Debate: the need to believe

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Rationalists seem to believe that religion should be replaceable by something other than a religion. Their proposition has been countered by the argument of obligatory, indeed, automatic replacement, according to which anything that destroys religion, if it is not itself already a religion, is doomed to become one anyway.

That argument is used by both believers and unbelievers, with the difference that the believers tend to use it, at least indirectly, as an argument in favour of their religion, and the nonbelievers as an argument for the overall inevitability of religion. Jacques Ellul, affirming that “one has to believe in one’s group, and to do so gives life some meaning and stability” [1], therefore concluded that religion is indestructible.

Régis Debray holds that it is impossible to end all religious belief [2]. One may, on reaching that conclusion, either rejoice in its implications or pretend to deplore the feebleness and irrationality of the human mind that usually prefers illusion to truth.

For Debray, “the mistake is to ignore the fact that one destroys only what one replaces, a phrase of Danton’s . . . Consider the sacramental substitutions of the recent past: the sacredness of the King transferred to the Fatherland in the Republican prayer book; that of the Church to the Party in the catechism of social progress. Far from disappearing, the . . . substitute plays its cruel tricks in the four corners of the earth, and here too, with our sects, our astrologies and our parasciences” [3].

To justify religious belief as Ellul does, on the grounds that we always need beliefs (an indisputable truth) and that religious belief is only one form among others, is not a serious argument. Religion is enough of a specific form of belief to pose special problems. That we cannot do without beliefs does not validate religious belief, which may prove completely groundless (though it is fortunately optional). The replacement argument has several weaknesses; it moves too quickly from fact to law. Rationalists such as Jean Bricmont maintain that because things have happened in a certain way does not entitle us to conclude that they could never happen otherwise.

Secularity versus secularism

It would be possible for a theory and practice of secularity to succeed in remaining fundamentally distinct from secularism (if secularism is understood as a religion that is neither more or less respectable than the others and likely to commit just the same abuses of power). Obviously history and examples from history, however many and significant, are not enough to explain the failure of a substitute for religion through internal necessity or some fatality that condemns us to remain religious.

One would also need to postulate essential truths that can be deduced from disciplines such as sociology and anthropology (which would therefore be useful for once) or, better still, from logic itself, as Debray discovered.

Repeating ad nauseam that there have been secular religions even more oppressive and murderous than the traditional religions they sought to replace can never be an argument in favour of religion itself. The only conclusion which a rationalist such as Bertrand Russell drew from that argument was that if the human race was to have a chance of avoiding the worst, it was essential that it should prove capable of learning to think in a truly non-religious manner.

The automatic replacement argument does not answer the main question: what exactly do we need as a religion and might there not be options that would be preferable for objective reasons? If we grant, and we can do so easily, that a religion with the limits of reason alone (in a sense similar to that meant by Immanuel Kant) would still be a religion, may there not be serious intellectual, moral and political grounds for preferring such a religion to one that ignores those limits?

Return to a lost belief?

The historical fact that religion has not withered away as predicted and even seems to be enjoying a renaissance (Debray said that this is the main peculiarity that needs to be explained, and rationalists cannot account for it) does not prove that its withering away would not constitute real progress. Must we believe that religions which were consciously or unconsciously substituted for traditional religions failed because they were not really religions, or anyway were not religious enough to compete seriously with the original? If society needs to return to a lost belief, what belief should it try to retrieve?

Even if Debray and other philosophers of religion make no great distinctions, belief is not the same thing as belief in the need to believe. What interests Debray is not truth and error (in the sense in which those such as Jean Bricmont use the terms) “but illusion — the belief one cannot do without because it responds to our most irrepressible biological or existential desires”. But Debray still has to tell us whether all the illusions that are supposed to fulfil what he would call the God function — the cult of the Christian God or of Republican values — must be considered as equivalent and interchangeable, although some seem to require much smaller sacrifices of reason and intellect and entail lesser direct or collateral dangers.

If what counts for Debray is indeed a matter of illusion, he should not feel entitled to inflict his lesson in brutal realism on naive rationalists, who believe things happen everywhere just as they do in their tiny provincial backwater: “Anyone who travels in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, and in the United States too — beyond the little fairyland of the so-called freethinkers, who are 200 years behind the times — knows that our view of things is, to say the least, parochial.”

Bricmont is understandably surprised that someone so concerned to portray himself as a defender of reason and rationalism can show so little gratitude, in Debray’s words, to “the sceptics, rationalists and scientists who took enormous risks in their time so that we today could live free from religious beliefs”.

Bricmont might have added that some of what he calls our “great forebears”, freethinkers of the most genuine and lucid variety, were not content to assert that religion is an illusion. They were also capable of understanding that illusion is not uniformly and invariably harmful but may also be useful, and is often more useful than the truth. Their estimate of humanity’s chances of being able to manage without illusion one day was not necessarily more naive or more romantic than Debray’s view, just less ambiguous and conciliatory.

Back or before?

I don’t think that that is the main problem with Debray’s attitude. When Bricmont put it to Debray that in the US “the weakness of a secular anti-religious tradition (such as existed in France in the bourgeoisie and the workers’ movement) accounts for the fact that the country is so backward from the religious point of view,” Debray immediately retorted: “That assumes a linear development that was progressive in 1880. You forget that protestant fundamentalism may lie before us.”

What did Debray mean by “before”? That what is happening now in the US could be what is in store for us in Europe, to our misfortune? Or that the US is ahead and we lag behind? That something lies before us chronologically does not prevent it from being a regression. But Debray thought the respective situations of the US and Europe showed that the effects of secularisation had not been uniformly positive since they seemed to have led to a loss of power and influence for Europe.

It has been worrying to see Debray contrast the “North Americans’ theological dynamism on the world stage” with the impotence to which “our tame agnosticism, our cautious scepticism” seems to condemn us in Europe. If that is to be understood as an argument in favour of religion, it is surprising to say the least. Let us accept for a moment that the much greater hold of religious belief on individual minds and on society as a whole may help boost the self-confidence of the inhabitants of the New World, and thus help the US to increase its influence and to establish itself as an unrivalled superpower, in contrast to what Debray called “the amiable bowing out of history” that is characteristic of contemporary Europe.

What conclusion can someone who reasons with reference to demands for justice and morality draw from the limited success of an imperial great power whose actions are inspired by the implicitly or explicitly religious conviction that it represents an “empire of good” engaged in a struggle with the “empire of evil”? Political arguments in favour of religion may appeal to politicians, and philosophers would do well to leave them to it, but they will not shake the convictions of unbelievers.

Technology and God

If you follow Debray’s reasoning, the US, the greatest world power, combines a highly developed and sophisticated technology with a national and international policy based on the holy scriptures. If this combination, at which rationalist Europe and its retarded, simple-minded freethinkers turn up their noses, is indeed what has made it so powerful, does that prove that it is also the most just and desirable combination on ethical grounds?

Debray might take shelter, with apparent justification, behind the authority of Émile Durkheim, from whom his idea of the sacred is mostly derived. According to Durkheim, “sacred things should not be taken to mean simply those personal beings we call gods or spirits. A rock, a tree, a spring, a stone, a piece of wood, a house, in other words anything at all, can be sacred” [4]. In the same way that it sanctifies men, society may also sanctify ideas and principles.

From Durkheim’s point of view, there is no reason why the principle of free enquiry should not be designated as sacred. “Even today,” Durkheim admitted, “with all the freedom we grant each other, it would be sacrilege for a man to deny progress and flout the humanistic ideal to which modern societies are attached. At the very least there is a principle that even peoples most enamoured of free enquiry tend to place above discussion and to regard as untouchable, or sacred: that is the principle of free enquiry”.

This does not mean that the choice of what is designated and treated, implicitly or explicitly, as sacred must be considered arbitrary or irrational. There can be objective grounds for regarding a society that confers a sacred character on the principle of free enquiry as distinctly preferable to one that confers that status on the dogmas of a state religion.

It is also from Durkheim that Debray derived his tendency to designate as “religious” all representations and events related to maintaining and strengthening the social bond. Durkheim told us that the real function of religion was not to increase our knowledge but to render us capable of action, to help us live: “The worshipper who has communed with his god is not only a man who sees new truths that the unbeliever does not know; he is a man who is capable of more. He feels more strength in himself, either to cope with the difficulties of existence or to defeat them. He is raised above human miseries because he is raised above his condition as man.”

‘The tree is known by its fruit’

Durkheim quoted William James and invoked, like James, the principle that “the tree is known by its fruit”. If one accepts the idea that the purpose of belief is not to know more but to be capable of more, one may be led logically, as is Debray sometimes, to regard as enviable the apparent success of such a society as the US, which seems able to agree to know less (to remain religious, in the most traditional and sometimes archaic sense of the word) in order to be capable of more.

Durkheim readily accepted that social cohesion and harmony could be engendered only by religion of a certain kind. But that proposition (which some have recently rediscovered and quoted as a fundamental truth) Durkheim considered merely a statement of the obvious: “Once a goal is pursued by a whole people, it acquires, as a result of this unanimous adherence, a sort of moral supremacy which raises it far above private goals and thereby gives it a religious character. . . it is clear that a society cannot hold together unless there exists among its members a certain intellectual and moral community. However, if it is true that religion is, in a sense, indispensable, it is no less certain that religions change, that yesterday’s religion could not be that of tomorrow. Thus, what we need to know is what the religion of today should be” [5].

In Durkheim’s view, there was no doubt about the answer: “All the evidence points to the conclusion that the only possible candidate is this religion of humanity; its rational expression is an individualist morality” [6]. But the fact that a “religion of humanity” is necessary does not mean that other religions should be rehabilitated by association with it. The role of the religion of humanity, according to Durkheim, is to make yesterday’s religions redundant. Calling it a “religion” does not imply that it can be considered as just one among other, equally possible and respectable, religions.

Durkheim’s authority cannot be invoked in support of the proposition that we need a secular religion, the religion of humanity, to ensure the protection of human rights, and, at the same time, a religion much closer to the great historical religions to resolve the problem of social unity and stability.

In Durkheim’s formulation, religious forces are moral forces whose authority “is only one aspect of the moral ascendancy society exercises on its members”. The individual, without realising it, venerates the power and sovereignty of society via the divinity. What happens when the moral ascendancy which society exercises over its members diminishes to the point where the group seems threatened with dissolution? (Some fear that, given the total triumph of individualism, that may now be the case in modern democracies.)

Why older gods haven’t died

The solution can lie only in society’s ability to change and reorganise itself so as to regain sufficient authority and prestige, and not in any artificial attempt to reintroduce religion, in the usual meaning of the word, into institutions, behaviour and customs in the hope of recreating or strengthening the social bond. To believe the contrary would be to take the effect for the cause and the reflection for the original, since the force which the individual feels to be at work in religious experience is only an expression of the power that society exerts on him.

Debray was not wrong when he thought that there was a real problem in the fact that some of the oldest gods are not dying but currently enjoying a revival. The explanation may be much more mundane than he imagines: much of it us results from the well-known phenomenon of historical amnesia, which leads us to return to the comfortable and reassuring good old remedies after the failure of a promising new departure. We carry on as if they had not already been tried and proved distinctly unsuccessful.

If, as many people seem to believe at the moment, society is no longer able to compete with God, that does not prove that God (who was assumed to be dead) is once again alive and well. Instead it conveys the feeling of social disintegration from which some members of society suffer, especially the most disadvantaged; it shows you how much current society lacks in order to fulfil its real function as a society, and how much society would have to transform itself to become genuinely competitive again — if you will forgive the expression.

[1] Jacques Ellul, Islam et judéo-christianisme, PUF, Paris, 2004.

[2] Régis Debray and Jean Bricmont, A l’ombre des Lumières: Débat entre un philosophe et un scientifique, Odile Jacob, Paris, 2003. More recently, Debray has published Aveuglantes lumières: Journal en clair-obscur, Gallimard, Paris, 2006.

[3] Debray, A l’ombre des Lumières, op cit. All other references to Debray are from this book.

[4] Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), translated by Carol Cosman, OUP, Oxford, 2001. Further references to Durkheim, unless specified, are from this work.

[5] Emile Durkheim, Individualism and the Intellectuals (1898), translation by S and J Lukes in Steven Lukes, “Durkheim’s Individualism and the Intellectuals”, Political Studies, vol XVII, no 1, Oxford, 1969.

[6] Ibid.