Posted by:
Inspired Stupidity
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Date: June 20, 2013 05:46AM
Virtually all societies are religious because almost all humans are religiously inclined. Why? Probably a combination of two things. First inherited fear of dangers that are not understood, the way that a rat or a mouse will panic when a shadow crosses overhead. The self-preservation response has been genetically incoded and does not differentiate between a swooping hawk and a pidgeon or pheasant. Humans have the same fear of fires and snakes and spiders; these are short-circuits that make it easier for us to avoid dangers even when we know those dangers are minimal or nonexistent. Second, the limitations of human intellect in the face of complex nature and the demands of human emotion. Put simply, people accept large parts of life on the basis of faith beause that faith answers lots of big questions that people don't want to waste time thinking about.
Nietzsche got this right. In the late 19th century he saw that Christianity had lost any real claim to the European heart and would soon die just as--in his words--the Christian "God is dead." Did he mean that a living God had actually died? No. That Christianity was dead? No, just that it was weak and its God no longer wielded enough power over people's hearts to get them to do what he (or his prophets) wanted. But Nietzsche never said that RELIGION is dead or would die. To the contrary, he wrote that the old God would be replaced by new gods that were arising contemporaneously in Germany and Russia. Which leads to a profound point, Marxism, Nazism, and many other supposedly secular ideologies are actually religions--systems of thought based largely on faith. Nietzsche would say that when people lose faith in their tradotopma; religion, they either 1) redefine social custom and political views to form an ideology that functions the same way as a religion, or 2) in danger of being quickly converted to a new religion.
So how did this play out in the 20th century? World War One did great damage to Christianity in Europe, which was largely displaced by totalitarianism in most countries, nihilism in some countries, etc. This followed Nietzsche's prediction. The Second World war destroyed those ideologies but also ruined the residual Christianities, whose decline has continued ever since. That is why Europe is largely irreligious: none of the Gods had to power to prevent multiple rounds of devestation. God proved that he did not exist or that he did not give a damn about his believers.
Something similar occcurred in Asia. In Japan the two world wars and the depression discredited all the buddhist and shinto religions, leaving only a faith in the state that has eroded deeply. China is even more extreme. There were folk religions before the instability of the 1920s adn 1930s, but these were discredited by the War of Resistance against Japan. The Communists imposed their own religion quite effectively after comming to power in 1949, but then came the Great Leap Forward adn the Cultural Revolution, which undermined faith in communism and the state. The coup de grace came in 1989, when Deng Xiaoping rejected Communist economics and told people that "to get rich is glorious." Since then the vestiges of the old religions, ideologies, and value systems have foundered dramatically; adn all that is left is a society that wants money and power and feels few emotional or moral constraints. NOt healthy.
Islam's a little different because it emerged from the two great wars in a stronger position, with more international respect and more national power. Then came the oil money, which gave them a faith that Allah treasured them. Ill-advised intervention from the US in AFghanistan and elsewhere ahs also given Moslems a chance to throw out infidel westerners, confirming that God blesses them, their lands, and their jihads. I'd guess that a lot of Moslems are now more confident that they hold the heavenly mandate than at any time since the Ottoman Empire.
I'd suggest that US religiosity is closer to Islam if viewed in these sociological terms. Whereas Europeans lost God in the 1910s, 1930s, and 1940s, Americans saw their powers and their values triumphant. It was God's blessing of the United STates with economic power, military power, and visionary leadership that proved the country's superiority and gave it the right to establish moral systems such as Bretton Woods, the World Bank, the IMF, the UN, and the free trade movement. And bolstered by these achievements, religiously confident Americans persisted in their faith much longer than their cohorts in Asia or Europe. Their God was still dominant; their faith still demonstrably powerful; and their principles spread messianically through the new international institutions. That American confidence is clearly starting to change now due to some lost wars, some economic disasters, the failure of Christianity to address the needs of gays and lesbians, and other social exigencies. But our movement towards secularism (or secular religions, ideologies, in Nietzsche's brilliant schema) only began twenty or thirty years ago.
I view Mormons in these terms as well. Mormons were not smart enough to realize that their global preeminence stemmed from the destruction of half the world, Franklin Roosevelt's insistence that the Europeans shift all their gold to the US and buy all theri weapons from the US, and the fact that only one country still had the power in 1945 to dictate the future course of events to others. Unkowingly, Mormonism rose on the back of FDR liberalism adn the political power and economic prosperity that emerged from Roosevelt's world. The stone was rolling forth from the mountain, to be sure, but Mormons didn't notice that it had been shoved by a cynical old atheist in a wheel chair.
Nevertheless Roosevelt's achievements set the stage of several decades of Mormon confidence. Our economy was better than everyone else's, our missionaries were welcome in most countries where people wanted to know why the US was so prosperous. This appeared to be the results of pure religion, with the Mormon God driving things rather than the crippled God in Hyde Park. It has consdquently only been in the last two or three decades, when American power has ebbed in relative terms, that Mormons have gotten to the questioning stage that struck Europe and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s.I think Americans are headed in the same direction as their secular brethren in other rich countries, just after a late start.
The interesting question is whether Nietzsche will now be proved wrong. Will agnostic and athiestic people be strong enough to live without religion or ideology? Or will they gravitate towards pseudo-faiths like Tea Party conservatism, or pro- or anti-European Unity movements, idiological warfare over permanently entrenched high unemployment rates and emerging class structures.
In short, will the secularism that began in Europe and has spread here prove lasting and durable or will some religion or thought process eventually regain its hold over the American, even Morridorian, heart?