Ideologies, cultures, and religions

Pope John Paul II admonishes the ideologist priest Fr. Cardenal

Weber wrote on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and he was right. Nevertheless, most people don’t realize the importance of religions that are no longer dominant in the way every society organizes itself. Even worse: few realize nowadays that most ideologies are just heresies in which the old religion was kept in most aspects, except for the most crucial of them: Divinity. The Godhead. The Guy Up There. The All-Powerful. That’s why Voegelin warned us that immanentizing the Eschaton – that is, squeezing the Infinite down into our ridiculously small materialist worldview – is a lousy idea.

Everywhere, at all times — well, except for Modern Western society, probably the weirdest thing to ever happen on such a big scale — people attributed a divine origin to the order of all things, society among them. It could be a pantheon of super-heroes or the open admission of a Great Ruler Above, but the idea of a society that did not at least try to agree with some kind of divine order is, historically speaking, an absolute novelty.

In Medieval Europe, this order was obviously seen in a Christian sense. It was such a Christian order that non-Christian groups were seen as if they inhabited another order, and had their own society (with its own judges, punishments, standard behaviors, and so on). It’s not politically correct to say it nowadays, but when later Enlightened societies offered Jews participation in the same lay society the greater part of people in the Jewish ghettoes were against it. They saw it as apostasy, for entering the new open society would mean abandoning the faith of their forefathers. Many militant Hassid groups began as anti-assimilation movements.

But, again, let us go back to that dastardly and interesting period of History when something new started brewing from the old Medieval order, in the XVIth Century. That time is known as the Renaissance, that is, the re-birth. Not in an Evangelical “born-again” sense, though. What was coming back, so as to say, was old Pagan knowledge, art, and such. Society had reached the point where it became possible to use old Pagan stuff without falling into the temptation of becoming a pagan. Astrologers, alchemists, and magicians started popping up like mushrooms, just as the symbolical usage of Pagan imagery (for instance, Hercules for strength or Jupiter for power) and tales. The good of Pagan culture, without its bad, animal-sacrificing, side. Or at least it was what people were seeking. Nobody in Southern Europe believed Roman gods of old actually existed, but the tales of their acts provided very good metaphors, as Freud would later prove with his Oedipal Complex thingy.

On the half-wild forgotten lands of Northern Europe, however, it sounded threatening; their old Pagan religion had not been as thoroughly destroyed as the Roman one. Christianity did not have the deep roots it had in the Southern part of the European civilization, and talk of Jupiter sounded like talk of Odin, and there were people in the countryside who did believe Odin was real. Oh, the literal sense of the Latin word “paganus” — pagan — is “guy from the countryside”. Hillbilly, if you want.

This is the social situation from which sprang the New Religion after Friar Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of a church on the eve of an important festival that would attract people from the whole region. As I wrote elsewhere, it led to a vicious rupture — and eventual destruction — of Christendom.

Now, religions are always lived in the particular way of each nation. A German Catholic is a singing Catholic, while a Swiss Catholic is a silent one, a Spanish Catholic is dramatic, and a Portuguese Catholic is laconic. There is always a two-way process going, in which religion informs society, and society informs religion. While there was the safeguard of being a part of a Continent-wide Catholic Church (“catholic” means universal, or everybody’s), national differences could not go much further. But when Luther’s New Religion triggered the creation of an infinity of sects, each nation — or social group within a nation — could get its own religion, fully informed by their society and, in turn, informing that society. It was in a way quite similar to what happens nowadays when people lock themselves (or are locked by algorithms) inside social-media bubbles of self-reinforcement.

That led to quite drastic departures from the Old Religion. Whereas profit had always been at least suspicious — that camel and eye of a needle story — in the Old Religion, Calvinism would make it just a tiny bit away from being glorious. In a religious sense. It was a reversal similar to that of Cannabis — that in less than fifty years stopped being “the Devil’s weed” to become an almost-universal panacea — but with much greater social effects. Those effects in the birth of Capitalism are what Weber pinpointed in his magistral essay.

A quite sad effect of the Modern proliferation of sects is that a market crowded with (religious) offers is a market where Religion is not worth much. In economic terms, that is what happened after a century of religious wars got to a stalemate, and the stalemate led to a ceasefire and an agreement: the Treaty of Westphalia, according to which rulers gained the power to establish the religion (new or old) they saw fit in their territories.

That led, in turn, to the laicization of society; after all, if the King is above God (as he is the one who decides what shall be his kingdom’s religion) one only needs to get rid of the king to get rid of God. That’s precisely what the French and the American Revolutions did. That’s the birth of the oh-so-very-Modern idea of a lay society, a lay government, in which religion is at best tolerated, as long as it remains a private issue. Something that any human being, in any other place or moment of history, would consider absolutely insane, as religion has always been the core of any society; a “private religion” has always been an oxymoron.

That was, of course, the case with the religion of old Christendom. In the Catholic Faith, all faithful are literally considered part of a divine family. Baptism makes one an adoptive son of both God and the Virgin Mary, and all other baptized are one’s siblings, whether living on Earth, on their way to Heaven, or already there. Brothers help siblings in need; therefore, asking for the prayers of those whom one knows to be in Heaven — closer to God’s ear, in a way — is just one of the mechanisms of a vast familial community: the Communion of Saints. That emphasis on community is central to Catholic life, in which — to the chagrin of Ayn Rand — everybody does have an actual duty to help the poor, the weaker, the downtrodden. Thus, cultures informed by this Faith tend to have a positive view of most communal social arrangements.

The opposite happens in Calvinism, the most extreme (surviving) form of the Islamizing heresy of having everything one could possibly need in The One Book. People, in that religion, would have had their final destiny chosen by their god before they were even born. The way to discern one’s final lot was by checking whether one had the signs that pinpointed someone loved by the Calvinist god: bourgeois virtues (talk about self-reinforcing pressures!) and, eventually, material riches, seen as “blessings” from above. Going to Heaven or Hell, after all, was not and could not be a consequence of how one lived one’s life. The way one lived, on the other hand, could be a sign of divine election. In the absence of a Communion of Saints, neither one’s actions nor the help of others could change one’s predetermined eventual fate. Even if every single other person tried to help, one would be either hell-bound or heaven-bound, and that was it. Religion became a very private matter — as it was between one and one’s god, with no possible participation of other people. At the same time, though, it became the groundwork of a radical theocracy, such as the one Calvin installed in Geneve. After all, hell-bound people were obviously going to be troublemakers; the heaven-bound had to tame them, to force them to submit. To either make bourgeois out of them or to get rid of them. Curiously, it is another aspect that links Calvinism and Islam.

A lay society that was culturally informed by Calvinism, thus, tends to be at the same time individualistic — that is, hostile to any form of communitarianism — and highly oppressive against those it views as “bad”. The dualism inherent in the dual predestination system, when Heaven and Hell are removed from the equation, becomes a form of social dualism. Instead of the elect and the damned, there are winners and losers, and there is no point in aiding the latter: they are literally born losers, and will not get any better.

Neither here nor there, between the cultural forms of the Old Universal Religion and the extremism of the Calvinist New Religion’s culture-forming aspects, Lutheranism survived as a society-ordering cultural force. Unlike Calvinism, it keeps a strong communitarian component. Unlike Catholicism, on the other hand, it never truly asserted its independence against State power. In this aspect, it is much closer to the Eastern Christian relationship with their Emperors (Byzantine or Russian) than with traditional Western Christianity. At the same time, being a form of Protestantism, therefore a religious expression of XVIth-Century bourgeoisie, the bourgeois virtues Weber wrote about are deemed important. A lay society that has a Lutheran cultural basis tends, therefore, to be a bourgeois society with a strong communitarian aspect, while at the same time granting the State authority to rule over everything.

Both forms of Protestantism share another peculiarity: just like Muslims, they are People of the Book. The substitution of The One Book for millennia of elaborated and, much more, lived Faith — in which authority was diffuse, coming simultaneously from the Church, cultural mores, the State, and intermediate social institutions — led to a mindset in which the written word is given tremendous power. Positive law — which as I wrote elsewhere in this blog has always been softened by cultural and religious filters — tends to be seen as analogous to “biblical” commandments. Regulations of all kinds tend to be seen as absolutely binding, deprived of any kind of “elbow room”. Deviation from the idol of the written word is seen as “corruption”.

When Modernity arrived at its strongest moment, in the last century, all those religious-based cultural mores took the form of ideology, that is, of Utopia-building formulas, ideas that should organize reality instead of being checked against it. Each of those cultures generated a different ideological dream of the perfect society.

Communism can be described as the absolute immanentization of Catholicism. God is out of the picture, replaced by the State. The Church, more exactly the clergy, is replaced by the Party. Material goods (food, roof, and so on) substitute for divine grace and the Great Leader substitutes for the Queen of the Angels. These, of course, are replaced by political commissars and such. Its strong communitarian component probably prevented it from becoming a strong political force in countries with a Calvinist — therefore individualistic — cultural basis (Switzerland, the US). In Southern European countries and their former colonies, on the other hand, it managed to infiltrate the whole society, and even nowadays Communist guerillas kill people in culturally Catholic countries.

Fascism started in Italy, but it could not advance much; its totalitarian ideals were frustrated by the residual cultural tradition of interpreting and softening laws. On the other hand, when that lousy idea arrived in Germany, it blossomed into a monstrous carnivorous flower that took the lives of millions of innocents. It happened because there was already a tradition of compliance with the state; no German would even consider softening an order from a superior, as any Spanish or Italian thoughtlessly would. At the same time, the worship of the written word gave Nazi authorities a kind of power that could not be conceived outside its cultural flowerbed. Curiously, in Russian Communism — which could happen because the czar had always seen as being above the Church —, as murderous as it was, there was not a shadow of the absolute respect for authority that helped Nazism turn Eastern Europe into a slaughterhouse. People complied with the State, but at the same time, they chose to interpret its orders in the ways they saw fit. The cultural elements Russian society shares with either Lutheran or Catholic societies are quite easy to see.

Capitalism, now, is the absolute immanentization of Calvinism. God is out of the picture, but the absolute primacy of the individual is there. The bourgeois virtues Weber pinpointed are still the same used by the Geneva theocrats to identify the supposedly Elect. The dualism, as I wrote above, just changed its final goal: out goes Heaven and Hell, replaced by what had been its sign: material riches. Donald Trump’s bathroom substitutes for Heaven. The bourgeois virtues are still considered not only essential but necessary and “self-evident”. Woe to those who defy them: they are the outcasts, and must be dealt with harshly. In this context, it is easy to understand why the US has the largest amount and proportion of incarcerated people on Earth.

Finally, Social-Democracy — the Welfare State, combining communitarianism and burgeois virtue, providing everybody a safety net but, on the other hand, hammering down any nail that rises above the others — is the ideological fruit of Lutheranism, and would utterly fail if implanted in societies with different cultural bases. It is a fundamental requisite of Social-Democracy, as it is of Capitalism, to have a written-word-based social order, in which everybody takes the literal meaning of all and any positive law as a moral imperative. Only on such a basis, it is possible to raise the vast complex of social and communitarian institutions that at the same time reward (up to a point) bourgeois virtue, while keeping afloat those who cannot attain them.

Ideologies are a form of idolatry if we reduce them to absurd. As with any idolatry, there are subordinate micro-idolatries: the idolatry of the written word that grants the State tremendous power over its citizens; the idolatry of the individual and his passions; the idolatry of a common good interpreted in terms of material conditions. The only way out is to abandon the whole idolatrous edifice and build society from the bottom up, checking ideas against realities instead of creating vacuous blueprints for a Utopia that can never be attained.