What is freedom for?

The best thing I've read about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or rather about what she's saying (this distinction is often missed). It's by someone called Rod Dreher and comes to you courtesy of bellevillenewsdemocrat.com, which I assume would be somewhere west of here. As he points out, the real weakness in her thought is not what she says about Islam, it's what she says about the West.

Hirsi Ali's final tragedy is that what she preaches is leading to the triumph of what she most fears. Having escaped a cruel culture dominated by religion, she understandably despises faith. But religion per se was not what oppressed Hirsi Ali; it was a particular religion, Islam. The militant secularism Hirsi Ali advocates has already created a spiritual vacuum in Europe that Islam is filling...

There is something deeply admirable about this passionate African woman's stirring defense of Western liberties. But the question remains: What is freedom for? It cannot be an end in itself. There must be purpose beyond self-gratification. Europe is proving that materialism - the philosophical basis for the secularism and libertinism that is modern Europe's creed - is not sufficient to sustain civilization.

Limited stories

I'm going to provide links to three articles, all of which are confronting the same issue from the same angle. All three are saying that religion, far from the force for evil that some claim it to be, is the very thing we need most here and now. I would put it in the form of a question, one that I have asked myself (a materialist for almost as long as I can remember) many times: can a secular society built on Christian-inspired ideals survive when it has cast off those ideals?

I have wondered about this for a long time, especially since I recognised that Anglo-Saxon liberalism is not essentially an ideal in itself. It is a negative philosophy, a recognition of the inevitable fallibility of all individuals and of the institutions that they create. Far from asserting the equality of all men and women (which seems to me a metaphysical asssertion), it rather rests on acknowledgement that no-one is, or can be, in a position to claim that anyone else is not equal. We are equal before the law only because we have made it that way; it is neither inevitable or necessary that it be so. As a materialist, I must admit that we exist within an enclosed circle of our own making - we assert democracy, equality and the value of individual life and, because we are powerful, we can maintain and defend that assertion and have done so far.

That enclosed circle is not, in fact, impermeable. It must confront the same challenge that all life faces: change. Now, one of the greatest attributes of this system built on fallibility is that it is able to adapt. Because it is not constructed of Temple marble, but of wood, which is more flexible and can be easily replaced piecemeal. However, despite my own confidence that this is the system best suited to its environment, that doesn't mean it always will be or that there are circumstances that will favour other ways of organising things. There are many who believe that we are faced with these circumstances now.

William Rees-Mogg (like Osama bin Laden and Pope Benedict to name but two others) thinks that the West is spiritually impoverished and lacks the means to extricate itself from its self-made 'poverty' trap. (One of those above believes that this will guarantee him victory in the end.) Larry Siedentop, on the other hand, thinks that Europe has fallen into an unfortunate misunderstanding in opposing its secular civil rights to religion. In fact, that "secularism [is] an embodiment of Christian moral intuitions" and the problem is that Europeans in particular are "out of touch with the Christian roots of their liberalism".

Neil Postman goes via the argument of need. We need a Grand Narrative, one that only a god can provide. We need a story which puts us securely inside something far greater than ourselves, with a beginning, middle and end that includes something of our own will. [You will rebut that just because we need it doesn't mean it's true. Maybe. However, it may mean that it is useful.] But he is not urging any final revelation upon us.

He quotes Galileo

The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.

And Pope John Paul II

Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.

[This is what Benedict was on about in the Regensburg Address.] And then puts out his stall

Science and religion will be hopeful, useful, and life-giving only if we learn to read them with new humility - as tales, as limited human renderings of the Truth. If we continue to read them, either science or Scripture, as giving us Truth direct and final, then all their hope and promise turn to dust. Science read as universal truth, not a human telling, degenerates to technological enslavement and people flee it in despair. Scripture read as universal Truth, not a human telling, degenerates to Inquisition, Jihad, Holocaust, and people flee it in despair. In either case, certainty abolishes hope, and robs us of renewal.

It's worth a few moments' thought.

(The first two via Ninme)

Losing faith in godlessness

I have a strong feeling that, if Europe is to rediscover its confidence and its élan, it will, in part, be through a resurgence of the Catholic church. It will not just be that people flee from relativism towards dogma, but rather that they will accept the framework of an intellectual tradition built on the idea of truth achieved through reason though built on faith. Pope Benedict XVI is the embodiment of this tradition; his Regensburg Address was one fruit of it. His church is the daughter of Greek as much as Hebrew civilisation.

It has another strand, one that has an important political dimension.

"Within this history of mankind which is ours," Ratzinger wrote, "there will never be the absolute, ideal condition." Which more or less means: Salvation is not of this world, let's not fool ourselves, but instead try to live truthfully.

Islam is going to attract a lot of adherents among those who previously were drawn to communism and fascism and their millennial promises. In its more radical versions it, too, imagines a world turned upside down, a revolution that will bring about the triumph of virtue. It imposes a discipline that can shut down doubt and uncertainty. It enables righteousness armoured with victimisation. The Catholic church has always postponed the New Jerusalem indefinitely, thus encouraging both hope and caution, essential political qualities.

It has other weapons in its armoury. According to this article, Benedict is planning to bring back some of the more sensual faith aids.

The dramatization of the sacred - Gregorian chants, billowing incense, ritual formulas murmured in Latin, the whole marvelous mystery play with a soupçon of Dan Brown - is a "unique selling point" on the faith market, and should not be thoughtlessly cast aside.

Post-secular Holland

Fascinating article on the rebirth of Christianity in (are you really surprised?) Holland. The evidence is both anecdotal and statistical, and includes these notable numbers:

[I]n the past decade, Muslim immigration has been overtaken by a larger stream of immigrants, namely Christians from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. An SCP estimate puts the number of Christian immigrants in Holland at around 700,000-- and rising fast. Recent immigration reports suggest that for every new Muslim moving to Holland, there are at least two new Christian immigrants.

The Africans are making a big difference, especially with their own brands of charismatic Christianity. But notably, the one age group whose church attendence is bucking the long-term Dutch trend is the under-30s. Other important factors: Dutch Muslims don't proselytise, but the Christians do; and the rise of one of the classic strategies of renaissance, that of going back to your roots, in this case in the form of Home Churches, in the manner of the first Christians.

I enjoyed Mark Steyn's America Alone, but found his prognostications of demographic doom for Europe a little over-wrought. I couldn't answer them at the time; I had no figures to hand. All I could muster was Chesterton's old nugget that History loves to cheat the prophets. But the figures for Christian immigration are just the sort of factor that will beggar his forecasts. At least, I hope so.

Clippings 3

All three today are from the same source, an article in the New Criterion by Roger Kimball: Raymond Aron & the power of ideas.

"Skepticism is first of all the habit of examining evidence and the capacity for delayed decision. Skepticism is a highly civilized trait, though, when it declines into pyrrhonism*, it is one of which civilizations can die. Where skepticism is strength, pyrrhonism is weakness: for we need not only the strength to defer a decision, but the strength to make one. ["TS Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture]

"Freedom of criticism in the USSR is total." [Jean-Paul Sartre, on returning from Russia, 1954]

What Aron called the “Myth of the Revolution” (like the “Myth of the Left” and the “Myth of the Proletariat”) is so seductive precisely because of its “poetical” charm: it induces the illusion that “all things are possible,” that everything—age-old institutions, the structure of society, even human nature itself—can be utterly transformed in the fiery crucible of revolutionary activity. Combined with the doctrine of historical inevitability — a monstrous idea that Marx took over from Hegel — the Myth of the Revolution is a prescription for totalitarian tyranny.

*Pyrrhonism: Sceptical philosophy which doubts everything

Meaningful inauthenticity

It would be easy to be cynical about what is happening here. Picturesque remains of a bygone age combined with the sentimental illusions evoked by a white wedding. "Who do they think they're kidding?" would be one reaction. "Mostly themselves" would be the automatic reponse.

Maybe. Maybe not. Obviously, none of us can have the slightest idea about the reality of this choice from the point of view of those involved. Without figures to hand, I cannot say how many people go for the picturesque setting to celebrate their wedding. There's a Unitarian chapel in Styal that in Spring and Summer needs a conveyor belt to manage the wedding parties passing through it. The villagers tend to sneer at them but I have some sympathy with folk who really don't have much consumer choice here.

What most of us think we're doing when we get married is very traditional: we're choosing a partner for life, someone that we're going to live with until we live no more. On the scale of the choices we make, not much comes close to that one in its consequences. We reach out for reinforcements, for the warmth of companionship to reassure us that we are not alone. Lots of people help, especially the ones that have known us and will continue to populate our little world. Others' eyes witness what we do and, in some way, guarantee it.

With our friends and family taking the secondary roles in our story, we acknowledge that there wouldn't be a story without them. But there are other narrative threads that must occupy the foreground at times. One of these is generational: the previous generation giving way to the current one just as the current one must one day give way to the next. This is one of those fundamentals that are so easy to forget if we persist in the delusion that 3.5 billion years of evolution are all about us. A wedding taken seriously will make you feel the star of the show, but will also remind you of you place in the scheme of things. And the scheme of things goes way back.

That's one story, but there are others, ones you could identify with culture or tribe and family. A ritual, an agreed and long-lasting set of actions, words and images, perform this function. All of these things are part of the bedrock of the structure you start to build with the wedding; they are a hedge against the uncertainty of the future you are making a claim on.

In the deracinated lives that most of us live, within the most revolutionary culture that has ever existed, we don't have much choice when it comes to long-lived, charged-with-meaning rituals. Intellectually, it is all too easy to undermine them, deconstruct them - you don't even have to understand much about them to do so. What we're less good at is building the bigger story that we can call on and all can make use of. What is left then but to rope in the unthreatening, but reassuring remains of a past that was more proficient in this field?

I took this photo at Fountains Abbey in July. I have no idea who the people are. In the unlikely event that they can be recognised, I hope that they take no offense at my use of them for idle reflections.