSA Group used to be a familiar stamping ground for me, and so I wondered how the sub-discipline would have fared since my last attendance five years before. Of course I also wanted to catch up with where things were now at, given not only the disputed increased salience and ambiguities of the religious factor in the world system, but also, not least, to observe what impact the substantial and unprecedented investment made through the Religion and Society Research Programme supported by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) with its £18 million budget might have made.

It has been apparent for at least the past fifteen years that what one might call the traditional sociology of religion exemplified most notably in a series of textbooks and monographs built around an array of recurrent basic concepts has faced a crisis. Of the latter thought patterns, the long drawn-out careers of the theory of secularisation and debates on the meaning of the term ‘religion’ are the most prominent. The slow but inevitable dying away of the pre-modern residua of religion in the inhospitable normality of rational scientific modernity charted in the theory of secularisation might remind readers with a poetic cast of mind of Matthew Arnold’s famous lines:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Those who have long memories may also recall the postmodern theologian Don Cupitt’s melancholic, grainy image in the Sea of Faith television series when he followed in the footsteps of Jesus and David Friedrich Strauss, and, somewhat lugubriously, announced his nocturnal presence in the Garden of Gethsemane. What this (post-) theologian also acknowledged in the poet was the threat of the unknown, a continuing presence of the irrational,

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Anyone involved in the study of religion, be they theologian, poet, critical scholar in the humanities, or indeed social scientist might well recognise that the retreating tide, with its ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ can now be seen as more like the retreat of the sea to the horizon that precedes the onset of a tsunami that carries much before it.

In face of this ‘resurgence of religion’ in the course of the last decade of the twentieth century Roland Robertson and Peter Beyer advanced the theory of globalisation and the ‘glocal’ matrix as the key components of a new ‘paradigm’ with which to challenge the persisting but apparently faltering theory of secularisation. The latter was regarded by them as incapable of explaining the increased salience of the religious factor and the apparent reflexivity of religious collectivities as they responded to global pressures. In his famous, controversial and influential work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1961), Thomas S. Kuhn argued that ‘normal’ science did not proceed thorough a smooth accumulation of objective evidence but could be subject to a crisis created by anomalies that would eventually bring about the collapse of a comprehensive theory and its displacement by a new ‘paradigm’. Was the same true of the theory of secularisation, and could globalisation theory effect such a displacement?

In my judgement there are problems associated with Robertson and Beyer’s advocacy of globalisation theory in that the ‘middle axioms’ that might make sense of the intermediate connections between the level of ‘grand theory’ (and theories do not come much grander than that of globalisation) and the contingent specificity of any given locale are not that obvious. Thus Beyer made use of the concept of ‘communication’ central to Niklaas Luhmann’s systems theory, and defines ‘religion’ in terms of it being communication, rather in the way that the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher made the feeling of ‘absolute dependence’ the category out of which to construct an entire experiential and theological architectonic. In short, however, Robertson and Beyer are in my judgement correct in attributing determinative significance to globalisation, but how this might be worked through in a satisfactory way is less than obvious.

The conference at Birmingham had a packed schedule and there was a rich diversity of short papers on a wide range of topics. There were three plenary and clearly definitional sessions respectively addressed by equally distinguished speakers. The first was the Scot, Professor Steven Bruce, the second the English (and European) sociologist Professor Grace Davie, and third the British/Australian Professor Bryan Turner. The question of national identity has itself become more salient as the nations of the United Kingdom move in the direction of individual self-determination, and the three speakers refracted this dimension and their awareness of their own individual social backgrounds in a number of ways.

Professor Bruce is a combative figure who throughout his career has trenchantly defended the secularisation tradition established by his mentor the late Bryan Wilson of the University of Oxford. At the BSA Conference Bruce once more re-asserted his position as a consistent scientific positivist, and pointedly excluded as basically irrelevant ‘normative theory’, ‘zeitgeist metaphors’, any extraneous ‘agenda-setting theory’ and feminist sociological insights, as opposed to the correct path of ‘sociological explanation’ to be applied to the study of religion. Professor Davie is a skilled practitioner of via media, and rather than confront Bruce she presented a positive (as opposed to a positivist) report as she highlighted the values of diversity in topics, theory and method apparent in the present-day sociology of religion in Britain. This emollient approach was indeed advisable as aspirant researchers availed themselves of the beneficence of the AHRC, a largesse that may well be unrepeatable; consequently we should think carefully before we bite the hand that feeds us. As a sociologist of renown, Professor Turner has had exceptionally wide international experience and he focused upon the topic of charisma, because unlike the positivist empiricist Bruce and the positively eclectic Davie, Turner would appear to have an enduring – even a personal – relationship with the core subject matter of religion, which on this occasion he identified with ‘charisma’. All three contributions were in their various ways controversial, but in the discussions that followed the interchanges were muted. Why, might one ask was this the case? How might we understand this relatively subdued atmosphere?

In the peace-promoting surroundings of Woodbrooke there was a strong sense that the sub-discipline of the sociological study of religion has reinforced its boundaries as a quasi-autonomous niche culture within the wider sociological field. Despite this, there are considerable questions that remained for the most part submerged. For example, whilst the ‘spiritual revolution’ was frequently mentioned but dismissed on the basis that the active spiritual subjects in Heelas and Woodhead’s Kendal Project only represented a tiny minority (according to Professor Bruce this was only 0.8% of the population), the tacit assumption that quantity should be equated with societal significance was never questioned. Such an assumption would make the terrorist an irrelevance. Globalisation and the global/local (‘glocal’) problematic was completely marginal. International political and cultural violence intensified by religious zealotry was likewise at the periphery of conference concerns whereas this is a matter of global importance. Clearly something was taking place that prevented anything really interesting from happening.

In conclusion, I invite you to imagine that we are beside a waterhole in the savannah amongst lions – and other animals standing at a respectful distance. The sombre tone of Sir David Attenborough’s voice can be heard as he comments quietly on the ethology of the animals we observe. A great grizzled lion who has banished many a rival continues to ensure the survival of his genes (and memes) by the elimination or cowing into silence of all opposition. The patriarch’s message is this: lions do not cultivate or eat vegetables; they do not eat fruit; they do not manufacture food; they hunt animals and eat meat alone: the true lion is a carnivore. A noble lioness, the matriarch that has born many cubs lies sunning herself at the other side of the waterhole. She knows that once roused the female is deadlier than the male, and so she keeps her counsel and lets her cubs down to the water’s edge to drink. All the other lions, young and old, know that the waterhole will soon dry up and so they likewise keep their growls to themselves. Another venerable master lion on the periphery stalks slowly forward and ventures to observe that lions should eat authentic wild meat and not factory-farmed animals. He then quietly walks off and away back to own far distant waterhole. The patriarch and the matriarch are meanwhile content. In ethological and social-psychological terms we can see that the patriarch and matriarch enjoy ‘sphere dominance’. Wisely, however, they know that they do not enjoy or aspire to ‘full spectrum dominance’, as this rightly belongs to a higher species that only very occasionally visits the oasis. Yet the future of the waterhole – and of the lions – depends upon the ideas and the behaviour of the higher species who understand the ecology that comprises both. The lions are meanwhile content to sun themselves until the hunt for the next meal. When, where, and in what form a Kuhnian ‘crisis’ might come that re-imagines some of the critical issues the BSA conference seemed unable to address is unclear, though simply continuing to lie in the sunshine and drink at the waterhole filled by AHRC largesse is not a long-term option.

What is a University for?

31 Monday Jan 2011

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The University is in a crisis. Even casual readers of the broadsheets know this. But the crisis is not what most people think, including those who run the University itself. The crisis is not that the University is underfunded, and therefore has to start cutting back on staff, programmes, and services. Nobody would deny the University is underfunded, and that the breadth and quality of education it once offered is now being seriously eroded. But funding is not where the real crisis lies. Cutbacks are just the symptom of a greater underlying problem. The real crisis is an identity crisis.

What, in this early millennium, and at this present stage of modernity, is the University for? What is its role in society? What is its fundamental raison d’être? We are being told one thing, and one thing only: it is to be an engine of the economy. It is to be, alongside several of other central engines, a crucial driver of economic activity. The government tells us this. The economists tell us this. Business tells us this. And now, increasingly, those who manage the universities – the Chancellors, the Vice-Chancellors, the Principals, the top administrators – tell us this. And thus, as part of the economic machine, the University must become more efficient, more corporate, and run on business models that have proven effectiveness towards economic growth.

This all may seem sensible enough, especially as the global economy becomes more homogenous, while still struggling to emerge from a recession that has made every institution (except banks) more fiscally aware, and more fiscally parsimonious. But the problem is that the University, as an institution, never began as an economic generator, run on the model of business. Nor have its main contributors, those who make the University what it is, the researchers and lecturers, ever seen themselves, except only very recently, and then not by choice but by coercion, as in the business of business. We did not undergo seven or more years of post-secondary education to become experts in fuelling the economy by providing qualified workers and immediately transferable research. Thus the crisis of identity. The University is being told it is one thing, but the very “cogs in the machine” do not, either by definition or by training, operate towards that end. They do not buy the metaphor of the machine or the engine itself. They do not buy the metaphor of buying. But they are now equally hard-pressed to tell us what they do accept.

The modern University has lost sight of its roots as liberal education. This is most salient in the area of the humanities: the University no longer has a sense of the “liberal arts”. Here, if we follow the theories of higher education that were forged during the 18th and 19th centuries in the West, “liberal” meant free from control of the State, from control of the Church, and from control of Business. This did not mean liberal arts subjects did not treat the domains of politics, religion and economics in their thinking. Far from it. But it did mean these domains did not set the agenda for research and teaching, did not dictate the curricula. Research was free to investigate all areas open-endedly, without vested interests, without being directed and governed by spread sheet logic and statistics. This was more than merely knowledge for knowledge sake; it was based on what it understood as the proper culturing, or cultivation, of humanity, and of the structures by which humanity should live. Research was free to probe, to question, to critique, to innovate the very paradigms under which we might find ourselves trying to live our lives, or better them. And these paradigms included those ruling within the domains of the State, the Church, and Business (which now too must be “capitalised”).

We now have a ruling global paradigm of liberal, free-market democracy – a politics so deeply entwined with an economic ideology (or a political ideology so deeply entwined with an economics) the two cannot be separated or distinguished – which, as a matter of course, is sold to us as truth. By imposing this paradigm upon the University, where now is the legitimate and legitimated voices who can, in the name of open-ended enquiry, ask the critical question: Is this the best paradigm available? Is this the only one we should be cultivating, and at all levels?

It might be. I can’t say I know the answer. But I do know the question needs to be asked, the matter debated, and no more than within the University itself. We need to address the fundamental issue of identity: what is the University now for? what is the University for now? And we need to debate this outside the context of a corporate understanding of balance sheets, of key performance indicators, and of government-led funding-driven research exercises. Must teaching and researching the disciplines of the arts and humanities necessarily lead towards some economic liquidity? Must careerism be the only motive for studying a subject like religion, or philosophy, or history, or literature? No one is debating these questions within the academy.

And the crisis is precisely that we cannot, under the present paradigm, find the space or the time to debate these questions. We are too busy administrating our way through the system, too busy conforming our research projects to maximise our minimal chances of being awarded external research funding from sources wholly wedded to the ruling paradigm, too busy writing departmental narratives that align ourselves to economic justification, too busy adjusting to managerial restructuring, too busy trying to attract “customers” through marketing schemes, too busy trying to achieve top-rate status as teachers and researchers who validate the ruling assumptions, too busy simply trying to survive what has become a profession with its own deep psychoses.

My own area, the study of religion (and theology), like so many of its cognate disciplines, will never be able to justify its existence on the grounds of economic contribution, careerist employability or spread sheet empiricism alone. Nor should it have to try. But it does, like others, have a tremendous amount to add to the debate about ruling paradigms. As we know, it had a monopoly on this subject – for better or for worse – for a good portion of the last millennium. And it should be given every chance to continue in that debate.

But the debate is not happening. Not in the halls of the government. Not in the aisles of the churches. Not in the boardrooms of the corporations. Not in the files of the so-called independent think-tanks. And not, worst of all, in the academic classrooms and research centres.

Perhaps blogs might be the only truly liberal sphere available these days.