Just Everyone Pipe Down, Alright?

After having carefully delineated the separation of science and religion (you remember, science is for when you're awake and using your ruler, religion is for when you're asleep and have no access to pens), it turns out that there has been a similar line of thought happening all over the bleeding shop. 

Last week saw the final instalment in a series of lectures that I would love to have gone to called Uncertain Minds), which tried to set out with some cohesion if any common ground is possible on the increasingly more fashionable topic of religion in this smoky stew we find ourselves dodging the chunks in at the turn of the century.  (For a full review of the event see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/24/uncertain-minds-uncertainty-faith) I found particularly interesting what Manchester University's own ex-Official Badass, Terry Eagleton, says about the polarising which has taken place in our society, between those who have no faith and those with too much. Here is a video of him being vague but wise: Eagleton Meaning of Life (As an interesting aside, Eagleton talks of the power of the lexicon in shaping our mental landscapes, citing the ubiquity of "like" we all use now as being indicative of a blurred, undefined cognitive realm, where we need not make anything precise.  I have thought that the use of the word "whatever" also functions in the same way, allowing us to make no judgement whatsoever if we don't feel like it.  These words make it easier to not commit to what's going on in the world.)  As Bunting says:

"Late capitalism is inherently faithless, he [Eagleton] argued, and its rationalism conditions the way we think and speak. The result is that a "shallow, technocratic managerialism pushes all deeper questions aside and abandons them to the red-neck fundamentalists"."

If we do choose to engage with the world around us (you brave souls, you) we must carve deep and thus recognisable fissures between the poles - left/right, believer/non-believer, East/West and so on (I mean, you've practically done an entire RE GCSE by reading that paragraph) - and plant ourselves firmly one side or the other. I agree that it is an interesting and perhaps unforeseen side-effect of all this globalisation that, instead of updating our palettes with ever more exquisite shades of grey, we have credit-crunched the whole paintbox to leave us with the bare minimum.  

Doris Salcedo's work Shibboleth - a 500ft crack along the length of the floor in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/dorissalcedo/leaflettext.shtm

Unfortunately, the truth is never going to be like that.  If there is nothing else that this current (UK) government has taught us (apart from representing quite a wonderfully painful and complete tableau of What Not To Be Like, Ever, As A Human Being, Not Ever) is that the crude scoring that separates ideas such as left and right is outdated, irrelevant, divisive and useless.  We are mostly so terrified of the growling juggernaut of living in a modern society that we scatter into corners, draping ourselves with our Likes and Dislikes, Star Signs and Pet Peevs, clinging to an identity which isn't necessarily the one we wanted, but hellfire! it's the one that was available.  Difference is to be celebrated, of course, we are all special unique snowflakes, I'm sure, but the ready-made opinions that we can instantly affiliate ourselves with seems to me to be so superficial as to be utterly without meaning.

So what you get is an ever-widening gap between the Believer and the Non-Believer.  The healthiest mental option, surely, of the Pick 'n' Mix Brain, the Mind at Large (learning as much of the world as you possibly can in order to make the most educated guess about where you fit in with it all) becomes increasingly difficult as this trench widens. 

There was an article in last week's New Humanist (which I must say, despite containing some irritatingly interesting articles, is on the whole one of the nastiest pieces of smug, self-congratulating arsewipe I have ever had the misfortune to not throw out of my balcony sooner - sample sentence: "The Rationalist Press Association (or RPA, founded 1899), the predecessor of the Rationalist Association, which publishes this magazine, does have a long history of publishing material sympathetic to various forms of eugenics. It’s not all bad news. There’s some comfort perhaps in the news that the key figure in the birth of eugenics was not a rationalist but a Protestant vicar." Thank God, eh boys?!) covering the new book by Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance.  The idea is that since we (arguably rightly) decided that religion should not be the force that described our waking life, that this should be the domain of science and that which is provable, testable and is agreed upon by qualified people, we have shunted religion to the sidelines, in that it is no longer directly intertwined with everyday culture.  Whereas in many cultures the year still rotates around the upkeep of various sacred rituals, designed to connect you to your religion, in the West at least, if you can't make money out of it then better keep it to yourself, pilgrim. 

Super-ironic pro-abstinence poster

This has meant that if anyone has the misfortune to just so happen to believe in something beyond the cold facts of Reality, then they know not to share this with the world at large, but only with the select few who also share, like any kind of extreme fetish, your secret love.  As Caspar Melville comments:

"“The ‘religious revival’,” writes Roy, “is primarily about the believer’s refusal to see his world reduced to the private sphere.” The new fundamentalisms look with shock at a culture where there is no longer any evidence of their faith. They become isolated and begin to brandish the religious markers of their faith – crucifix, headscarf, Bible, faith accessories – as a demand for public recognition. In this context religion, for so long part of everyday culture, becomes strange. For the secular, people with faith are looked on as weird. Roy points to the case of the Pope – he has been wearing the same sort of garb for centuries, but is suddenly publically lampooned as a man in a dress with funny shoes."

So, it turns out that "faith" no longer means (as I took it to) a bespoke smorgasbord of your beliefs - the part of you that reacts with other than cold objectivity when a million fish dies, for example - infused with whatever else you've understood from the world of waking.  It is apparently now a wholesale rejection of everything that is rational and correct and consensually upheld.  This is why believers are idiots and must be ridiculed. 

And I'm not necessarily saying that they're not - both Christian and Muslim fundamentalism in particular are back-of-the-classroom-style sniggering culprits in this.  There is nothing more uplifting than wandering out onto Market Street in Manchester and watching the preaching Christian nutjobs (who all seem to be wearing brand new branded sweatshirts recently, and singing from expensive looking tannoy systems - it's easy to see how you gain impetus as the alternative when the other side is so bleak) getting into heated exchanges with Muslim nutjobs on the street and knowing that, whatever else might be true, their bullshit isn't. 

But what I am saying is that idiocy comes from all sides, because it comes from ignorance.  Reading some of the readers' letters in the New Humanist made my fists ball up into tiny white socks, especially when several enlightened subscribers had written in to bemoan all the Dawkins bashing that has been going on recently - "I mean, if they'd actually read The God Delusion they would know they were wrong."  Oh really?  How many of you judgmental fuckwits have read the Bible, cover to cover? The Qur'an? The Upanishads, the Rig Veda, the various Books of the Dead?  Nope, didn't think so.  Unless you have some basis to your judgements, have the good decency to keep them to yourselves, and certainly not to dismiss every person who believes not as you do as being a moron, because then, I'm afraid, you're just as bad as the shoutiest of explosiviest of rantiest of religious nuts. If St Paul's Cathedral can chair a series of debates on the existence of God, then you can all eat some non-leavened humble pie.  

Man Ray, Dust Breeding (Detail from the Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp), 1920, showing how dust accumulated on Duchamp's work.

As I have said before, and will probably say many more times, if you have in any way understood the facts of the universe as incontrovertibly proven by science, then there is no need and no time for all of this callous points-scoring.  You try your best to learn as much as you can and do with it what you can, but don't, please, start shitting on anyone else while you do it.