God’s only excuse - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 8: People like Us
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Robyn Williams
THE REALLY INTERESTING QUESTION IS WHETHER THE CONTRARY APPLIES: will stable, flourishing societies be less vulnerable? There are a few clues. Wars between secular democracies are unknown. Democracies require that we regularly hand over power to them, on the basis, of course, that they will regularly give it back. Democracies, even American ones, also try to keep religion in the cloister. They also welcome outsiders ("Give me your tired, your poor, your huddling masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore"... ) – though not as often as they might. Healthy societies, like forests, benefit from biodiversity.
To give a contemporary example from my own experience. When, in 1996, the Howard Government looked at the ABC it saw an institution it didn't like. It was, in the words of one Tory, "our enemies talking to our friends".
A somewhat unsubtle way to tackle this difficulty was to appoint a chum of the prime minister, Donald McDonald, as chairman of the corporation. Then, in 2000, to place another member of the Party, Jonathan Shier (though he was once a leader of the Young Liberals in Victoria, he claimed to be lapsed at the time of his appointment) as managing director. His riding instructions, from the PM's office, I'm told by a senior Liberal Party member, were to "change the culture at the ABC".
Now this is perfectly normal power politics and unsurprising after 13 years on the sidelines during which the conservatives became understandably cross about a number of ABC activities. It is what Shier did to change "the culture" that some of us found shocking.
He sacked the ABC senior managers. All of them. He committed executive cleansing. He then set out to do the same with middle management. Stalin's friend Lavrentii Beria would have been proud. The aim, remember, was not to replace a poor leadership with a better one. It was to transform the culture of an institution.
Did it work? Not at all. The culture was unchanged. It simply became more impoverished and resentful. The mission to change them (ABC pinkoes) into us (right-minded professionals) failed for the same reason that the British failed to quash the Irish rebels and the Americans are failing in Iraq. You cannot impose a culture from above. Not for long.
How do you change culture? At the ABC you could do so by hiring bright kids. This is also cheaper (Shier wasted $37 million in his cavalier adventure) and far more insidious. Advertise jobs for young Australians, appoint the best and they automatically (unless you bind and gag them) trash old-fashioned ideas and biases before you can say the word "elite". It's human biodiversity. But replace one lot of suits with another lot and what are you left with? Suits!
"Hire the best people you can find and let them do what they want." That wasn't the New Age rant of a pony-tailed management guru from Byron Bay. That was Bill Gates.
ORGANISED RELIGION RELIES ON AUTHORITY IN THE SAME WAY as Jonathan Shier relied on correct-line suits. It is a top-down approach. But it is also an enormously sophisticated psychological exercise, as anthropologist Robin Dunbar has pointed out in his latest book, The Human Story (Faber and Faber, 2004). It is at the fifth, or highest level, of cognition, of intention. After an ability to recognise ourselves, others and others playing tricks on us, all within the capacities of clever animals such as apes and dogs, we humans add our own unique bit of brain power: we can imagine gods. Other worlds. (This may also explain how we can take the other-worldly nature of modern motivational management seriously). This capacity for spiritual belief has served us well in history as a unifying force – though at some considerable cost.
The natural size of us, of our intimate community, according to Dunbar, is 150. Beyond that number we find it hard to cope socially. Your 150 may include several at the end of intercontinental phone lines or email, but it is your "village" – the size of close society your brain capacity is equipped to deal with. Dunbar claims to be able to predict the size of an animal's likely social group from the depth of its cerebral cortex.
Greater populations require a means of social cohesion beyond the capacities we were born with. This could be shared experience of television, music, literature, fashion – what Richard Dawkins calls the "extended phenotype". This is extra-somatic inheritance – it evolves outside our bodies. Religion, with its initially homely gods and limited kit back in the forest, also evolved. Randy gods with whimsical or capricious habits became one mysterious all-powerful god. Anachronisms of faith were quietly abandoned as they became more embarrassing and manifestly absurd. Most modern priests would have been burned as heretics only a few hundred years ago. Religious infrastructure also evolved, sometimes to disastrous levels, as in Easter Island and Central America. And Rome. Church unified us in our separate societies. Sometimes too much. In hard times, those not recognised as Party, the infidels, had to go. Crusades, inquisitions, pogroms, cleansings were required.
Let me ask the question in a purely evolutionary way, as Wrangham might, about demonic males wearing surplices. Could institutional religion have outlived its usefulness? Are the men in beards too disruptive? (I am not against beards, nor religion, in certain circumstances. Beards belong in trad jazz bands, real ale pubs and anywhere with anoraks. Religion, as practised personally and without an inclination to rule the world, is fine, too.) I do believe, the answer is yes in both instances.
Religion has become catastrophically divisive. It magnifies us and them in the same way party did. It demands credulousness and obedience. It is the unforgiving force, with its visions of Armageddon, that drove Ronald Reagan against the Evil Empire. It is the force, allied with an apocalyptic fundamentalist-view history, that drives his successor, George W. Bush, against an "axis of evil". It is the fanatical force that makes the Islamic army in Iraq condemn the "farce of democracy and elections" by calling polling booths "centres of atheism".
I WONDER WHETHER MY FATHER, WHO DIED MORE THAN 40 YEARS AGO, would have recognised these new antagonisms. He spent his last years muttering against the Stalinists yet loyally, vainly, trying to sell their mouthpiece Soviet Weekly on freezing London street corners. The cold and humiliation killed him.
My last row with him, before his six-foot miner's frame collapsed and his George Orwell features eroded forever, was about The Bomb. Back then, I was marching in those first anti-nuclear protests alongside jolly bearded jazzmen and gaunt friendly vicars, frisky girls-who-would and young men who couldn't believe their luck. The all-inclusive melting pot of the sixties was just beginning.
My father seemed to approve of my sudden adolescent politicisation. After all, red flags were plainly seen among the crow's foot peace symbols and the odd Christian cross. But there was a catch. The Soviet bomb, he insisted, was necessary. So was its relentless testing. It was our bomb. Not theirs. Therefore all right.
He argued like a barrack-room lawyer. Like a contorted priest. That was another good Party word. Argue. Never give an inch. No sophistry is too blatant – when repeated forever.
Our last physical fight wasn't about politics but about family. I tried to stop him beating my small brother. My father, Gwynfor Williams, born in 1905, was raised in the shadow of the Welsh Chapel with its unforgiving moral instruction and harsh discipline. His atheism did not erase its Dickensian mores. Gwyn used fists or sticks to keep us in line. It was for our own good. The tyrant's discipline usually is.
He hit my brother. I told him to stop. He turned on me, now a fit rugby-playing youth of some stature. What do you do as a self-styled pacifist disarmer when a self-righteous demonic Party pugilist starts throwing punches? I lifted my arms above my head and allowed him to pummel my flexed abdomen until he gave up, exhausted. He never attacked us again.
Gwyn didn't give up the promised (Party) land. He argued on his deathbed, physically shrunk and stick-like, for "the peoples' democracies". He didn't return, even when in agony, to the comforts of the chapel of his youth. But I did see him sometimes, at ceremonies where believers prayed, courteously mouthing along with the Lord's Prayer. "It's an affirmation of a just, equal society, a socialist tomorrow," he'd say, as if the prayer were a version of the Communist Manifesto of 1848.
"Kingdom come ... on earth as it is in Heaven" was, in real life, translated by Soviet diktat into the Five Year Plan. It didn't work. It is in the ash can of history. As for God, He is becoming the last refuge of the fanatic. Poor God. He was meant to keep us cosy. Is it time He shaved off his beard?
Yes! For two reasons. The first is innovation. Throughout history the main mother of invention has been not a five-year plan but disaster and war. Conflict and catastrophe. The War, as my parents called it, was the seedbed of the modern world: it gave us antibiotics, rockets to the moon, computing, satellites, radar and radio astronomy. Disasters, such as the black death, led to printing, modern science and the Renaissance. Human conflict, in a startling way, was creative. In between nothing much happened.
Now that we cover the earth as a species, we cannot possibly rely on such a disruptive mechanism for creativity any longer. The costs are too gigantic. We must find another driver of innovation. If it is not to be us against them it will have to be something to unite us with our neighbours, the rest of humankind. While Wrangham points to the demonic nature of some animals in some conditions, others, such as Professor Lynn Margulis, show that much of biology also survives by co-operation. Margulis is the co-inventor, with Jim Lovelock, of the Gaia Hypothesis, which sees our planet as a kind of living organism, responding in a unified way to circumstance. She is also famous, and doesn't mind its being mentioned, as Carl Sagan's first wife. She is adamant that altruism is not the last refuge of sentiment but a strong force in nature.
Which brings me to the second reason. We now know that God did not unleash the tsunamis because he was upset. They were unleashed by geology. Nor did God go blind at Auschwitz, Beslan or on Boxing Day 2004. He wasn't there. As Sartre said, quoting Stendhal: "God's only excuse is – He doesn't exist." Now, at last, we are unified by a contemplation of horror and loss. Differences between them and us become ultimately trivial in the wider context we modern humans, alone, can recognise. Mere veneer. The badges of ideology and dogma fade as we contemplate sheer, enormous needs of humanity. That is the future. The alternative is catastrophe.
Perhaps, once you dispense with Party, that's what my poor parents were on about after all. ♦