1: Religion
A MORAL PRIMER SIMON RAVEN
This is the first of fire weekly extracts from what Simon Raven describes as 'a substantial primer of moral and social instruction for the adolescent young.' Subsequent extracts will deal with travel, love and marriage, food and drink, and money.
As that eminent psychologist, William James, has observed, since no assertion about God is either verifiable or refutable, any religious belief which is strongly held is, in a sense, true. If, for example, I believe firmly enough that there is a benevolent God whom I shall later join in His heaven, then whether or not this really is so I shall still derive equal pleasure from my assurance, and to that extent my belief is a valid one.
But not quite valid enough, and hence the ill-temper which discussion of religion arouses. No one, to be sure, can disprove my smug con- tention that I am bound for paradise; but if enough people express scorn or dissent, I shall begin to have an uneasy feeling that they could, after all, be right. There is only one way to remove such infuriating doubts (logical repu- diation being impossible), and that is to silence those who articulate them.
But it is not enough merely to silence people. As James would have pointed out, the mere fact that a religious belief differing from my own exists at all lends it a kind of truth, whether or not it is actually expressed in words. Thus to subvert a truth which I find unacceptable I must first destroy the belief which created it, and this means destroying not only those who voice the belief but also those who tacitly cherish it. How does one detect this latter class? Since one must clearly take no chances, it is best to assume that all those who don't openly profess one's own creed in fact hold a hostile one. But even this isn't foolproof: suppose there are people who are busily paying lip- service to my creed while practising a rival one in secret?
As you will have realised by now, the only way to ensure that one's own religious belief, and hence one's own religious truth (i.e. the truth), prevail to the exclusion of all others, is to kill everyone except oneself. Not sur- prisingly, then, violence has been an abiding element in religious affairs. However, since it is impractical to depopulate the globe in the interest of religious uniformity, and since such bloody proceedings have for some centuries been offensive to educated opinion, an alter- native method of upholding orthodoxy has been developed : proselytism by persuasion. At first sight this seems a far more humane way of going about things: but, once again, prosely- tisers are up against the difficulty that they can- not justify their belief by logical argument; and they must therefore have recourse to propa- ganda—that is, to verbal violence. Refraining from massacre and torture in this world, they threaten extravagant punishments, and promise equally extravagant rewards, in the next. These days suoh punishments and rewards are not as crudely described as they were a hundred years ago; but they are still massive, despite the softening of the terms in vogue. Thus an eternity of flame has now been replaced by an eternal deprivation of God's presence, a per- petuity of harps and hallelujahs by perpetual oneness with the infinite. But the principle remains the same: join our side, or else. . . .
All of which brings us to another important factor in religious matters. In order to justify the enormity of such forecasts, it has been necessary throughout history to devise an authority for them which transcends mere speculative belief, for this, however enthusiastic, will hardly convince any but the half-witted of the existence of (e.g.) lakes of brimstone or supernal bowers of bliss. The only way to pass those off is to quote God Himself in one's support; and hence we come to Revelation. The principle here is elementary: 'God came down and told me,' or (more daring) 'I am God's appointed representative,' or (more daring still) 'I am God.' The difficulty with this method of proselytisation lies in gaining public accep- tance of one's credentials; its advantage is that once one is accepted one's lightest word goes unquestioned. There is no longer any need to persuade or to promise, only to state.
Two final generalisations, before we discuss the practical and contemporary implications of all this. First, it should now be clear from the foregoing that the authority behind any religious faith, whereas it purports to be ver- tical (i.e. to descend from on high), is in fact horizontal—which is to say that it is really embodied in and wielded by a man among men, who has had the cleverness, the charisma, the fanaticism or just the luck to convince his fellows that he is in God's confidence. All religion, in a word, consists of the human masquerading as the Absolute.
And secondly, it goes without saying that the seeming verticalness of the authority enables its earthly nominee to dictate absolutely in moral matters as well as in religious ones. (A point to which we shall recur very shortly.) Now, what conclusions are you, my dear pubescent readers, to draw? On the face of what I have been saying, you might be tempted to infer that all organised religion is simply a majestic fraud which has long since been rumbled as such by all true men of the world. In the latter respect, unfortunately, you would be wrong. To take England alone, you will find that conventional religion of one brand or another still operates quite forcibly in our affairs, not only among the ignorant, who find it a solace, but also among the ruling and educated classes, who consider it (although they may not believe it very seriously) to be in some vague way 'a good thing,' a stabilising influence.' Let me put it this way : religion, even outside the established Church of Eng- land, is officially encouraged.
You will, therefore, find strong religious pressures at work in your homes and your schools, and the big battalions, rest assured, are still behind those pressures. Once you are grown and independent you may be able to afford to ignore them, but until then you must live with them, and the best way of doing so is this: fall in with whatever your parents and the rest require of you without making a fuss. You can think your own thoughts while going through the prescribed motions; and you will find that if you practise polite observance in small matters, the authorities, lulled by your apparent acquiescence, will prove surprisingly obtuse in detecting your delinquencies in large ones. As I shall have reason to repeat very often in these pages, the easiest and quickest way to freedom does not lie through protest (so childish and time-wasting) but through good-humoured superficial compliance.
However, there is one important point which you may want to raise at this stage: ,granted, you may say, that all religions are discredited superstitions, is there not some value, never- theless, in the moral codes which they propose? For though some of the items may be harsh or ridiculous (all those nagging rules about chastity), such codes do at least seek to set up a frame of decent behaviour and to provide sound practical answers in problems and emer- gencies. Well, yes. But in so far as these moral codes are truly valuable, it is because they in- culcate such qualities as good will, cleanliness, reliability and courage, all of which are in any case recommended to us by the canons of tnere common sense and require no endorsement from the vertical or the absolute.
It is very important to understand this. You may recall my saying a little earlier that once a man gets us to believe in his vertical religious authority, he is able to dictate absolutely in moral matters as well as religious. Now, the common-sense morality which I advocate is empirical; it depends, that is, on wide human experience and only includes among its tenets what that experience has tested and found worth while. But a morality dictated by a man in the name of an Absolute God is purely theoretical; it depends, not on a calm assess- ment of facts and conditions, but on what the law-giver happens to think desirable for ab- stract reasons, and since it is propagated with divine sanction it does not admit of healthy argument. Although it may well include the good things, it can also include anything else at all (like all that rubbish, for example, to be found in orthodox Judaism) and it knows it is right. Such morality is the most vicious enemy of civilised life.
I want to emphasise this because there is a lot of theoretical morality flying about just now. As it happens, it has little to do with any of the established churches, but it is as fanatical in kind as the churches have ever been. Although it does not claim divine sanction in the old conventional sense, it does claim absolute authority in the name of humanity, equality or some similar cant-word of our own day. It is, that is to say, a religious phenomenon, because it is human belief masquerading as absolute truth and on that ground arrogating immunity from argued opposition. And just as in the bad old days religion's favourite method of dealing with those who differed was by brute violence, so the new religion, as you will have read in your newspapers, claims that it too has a right and even an obligation to silence speech by cutting throats. The bonfires are building once more: watch carefully lest you wake up to find one on your lawn.
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