In all these cases [of making pagan deities by personifying qualities] we are justified in asking how far this business of personification springs from—or results in—an attitude of faith. We may go further: is not all personification from beginning to end but a playing of the mind? Examples from more recent times lead us to this conclusion. St. Francis of Assisi reveres Poverty, his bride, with holy fervour and pious rapture. But if we ask in sober earnest whether St. Francis actually believed in a spiritual and celestial being whose name was Poverty, who really was the idea of poverty, we begin to waver. Put in cold blood like that the question is too blunt; we are forcing the emotional content of the idea. St. Francis' attitude was one of belief and unbelief mixed. The Church hardly authorized him in an explicit belief of that sort. His conception of Poverty must have vacillated between poetic imagination and dogmatic conviction, although gravitating towards the latter. The most succinct way of putting his state of mind would be to say that St. Francis was playing with the figure of poverty. The saint's whole life is full of pure play-factors and play-figures, and these are not the least attractive part of him.
It strikes me that this seriously playful attitude of "belief and unbelief mixed" is very like that of the more intelligent occultists and neopagans I have known and is possibly the only thing that can rescue more conventional religions from the pit they have dug themselves into, where the pendulum of liberalism and literalism swings ever lower.
Oh, and speaking of play, that last metaphor was just for the hell of it.
I tried to explain in my previous post, by analogy with Harry Potter, how religion can make us more moral. A brief look at history can also show us how religion makes us capable of monstrosities in the name of morality. But this is something different. The people spitting on schoolgirls are not, I think, in the mold of Torquemada, who tortured and killed from a fervent moral conviction. This seems to be more submoral, a word which has been used in various ways, but which I take to mean the following: a submoral person is one who, while having moral intuitions and being capable of moral reasoning, elects to let them atrophy in favour of a set of quasi-moral principles for behaviour. Of course we all do this a lot of the time because thought is hard; we might even argue that it is the normal state of tradition-bound societies. What is interesting here is that the people concerned have thought very carefully about their religion; they are just refusing to reason about the moral basis of their actions. What we have is religious kitsch, by which I mean not plastic Virgin Mary table lamps or glow-in-the-dark crucifixes but a certain attitude to religion which is in a way a failed version of what I described in the Harry Potter post. To explain this, we need three tools: moral reasoning and intuition, the idea of kitsch, and the view of religion I put forward in the last post.
Philosophers and neurologists may debate endlessly about the nature and validity of moral intuitions, but it is plain that nearly all of us have them; not to have feelings that certain things are right or wrong is pathological. We react at a gut level against murder, incest, and torturing cute puppies. We also have moral reasoning, by which we argue from general principles to specific cases and strive (usually unsuccessfully) for consistency in our moral judgments. This is what enables us to decide that gay people have rights even if we may personally find the idea of gay sex totally icky, or that it is as bad to torture your enemies as it is to torture cute puppies. Again, everyone has this capacity, albeit in varying degrees. Both moral intuition and moral reasoning can be wrong, but we are generally better off with them. To be submoral, then, is to refuse to use both of these moral faculties. The submoral person may even do the right thing, but by chance, because the particular moral code they have, for non-moral reasons, adopted, happens to prescribe it.
How kitsch applies to morality and religion is less straightforward. I'm using it in a broader sense than just tacky art, of course. I actually started thinking about it in a broader context while proof-reading a book written by my friend Ulrich Steinvorth. Steinvorth examines the idea of kitsch put forward by Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a long passage which I'd skimmed over at the time because I find polemics in novels irritating, and besides, I was more interested in seeing how far things would go with Tereza and Sabina. The key idea is where Sabina describes the reaction to a sentimental painting:
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
Steinvorth expands this idea:
First, we may wonder why the picture of fluffy kittens or a sunset is kitsch while real fluffy kittens or a sunset that look exactly like the pictures are not. Similarly, a Gothic cathedral is often great art, but the same cathedral rebuilt in our time is felt as kitschy. The reason is the picture or copy is made to trigger not so much a first emotion as a second one that indulges in our agreement with what we consider all mankind’s love of kittens or the love of Gothic cathedrals by all people of our ilk.
Kitsch is a lot more than tacky art. Steinvorth argues that when we descend into kitsch, we stop doing things for their own sake (which is the theme of his book) and start doing them for our sake. When we go "awww" at a fluffy kitten, our focus is on the kitten; when we hang a picture of fluffy kittens on the wall, our focus is on ourselves. We are not saying "Look, a fluffy kitten!" but "Look, a person who thinks fluffy kittens are adorable!"
To apply this to religion, let's recap the pragmatic view I described earlier: a religion combines a vision of what people should be, a set of practices designed to bring us closer to this, and a supportive fantasy; i.e., a system of beliefs which motivate and provide meaning to the first two elements. When it works like this, whether in its liberal or literalist forms, the practice of religion may often be wrong, but it is not kitsch. The focus is on the belief, but with the aim of becoming a better person, however the religion defines "better". Torquemada may have been totally evil and depraved, but he was not in the least kitschy; his problem was in his view that torturing and burning people fell within the parameters of being a good person. Religious kitsch leads to more mundane, but much more widespread badness; it is what we could call "religiosity".
Artistic kitsch focuses on the feeling of satisfaction that we get from having certain feelings, which is what leads to its disregard of aesthetic standards. Similarly, religious kitsch moves the focus from moral or spiritual behaviour to the feeling of satisfaction we get at feeling like a moral or spiritual person. The Voodoo syncretist who puts a plastic Virgin Mary lamp on their altar because they think it works magic is not being kitschy; the good Catholic who puts it on their bedside table may well be. The lamp says "See, I am a good Catholic who loves the virgin Mary!" but this is not mere show because we say it to ourselves as much as to others. We all do this to some extent, but when it becomes the main focus, then we become submoral, because we have abandoned moral reasoning, and even perhaps moral intuition, in favour of feeling moral about being moral.
This is why people can spit at schoolgirls. They probably are not demented Torquemada types who, after consulting with their conscience, really, truly think an eight-year-old is the Whore of Babylon. They are simply being spiritually kitschy.
Let us think of religion as a combination of three essential elements. The first is a moral vision. Every religion has some idea of what human beings are ideally like, including their relationship to each other and to the non-human world (Nature plus any gods, spirits etc. you may happen to believe in). Secondly, it has a set of practices which are thought to be helpful in realising that vision: prayer, ritual, meditation, fasting, church jumble sales etc. Finally, it has what we could call "supportive fantasy". Religious believers may object to this term, since it seems to put what they hold to be absolute truths on a level with Harry Potter, but this is not exactly my intention. The term was coined by Pete Carroll when talking about magic: a magical belief or supportive fantasy is something that, regardless of whether you think it is literally true, is there to help produce a result. Religious beliefs strike me as similar. Take the role of Buddhism and Taoism in China, for example. Buddhists hold that life is full of suffering, and you'll have to repeat it in countless incarnations unless you curb your desires, live a blameless life and meditate a lot. Taoists believe that life is just dandy, so to live as long as possible you should curb your desires, live a blameless life and meditate a lot. Hmm.
Leaving aside the question of whether any particular religious belief is true in the sense that Boyle's Law is true, it seems clear that when religion works well, it is like the Harry Potter Alliance on steroids, or whatever illegal performance enhancers kids at Hogwarts take. The HPA uses a popular fantasy as a way of creating a sense of community, providing fictional role models and generally motivating people to do good. Just imagine how much more powerful that would be if people not only enjoyed the fantasy but believed Harry Potter was a real person. OK, they would be stark raving bonkers, but they would be a potent force for good (so long as they could conceal the fact that they were stark raving bonkers).
Is religion, then, a kind of controlled insanity which - when it is not doing indescribable evil - can be harnessed as a force for good? Not quite, and not just because a belief in gods or spirits is not as obviously nutty as a belief in, say, horcruxes. I would say it was rather more like a placebo. You take the big red pill that you believe is a powerful medicine, so you get better. The pill is not a real medicine because you only get well because of the placebo effect. But if the placebo effect means you get better because you took the big red pill, then the pill really is medicine. And the fact that it is big and red is important; studies show that big red pills work better than small blue pills. It may sound like I'm just playing with words here, but I think there's an analogy with religion. (And more than an analogy with magic; for all practical purposes, the placebo effect is magic.) If my faith in some god lets me work miracles, then is it justified? As a statement of fact, no; as a statement of faith, maybe. The pill-as-object and the pill-as-healing-agent are different, and we believe in them in different ways, or as Wittgenstein might put it, in different language games.
This leads us to the problem with liberal theology. While it is better than illiberal theology (largely because it doesn't kill people) it is weaker. It is damnably hard to be cured by a placebo that you actually think is a placebo; in fact, I'd hazard a guess that if you were told a really potent drug was a placebo it would have less of an effect. This doesn't seem to apply so much to fantasy/religion because, as we have seen, people can still be motivated by the Harry Potter books even though they don't believe in their literal truth, but liberal religion still packs much less of a punch than literalism. It's the difference between saying "Well Harry Potter represents some noble qualities of the human soul, such as courage, compassion and a sense of justice, so it's ironic that people are using him to sell chocolate produced in an exploitative way" and "Harry Potter is real and HE'S REALLY ANGRY with Warner Brothers!" The first one is just so C. of E. The best we can hope for, I suppose, is something like this headline from the HPA website:
DID YOU EVER WISH THAT HARRY POTTER WAS REAL? WELL IT KIND OF IS.
Note: If any of my dear readers are worrying that I'm about to get all churched up, worry no more. This is a two-part article, and the second part will be entitled "How Religion Makes Us Sub-moral."
Words go in and out of fashion, and occasionally die out completely, and this is nowhere more true than in words that mean "good" or "bad". I am swearing off the word "awesome" because it has got to the point where overuse presages decrepitude. We saw the same thing with "cool" some time around the turn of the millennium. Once Tony Blair started talking about "Cool Britannia" you knew the word's days were numbered. Soon David Cameron or Mitt Romney will say something is "awesome" and the entire population will look desperately for another word meaning "good". I suggest we strike preemptively. My preference is to revive some terms from the'60s. How about "groovy"? Or "fab"? And while we're at it, let's start ditch "dude" and start calling people "cats" again.
1. Almost everybody swears.
OK, this is no big deal, but at least some people will stop living in a bubble-world where only bad people say "fuck", which means the rest of us won't need to feel awkward when someone catches us saying it. Sooner or later the Pope is going to be caught messaging "Du arschgefickter Hurensohn!" to a cardinal and we can all relax.
2. Most people watch porn
My favourite case of unintentional disclosure was not from the evil Facebook but a simple clipboard error: someone posted a bug to the Chromium forum and included the wrong link. The link in question was for, if I remember rightly, group anal sex, but merely produced the laconic reaction "I don't think this link points where you intended." That is how it should be. Goofs like this aside, the chances are that eventually a lot of people will be revealed to be watching porn, and it won't be a big deal any more. Probably the Pope will be one of them. Another of them will be your partner. Of maybe your grandmother. People will just have to live with it.
3. A hell of a lot of people are gay, support gay rights or are friends with gay people
A lot of unintentional outing can occur through social media, which may have bad consequences for the individuals involved in the short term, but in the long term will make it impossible for bigots to pretend that it's only a tiny minority of sick people who are gay, know gays or are anything other than totally hostile to gays.
4. People don't like their governments
"Well DUH!" I hear you say. In Western democracies it is normal to hate politicians (even the ones you vote for) and this naturally spills over into the Internet. But of course the Internet is nothing if not international, so it is becoming increasingly common for people to vent their spleen about governments elsewhere, not just in a spectacular Arab Spring kind of way, but also in an ordinary disillusioned citizen kind of way. The danger, of course, is that governments can get their hands on this data comparatively easily and use it to repress dissent, either overtly Syrian style or less directly American style. But I think - or at least hope - that eventually the sheer volume of citizen discontent is going to give less savoury governments pause for thought. Repressing dissidents for fun and profit is fine when dissidents are an identifiable minority and the government can maintain the illusion that the vast majority of citizens are responsible and patriotic. When you know the vast majority actually regard you with the same respect they accord pubic lice, you have to tread more carefully.
5. Getting drunk and acting stupidly is normal
One of the main reasons people were freaked out by Facebook's Timeline was this made it a lot easier for people to see your past (since apparently you need a degree in computer science to delete anything on Facebook). This was about the same time it was revealed that potential employers were scouring job applicants' Facebook pages and eliminating the ones tagged in pictures of silly drunken activity. Suddenly those college party pictures didn't look so cool. But eventually, I think, there will be so many of these pictures around that employers will wake up to the fact that getting drunk and doing silly things is just what young people do, and unless you're willing to outsource everything to Utah or Saudi Arabia, you'd better get used to it.
But wait, it gets worse. You will only have become a master photocopier salesperson if you were consciously practising your salesy skills during all that time. Coffee breaks don't count. Doing routine tasks without thinking about them - which is what most work consists of - doesn't count either. So most people probably aren't even masters of their chosen professions, though one would hope doctors are an exception here.
And there lies one problem. You have to work at mastering something for 10,000 hours if it's the kind of thing that takes 10,000 hours to master, which is kind of circular. If I allow someone to perform surgery on me, then I want them to have put in 10,000 hours of study, training and consciously reflective job performance because surgery is the kind of thing that requires it if you aren't going to kill people. I do not have the same expectation of the person ringing up my groceries. I learned pretty much everything there is to know about that on the first day of my first job. I also wonder if the 10,000 hour rule is just something like "Dunbar's numbar", the twenty words that Eskimos don't actually have for snow or any number that sticks in the popular imagination just because it's a nice number that seems to explain something.
Nevertheless, all this led me to wonder if there was any skill I had actually put 10,000 hours into mastering. I'd come pretty close with playing the recorder when I was twenty: my teacher, who tended to praise with faint damnation, said "You're playing virtuoso pieces, but you're not a virtuoso yet," which kind of implied that I wasn't far off. (And for people who think the recorder is a pissy little instrument for ten-year-olds, listen to this - I used to play that shit, man). None of the martial arts I've practised come anywhere near. In fact the only area where I might meet the 10,000 hour criterion is teaching. Not every hour I have taught could be classed as conscious practice, but most of it probably does, because teaching, like medicine, is one of those professions where you don't get to zone out much, and the hours where I have just told students to get on with something can be compensated for by the hours I spent planning lessons and reading about education.
So am I a master teacher? Well, maybe not, but I'm a hell of a lot nearer to mastering teaching than to mastering anything else that is worth mastering. In that case, I shouldn't be so disappointed that I'll be missing my capoeira batizado because it clashes with a conference on English for academic purposes where I will be presenting a paper. Sure, that is not nearly as much fun as doing capoeira for three days and getting a funky Portuguese nickname at the end. But while capoeira is something I enjoy a lot, it is not something I will ever master. On the other hand, at the conference I'll be talking to a bunch of people from around the world who know what they are talking about and still want to hear what I have to say about the gamification of EAP, which can't be bad. And compared to mastering the art of selling photocopiers, teaching is a pretty good thing to be good at.
Legal disclaimer: It is not the aim of this article to disparage photocopier salespeople. Selling photocopy machines is an important job which can only be performed by suitably qualified personnel who will not turn into psychopthic militia leaders after civilisation collapses.
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