Holding Together Without God

There is still a strong idea around that without a belief in god societies will fall apart.  Some of the keenest supporters I know of this idea are themselves atheists.  Although they lack a belief in the supernatural they are sure that belief in god, and religious practices and religious faiths generally, are essential to keeping society in order - at least for people other than those like themselves.

Without any religious belief of their own, they can admire Pope John Paul II as a pillar of consistency in an uncertain age; they can attack as error the reforms of the Second Vatican Council; some of them have doubts about whether the enlightenment should have happened.

One thing to clear up; if we're speaking of god rather than the gods and other spirits we are shortening the story down to the three monotheistic faiths, that is to say the three Judeo-Christian-Islamic faiths, the book-based faiths of what in a more ecumenical age would be described as the spiritual descendants of Abraham.  In its full form this is the world of God, not of the gods, the world of god as divine creator of all things and also of god as divine intervenor, either on direct initiative, or in response to correctly directed prayer, ready to butt in and turn things around.  This confusion of roles involves a series of logical difficulties that, it may be said, have been tested throughout the ages in the sense that they have been, very largely, ignored.

That said, what are some of the questions raised by asking whether a society can hold together without god?

I don't know that there is any order of priority - except one.  And that is that religious fervour can be one of the greatest causes of civil disorder, of tearing societies apart.  For one thing, religions can rise in opposition to a social order.  For another, religions can threaten the social order by their contests with each other.  The religious wars that followed the Reformation in Europe were remarkable for their material destruction and human savagery, and, even if to a lesser degree, religious bigotries - as in Northern Ireland or India - can run as chronic diseases of civil distrust and occasional terror.

More generally than this?  That depends on place and time.  I suppose as good a way as any to start is to look at what religious beliefs and practices can be supposed to do.

• Traditionally they have been cognitive. They have explained natural phenomena, human conduct, everything. They give us a kind of meanings map of existence.
• They have been instrumental.  By prayer, sacrifice and ritual, they have been a way of getting things done by supernatural intervention.
• They have been legislative. Some of them have laid down rules of peaceful behaviour and moral conduct (usually with systems of reward or punishment).
• They have been expressive. They have 'held people together' around symbols and ceremonies.
• And they have often been repositories of faith.

Cognitive

From the late 18^th century onwards god as a supernatural agent has been sometimes abstracted down to a First Cause - a condition that can fall into an extreme and comforting fuzziness for those who want Darwin and god too.  This is not however, in itself, shaking the social order.  For those who want it, it's a compromise.  It means simply that we can go on as we are, accepting a secular view of existence back to the First Cause, and, before that, a feeling of undefined comfort.

There are difficulties, however, with the literalists, fundamentalists and creationists.  If creationism as the basis of a system of knowledge were given a full run that would shatter the social order in a modern industrial state.  It would roll back the whole scientific age, and for that reason it is not going to happen.  As a fantasy, creationism can be taken more seriously than astrology but, apart from its interruption to education programs, because of its own impractibility, it brings its own limits.

Instrumental i.e. getting things done

Getting things done by requesting divine intervention has, in the past, been one of the strongest urges towards the supernatural - not even necessarily connected with faith or moral conduct but sometimes only with the performance of ritual - to the extent that in some tribal practices the places where ritual was performed were allowed to fall into decay while things were going well.  It was only when the help of the gods or whoever was needed  that they were put in order so that tribal members could negotiate with their gods to get whatever it was they wanted.

The god of the spiritual descendants of Abraham is these days responsive to prayer in the three religions devoted to him although in the case of one of them he is also responsive, at appropriate seasons, to the sacrifice of goats.  Does faith in prayer help sustain the social order?

The answer to this would come in two different parts.

One consists of invocations to god on great public events - most notably, success in wars or other slaughters.  On these occasions, god is useful in adding strength to the voices that call for victory on one's own side and proclaim the justice of one's own cause.  This kind of request for help can help bind people together, but there is plenty of evidence that secular rhetoric is also available for this purpose.  Relief from droughts and other pestilences are also occasions for calls for divine help and may help hold people together.  All one can say here is our faith in scientific improvement and improvement in management techniques may also provide hope for the future in troubled times.

The other kind of prayer - private prayer for private purposes - undoubtedly provides private reflection and solace and that in turn may help maintain public peace.  However, at least in the more prosperous societies, in this function god may now be in the process of being supplanted by stress clinics and other agencies.

Legislative

Laying down rules for peaceful behaviour and moral conduct, with systems of rewards and punishment, is usually administered by god in terms of the fears and hopes of an imagined hereafter. In terms of punishments the criminal law system can usually do a more immediate and effective job but in turning away from God and turning in on our own liberal-democratic potential we can reach possibilities of holding together that are both more complex than the simplicities of what God has to offer, and, by relying on human potential, more fundamental.

Here we get to the heart of 'holding together'.  A society can be 'held together' ('held down' is a better phrase) by physical force - killings, floggings, imprisonments; it can also be held down by social force - arbitrariness, prejudice, discrimination, enforced conformity.  And economic hopes and fears can keep us in order.  So can restraint among the main political parties in exploiting race or ethnic or regional or class or other prejudice, just as exploitation of distrust and hatred by politicians can split us apart.  But what can also assist social concord is the way in which, in a civil society, we can get on with things in our own different ways.  So can civil trust.  I'll now run over how I would put these two alternatives to divine intervention.

Civil society', a phrase popularised by an 18^th century Scottish Enlightenment professor, had a big run in the nineteenth century, then it was almost forgotten until it enjoyed a revival in the 1980s, at first in the disintegrating Communist countries, where dissidents wanted to end the intrusion of the Communist Party into all social activities and most personal activities as well.  From there it spread back into the west.  You all know the rest. It means that a large part of what goes on in a country is handled by citizens themselves. ('Some of the citizens' would be more accurate.)

However since big business and its satellites are the other dominating force in a country like Australia, 'civil society' might be more usefully thought of as those activities in a society that are not dominated by big business and the state.  Some of it is the world of many large non-business and non-government organisations: all these organisations are oligarchic but, in offsetting big government and big business, they are essential to general liberal-social-democratic health, and their representatives, if they push hard enough, can be heard, and sometimes get things done.  But there are thousands of other groups - community centres, cultural and sporting clubs, schools, special issue groups, voluntary agencies, family and friendship networks, etc and 'linking networks' of intellectuals and activists - in which Australians get on with their own affairs and learn the virtues and efficiencies of co-operation and of doing things among themselves.  In Australia, we can, if we wish, see this going back to the days when the convicts began to negotiate what we would now call 'their own space'.  Talkative groups getting on with their business can be much closer to Athenian democracy than parliamentary government.  Just as true social harmony can be founded only on tolerance of special interests, these groups, even when hot in dispute, are an essential to a resilient social harmony.  One of the most fruitful parts of our British folk heritage in the 19th century was the lower middle class and working class idea of 'mutuality' in collective action.  If only we could have a revival!

An interesting new idea that has support in some community cultural development and local government activities  has been suggested by Jon Hawkes in his The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability; it's the idea that in local government affairs the 'triple bottom line' of sustainability -of economic, environmental and social sustainability - should be extended to include cultural sustainability.  This means taking into account the variety of people's existing ways of life and their aspirations.  It means taking into account  their perceptions of the people and groups who play a part in their lives, their opportunities for sociability and dialogue, their wishes, if any, to extend those opportunities and the physical facilities there are for coming together - for dialogue and production, as well as entertainment, recreation, conviviality.  It can also involve consideration of the opportunities they have for being citizens.  Not necessarily as 'joiners', and certainly not simply as people who fill in boxes on ballot papers at election time, but as people who are ready to talk things out.

The second key phrase, 'civil trust', also provides an important underpinning.  In his Between Fear and Hope, Martin Krygier says, in effect, that as a way of helping to explain how a society holds together, 'civil trust' can be more effective than warm feelings. (Warm feelings can lead to hot tempers.) He sees it as 'enabling smooth, routine, secure relationships between members of different communities'. It is not a sense of common belonging.  It assumes differences. It is 'a particular sort of trust between citizens' who may be different from each other.  It 'does not require love, nor even necessarily friendship, but it does require the ability, routinely and undramatically, to make presumptions of confidence and reliability about people one doesn't know too well' (or, one might add, about people one doesn't know at all, or people one dislikes).  Governments can imperil civil trust through incompetence.  They can also threaten civil trust by overplaying divisive politics - for example by deriding certain groups as 'minorities'.  But civil trust can also be endangered by the eruptions of unexplained economic change, and that has happened all over the place - because of the inability of so many of our leaders to talk plain English and think human. The politicians talk 'community', but they don't talk about the tearing apart of some of the most significant 'communities' - in the restructuring and down-sizing of many of the communities of the work place.  Nor do they recognise the effects of the cultural revolutions of the ethic of 'the consumer society'.

We do have, of course, the common 'community' offered by the mass culture industries.  I haven't said 'popular culture'.  (That's a term best saved for the repertoires of folk activities that originate among 'the people'.)  Most of what Australians read or look at or listen to are products of the centralised production of cultural products and services at all kinds of levels, with, almost universal reach, and low levels of participation (except for the decisive involvement in which people can be engaged, or critical, in what they look at, or read, or hear).

What mass culture industries offer is essential to the civic processes of citizens gate-crashing agendas, protesting,  working things out in a kind of 'social yeast' of their own - but mass culture industries can also provide limiting and vicarious ideas of a single 'community' in the Australian drama they put on in television and film and in the theatre, in their news presentations and comments in print and broadcasting, in advertisements and in the general showbiz range of the shopping experience, in Australian documentary and lifestyle presentations, both print and broadcasting, in concerts and other shows, and in Australian books, videos and CDs.  These make the mass culture industries the main arena for presenting public examples of 'what it means to be Australian'.  They provide a series of demonstrations (some of them in conflict) about some of what goes on here.

But Australia is not a community. It is a pluralist society.  The attempt to speak of everyone in Australia as  'the community' is to deny, amongst many other things, the differences of place.  When we think of 'being Australian' we should consider how different kinds of 'Australia' are projected in general 'feel' according to whether we live in Hobart or Broome, Cairns or Bunbury, Adelaide or Perth.  Or to what extent we make up our 'Australia' from our own experience of neighbourhood, workplace and other small 'communities'.  More generally, to lump Australians into the one 'community' denies the democratic, pluralist, tolerant, liberal ideal of Australia as a myriad of overlapping communities, with people moving between them as they follow their own ways (and perhaps become somewhat different people as they move from one to the other).

Expressive

Back to the functions of religion.  The fourth and second last function I suggested was that religions are expressive.  They have 'held people together' around symbols and ceremonies.  Well they're not alone in that.  The symbols and ceremonies  of shopping  centres are also declarations of common meaning.  As are the great festivals of organised sport. Or of Anzac Day.  Or of Election Day, with its rituals of marking pieces of paper and its uniting myth that what is happening is that the government is being 'chosen by the people' Big and small, the lists can go on for a long time.  What is odd about Australia is the paucity of public declarations of  civic value.  What Australians hold in common  is not some kind of communal ethnic cosiness - the threadbare illusion that there is an Australian 'national identity' proclaimed by Australians waving their Akubra hats.  What Australians hold in common is not, in the prime minister's words during the 2001 centennial celebrations, 'a gift of the air we breathe ... a gift of the land we share...'  It is not an air-and-soil achievement; it is a human achievement.  It is Australia's comparative success as a liberal democratic state with a developed civil society in which the citizenship oath is:

In other words, a civic definition of Australia, not an ethnic definition, even less a soil-and-air definition.

Even the Australian Republican Movement can't come up with inspiring language of an Australian civic identity. On Queen's Birthday last year a piece of impertinence came from six people I shall call the Poets of the Preamble when the ARM released six proposed preambles to our Constitution.

As it happened they weren't preambles.  They were prose poems and they came in two flavours. One was banal plain The other was banal purple. (As in: 'We pledge our allegiance to the land, the sea, the sky'. This is the soil-and-air plus water definition of Australians.) None of the preambles were related to the kind of words appropriate to a constitution - which is a document laying down some ground rules for political existence.  They were intended (I'm quoting) 'to tell us the story of who we are'. Just imagine it.  There's the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia up there in all its glory and it's going to tell its citizens who they are. It is the citizens who will say who they are, speaking in many voices.

Instead of the pantheism of a 'national character' founded in soil and air and water we should have a Constitution which declares that Australia is an independent, sovereign nation in which all public power comes from the people, as expressed in elections and referendums.  Our Constitution should be turned into a document of openness, accessibility and shared discourse expressed in the language of common citizenship. Something that could be taught in schools and quoted on civic occasions. And the main role of a president would be to symbolise this power.

There has developed a minor habit of speaking of Australia as a 'Judeo-Christian' country. Australia is not a Judeo-Christian country. In Max Weber's terms it is a legal-rational state in which authority comes not from God or King but on the acceptance of rational rules and procedures as the basis for authority.  This provides a basis for developing an explicit civic faith in Australia - a faith based on maintaining the rule of law and equality under the law , on strengthening Australia as a liberal electoral democracy based on universal adult suffrage and on freedom of speech and opinions and on upholding the ideal of Australia as a fair and tolerant society concerned with developing Australia as a society devoted to the welfare of its people.

This has obviously strayed into the fifth and last field of what religious beliefs and practices are supposed to do -they should provide repositories of faith.  I think one must recognise here that everyone has faiths of some kind - without them we can't think or act. And faiths are in no way exclusive to religion.  The exclusive attribute of religion is not faith but belief in the supernatural.  One might add that some of humanity's most evil acts are as likely to be committed by people of religious belief as by those who aren't.

The faith we might call on here is faith to see our future in terms of our own humanity and its potential ... Why not affirm more strongly our common membership of the human species and proclaim as a transcendent ideal the development of the human potential, whether individually or communally?... Why not recognise the human capacity for diversity? ... Why not see doctrines of tolerance and cooperation as ideal social forms?  And why not give secular meanings to good and evil? It is idiotic to be utterly inhibited by fear of being accused of cultural relativism if, for example, one describes the Nazi death camps as 'evil'.  One should always remember that the SS had a strong culture - a culture based on strong community spirit - and its monument is Auschwitz.  And for this we need to face up to the realities of tolerance ... not in the language of respect - how far does one go in respecting the SS? But in what I have described as reciprocal tolerance, a two-way tolerance that should be taught in schools.

To work well, reciprocal tolerance would need everyone (well, almost everyone) to accept it, to see it as a universal practice -with no compromise other than accepting the rules of tolerance itself.  Plus three extra restraints.  The tolerant should be expected to be intolerant of intolerance.  They are not expected to think one belief is as good as another. And they should not make the error of confusing tolerance with indifference.

In speaking of reciprocal tolerance we mustn't expect too much. Reciprocal tolerance doesn't mean that we should all love each other. It doesn't mean that we should compromise in our beliefs and habits - unless they are intolerant. It means that we should be able to accept non-violent coexistence, living together as citizens on publicly equal terms.  What reciprocal tolerance means is that we accept difference between groups (within the law). We might consider some of their ideas dangerous, but we know they are not criminals.  They may be dismissive of us, but they accept our equal civil status.

Spinoza, the first great begetter of the cause of tolerance said it directly: 'To tolerate a group who follow a system of belief or a way of life is not a question of liking, or approving, or agreeing with them. It is a question of accepting their right to be there'.

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