Stanley Fish has an interesting blogpost up at the NYT on ten questions about democracy, a subject about which I am fairly opinionated. Not having the time to answer them all (lots of disagreements), I thought I’d address two of them, about women and God.
“Is God democratic?” That one’s easy. God, like Hobbes’ sovereign, requires obedience, and those who worship him must subordinate their personal desires to his will. (Here the Abraham/Isaac story is paradigmatic.) His rule, therefore, is the antithesis of democracy, which elevates individual choice to a position of primacy. That doesn’t mean, however, that God frowns on democratic states or requires a theocratic one or has any political opinions at all. (On the other hand, someone who, like Walt Whitman, believes that God is not a separate being but resides in each of us might conclude that democracy is the deity’s favored form of government.)
Well, it turns out it’s not easy at all, at least if we’re talking (presumably) about the biblical God. Unlike Hobbes’ sovereign, God’s relationship to humans is based on far more than fear, and demands something much more complex than this kind of “simple” obedience. The notion that we as free human beings don’t have obligations to each other, that we don’t have to obey a code of laws, whether they are criminal laws, civil laws, tax codes, etc., makes no sense. Democracies, like any polity, must demand obedience. What sets democracies off from monarchies and other hierarchical orders, is that they work bottom up, through voluntary obedience based on good will and a sense of mutual commitment (covenant/social contract) and not top-down through fear (Hobbes’ Leviathon).
And here, the Abraham/God relationship about Sodom and Gemorrah is paradigmatic: rather than God declaring a principle top down, the reader learns about it as an act of confrontation from bottom up: Abraham challenges him to maintain the principle. “Heaven forbid the judge of all the earth should act unjustly.” As for the Abraham/Isaac paradigm, there are far too many readings to reduce it to this simplistic formula (which is what Augustine did with the story of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil — it’s about disobedience and God is a tyrant).
The demotic reading of the biblical text depicts a God who above all wants human beings to be morally autonomous. Pace Augustine and Calvin, the core of biblical morality lies in free will. Accepting the yoke of the kingdom of heaven means accepting God’s desire that we know the difference between right and wrong, and that we treat each other well. This is why Josephus coined the term “theocracy” as a synonym for democracy (then the equivalent of the Greek isonomia or “equality before the law.” God’s rule meant that all humans were to be treated with the same respect and the same legal rights, that fairness meant mutuality not hierarchy of privilege.
So the paradox, which apparently escapes so many, is that what God apparently wants is voluntary obedience, and the highest form of that obedience comes not — as Macchiavelli and Hobbes would have it, from predictable fear — but from unpredictable love and loyalty. In my reading of the origins of civil society in the West (i.e., in its current form, democracy), the key players were not a small group of intellectuals reading Greek sources (precious few) in praise of democracy. On the contrary, the basic building blocks were those commoners, empowered by vernacular translations of the Bible, who took upon themselves voluntarily the yoke of the kingdom of heaven. They constitute the core citizenry upon which any democratic — i.e., voluntary — polity is built.
There are two monotheistic political formulae:
1) the imperial — One God, one king (ruler), one religion; and
2) the demotic: No king but God; and God is too great for any one religion.
The latter is not only the path to democracy, but the way to deal with to the (inevitable, fruitful) tensions between Judaism, Christianity, Islam and secularism.
So my answer to the question is: Yes. God smiles on democracy. And you don’t need Emersonian transendentalism — which can easily slip over into ego inflation — to elicit that smile. See it on your neighbor.
Why does god need to enter in discussions on these subjects, when they can be much better tackled without it? Why is it necessary to invoke it? Why is there a need to some external force to keep up line, and does a believe in such can be considered moral FREE CHOICE?
Let’s keep politics and morals separate from superstitions.
Comment by fp — October 8, 2007 @ 5:33 pm
fp, you can’t dismiss thousands of years of cultural and moral convictions that as has just been demonstrated by Dr Landes have driven ordinary people to create democracy. Superstition is when you see a black cat crossing the road in front of you and you believe that you’ll have a bad day. Religion is a bit more complicated.
Anyway, I just wanted to say to Dr Landes that his argument really resonates with me especially in light of the fact that I’ve been following Augean Stables for over a year.
Comment by Hettie — October 9, 2007 @ 10:19 am
moral convictions, my ass. the amount of immorality and ammorality in religion is humongous and only by ignoring it can such claims be made.
superstition is believing in supernatural; in that sense a black cat crossing and god are equivalent. that people can believe in the worst types of crap for thousands of years does not make it less crap.
the reality is that religion was invented in times where the human ignorance was almost 100% relative to today. that is the only reason religion was invented and since then an overwhelming majority are indoctrinated with it from childhood (child abuse), or has been imposed on people via the sword.
all you have to do is watch muslim societies, including those so-called moderate; or the vatican or anglican church on how they ignore their own believers being massacred by muslims, but anti-semitically focused on jews; or to observe the Neturei Karta and other fanatics jews to see the “morality” involved.
for good people to do bad things it takes religion.
had it not been for the taming of religion in the west you would have had no democracy today. show me a really democratic muslim nation (and pls don’t tell me indonesia! fact india is democratic, pakistan is not. care to figure out why? even in israel the structure of government allows the religious parties to impose their religion on the secular majority).
and i still ask: if one does the “right” thing out of fear of god, are they being moral or oppressed into it?
Comment by fp — October 9, 2007 @ 11:02 am
fp: i think we’ve hit a nerve here, and i don’t want to prolong this unnecessarily. matters of faith are notoriously touchy. but since your remarks are characteristic of wide range of anti-religious opinion, let me make a few points for you to consider:
1) secular or anti-religious movements like Nazism and communism have killed far more than religious movements in the last 2 centuries; you don’t need religion to turn good people to evil (you sound like a liberal). lots of people are just not capable of resisting their desires no matter how much indulging them harms others.
2) there’s a huge difference between demotic/voluntary religiosity and hierarchical/coercive. don’t lump all religion with theocracy (the only serious variant of islam we have). demotic religiosity flourishes under secular rules — they must make their case by persuasion, not by force. it’s a big mistake to throw the baby out with the bathwater… and unnecessary. if you want to vent about religion, at least pick your target — holy war, inquisition, theocratic coercion.
3) if one does the “right” thing out of fear of the law, are they being moral or oppressed into it? obviously the best outcome is people being good voluntarily (which is the goal of demotic religiosity), but let’s face it, most people will achieve such exceptional levels of integrity only in messianic conditions, so your “moral scruples” here seem strange to say the least. any culture that wants order needs some way to “encourage” people to obey certain laws. the point is to use the least amount of coercion, and limit the laws to the minimal demands. it’s a matter of percentages, and to be honest, many “secular saints” (ie people who don’t need religion to be good) are not that reliable when the crunch comes… look at the appalling record of secular leftist ideologues who think they don’t need god telling them what to do in order to “be good.”
Comment by RL — October 9, 2007 @ 11:27 am
Take this example, of which there are tons in the muslim world:
http://blog.camera.org/archives/2007/10/murder_in_gaza_one_paragraph_i.html
Now, where are those paragons of morality, the christian churches and communities on this? you can hear them all loud and clear if some libel has been staged on the jews. but muslims, sssshhh, ignore it, ignore it.
what about the sexual abuse of children and how the church defended the priests who did it? or try to read this book:
The Vatican Exposed
http://www.amazon.com/Vatican-Exposed-Money-Murder-Mafia/dp/1591020654/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-4851335-2407208?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191715590&sr=8-1
remember pius XI and the nazis?
and you have the nerve to mention morality and religion in the same paragraph?
Comment by fp — October 9, 2007 @ 11:34 am
of course you touched a nerve: when reasonable and educated people like you defend nonsense and superstition, it is really scary.
1. nonsense. they did not murder IN THE NAME OF SECULARISM, but rather in the name of SECULAR RELIGION (socio-economic and political utopias have a degree of religious characteristics about them). religions have, however, killed explicitly in the name of religion.
2. there might be a distinction, but from the perspective of believing in the supernatural it is one without difference. the minute judgment is suspended — which is what faith requires — all bets are off even if the suspender is moral (a) why can’t he be without the notion of god and (b) he puts himself at risk of being abused by others who exploit the suspension. this is in fact how organized religions operate.
3. are you suggesting that because laws involve coercion anyway, we might as well use a god to coerce? if so, you can’t be serious. if a law is immoral, it can be reversed (albeit often difficult and by paying a price). what do you do with an immoral god? and if you can dump it for another, what does this say about a god being moral by definition? after all, as archie bunker said “hey, god makes no mistakes. that’s how he got to be god”.
the main point, however, is that god is a human invention and thus defined and interpreted by humans. so whatever faults human have, so do their gods. which means that they’re redundant, but damagingly so, because they are claimed not to be.
Comment by fp — October 9, 2007 @ 11:53 am
note: it does NOT follow from “not all seculars are moral” that “religion/faith is moral, or more so”.
morality is morality. it CAN be incorporated in religion (and it sometimes is), or in secularism (and it sometimes isn’t).
but to claim that religion is the SOURCE of morals therefore secularism is immoral is pure crap.
Comment by fp — October 9, 2007 @ 12:07 pm
Regarding the morality of secular leftists, I addressed that in the previous message.
If it were true that left to their own devices people chose faith over atheism, you would have a case. But the reality is that a vast majority of the religious are “born into it” and social mechanisms exist to indoctrinate into and impose religion since early age. Furthermore, the less knowledgeable and unable to reason people are (or are kept), the more susceptible they are to superstition. There are exceptions (which also have mundane explanations) but they don’t prove the rule.
Regarding the minimization of coercion by laws you refer to is an illusion: it is achieved via mental coercion. indeed, manipulating people’s minds to control them easier is exactly what religion is all about: easier control. It’s cheaper and easier to coerce minds into obedience than physically.
What this has to do with morality escapes me. In fact, it is usually counter to it.
BTW:
1. CAN an atheist be moral? if it’s possible — obviously, since there ARE such people — where do they take their morals from?
2. was there any morality prior to religion?
Comment by fp — October 9, 2007 @ 1:03 pm
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