Disorganised religion and science fiction
Disconnected jottings
Disorganised religion
Is organised religion more powerful than disorganised? Had lunch with Linda Woodhead this week, who was going to defend at the Oxford Union the proposition that organised religion was on its way out. And a damn good thing too, she might have added. Of course, as soon as this was proposed, I disagreed with it.
In a narrow sense, it’s obvious that disorganised religions can outcompete organised ones under most conditions. The obvious present examples come from Christianity, where charismatic evangelicalism is almost everywhere outcompeting “mainstream” organised denominations. In Latin America and Africa the Roman Catholics are in retreat; in North America all of the traditional denominations are. I suspect that the present wave of extremely crazy, extremely right-wing preachers will subside. But what come after will not be more organised, and even the organisations, like the Southern Baptists, which arose from an earlier wave of disorganisation, are now themselves splitting.
These are all examples of disorganised monotheisms outcompeting organised ones. This is separate to the wider global phenomenon of monotheisms driving out polytheisms in Africa. I think that happens for political reasons which would need a long post to themselves.
Everywhere, the patterns religious of organisation shadow and sanctify political ones. This is the central takeaway of Robert Bellah’s great book. It also explains the role of Christianity and specifically Roman Catholicism, in the idea of Europe. Because the structure of the Roman church emerged under the Roman empire, and has maintained a certain continuity since then, there is implicit in it the idea that the continent ought to form a single political unit. This ideal survived all the centuries in which it was manifestly untrue. But the worst disruptions, after the reformation, produced even more tightly organised forms of religion, the national/state churches of protestant countries. The unit of organisation was now much smaller than a continent, but within these new units there was much greater homogeneity. European nationalism is a very special case of disorganised religion — it is more organised but at a smaller scale to the preceding form.
The breakup of established churches, then, is surely connected to the breakup of established nations. Even when this disintegration does not happen politically, or before it happens politically in the case of the UK, it has happened on a spiritual or imaginative plane. The ways in which people imagine their communities have changed profoundly. The old ways are everywhere contested and their followers are everywhere fighting back.
Why I hate Woke
Obviously, in a week when all decent people are repelled by the efforts of a floundering government to open up a “War on Woke”, this is not the moment to point out that I, too, find the woke rebarbative. But I do, and this has little to do with particular policies, or with the general aim of the movement.
What I can’t stand is a particular tone of evangelical condescension employed by people entirely confident that they are on the right side of history, as if history had only two sides and one direction.
Obviously I want a less militarised police force in the USA. Obviously I think we should be much more conscious of the role of force in the distribution of wealth in the world, and that we should honestly consider how much of Britain’s prosperity and England’s peace was derived by simply taking chunks of the world that had belonged to other people and using them for our benefit. When Nigel Biggar claims that the the British Empire was not founded on racism or exploitation, I think “Go tell that to Robert Clive, to Warren Hastings, or to Arthur Wellesley”. There is a Bartley Avenue in Singapore named after one of my great uncles, and he was not there as an indentured labourer.
But that’s the easy bit. The hard bit would be trying to work out what a genuinely less exploitative world would look like, and what would be the minimum force needed to get there and to sustain it. These seem to me to be the questions that the Left gave up on after the Sixties, and that the neoliberal optimists of 1990s failed to even ask, still less to answer. The emerging powers don’t care about them either. If the future is Chinese it’s not going to be any more fair or less racist than the most brutal examples of European colonialism. The wheel of fortune will revolve all right, but the distance between the top and the bottom will remain.
Too late! the uncontrollable future is already here
“Who knows what the right way to control a tokomak really is?” a throwaway line from Charles Arthur’s newsletter which works like some of the best SF and suddenly makes you realise how immensely strange some of the unevenly distributed bits of the future already are, here, today. It’s the feeling I get whenever I reread Frederik Pohl’s work on advertising from the Fifties.
Charles is talking about how we’re training AIs to do incredibly dangerous things that no human ingenuity could achieve — in this case, controlling a live fusion reactor. Few things bigger, more physical and more dangerous can be imagined. But why should dangerous things be physical? We have already trained AIs to to do incredibly complex and dangerous things beyond the scope of unaided human activities — we built the adtech industry and the global financial markets that way. No one knows the right way to control the adtech industry — or the global financial markets — really is, but they got built just the same.
All religions start off disorganized, as familial, tribal, or local cults, and become organized when they’re appropriated by elites and become departments of the state. Once they evolve into formal institutions by law or custom established new cults bubble up from the bottom which, if they prosper, become organized continuing the cycle. Millenarian cults that attracted a dispossessed peasantry during the late Middle Ages morphed into the left wing of the Reformation and, eventually, into respectable Protestant churches.
But this time it will be different because modern nations no longer maintain state religions and educated elites are no longer sympathetic to religion of any kind, whether organized or disorganized. Disorganized religion will continue to flourish as long are the poor are with us, in the Global South and amongst the lower classes in affluent countries. But, alas, organized religion, religion that caters for ‘elites’ (defined in the US as anyone with a college degree) and produces music, art, and architecture is on the way out for good.