The Religion Thing

Thoughtful and considered pieces from Ed Rooksby and Socialism in an Age of Waiting on “the religious question” appeared over the weekend, pondering the appropriate socialist attitude toward religion and the religious. SIAW also ask whether it might be possible for socialists to develop an attitude comparable to “hating the sin but loving the sinner” as advocated by the Christian faith in one form or another.

As anarchists, and therefore socialists, our beef has always been with organized religion and the insidious nature of power relationships as they are exercised through the hierarchy (and patriarchy) of the church (used in the broadest sense to cover all mainstream organized religions). The religious impulse itself is another matter entirely: Anarchists’ attitudes towards what we might call “spirituality” vary from the scepticism of Stirner and the Bakuninites to the Catholic workerism of Simone Weil and Dorothy Day to the anthroposophy of Jens Bjørneboe.

For what it’s worth, my own personal view is that it’s both patronizing and short-sighted for anarchists to imagine that the religious are less enlightened, more parochial, or simply more gullible than those of us who have, it follows, attained a higher level of perceptiveness and proximity to understanding the world as it really is. The impulse to find meaning in the world is something that is universal, something that not just derives from the human condition, I would argue, but which arises simply as a logical consequence of the presence of consciousness to itself. In other words, if we ever encounter aliens, they too will exhibit, if they are conscious, the same propensity toward making sense of life in a manner that we can call religious, not forgetting that what we today regard as superstition was once regarded as science, as providing an explanation for everything.

I’m drawing on the existentialists, particularly Sartre, here, although he gives anyone a hard time who attempts to argue that life has definite meaning and that our existence here is anything but accidental. Unnecessarily hard, I think, because the temptation to conclude that our existence must have some purpose is overwhelming. That the universe exists at all is something impossible to explain; that there should be something rather than nothing prompts speculation in itself. Add to that the infinite number of possible forms that the universe could take and you begin to see why anyone might conclude that their existence surely could not be accidental: The odds against their existence are so immense that surely arbitrary chance would have resulted in some other outcome.

The irony is that, whatever outcome there might have been, if there were conscious entities in it, they would be tempted to regard their existence as anything but accidental. Existentialists (myself included) are in the minority, I have no doubt, when we conclude that, yes, it is an accident that we exist—Darwinism has made things much easier for that minority to bolster its case, mind you, and to increase its numbers—and we are right to argue our corner, but it doesn’t make sense for us to behave the way someone like Dawkins does and to regard religion as irrational and “a virus.” Human beings have a distinctively human reason (yes, reason) for being attracted to explanations for their existence, and when the absurdity of that existence is compounded by apparently inexplicable and arbitrary suffering, the need to find an explanation or justification for that pain is only made all the more urgent. Some of that suffering, socialists can relieve because it originates not in “the human condition” but in the organization and distribution of resources in society, but the last thing we should do is present socialism as a form of earthly religion, promising a universal panacea for everything that ails us as a species.