What if the Provisional IRA and all other Republican paramilitaries had never fired a single shot, or planted a single bomb? Would the situation for the Catholic community in Ulster be better or worse today? I’m not posing this rhetorically, but as a point of discussion. Many will jump to respond that events such as Bloody Sunday render this game meaningless, worthless. Ulster Catholics would not, could not, and perhaps should not, have simply turned the other cheek. But whatever your take I only ask you to suspend it for a moment. We can be sure at least that this was not a logical impossibility, and not without historical precedent. For better or worse, it is not unknown of for humans to respond to intense violence and oppression with a stoical determination not to respond in kind.
Jumping straight to outcomes then, the important ones would seem to be twofold: death and politics. Assuming an absolute and unconditional commitment to non-violent protest by the entire Catholic community of Ulster, what might have been the outcome in these two areas?
First, deaths. Would there have been fewer casualties in the protestant community, less deaths of British soldiers and mainland British civilians? - undoubtedly. This is the unambiguous good news. No Claudy, La Mon House, or Enniskillen; no Newry or Warrenpoint; no Guildford or Birmingham, or Brighton Grand. All those people alive and intact today, assuming they hadn’t died since in a more peaceful manner. All those tears never shed, and hatreds not fomented.
What about fewer deaths in the Catholic community? This is more contentious. If you hold the ‘cycle of violence’ view then again yes, undoubtedly. Like the Tango, it takes two to create a cycle of violence. Every Catholic killed in a reprisal for an IRA shooting or bombing would presumably still be alive today, or represented by the children or grandchildren they never had. But as we've only asked Republicans to lay down their arms it's harder to gauge. Violence against the civil rights movement cannot be framed as ‘reprisal.’ That was prime-mover violence, original sin, and we have little reason to suppose it would have diminished if the Republican side had remained passive. Indeed the IRA liked to paint itself as the armed protector of the Catholic community. To whatever degree that was true, then perhaps some Catholics lives were in fact saved by the IRAs presence.
What about those killed by British soldiers? Would the British army have been in Ulster in the first place? Legend has it that they were first sent-in to protect the Catholic community. If this is true then it is possible to frame all violence by the British army as a response to Republican violence - the cycle again. It depends how much you believe the British army and British government were there as neutral peacemakers, maintainers of empire, or in cahoots with the loyalists.
Next, politics. For Ulster Catholics, would the political world of 2013 be better/worse/comparable if the IRA had never fired a shot? Would a body comparable to the current Northern Ireland Assembly have arisen without 30 years of bloodshed? Assuming it would have, would the Catholic hand be stronger or weaker on such an assembly? Would the treatment of Catholics as a class in Ulster - housing, education, job opportunity - be better or worse? How would the mutual opinions of a catholic and a protestant stranger differ today, sitting opposite on a Belfast bus? Would there be more or less fear, respect, suspicion?
While we can be sure things would not be the same as they are today, we can be equally sure that they would not be the same as 1969, either. Northern Ireland was not set in aspic, and the Troubles were not conducted in a vacuum. Britain and Ireland sit adjacent to a vibrant continent which itself underwent huge changes over this period - notably the collapse of dictatorships in Spain and Portugal, and the fall of Communism in the East. Much of this was achieved through political pressure, internal and external, rather than bullets and bombs.
And of course there is the EU itself. It’s not beyond possibility that it might have exerted greater pressure on Britain if Britain and the Loyalists had been the only belligerents. With the addition of IRA bombs however, perhaps it was easier for the British government to paint the whole thing as a war on terror - Britain under attack, rather than the rights of Irish nationalists. Could continental Europeans even discern the plight of the Catholic community through the fog of IRA incendiaries? God knows, most mainland Britons couldn't.
I stress again, I am not posing any of this rhetorically. I really haven’t a clue. But it's something that deserves thought. Hopefully Ulster has been through its worst pain and is safely on the other side. But the world is still full of comparable disputes. Anyone considering lending support to one party or another, materially or vocally, might do well to consider Ireland's case before pledging.
At this point one might ask, why the hell should the oppressed be the ones to lay down their arms, rather than the oppressors. I can only suggest, for reasons of pragmatism. The asymmetry of the forces involved in disputes like the Troubles make military victory all but impossible for the weaker side. War proper (though still deeply indecent) is a mutilation contest. The aim is to out-mutilate the opponent - and victory to the last man standing. This necessarily requires a degree of material equality between combatants. Otherwise it's all over before you get a chance to call it war (you have to settle for calling it liberation.)
In situations like the Troubles, on the other hand, the imbalance of power makes this form of victory near-impossible. The IRA was never going to 'take' Belfast like Monty took Alamein. So they chose guerrilla warfare. This is tactically very different. Rather than out-mutilate the opposition to capture the castle, the guerrilla army uses arbitrary small-scale acts of violence in the hope that this will frighten the opposition into vacating the castle voluntarily.
I won't comment on the morality of such tactics, but permit me one observation about their strategic value. Consider that the IRA's explicit war aim was the dissolution of the province and reunification of Ireland. I don't want to rub salt, but this goal is no closer today than it was in 1969. Indeed Sinn Féin now participates in the governance of the very province it was fighting to dissolve. How does that stand-up as a victory for guerrilla warfare? Is there nothing others can learn from this?
Returning to the original question, for Ireland at least, both answers are awful. If we believe that comparable civil-rights could have been secured by the Catholic community without them taking-up arms, then thousands died for nothing. Alternatively, if we believe that these gains could not have been secured without Republican terror then we would have to conclude that intense violence is sometimes the only way for one group of humans to secure basic rights from another - in which case our whole species should hang its head in shame. My personal hope, without much confidence or evidence to support it, is that the first conclusion is true, grim as it is.
Monday 9 December 2013
Thursday 3 October 2013
One person’s base is another’s superstructure
It is a truth universities acknowledge, that academics would be stranded without administrators – well, it’s acknowledged by us administrators at any rate. Of course, academics can reply that without teaching-staff administrators would be equally stuck, perhaps more-so. As education is the end product, it is the teacher who is truly indispensable. While it is possible to deliver teaching without support-staff – say as a freelancer delivering private tuition – it is not possible to administer teaching without any teachers.
Within a large structure like a university, however, it is safe to say that both academics and administrators are essential. Without one the other can’t function, and neither can the institute (– phew!)
This hints at a wider principle, and regular source of confusion: While it is often possible to identify ultimate dependencies, this may not be the best way to comprehend a complex system.
For example, the following three claims seem sound enough: DNA can exist without organic life, but organic life cannot exist without DNA; Brains can exist without intelligence, but intelligence can’t exist without brains; Thought can exist without culture, but culture can’t exist without thought. Each step of the way, we can see the causal arrow pointing firmly in one direction, with the consequence fizzling out as soon as its cause is disconnected, as surely as a TV picture fizzles out when the plug is pulled.
But not so fast; there are more dependencies at play here. While DNA may be essential to life, the profusion of DNA on earth today is itself a product of life. It is living bodies that have borne and protected DNA over the ages, and given it the means to replicate.
Likewise, a human brain will quickly die without the feedback provided by its intelligence. The limited intelligence we all start out with (and often end-up with) is not enough to keep our brains and bodies alive. Other, more intelligent, humans need to be at hand, or drafted-in, to care for us at these times.
And while culture is clearly a product of thought, it also feeds-back into thought. Indeed culture can lie dormant for millennia, without a single oxygenated corpuscle for sustenance. Ancient texts and images can be rediscovered, dusted off, and go on to alter the course of human history. The causal arrow really can point in the other direction.
Speaking of dusty texts, the causal relationship I want to look at here is a political one – the base/superstructure model suggested by Karl Marx. With arguable degrees of metaphor, Marx sketched out a model of society comprising two interrelated layers: An economic base, beneath a social and cultural superstructure. As the ‘building site’ flavour of the model suggests, the continued existence of the superstructure depends on the integrity of the base. If structure is the house then the economy is its foundation. If the foundation caves-in, the house follows.
This principle is clear to see at the most basic level of economics – allocation of food. You can have bread without circuses but you can’t have circuses without bread. However informed your politics, however refined your art, however noble your dreams, all mean nothing without food, without the economic means of staying alive. As both Marxists and Monetarists agree, it’s the economy, stupid. You can’t eat books.
Marx took this relationship and expanded it to describe society as a whole. All of human production – owners, bosses, workers and customers formed the economic base. The rest of society – politics, art, religion, education, entertainment and the military, formed the superstructure. As with the most basic commodity – food – such superstructures depend upon the support of the economic base, rather than the other way round: You can irrigate the Nile Delta without building pyramids, but you can’t build pyramids without irrigating the Nile Delta. You can run Lancashire cotton mills without running day trips to Blackpool, but you can’t run day trips to Blackpool without running Lancashire cotton mills.
These last two points illustrate another deep insight in Marx’s model. Not only does economics support culture, the particular type of economics determines the particular type of culture it can support. If you live in age where the key products are apples, wheat and the occasional hurdy-gurdy, then you will likely spend your evenings eating bread, drinking cider and dancing round the fire. If you live in age where the key products are cars, televisions and computers you will likely spend your leisure-time at the wheel, on the sofa, or immersed in one digital universe or another.
For Marx, the 19th century revolutionary, this all pointed to an interesting conclusion: Ultimate power resided with the workers. Every apparent instrument of power was actually at the mercy of the producing class. Politics and propaganda, church and school, police and army, football and circuses, all fed off the economic base, all were mere superstructure, at the mercy of economics.
With their hands directly on the means of production, only the working classes have the means to pull the plug on the rest of society. Whether workers recognised this power is another matter. The ruling classes of all ages do their best to spread the belief that their rule is true, right and unassailable – even amongst themselves. Maintaining such worldviews has been a key function of superstructure throughout the ages. Call it aristocracy, the divine right of kings, hereditary privilege or racial superiority – it all really boils down to the same thing: One section of humanity persuades another section to do all the nasty backbreaking parts of life, so that the first section can live in luxury.
The extent to which workers might flex this terrible power is another matter again. It holds the potential for wholesale human emancipation, or great mischief, depending on your take. At the micro level, the basic threat to withdraw labour – to strike – remains a priceless bargaining chip, and a major determinant of pay and conditions. At the other end of the scale, a union of unions can lead to a general strike, and bring a whole economy to a halt. ‘Holding the country to ransom’ – as was the shriek throughout the 20th Century.
Rather than the solidity of bricks and mortar, the superstructure starts to look more like a house of cards, built on a rug called the economy. The rug is unmoved by the cards, but one sharp tug can bring the whole house down. We must tread carefully though. As lucid and commonsensical as it might sound, there are good reasons to be cautious before grafting this model onto our own lives. I’d like to identify two areas in which the model can mislead as much as it might illuminate. One is timeless and has dogged Marxism from the start. The other relates to historical changes.
The timeless one can be dealt with quite quickly. The discovery that one factor depends upon another is easily confused with the belief that one factor is caused by the other – shaped, detailed and defined by the other. But this really doesn’t follow. ‘A’ can be dependent on ‘B’ without being caused by ‘B’. Cars run on petrol, and are certainly designed with petrol in mind, but there’s a lot more to cars than petrol.
Similarly, while the social is dependent on the economic, it is not fully described by the economic. Sometimes quite the opposite. Although the nature of a given economic base remains a key influence on the kinds of social structures that can ‘grow’ upon it, there is also feedback in the other direction. Take technology for example. Is that base or superstructure in the first place? The principles behind a given technology constitute knowledge, so presumably superstructure. But such knowledge gives rise to products (base) which modify our way of living (superstructure) which in turn alter consumer demand (base). The process is dialectical, as Marx would have been happy to call it – an on-going inter-modification between base and superstructure.
Failure to grasp this distinction lies at the heart of some of the more vulgar and disastrous readings of Marx. While it is only wise to conclude that it is impossible to build a just and happy society upon a grossly uneven economic base, it is far from wise to assume that enforced equality at the economic base will simply percolate-up through the superstructure, and produce a just and happy society. Indeed, the 20th century was littered with examples of enforced material equality leading to social hell.
One might wonder why this misunderstanding is so hard to shake. Political desperation certainly plays a part – who wouldn’t like a simple answer to the world’s problems? But the fundamental problem is the grain of truth. For the genuinely impoverished, economics really is everything. When you are truly hungry food is all that matters, and at present that describes the situation of one in eight humans. It is easy to see why the global poor, and those who care about the global poor, might be tempted to take that basic truth further, try to map it onto the rest of human society.
In truth however, while food and shelter are necessary for a happy life, they do not guarantee it. The meeting of basic material needs usually just facilitates a different level of misery, uncertainty and powerlessness. Rather than being answered, political questions in fact multiply from that point upwards.
The belief that all social injustice can be reduced to economic injustice is certainly attractive, and politically emboldening. It contains within it the hope that an equitable economic base can automatically give rise to human happiness. But while greater economic equality might be an essential step towards peace on earth it is little more than religious faith to think it will necessarily lead there. As with all articles of faith, the burden of proof lies with the believers.
The second confusion takes a bit more explaining. It relates to historical changes since Marx’s day. Let’s begin though by confirming what hasn’t changed: The majority of human suffering remains a direct consequence of material inequality, born of inequality in the ownership and control of production. Billions of humans still live hand-to-mouth, paid a pittance by corporations who syphon-off the wealth produced for themselves.
Just the same, the superstructure erected on today’s economic base still functions in maintaining, justifying and enforcing this inequality. Humans are still numbed by churches, diverted by sport, infuriated by immigrants, heartened by patriotism and threatened by lunatic foreign powers, not to mention the enemy within. And if we still won’t play quietly there are truncheons, bayonets, daisy-cutters and drones to persuade us. And as ever, the fear that prompts this ideological and physical barrage is the same as in Marx’s day: the recognition that workers have the means to unplug the whole operation – should they choose to.
What has altered sharply however is location. While much of the capital of capitalism is still raised in the west, much of industrial production now takes place in the developing world, notably the Far East. As workers, far fewer westerners have anything to do with actually making things. Aside from food and cleaning products, what else in our supermarkets is produced at home? This change of location gives us several reasons for caution before mapping Marx’s model onto our own lives.
Let’s start with production itself, and a commonplace scenario in our new private sector. Let’s say some British capital finds itself invested in a toy factory in Asia. The investors could be shareholders in an established UK toy company, or shareholders in an otherwise disinterested body such as an investment fund, which itself holds shares in an Asian firm. All being well, the toys produced are then sold at profit, and an enhanced sum is sent back to investors in the UK. Interestingly however, the toys come along too. Both profit and product are imported. The toys are bought by a British retailer, say ASDA, who sell them at some mark-up to members of the British public.
Now, the interesting question is where does the British public get the money to buy the toys? It’s increasingly unlikely that they get it from producing anything as corporeal as toys. More likely than not, they get it from working in ASDA, or some other retail giant.
At last, the title of this essay emerges. Rather than an integrated part of the process of production, our own economy starts to look peripheral. Certainly, from the perspective of a politically savvy Asian factory worker the UK economy must look more like superstructure than base. It’s more like a game of monopoly going on overhead, a circular sloshing of pretend money between friends, all the while supported by the genuine wealth producing economies below.
At first glance this might look like business as usual. International capitalism has always involved a hierarchy of productive process, with those countries higher in the chain making the greater profits. Companies and countries whose production centres on intermediate goods, like raw cotton or coffee beans, tend to get the bum deal. Those who produce finished products, like clothing and freeze-dried coffee, are the ones who do well. But can retail seriously be called ‘finish’ at all? Turning beans into a jar of instant genuinely does add value to the coffee. Putting that jar on a shelf doesn’t add a bean. Any fool can do it.
If this still sounds overstated then we can always test it against the causal premise of Marx’s model – the existence of the superstructure depends on the integrity of the base. On this reading it stands: A general strike in China certainly could bring western capitalism to its knees. A general strike among British retail workers (if we can contain our mirth) would barely register in the Chinese economy. A blip in the demand curve, ironed-out as soon as new outlets are found.
However it’s when we turn to the public sector that the full picture emerges. Let’s return for a moment to the profits from the Asian toy factory, as they flow back into the UK. Some go into the pockets of the investors, but a portion goes to the treasury in the form of tax. Consequently some of this goes to fund our public sector, not least the wages of public sector workers.
Along with retail, our gargantuan public sector is another key source of employment in ‘service economy’ UK. Even more starkly than retail, wealth creation here is all but non-existent. Essential as they are, doctors, nurses, police, fire-fighters, refuse collectors and social workers don’t produce a thing. In fact the whole operation runs at a massive loss. Economically, the kindest thing you can say is they save us money by pre-empting disasters - but that’s a far cry from wealth creation.
Again, from the viewpoint of the Asian factory worker our NHS isn’t an economic entity, it’s pure superstructure. It might not seem this way to a hospital porter, sweating endless hours away on minimum wage. Doubtless the internal feeling is of being a worker, employed by a company called the NHS. As in a factory, both worker and employer wrangle over those timeless issues of pay and conditions. If a compromise cannot be reached there is always the threat of a strike.
But again, we only have to apply the causal premise of Marx’s model to see the true economic relationship here. While it is quite feasible that a general strike in China could bring severe disruption to our NHS, a total walkout of staff at the NHS would have zero effect on the economy of China.
This shift has dire implications for anyone holding out for worker-led liberation in the western world. Our own proletariat (if that is still the right term) no longer do hold the reins of production. Relocation of industry has stripped their power. In terms of pulling the plug (or the rug) on capitalism our own proletariat has been pretty much neutered.
This might sound an odd claim just after a successful bin-strike, but in fact that strike is a clear example of how depoliticised public-sector strikes really are. It’s tempting for leftists to portray such disputes as a traditional class fight between workers and tight-fisted capitalists, but in truth who were the evil paymasters? It was us, the residents, including the bin-men themselves assuming they live in the area they serve. Nice as it would be, we really can’t blame Rothschild and Carnegie for this one. Rather than class conflict, such disputes are better understood as the public desire for the impossible – low levels of council tax and clean streets.
‘Sticking it to the man’ loses its potency when the rebel is at one and the same time ‘the man’. It’s the same story across the public sector. Schools, NHS, policing, roads, local services, we are simultaneously employer, employee and customer. If we seriously believe we aren’t paid enough, we can always pay ourselves more. Threats to suspend health care, education and bin collection are really only threats to ourselves. If we want to roll in our own detritus, it’s really our own business. International capitalism will not weep.
And of course there is more to public sector spending than paying people to work. It also supports those who aren’t working. Here again wealth created overseas must be playing a part in propping things up. It is difficult to imagine how it could be possible for a large section of working-age citizens to spend weekday mornings watching daytime television without financial contributions from more productive nations. Few workers in Bangladesh can indulge this dubious luxury.
Our long-term unemployed would presumably form a major component of a productive working class, were we a more productive nation. But with welfare payments providing a better standard of living than the wages paid in Asian factories, no domestic factory can compete directly with an equivalent in Asia. Who would sign-off to work in a factory for less money than benefits are bringing in – even if such pay rates were legal, given the minimum wage?
As no one outside the crankiest think-tanks would suggest our own unemployed should accept Asian-level factory wages, we are stuck with the situation as it stands. Our best hope is that Asian workers use their new power – good old class struggle – to win themselves better pay and conditions. Aside from the intrinsic justice, this would also inflate the costs of goods from Asia, and make competition from western manufacturers a possibility again. Until then, the outlook is bleak on both continents. For the long-term unemployed, in our dying towns, and post-industrial cities, life will remain an earthly purgatory, drip fed, at least in part, by the developing world.
The decline of manufacturing in the UK has left much of our workforce creating either zero wealth (retail, banking, customer service) or absolute loss, via welfare. When we were sold this new arrangement in the 1980’s it was presented as a mere skills swap, a transfer from one form of productivity to another. But this just doesn’t wash. Contrary to propaganda, no banker has ever made any money. Only people who create, by hand or by brain, add value. Banking isn’t about making money, it’s about getting other people to make money for you. The money that finds its way back into bankers’ and investors pockets is always the fruit of another’s labour. When Chancellor Lawson looked favourably towards the UK’s future as a ‘service economy’ it was really a declaration of parasitic intent. Phrases like ‘Britain now makes much of its money through banking’ are just the finance journalist’s polite way of admitting that Britain now gets citizens of other countries to make its money.
For anyone with a moral interest it’s a curious set-up. Through neither malice nor love, the Asian factory worker simultaneously puts the western worker out of work, pays the benefit cheques, and ends up with a worse standard of living. We pay each other to obtain the luxury goods they produce but cannot themselves afford. While they often struggle to see their children into adulthood, we grow increasingly indignant if our loved ones don’t make it into triple figures.
As our economy morphed from manufacturing to overseas investment, our welfare system itself morphed from something democratic and enlightened, something to be proud of, to something parasitic upon the poor of other nations, every bit as parasitic as the luxury purchases of capitalists. From the perspective of the proletariat of India, discovering that their labour subsidises the UK’s NHS is probably no more comforting than discovering it gets spent on yachts. In both cases, they don’t get to see the benefits. If any state healthcare system is to be subsidised, I’m sure they would choose their own.
As a nation we of course have every right to prioritise our own health and welfare if we so wish. There’s nothing immoral in a country deciding to use part of the wealth it creates to provide its citizens with universal healthcare and unemployment benefit. Such policies are widely seen as the great political victories of the 20th century. But the same can’t be said for using wealth extracted from foreign labour. I’m sure Marx would be the first to agree.
Within a large structure like a university, however, it is safe to say that both academics and administrators are essential. Without one the other can’t function, and neither can the institute (– phew!)
This hints at a wider principle, and regular source of confusion: While it is often possible to identify ultimate dependencies, this may not be the best way to comprehend a complex system.
For example, the following three claims seem sound enough: DNA can exist without organic life, but organic life cannot exist without DNA; Brains can exist without intelligence, but intelligence can’t exist without brains; Thought can exist without culture, but culture can’t exist without thought. Each step of the way, we can see the causal arrow pointing firmly in one direction, with the consequence fizzling out as soon as its cause is disconnected, as surely as a TV picture fizzles out when the plug is pulled.
But not so fast; there are more dependencies at play here. While DNA may be essential to life, the profusion of DNA on earth today is itself a product of life. It is living bodies that have borne and protected DNA over the ages, and given it the means to replicate.
Likewise, a human brain will quickly die without the feedback provided by its intelligence. The limited intelligence we all start out with (and often end-up with) is not enough to keep our brains and bodies alive. Other, more intelligent, humans need to be at hand, or drafted-in, to care for us at these times.
And while culture is clearly a product of thought, it also feeds-back into thought. Indeed culture can lie dormant for millennia, without a single oxygenated corpuscle for sustenance. Ancient texts and images can be rediscovered, dusted off, and go on to alter the course of human history. The causal arrow really can point in the other direction.
Speaking of dusty texts, the causal relationship I want to look at here is a political one – the base/superstructure model suggested by Karl Marx. With arguable degrees of metaphor, Marx sketched out a model of society comprising two interrelated layers: An economic base, beneath a social and cultural superstructure. As the ‘building site’ flavour of the model suggests, the continued existence of the superstructure depends on the integrity of the base. If structure is the house then the economy is its foundation. If the foundation caves-in, the house follows.
This principle is clear to see at the most basic level of economics – allocation of food. You can have bread without circuses but you can’t have circuses without bread. However informed your politics, however refined your art, however noble your dreams, all mean nothing without food, without the economic means of staying alive. As both Marxists and Monetarists agree, it’s the economy, stupid. You can’t eat books.
Marx took this relationship and expanded it to describe society as a whole. All of human production – owners, bosses, workers and customers formed the economic base. The rest of society – politics, art, religion, education, entertainment and the military, formed the superstructure. As with the most basic commodity – food – such superstructures depend upon the support of the economic base, rather than the other way round: You can irrigate the Nile Delta without building pyramids, but you can’t build pyramids without irrigating the Nile Delta. You can run Lancashire cotton mills without running day trips to Blackpool, but you can’t run day trips to Blackpool without running Lancashire cotton mills.
These last two points illustrate another deep insight in Marx’s model. Not only does economics support culture, the particular type of economics determines the particular type of culture it can support. If you live in age where the key products are apples, wheat and the occasional hurdy-gurdy, then you will likely spend your evenings eating bread, drinking cider and dancing round the fire. If you live in age where the key products are cars, televisions and computers you will likely spend your leisure-time at the wheel, on the sofa, or immersed in one digital universe or another.
For Marx, the 19th century revolutionary, this all pointed to an interesting conclusion: Ultimate power resided with the workers. Every apparent instrument of power was actually at the mercy of the producing class. Politics and propaganda, church and school, police and army, football and circuses, all fed off the economic base, all were mere superstructure, at the mercy of economics.
With their hands directly on the means of production, only the working classes have the means to pull the plug on the rest of society. Whether workers recognised this power is another matter. The ruling classes of all ages do their best to spread the belief that their rule is true, right and unassailable – even amongst themselves. Maintaining such worldviews has been a key function of superstructure throughout the ages. Call it aristocracy, the divine right of kings, hereditary privilege or racial superiority – it all really boils down to the same thing: One section of humanity persuades another section to do all the nasty backbreaking parts of life, so that the first section can live in luxury.
The extent to which workers might flex this terrible power is another matter again. It holds the potential for wholesale human emancipation, or great mischief, depending on your take. At the micro level, the basic threat to withdraw labour – to strike – remains a priceless bargaining chip, and a major determinant of pay and conditions. At the other end of the scale, a union of unions can lead to a general strike, and bring a whole economy to a halt. ‘Holding the country to ransom’ – as was the shriek throughout the 20th Century.
Rather than the solidity of bricks and mortar, the superstructure starts to look more like a house of cards, built on a rug called the economy. The rug is unmoved by the cards, but one sharp tug can bring the whole house down. We must tread carefully though. As lucid and commonsensical as it might sound, there are good reasons to be cautious before grafting this model onto our own lives. I’d like to identify two areas in which the model can mislead as much as it might illuminate. One is timeless and has dogged Marxism from the start. The other relates to historical changes.
The timeless one can be dealt with quite quickly. The discovery that one factor depends upon another is easily confused with the belief that one factor is caused by the other – shaped, detailed and defined by the other. But this really doesn’t follow. ‘A’ can be dependent on ‘B’ without being caused by ‘B’. Cars run on petrol, and are certainly designed with petrol in mind, but there’s a lot more to cars than petrol.
Similarly, while the social is dependent on the economic, it is not fully described by the economic. Sometimes quite the opposite. Although the nature of a given economic base remains a key influence on the kinds of social structures that can ‘grow’ upon it, there is also feedback in the other direction. Take technology for example. Is that base or superstructure in the first place? The principles behind a given technology constitute knowledge, so presumably superstructure. But such knowledge gives rise to products (base) which modify our way of living (superstructure) which in turn alter consumer demand (base). The process is dialectical, as Marx would have been happy to call it – an on-going inter-modification between base and superstructure.
Failure to grasp this distinction lies at the heart of some of the more vulgar and disastrous readings of Marx. While it is only wise to conclude that it is impossible to build a just and happy society upon a grossly uneven economic base, it is far from wise to assume that enforced equality at the economic base will simply percolate-up through the superstructure, and produce a just and happy society. Indeed, the 20th century was littered with examples of enforced material equality leading to social hell.
One might wonder why this misunderstanding is so hard to shake. Political desperation certainly plays a part – who wouldn’t like a simple answer to the world’s problems? But the fundamental problem is the grain of truth. For the genuinely impoverished, economics really is everything. When you are truly hungry food is all that matters, and at present that describes the situation of one in eight humans. It is easy to see why the global poor, and those who care about the global poor, might be tempted to take that basic truth further, try to map it onto the rest of human society.
In truth however, while food and shelter are necessary for a happy life, they do not guarantee it. The meeting of basic material needs usually just facilitates a different level of misery, uncertainty and powerlessness. Rather than being answered, political questions in fact multiply from that point upwards.
The belief that all social injustice can be reduced to economic injustice is certainly attractive, and politically emboldening. It contains within it the hope that an equitable economic base can automatically give rise to human happiness. But while greater economic equality might be an essential step towards peace on earth it is little more than religious faith to think it will necessarily lead there. As with all articles of faith, the burden of proof lies with the believers.
The second confusion takes a bit more explaining. It relates to historical changes since Marx’s day. Let’s begin though by confirming what hasn’t changed: The majority of human suffering remains a direct consequence of material inequality, born of inequality in the ownership and control of production. Billions of humans still live hand-to-mouth, paid a pittance by corporations who syphon-off the wealth produced for themselves.
Just the same, the superstructure erected on today’s economic base still functions in maintaining, justifying and enforcing this inequality. Humans are still numbed by churches, diverted by sport, infuriated by immigrants, heartened by patriotism and threatened by lunatic foreign powers, not to mention the enemy within. And if we still won’t play quietly there are truncheons, bayonets, daisy-cutters and drones to persuade us. And as ever, the fear that prompts this ideological and physical barrage is the same as in Marx’s day: the recognition that workers have the means to unplug the whole operation – should they choose to.
What has altered sharply however is location. While much of the capital of capitalism is still raised in the west, much of industrial production now takes place in the developing world, notably the Far East. As workers, far fewer westerners have anything to do with actually making things. Aside from food and cleaning products, what else in our supermarkets is produced at home? This change of location gives us several reasons for caution before mapping Marx’s model onto our own lives.
Let’s start with production itself, and a commonplace scenario in our new private sector. Let’s say some British capital finds itself invested in a toy factory in Asia. The investors could be shareholders in an established UK toy company, or shareholders in an otherwise disinterested body such as an investment fund, which itself holds shares in an Asian firm. All being well, the toys produced are then sold at profit, and an enhanced sum is sent back to investors in the UK. Interestingly however, the toys come along too. Both profit and product are imported. The toys are bought by a British retailer, say ASDA, who sell them at some mark-up to members of the British public.
Now, the interesting question is where does the British public get the money to buy the toys? It’s increasingly unlikely that they get it from producing anything as corporeal as toys. More likely than not, they get it from working in ASDA, or some other retail giant.
At last, the title of this essay emerges. Rather than an integrated part of the process of production, our own economy starts to look peripheral. Certainly, from the perspective of a politically savvy Asian factory worker the UK economy must look more like superstructure than base. It’s more like a game of monopoly going on overhead, a circular sloshing of pretend money between friends, all the while supported by the genuine wealth producing economies below.
At first glance this might look like business as usual. International capitalism has always involved a hierarchy of productive process, with those countries higher in the chain making the greater profits. Companies and countries whose production centres on intermediate goods, like raw cotton or coffee beans, tend to get the bum deal. Those who produce finished products, like clothing and freeze-dried coffee, are the ones who do well. But can retail seriously be called ‘finish’ at all? Turning beans into a jar of instant genuinely does add value to the coffee. Putting that jar on a shelf doesn’t add a bean. Any fool can do it.
If this still sounds overstated then we can always test it against the causal premise of Marx’s model – the existence of the superstructure depends on the integrity of the base. On this reading it stands: A general strike in China certainly could bring western capitalism to its knees. A general strike among British retail workers (if we can contain our mirth) would barely register in the Chinese economy. A blip in the demand curve, ironed-out as soon as new outlets are found.
However it’s when we turn to the public sector that the full picture emerges. Let’s return for a moment to the profits from the Asian toy factory, as they flow back into the UK. Some go into the pockets of the investors, but a portion goes to the treasury in the form of tax. Consequently some of this goes to fund our public sector, not least the wages of public sector workers.
Along with retail, our gargantuan public sector is another key source of employment in ‘service economy’ UK. Even more starkly than retail, wealth creation here is all but non-existent. Essential as they are, doctors, nurses, police, fire-fighters, refuse collectors and social workers don’t produce a thing. In fact the whole operation runs at a massive loss. Economically, the kindest thing you can say is they save us money by pre-empting disasters - but that’s a far cry from wealth creation.
Again, from the viewpoint of the Asian factory worker our NHS isn’t an economic entity, it’s pure superstructure. It might not seem this way to a hospital porter, sweating endless hours away on minimum wage. Doubtless the internal feeling is of being a worker, employed by a company called the NHS. As in a factory, both worker and employer wrangle over those timeless issues of pay and conditions. If a compromise cannot be reached there is always the threat of a strike.
But again, we only have to apply the causal premise of Marx’s model to see the true economic relationship here. While it is quite feasible that a general strike in China could bring severe disruption to our NHS, a total walkout of staff at the NHS would have zero effect on the economy of China.
This shift has dire implications for anyone holding out for worker-led liberation in the western world. Our own proletariat (if that is still the right term) no longer do hold the reins of production. Relocation of industry has stripped their power. In terms of pulling the plug (or the rug) on capitalism our own proletariat has been pretty much neutered.
This might sound an odd claim just after a successful bin-strike, but in fact that strike is a clear example of how depoliticised public-sector strikes really are. It’s tempting for leftists to portray such disputes as a traditional class fight between workers and tight-fisted capitalists, but in truth who were the evil paymasters? It was us, the residents, including the bin-men themselves assuming they live in the area they serve. Nice as it would be, we really can’t blame Rothschild and Carnegie for this one. Rather than class conflict, such disputes are better understood as the public desire for the impossible – low levels of council tax and clean streets.
‘Sticking it to the man’ loses its potency when the rebel is at one and the same time ‘the man’. It’s the same story across the public sector. Schools, NHS, policing, roads, local services, we are simultaneously employer, employee and customer. If we seriously believe we aren’t paid enough, we can always pay ourselves more. Threats to suspend health care, education and bin collection are really only threats to ourselves. If we want to roll in our own detritus, it’s really our own business. International capitalism will not weep.
And of course there is more to public sector spending than paying people to work. It also supports those who aren’t working. Here again wealth created overseas must be playing a part in propping things up. It is difficult to imagine how it could be possible for a large section of working-age citizens to spend weekday mornings watching daytime television without financial contributions from more productive nations. Few workers in Bangladesh can indulge this dubious luxury.
Our long-term unemployed would presumably form a major component of a productive working class, were we a more productive nation. But with welfare payments providing a better standard of living than the wages paid in Asian factories, no domestic factory can compete directly with an equivalent in Asia. Who would sign-off to work in a factory for less money than benefits are bringing in – even if such pay rates were legal, given the minimum wage?
As no one outside the crankiest think-tanks would suggest our own unemployed should accept Asian-level factory wages, we are stuck with the situation as it stands. Our best hope is that Asian workers use their new power – good old class struggle – to win themselves better pay and conditions. Aside from the intrinsic justice, this would also inflate the costs of goods from Asia, and make competition from western manufacturers a possibility again. Until then, the outlook is bleak on both continents. For the long-term unemployed, in our dying towns, and post-industrial cities, life will remain an earthly purgatory, drip fed, at least in part, by the developing world.
The decline of manufacturing in the UK has left much of our workforce creating either zero wealth (retail, banking, customer service) or absolute loss, via welfare. When we were sold this new arrangement in the 1980’s it was presented as a mere skills swap, a transfer from one form of productivity to another. But this just doesn’t wash. Contrary to propaganda, no banker has ever made any money. Only people who create, by hand or by brain, add value. Banking isn’t about making money, it’s about getting other people to make money for you. The money that finds its way back into bankers’ and investors pockets is always the fruit of another’s labour. When Chancellor Lawson looked favourably towards the UK’s future as a ‘service economy’ it was really a declaration of parasitic intent. Phrases like ‘Britain now makes much of its money through banking’ are just the finance journalist’s polite way of admitting that Britain now gets citizens of other countries to make its money.
For anyone with a moral interest it’s a curious set-up. Through neither malice nor love, the Asian factory worker simultaneously puts the western worker out of work, pays the benefit cheques, and ends up with a worse standard of living. We pay each other to obtain the luxury goods they produce but cannot themselves afford. While they often struggle to see their children into adulthood, we grow increasingly indignant if our loved ones don’t make it into triple figures.
As our economy morphed from manufacturing to overseas investment, our welfare system itself morphed from something democratic and enlightened, something to be proud of, to something parasitic upon the poor of other nations, every bit as parasitic as the luxury purchases of capitalists. From the perspective of the proletariat of India, discovering that their labour subsidises the UK’s NHS is probably no more comforting than discovering it gets spent on yachts. In both cases, they don’t get to see the benefits. If any state healthcare system is to be subsidised, I’m sure they would choose their own.
As a nation we of course have every right to prioritise our own health and welfare if we so wish. There’s nothing immoral in a country deciding to use part of the wealth it creates to provide its citizens with universal healthcare and unemployment benefit. Such policies are widely seen as the great political victories of the 20th century. But the same can’t be said for using wealth extracted from foreign labour. I’m sure Marx would be the first to agree.
Tuesday 12 February 2013
The Core Disbelief
I can’t vouch for believers, but from the atheist perspective, arguments about religion seem tediously slippery. No sooner than a point seems to be established the terms of the argument magically change. What sounded like a fact turns out to have been only allegory, and it is the atheist who is branded naive for ever thinking otherwise.
I would like to propose a means of avoiding much of this slipperiness, a simple initial question that can be asked of all participants that will hopefully close-off some of these blind alleys. But first, a couple of examples of the problem.
Let’s start with a big one – the nature of God. Listening to Christian prayers and sermons one could be forgiven for imagining a very anthropic being. He listens, thinks, makes, judges and punishes. He bequeaths His only son. Note that this image is not restricted to the Sunday school and the southern Baptist tabernacle, it can be heard on Choral Evensong on BBC Radio Three – arguably the most intellectually high-brow radio station on Earth:
O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders; Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults, Restore thou them that are penitent, According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord: And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.
It seems fair to suppose that for some believers this human-like God is taken at face value. In the absence of alternative descriptions, it will surely be the sort of being that coalesces in the mind of any children listening.
However, should one question the plausibility of such a being it immediately evaporates. Nobody actually believes in this sort of God, it seems (nobody of course, apart from the countless millions who still do.) Instead, this anthropic image is turned into mere allegory. The real God is far more intangible. Variously He is life, nature, human love, an ether permeating all the universe, the cement that binds us, or, in line with 21st century consumer choice, any other form the individual believer wants Him to be. ‘God with a beard’, it turns out, was just a foil created by atheist zealots to discredit believers.
A second example concerns the origin of species. For millennia the church propagated the myth of a six day creation. Eventually geology and rationality rendered this story untenable. But instead of simply dropping the idea of conscious creation, the six days are recast as allegory. Much as God’s being has been transformed into a multitude of inexplicable forces, so have His methods: Perhaps he created us via evolution, His powers “having been originally breathed into a few forms” to quote a rather uncomfortable-sounding Charles Darwin, of all people.
With summits as mobile as these it’s no wonder it’s so difficult to plant a flag. One of the chief causes I would suggest is lack of clarity about the basis of belief – what I see as the crucial dividing-line between atheists and believers. I think it can be clarified with the following simple question:
Aside from other humans, do you believe there are any other intelligent agents at play in your life?
Extra-human intelligence really is the issue, the dividing-line between the natural and the supernatural. After all, who would care about non-intelligent super-nature? What would that even mean?
If established at the offing, this question can bypass a lot of the slipperiness that tends to follow. But first we must deal with the agnostics – some will question the question itself. Some people will argue that as they cannot be sure whether such forces are at play, the question cannot be answered. This is usually fielded as an intellectual virtue, with Shakespeare wheeled-out to emphasise the profundity: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio”
We can avoid this however with a clarification of what we mean by belief. One might say that I believe in extra-terrestrial life – in the sense of believing it to be statistically likely, given the size of the universe. But clearly this is very different from believing that some aliens crashed at Roswell. The first sense of belief is inert. It doesn’t modify my behaviour toward other humans, not the way that belief in the Roswell ‘incident’ might.
So when I say “do you believe there are any other intelligent agents at play in your life?” I mean ‘believe’ in the strong sense – in the sense that your daily thoughts and deeds might be affected by this belief. Rather than drive the agnostics out of the temple, with this clarification they are given a clear choice to remain or leave. No-one can keep one foot inside.
Armed with this question we can now return to the original two examples. Let’s look again at the nebulous nature of God’s being. Rather than anything as unfashionable as ‘God with a beard’ many of my contemporaries today would be more likely to describe themselves as ‘spiritual’. This is a gloriously slippery term. It could mean they consider themselves to place little value on material wealth. Or it could mean that they believe each human body is animated by an eternal soul.
Asking ‘the question’ cuts right through the fog. If you don’t believe there to be any other intelligent agents at play in your life your notion of spirituality must be a world apart, literally, from those who do. ‘Spirit’ in this context must just be another attribute of physical and mental being. Transcendence, equally, can only be something you achieve within the confines of your own mind, with your feet planted firmly on the ground.
It’s the same for those who claim to believe in ‘karma’. In fact karma is a great illustration. If you answer no to ‘the question’, but also claim to believe in karma, then you can only be referring to an earthly phenomenon, most likely a version of ‘what goes around comes around’: Be unpleasant to your fellow beings and there is a good chance you will suffer in return. Even if those you wrong are unable to exact revenge, your own conscience may settle the score on their behalf – there is no escaping your own feelings of guilt.
Conversely, acting charitably is liable to make other people like you, and lead you to like yourself. ‘A good conscience is a continual Christmas’ as Ben Franklin so sweetly put it. Now see how different this is from the sort of karma that keeps Earl Hickey in check. That is clearly supernatural, requiring super-human intelligence. Something very clever and very powerful must be watching over Earl, and tweaking his destiny accordingly.
It’s similarly useful when we turn to the origin of species. While a six day creation might seem more ludicrous than the idea of God creating things ‘via’ evolution, the difference is in fact superficial. If you answer no to ‘the question’ then you should be prepared to reject both stories with equal vigour. Along with intelligent design, elan vital and spontaneous generation, creation ‘via’ evolution requires an intelligent agent – to do all the planning and designing. If you find it fanciful for an agent to do this in six days, it should seem no less fanciful in all the other cases.
The No camp
When it comes to the thorny subject of assessing the worth of religion, those who answer no to ‘the question’ can be split into two further groups: Those who see no good in religion at all; and those that still value religion despite their own lack of belief. The first group do exist I’m sure, but I should think their numbers are quite small. It’s a rare atheist who rejects every religious act and artefact. Any non-believer one who has witnessed the happiness, consolation and social bonds enjoyed by some believers would need a hard heart and some hard arguments to condemn the whole enterprise outright. If they are not careful it might come across as envy (not exactly a sin in atheism, but not a virtue either.)
But notice the bold distinction here. Anyone who answers ‘no’ to the question but still wishes to defend the worth of religion must now only be doing so purely for its earthly utility. There can be no recourse to pleasing gods or heavenly rewards. Regardless of what the ‘yes’ camp might believe, all benefits remain in the here and now.
Utilitarian justifications for human behaviour are always more complex than they might first appear. Here are a few pointers at the sort of discussions might arise. The first might be an empirical weighing-up of pros and cons. Any religious belief or practice that appears to increase human wellbeing could be seen as a plus, much as any belief that appears to increase human misery could be seen as a minus – just like we assess the worth of secular beliefs. But as always with utilitarianism it isn’t that simple. Different people have different ideas of good and bad. With God’s judgement out of the picture, who gets to decide which effects of religion are beneficial and which are a curse? Do we just vote on it?
Then there is the question of the motives and methods of such non-believers. If you don’t believe in God but do see worth in religion, how should you yourself act? Should you join-in at prayers even though you don’t believe anyone is listening, or just encourage events from outside the church? Both positions have their downsides. There’s something undeniably ludicrous about going through the motions of a religion you have no belief-in (I remember from childhood.) Then again there’s something distinctly paternalistic about championing other peoples’ belief in myths that you yourself don’t believe-in. What might be your motives here? Do you prefer other people to have a cloudier worldview than yourself?
Furthermore isn’t there something fundamentally dodgy about encouraging children to believe things we ourselves believe to be untrue? Isn’t education about doing our best to paint an accurate picture of the world, not a mixture of strict truths and any untruths we deem useful?
The Yes camp
Those who answer ‘yes’ on the other hand are faced with a much larger set of potential benefits. Naturally they can agree with the ‘no’ camp on all the earthly benefits (and like the ‘no’ camp, they will need to produce empirical evidence to defend these claims – the earthly pros will need to outweigh the earthly cons.) But of course they have a lot more to champion than this – perhaps too much. If prayers really can be answered rather than just provide comfort, and an eternal afterlife really does await us rather than just prevent us from despairing about the briefness of life, and if eternal ecstasy or eternal damnation really do swing on the judgement of one who watches over us, then the earthly consequences of religion seem almost insignificant by comparison.
Of course many modern believers will be horrified at being associated with the last of these images. Once again, nobody actually believes in hellfire and damnation anymore (apart from the countless millions who still do.) But such dreadful misattributions are an unavoidable hazard if you answer yes to ‘the question.’ If you declare a belief in extra-human agency but have no means of proving what it is – and there is no means of proving it – you inevitably consign your beliefs to the same factual basis as any other supernatural belief – ghosts, devils and very ruthless gods. That these other beings might sound absurd or vile, while you believe your own to be sacred and loving, has no bearing on proof. Once you forfeit the claim to rational justification for your belief, you can’t really complain if non-believers make assumptions about your worldview. What can we do but guess?
Fine then, some will say, damn the evidence – my faith is enough on its own. And that is everyone’s prerogative. But in truth this isn’t really enough for many believers, and this is how so many of the exasperating arguments arise. If most believers were truly content with their faith alone, and really didn’t give a fig about empirical support, then such abominations as intelligent design, Lourdes miracles and the virgin birth would not arise. Like it or not, we humans are desperate for verifiable truth. If we have faith in supermen, we can’t help but want to show people evidence of their works, to back that faith up.
So round and round we go. Miracles provide wonderful evidence until they are shown to be illusions – upon which miracles no longer matter, all that matters is the comfort religion provides to the believer. Similarly, a complex trait of an organism provides clear evidence of God’s handiwork until a more mundane evolutionary path is posited. Then the evidence of biology becomes an irrelevance, and only personal faith matters.
This urge to cross back and forth, from the earthly to the supernatural, is surely a consequence of all that religion has lost to rationalism. Only two hundred years ago, with little fear of contradiction, the whole universe could be explained away as the product of superhuman intelligence. For better or worse, rational explanation has now taken over most of that terrain. However one tries to paint it, there has been an enormous loss of ground, and loss of purpose. Widespread belief in a god who hand-crafted the universe has been reduced to belief in a god because that belief in itself provides comfort to the believer (and even that is open to question.) It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that for some believers this new scheme just isn’t enough to satisfy their needs, and the urge to find empirical evidence for irrational beliefs just won’t lie down.
I would like to propose a means of avoiding much of this slipperiness, a simple initial question that can be asked of all participants that will hopefully close-off some of these blind alleys. But first, a couple of examples of the problem.
Let’s start with a big one – the nature of God. Listening to Christian prayers and sermons one could be forgiven for imagining a very anthropic being. He listens, thinks, makes, judges and punishes. He bequeaths His only son. Note that this image is not restricted to the Sunday school and the southern Baptist tabernacle, it can be heard on Choral Evensong on BBC Radio Three – arguably the most intellectually high-brow radio station on Earth:
O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders; Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults, Restore thou them that are penitent, According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord: And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.
It seems fair to suppose that for some believers this human-like God is taken at face value. In the absence of alternative descriptions, it will surely be the sort of being that coalesces in the mind of any children listening.
However, should one question the plausibility of such a being it immediately evaporates. Nobody actually believes in this sort of God, it seems (nobody of course, apart from the countless millions who still do.) Instead, this anthropic image is turned into mere allegory. The real God is far more intangible. Variously He is life, nature, human love, an ether permeating all the universe, the cement that binds us, or, in line with 21st century consumer choice, any other form the individual believer wants Him to be. ‘God with a beard’, it turns out, was just a foil created by atheist zealots to discredit believers.
A second example concerns the origin of species. For millennia the church propagated the myth of a six day creation. Eventually geology and rationality rendered this story untenable. But instead of simply dropping the idea of conscious creation, the six days are recast as allegory. Much as God’s being has been transformed into a multitude of inexplicable forces, so have His methods: Perhaps he created us via evolution, His powers “having been originally breathed into a few forms” to quote a rather uncomfortable-sounding Charles Darwin, of all people.
With summits as mobile as these it’s no wonder it’s so difficult to plant a flag. One of the chief causes I would suggest is lack of clarity about the basis of belief – what I see as the crucial dividing-line between atheists and believers. I think it can be clarified with the following simple question:
Aside from other humans, do you believe there are any other intelligent agents at play in your life?
Extra-human intelligence really is the issue, the dividing-line between the natural and the supernatural. After all, who would care about non-intelligent super-nature? What would that even mean?
If established at the offing, this question can bypass a lot of the slipperiness that tends to follow. But first we must deal with the agnostics – some will question the question itself. Some people will argue that as they cannot be sure whether such forces are at play, the question cannot be answered. This is usually fielded as an intellectual virtue, with Shakespeare wheeled-out to emphasise the profundity: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio”
We can avoid this however with a clarification of what we mean by belief. One might say that I believe in extra-terrestrial life – in the sense of believing it to be statistically likely, given the size of the universe. But clearly this is very different from believing that some aliens crashed at Roswell. The first sense of belief is inert. It doesn’t modify my behaviour toward other humans, not the way that belief in the Roswell ‘incident’ might.
So when I say “do you believe there are any other intelligent agents at play in your life?” I mean ‘believe’ in the strong sense – in the sense that your daily thoughts and deeds might be affected by this belief. Rather than drive the agnostics out of the temple, with this clarification they are given a clear choice to remain or leave. No-one can keep one foot inside.
Armed with this question we can now return to the original two examples. Let’s look again at the nebulous nature of God’s being. Rather than anything as unfashionable as ‘God with a beard’ many of my contemporaries today would be more likely to describe themselves as ‘spiritual’. This is a gloriously slippery term. It could mean they consider themselves to place little value on material wealth. Or it could mean that they believe each human body is animated by an eternal soul.
Asking ‘the question’ cuts right through the fog. If you don’t believe there to be any other intelligent agents at play in your life your notion of spirituality must be a world apart, literally, from those who do. ‘Spirit’ in this context must just be another attribute of physical and mental being. Transcendence, equally, can only be something you achieve within the confines of your own mind, with your feet planted firmly on the ground.
It’s the same for those who claim to believe in ‘karma’. In fact karma is a great illustration. If you answer no to ‘the question’, but also claim to believe in karma, then you can only be referring to an earthly phenomenon, most likely a version of ‘what goes around comes around’: Be unpleasant to your fellow beings and there is a good chance you will suffer in return. Even if those you wrong are unable to exact revenge, your own conscience may settle the score on their behalf – there is no escaping your own feelings of guilt.
Conversely, acting charitably is liable to make other people like you, and lead you to like yourself. ‘A good conscience is a continual Christmas’ as Ben Franklin so sweetly put it. Now see how different this is from the sort of karma that keeps Earl Hickey in check. That is clearly supernatural, requiring super-human intelligence. Something very clever and very powerful must be watching over Earl, and tweaking his destiny accordingly.
It’s similarly useful when we turn to the origin of species. While a six day creation might seem more ludicrous than the idea of God creating things ‘via’ evolution, the difference is in fact superficial. If you answer no to ‘the question’ then you should be prepared to reject both stories with equal vigour. Along with intelligent design, elan vital and spontaneous generation, creation ‘via’ evolution requires an intelligent agent – to do all the planning and designing. If you find it fanciful for an agent to do this in six days, it should seem no less fanciful in all the other cases.
The No camp
When it comes to the thorny subject of assessing the worth of religion, those who answer no to ‘the question’ can be split into two further groups: Those who see no good in religion at all; and those that still value religion despite their own lack of belief. The first group do exist I’m sure, but I should think their numbers are quite small. It’s a rare atheist who rejects every religious act and artefact. Any non-believer one who has witnessed the happiness, consolation and social bonds enjoyed by some believers would need a hard heart and some hard arguments to condemn the whole enterprise outright. If they are not careful it might come across as envy (not exactly a sin in atheism, but not a virtue either.)
But notice the bold distinction here. Anyone who answers ‘no’ to the question but still wishes to defend the worth of religion must now only be doing so purely for its earthly utility. There can be no recourse to pleasing gods or heavenly rewards. Regardless of what the ‘yes’ camp might believe, all benefits remain in the here and now.
Utilitarian justifications for human behaviour are always more complex than they might first appear. Here are a few pointers at the sort of discussions might arise. The first might be an empirical weighing-up of pros and cons. Any religious belief or practice that appears to increase human wellbeing could be seen as a plus, much as any belief that appears to increase human misery could be seen as a minus – just like we assess the worth of secular beliefs. But as always with utilitarianism it isn’t that simple. Different people have different ideas of good and bad. With God’s judgement out of the picture, who gets to decide which effects of religion are beneficial and which are a curse? Do we just vote on it?
Then there is the question of the motives and methods of such non-believers. If you don’t believe in God but do see worth in religion, how should you yourself act? Should you join-in at prayers even though you don’t believe anyone is listening, or just encourage events from outside the church? Both positions have their downsides. There’s something undeniably ludicrous about going through the motions of a religion you have no belief-in (I remember from childhood.) Then again there’s something distinctly paternalistic about championing other peoples’ belief in myths that you yourself don’t believe-in. What might be your motives here? Do you prefer other people to have a cloudier worldview than yourself?
Furthermore isn’t there something fundamentally dodgy about encouraging children to believe things we ourselves believe to be untrue? Isn’t education about doing our best to paint an accurate picture of the world, not a mixture of strict truths and any untruths we deem useful?
The Yes camp
Those who answer ‘yes’ on the other hand are faced with a much larger set of potential benefits. Naturally they can agree with the ‘no’ camp on all the earthly benefits (and like the ‘no’ camp, they will need to produce empirical evidence to defend these claims – the earthly pros will need to outweigh the earthly cons.) But of course they have a lot more to champion than this – perhaps too much. If prayers really can be answered rather than just provide comfort, and an eternal afterlife really does await us rather than just prevent us from despairing about the briefness of life, and if eternal ecstasy or eternal damnation really do swing on the judgement of one who watches over us, then the earthly consequences of religion seem almost insignificant by comparison.
Of course many modern believers will be horrified at being associated with the last of these images. Once again, nobody actually believes in hellfire and damnation anymore (apart from the countless millions who still do.) But such dreadful misattributions are an unavoidable hazard if you answer yes to ‘the question.’ If you declare a belief in extra-human agency but have no means of proving what it is – and there is no means of proving it – you inevitably consign your beliefs to the same factual basis as any other supernatural belief – ghosts, devils and very ruthless gods. That these other beings might sound absurd or vile, while you believe your own to be sacred and loving, has no bearing on proof. Once you forfeit the claim to rational justification for your belief, you can’t really complain if non-believers make assumptions about your worldview. What can we do but guess?
Fine then, some will say, damn the evidence – my faith is enough on its own. And that is everyone’s prerogative. But in truth this isn’t really enough for many believers, and this is how so many of the exasperating arguments arise. If most believers were truly content with their faith alone, and really didn’t give a fig about empirical support, then such abominations as intelligent design, Lourdes miracles and the virgin birth would not arise. Like it or not, we humans are desperate for verifiable truth. If we have faith in supermen, we can’t help but want to show people evidence of their works, to back that faith up.
So round and round we go. Miracles provide wonderful evidence until they are shown to be illusions – upon which miracles no longer matter, all that matters is the comfort religion provides to the believer. Similarly, a complex trait of an organism provides clear evidence of God’s handiwork until a more mundane evolutionary path is posited. Then the evidence of biology becomes an irrelevance, and only personal faith matters.
This urge to cross back and forth, from the earthly to the supernatural, is surely a consequence of all that religion has lost to rationalism. Only two hundred years ago, with little fear of contradiction, the whole universe could be explained away as the product of superhuman intelligence. For better or worse, rational explanation has now taken over most of that terrain. However one tries to paint it, there has been an enormous loss of ground, and loss of purpose. Widespread belief in a god who hand-crafted the universe has been reduced to belief in a god because that belief in itself provides comfort to the believer (and even that is open to question.) It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that for some believers this new scheme just isn’t enough to satisfy their needs, and the urge to find empirical evidence for irrational beliefs just won’t lie down.
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