Secularism: The Hidden Origins of Disbelief

325 Pages·2007·4.6 MB·English

by  Mike King

Secularism
T h e H i d d e n O r i g i n s
o f D i s b e l i e f
Mike King C
SECULARISM
The Hidden Origins
of Disbelief
Mike King
C
James Clarke & Co.
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James Clarke & Co
P.O. Box 60
Cambridge
CB1 2NT
www.jamesclarke.co.uk
[email protected]
First Published in 2007
ISBN: 978 0 227 17245 2
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record is available from the British Library
Copyright © Mike King, 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this edition may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission in writing from the Publisher.
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Contents
Introduction 5
One: Issues in Secularism and Culture 9
1.1 Secularism, Atheism and Scientism 11
1.2 Secularism and Contemporary Culture 18
1.3 Philosophy and Secularism 25
1.4 The Role of Language 28
1.5 Psychology, the Brain and Secularism 36
1.6 The Shibboleths of Secularism 43
Two: Articulating Spiritual Diff erence 45
2.1 The History of the Spiritual Life 50
2.2 Four Spiritual Polarities 59
2.3 The Varieties of Spiritual Impulse 68
2.4 Pathologies and Correctives in the Spiritual Life 72
2.5 The Problem of ‘God’ 82
2.6 The Bhakti / Jnani Distinction 86
Three: Returning to the Roots 90
3.1 The twentieth century 90
3.2 The Enlightenment 117
3.3 The Spiritual Wounds of the West 151
Four: Bhakti and Jnani in Western Development 184
4.1 Piety and the West 184
4.2 Jnani, the East, and Hellenic Infl uence 206
4.3 A Radical History of Western Development 243
Five: The Undefended Western ‘God’ 244
5.1 The Enlightenment Reconsidered 245
5.2 Deism 276
5.3 Failure of the Western Jnani Religion 280
Conclusions 287
References 289
Bibliography 304
Index 311
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For Douglas Harding
1909-2007
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Introduction
This book sets out a radically new exploration of the question: what
are the origins of the secular mind? This question has an urgency
at the start of the twenty-fi rst century that modernist thinkers of
the twentieth century could not have anticipated. According to
mainstream Western ways of thinking, religion was a relic of pre-
Enlightenment culture, and its disappearance was inevitable, as a fog
dispersed by the sun. This ‘sun’, according to the view of the secular
mainstream, was science and rationalism. But 9/11, the rise of militant
Islam, and the rise of the religious right in America, suddenly made
the secular assumption of the death of religion untenable. It became
necessary, urgent, even, to att empt a new understanding of religion:
everywhere the question of religion has had new debating grounds.
But what is missing – and which this book att empts to address – is a
new debate about secularism.
Painful as it might be, this book takes apart the assumption that
science and rationalism are as the sun to the fog of religion and
spirituality. The uncomfortable fact needs acknowledgement: that
a huge range of scientists and thinkers, from the Enlightenment
onwards, fi nd no contra diction between their outer pursuit of science
and rationalism, and their inner pursuit of faith and spiritual enquiry.
What makes it possible to gradually understand this so-called
contradiction is a recognition that ‘religion’ is not the monolithic
entity that either Western faith traditions like to assume, or that
secularists have inherited as an assumption, exposed as they are
mainly to defensive accounts of religion put forward by theologians.
This book explores instead the idea of ‘spiritual diff erence’ – religion,
or spirituality, as an expression of a wide range of spiritual impulses,
some of them congenial to science and rationalism, and some of
them deriving instead from the devotional, the moral, the intuitive,
the poetic, and the aesthetic. When secularism applies its own well-
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6 Secularism
developed language of pluralism to the phenomenon of religion
and spirituality, instead of lazily assuming the monolithic nature
of religion, then the fi rst step is taken of engaging with the subject.
To taxonomise a domain is to have respect for it. But, crucially, this
articulation of spiritual diff erence also allows for a radically new
understanding of the origins of the secular mind.
In exploring the history of spiritual diff erence the turning point
in Western history – the Enlightenment – is reconsidered. Instead of
understanding this moment in history as the beginnings of a process
that would inevitably bring about the death of religion, we can see
instead that the secular mind arose out of a purely negative legacy of
that period. It was not the death of religion that was made inevitable
by the Enlightenment, but the gradual confounding of its secular
legacy. Slowly, it becomes clear that the adventure of secularism has
gone wrong by betraying its Enlightenment roots. Secularism became
a caricature of Enlightenment thought, an unbalanced extremity of
assumption, and, in its forced and reluctant re-engagement with
religion, it now has the opportunity to repair a breach in the very
fabric of society.
This book opens up a conversation between religion and secularism
in a way not previously att empted. It sees their apparently opposing
worldviews as not intrinsically antagonistic, but only so through
accidents of history. Once those accidents are exposed and accounted
for as partially wrong turnings, a new rapprochement can take place.
But the conversation pursued here has a third partner: the New Age.
Usually dismissed by both the other parties, it has elements within it
that are important to the debate, particularly its open enthusiasm for
the spiritual life. By the term ‘New Age’ the broad phenomenon of
new religious movements, adoption of Eastern practices, and revival
of pre-Christian religions is meant.
Hence we have in this book a conversation, and the development
of a vocabulary for the wider dissemination of a conversation,
between the secularist, those who pursue faith traditions (‘old
religion’), and those who pursue new religions or popularisations
of Eastern religious movements. For simplicity, these three groups
will be referred to as secularists, religionists, and New Agers: we can
understand the new cultural landscape of the twenty-fi rst century
as a three-way contest between them. Each group has unique
insights and limitations of thought, and a conversation must start
with the awkward acknowledgement of those limitations. As this
book begins the conversation with the idea of spiritual diff erence,
we need to address it through that virtuous hallmark of the secular
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Secularism 7
era – pluralism. Religionists, secularists and New Agers, each in
their own way deny the idea of spiritual diff erence and spiritual
pluralism: old religion through its absolutist certainties and war on
‘heresy’; the secular world through indiff erence, and the New Age
through an uncritical acceptance of all and everything – its mantra
that ‘all is one’.
Freud criticised monotheistic religion in particular for its ‘narcissism
of minor diff erence’. He meant by this the small diff erences in
religious belief that separated groups, which otherwise shared vastly
similar ideas, and which could lead to the most appalling violence
between them. If we characterise old religion as suff ering from the
‘narcissism of minor diff erence’ then we can characterise secularism
as suff ering from the ‘narcissism of self-suffi ciency’, indicating the
false belief that humanity had grown up and out of the need for any
kind of spirituality (a key shibboleth of secularism). The New Age in
turn can be said to suff er from the ‘narcissism of diff erence denied’
– its tendency to downplay spiritual diff erence in the interests of a
superfi cial harmony.
Chapter One outlines the contours of the contemporary secular
worldview, using some case studies in cultural production, including
literature and fi lm. It explores the role that science, philosophy,
language, psychology and neurology play in constructing the
shibboleths of the secular mind.
Chapter Two presents a two-fold Model of Spiritual Diff erence
to provide the necessary detailed articulation of spirituality for
the subsequent chapters. It highlights the diff erence between
the devotional and non-devotional spiritual impulse (usefully
articulated in Hinduism as bhakti and jnani), and looks at pathologies
and correctives in the spiritual life.
Chapter Three starts with a detailed consideration of the alienation
of the modern, secular mind, and then works backwards through
Western history to identify the major factors in the abandonment
of religion as a credible cultural force. It considers both the rise of
science and the legacy of religious cruelty as factors, and concludes
that these were insuffi cient to account for the ‘death of God’.
Chapter Four considers the rise of Christianity as a devotional
religion with Hebraic roots, as juxtaposed to the Hellenic modality of
the spirit: a contrast between the profoundly diff erent spiritualities
identifi ed through the terms bhakti and jnani.
Chapter Five reconsiders the Enlightenment, not as the triumph
of rationalism, but as the re-assertion of a non-devotional world-
curious spirituality: the atheist Enlightenment thinker being the
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8 Secularism
exception, not the rule. It is shown that the ‘death of God’ was not
intended by almost any serious Enlightenment thinker, but that they
defended a conception of ‘God’ that was more Hellenic (or jnani)
than Christendom could bear.
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One:
Issues in Secularism and Culture
In this chapter we begin our exploration of the secular mind and
how it has placed itself beyond any discourse of the spirit in
secularism’s overa rching cultural dominance. The word ‘spiritual’ is
broadly rejected by the secular mind, and in secular Western culture,
permitt ed only to poets whose aesthetic vocabulary requires the use
of old-fashioned and vaguely provocative terms. However, at least a
place-holder defi nition of spirituality is required here, so we start by
saying that it is simply to do with a profound connectedness. Crucial
to the understanding of spirituality is the idea that it is multiple, not
one; that there exists spiritual diff erence, spiritual pluralism, a variety
of spiritual impulse. Its detailed articulation is kept for Chapter Two,
and in Chapter Three we will show how it also delineated through
the manifestation of its opposite: a debilitating sense of alienation.
We are particularly interested to show here how contemporary
Western culture refl ects the assumptions, the shibboleths, of secular-
ism. A shibboleth is a culturally received but unexamined assumption
that is both a requirement of membership and outmoded: the group
clings to it for identity but forgets its original meaning. Professor
Mike Tucker of Brighton University puts it well:
ours is the fi rst culture to proclaim with hubristic certainty that
history and politics together constitute the sole ground of our
being, and that any sense of the ‘vertical’ or ‘cosmic’ dimension
in life is but a reactionary remnant from the irrationalities of
pre-Enlightenment thought.1
Tucker is right about politics: it is secularism’s fi rst cultural reality,
and we will show that political thinkers, in particular Marx, are
amongst the prime architects of the secular mind. Marx eff ectively
denied the spiritual or religious interiority of the mind when he said
of the human essence: ‘In its reality it is the ensemble of the social
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