On Religion and Politics (I)

I’m getting more in the thick of the preparation of my new book, and as part of it I laid out the areas of social research I needed to strengthen, among which there is a deeper understanding of sociological action theory. I had already read Parsons’ The Social System some years ago, and it has heavily influenced my own take on the working of society (my construct of dominant reason is indeed a way of integrating voluntary individual action with the influence of the group, which specifically has to provide the arguments for the eventual justification of said action to others -and to self-, along contractualist lines), but knew I had to delve deeper. Before proceeding with the results of such delving, I have to say that Parsons has been, in my humble opinion, very unjustly neglected by later sociologists (he is not much quoted or acknowledged), and I cannot  avoid sympathizing with what I suspect is the real reason of his (relative) falling out of fashion. It has to do with a dazzling representative of the next generation of his craft, the charismatic Charles Wright Mills, devoting a good deal of one of his most known and influential books (The Sociological Imagination) to savagely criticizing the aforementioned Social System, because of its “unnecessary verbosity”.

Wright Mills presents a number of long, torturous and yes, somewhat convoluted paragraphs of Parsons’ book followed by a “translation” in much more direct and colloquial prose that purportedly contains the same information, thus giving the impression that the original work by Parsons is a pompous and ponderous accumulation of uninspired digressions, apt to be summarized and streamlined in a paper of 10-12 pages without substantial loss of accuracy (rather, what survived the process of pruning and eliminating redundant and uninformative verbiage would be a bunch of self-evident platitudes almost devoid of any scientific value). I may be exaggerating the extent of Wright Mills critique (there was, may be, a tinge of admiration and recognition for who was, after all, one of the giants of American sociology when the Sociological Imagination was published) but not much, as both figures were both characteriologically and ideologically worlds apart (Parsons was a paradigm of the scholarly establishment, and quite conservative and anti-communistic, couldn’t be seen without a flannel suit and tie, and had a staid and cautious personal life, whilst the rambunctious Wright Mills wore jeans and working boots, married four times -but only to three different women!, drove to class in a motorbike -but not an American Harley, but a German BMW, what a wuss!- and spent time in Cuba interviewing Fidel Castro). Unsurprisingly, in the late sixties and seventies students the world over identified with the latter, leaving the former’s theories aside (I myself like to keep my copies of the Sociological Imagination and the Social System side by side in my library as a little private joke). Which is a pity, because sparkling and passionate as Wright Mills’ work may be, Parsons’ is by far more interesting, more illuminating and much deeper…

All this long introduction (and no reader of this blog should be surprised that I sympathize and empathize with an author accused of having a writing style considered by some young gun to be too wordy, and too abundant in long paraphrases and circumlocutions) was just to say I recently finished reading The Structure of Social Action, the other major book by Talcott Parsons (in 2 scrumptious and eminently enjoyable volumes), and that (more specifically, its discussion of previous sociologist Émile Durkheim, which I have also extensively read, of course) got me thinking in some remarks by one of my teachers (Amelia Valcarcel, we will get to her in a subsequent post) in very illuminating ways. Let’s start with Parsons’ understanding of Durkheim first, and see if we can reach to Valcarcel’s considerations in due time…

What we are reminded at the beginning of the section of the Structure of Social Action devoted to the discussion of Durkheim’s ideas is that he was a strict positivist. As this feature will turn out to be of extraordinary importance for my argument, we will need to deviate for a moment from our exposition of Parsons’ considerations of Durkheim, and expound what we understand such position to entail. During the first third of the XX century, positivism (a position championed first and foremost by Auguste Comte, the avowed teacher and inspirator of Durkheim) coincided quite literally with what today we call (a bit deprecatingly) “scientism”, and was an evolution of the (much older) empiricist worldview. For empiricists (the basic psychological and ontological scaffolding was designed and built by Locke, but the real meat and potatoes of the complete and philosophically coherent system were developed by my old friend Davey Hume), only those things that we can directly perceive through our bodily senses can be said to “really” exist. Even what we would call “mental” realities (“abstract” ideas, emotions, feelings, anticipations, memories, complex theories, mathematical systems, flights of fancy in our imagination and whatnot) are, according to empiricists, but a residue (or a re-elaboration of residues) of impressions left by things that we have perceived a number of times through our senses. As science developed in the XIX century the strictly empiricist position became more and more difficult to sustain (Maxwell equations showed quite conclusively the existence of a number of stubbornly physical things, no hocus-pocus or fluffy fairy-dust here!, like electromagnetic fields, charged particles, and subtle interactions, that our feeble senses would never be able to perceive), and was thus replaced by the positivism we are talking about: “Science” (at least the part of it that had to deal with non-conscious elements of nature, also called “natural sciences”, Naturwissenschaften in German) could exhaust the description of what was real and, vice versa, only those elements of reality that could be described by said “science”, that could be measured, that could be shown to conform to universal, parsimonious rules, were deemed to be “really, truly, honest-to-God real”. All the rest (first and foremost religious dogmas, of course, but once you start wielding your positivistic axe, all of metaphysics, doesn’t matter how anticlerical it may turn out to be, has to be discarded too).

I won’t go into the evident self-contradiction that stares you in the face the moment you formulate either empiricism or positivism (the discarding of metaphysics is itself a metaphysical proposition, not empirically demonstrable, and not amenable to being formulated, falsated or verified through anything remotely resembling the scientific method), or dwell in the methodological quicksand it soon found itself mired into (what has been called the demarcation problem: we can all agree that physics is unimpeachably “scientific” and that astrology is not… unfortunately, when we try to isolate the actual ways of doing physics, or chemistry, or biology that should distinguish them and constitute the ultimate explanation of such unimpeachability, so we could replicate them in other disciplines, like psychology, or anthropology, or sociology to make them more “scientific”, we find that the original “hard sciences” share a lot of the quirks and biases and implicit and unfounded assumptions that plague the latter, and we end up accusing the former of not being so scientific after all -see the whole social constructivism line of thought). I’ll just point out that Durkheim thought that the universe was composed only of three types of facts (all of them observable, with the help of specific instruments that may magnify them, if needs be): the “brute” facts of nature, the “mental” facts within the individuals’ brains (which were, needless to say, reducible to the first, no Cartesian whims here!) and the “social” facts, which constituted a third category. Finally, we need to note that for him any proposition, to be true, had to have a referent, to point to some existing fact or another (what after Wittgenstein we would call a “denotative theory of language”).  

The next element that Parsons draws our attention to is that for Durkheim (contra most progressive thinkers of the era and previous eras, like most philosophes, and the German left Hegelians, Marx and Feuerbach first and foremost among them… but not necessarily his teacher Comte!) religious propositions, being a manifestation that could be found in all societies, in his own time and in the past, had to be “true” (or they would have been eliminated). Now, they could not be true in the sense of describing an element of reality not amenable to scientific knowledge (because, remember, for him there could simply NOT be such elements). So they had to describe something really existing, and the question is, what could that be? it could not be facts of inert matter, as most of the contents of religious dogmas were incompatible with what physics teaches of how matter behaves (starting with the creation of the universe out of nothing, or out of a primordial chaos, that is more or less shared by all religions and would contradict either the laws of conservation of matter and energy or the second principle of thermodynamics). It could not be mental facts either, as what we know of human psychology is similarly incompatible with the most salient aspects of most religions, from ancient totemism to more developed “revealed” ones (from magical effects to miracles, prophecy and other types of supernatural knowledge), which presuppose some capabilities at least in some persons (not only founders, which can be assumed to be of a divine origin, but in selected leaders of the church or chosen ones, be them shamans, priests, gurus, etc.) As Parsons summarizes it (in page 413 of Volume I of the Structure of Social Action):

At the outset of the book [Parsons is here discussing Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life] he remarks that so persistent and tenacious an element in human life as religion is inconceivable if the ideas associated with it are pure illusions, that is, do not “reflect any reality”. And so he starts with a critique of the schools of interpretation which have, on the one hand, made religious ideas the primary element of religion and, on the other, have sought to derive these ideas from men’s impressions of the empirical world. This will be recognized as the typical approach of the earlier scheme – the question what , from the point of view of the actor, is the “reality” reflected in the ideas, the “representations” in terms of which he acts.

You probably can already see where this is leading: for Durkheim (in Parsons telling, and I think Parsons got it right here) the propositions of religious dogma, since its earliest manifestations (in totemism, as could be observed between Australian aboriginal tribes as documented by mostly German anthropologists, so kind of a third-hand account, but enough for him to assume that was a valid blueprint for every religious expression and form that came afterwards) really referred to the social reality, a somehow fuzzy concept that he had been championing since his first writings as being a sui generis kind of entity, but with as much claim to real existence as any lump of matter. And, if religious expressions, religious feeling, even actions that could be construed as religious ritual, all made reference to society, which is undeniably real, they could safely be understood as being true, which is what he was really after.

Of course, a believer may see things quite differently. When the Australian aboriginal chooses not to eat his totemic animal, or refrains from having sex with someone from the wrong totem, he is not complying with those prescribed behaviors because he feels an irrational respect (and awe and veneration) for the enhanced powers of the social group. Or not only that (because, if that were all he had in mind, we would lack a non-circular explanation of his behavior, specially the part of it more detrimental to everyday survival). When the Dervish dances and reaches a mystical feeling of unity with the divine that created the universe he does not consider that he is just very attuned to the traditions and myths and (somewhat deluded) worldview of his fellow believers with which he constitutes a collective unit (society!) able to exert much more power over their shared environment than what he alone could. When a Christian of whatever denomination participates in communion he doesn’t think about the holy form as a symbol of the unity of the group (or at least he shouldn’t only think that; in our own very disenchanted age it is a valid question what exactly does an enlightened citizen thinks he is doing by eating the wafer, and I wouldn’t discard in most cases it is something closer to the Durkheimian affirmation of group belonging and respect for the group’s traditions than to the direct access to the numinous, to the “irreducibly, entirely other” in Karl Otto’s terms, that orthodox theology tells him).

Be it as it may, the key aspect that caught my attention in Parsons interpretation of Durkheim is how the former sees the latter as using religion to complement an understanding of human motivation that would make the stability of social groups almost impossible to explain in its absence. Durkheim’s positivism limits him to positing what Weber called “means-ends rationality” when explaining human action: a modern citizen could use his reason only to determine what were the most adequate means to achieve his ends, but those ends themselves could not be subjected to rational validation. Other way of saying the same thing is that reason (understood as the systematic application of the scientific method to root out superstition, bias, fraud and other ways of thinking that are considered by positivist to be non-rational and, what is essentially the same, unscientific) can tell us how to act to achieve certain ends, but not to decide what ends we should set for ourselves (or for others) in the first place. This creates a problem for complex group, as different individuals are wont to choose different ends, some of which are likely to be exclusionary (not amenable to being pursued simultaneously: like if I pursue maximum economic development, ready to sacrifice whatever it takes to reach it, and you aspire to a maximally clean and unpolluted environment… our ends would clash and we would have no way to adjudicate rationally between them). It is a great merit of Parsons to identify that any “merely” utilitarian system of values (and all positivist systems end up being utilitarian, as they are left trying to maximize each individual pleasure -or, alternatively, minimize each individual’s pain, which is the only thing that is empirical, non-metaphysical and, according to their understanding of what reality consist of, the only thing that is “real”, and thus the only valid source of “value”) tends to be unstable, as those “ultimate ends” are, as I’ve said elsewhere, incommensurable.

So far, so good, we already know that for utilitarian (and, in more general terms, for all positivistic) systems there is no place for such thing as “values”, and so it is very difficult to demonstrate there is something that ultimately matters (in a  Parfitian sense). Things are like they are, happen as they happen (Parsons also notes perceptively that the positivistic view entails both value neutrality, obviously enough, and determinism, something with which I also strongly agree), and there is not much we can do about ‘em, other than note dutifully how they proceed and, at most, show a pro or con attitude. On top of determinism such outlook ends up resolving itself in utter relativism: as there is no way to compare my preferred ends with yours, both being equally valid for each of us (which is the same as saying, both being equally invalid in the traditional moral sense, because of its quaint aspiration to universality and unconditionality), the maximum we can aspire to is a deflationary ethics of tolerance where we endure each other as best we can, living and letting live as they say, trying to at least respect a basic set of individual rights in the expectations that our own rights would be similarly respected. Such lack of common values and common sense of “what indeed matters” would make the coordination of social groups very difficult and translate into fragmented, ultra-individualistic societies beset by “anomie” (an original Durkheimian term). If not killing each other is the best we can hope for, better to renounce all possible dreams of making great things together (like ever going to Mars, cheap and plenty fusion energy, or simply maintaining a planet with a semi-stable climate), as we would be forever doomed to the suboptimal equilibria we now endure, because of everybody looking out only for himself, with all the free-riding and externalities we have come to know so well, and which absent an all-encompassing set of  commonly accepted “ultimate ends” we would be unable to overcome.

Which means that, according to Durkheim, religion is a necessary component of social cohesion, or at least to the minimal level of group collaboration required to guarantee a modicum of human flourishing. Because in the absence of religion, of a common set of ultimate values that can bind people together and move them towards sacrificing at least something for the greater good, all we would have is a disparate group of selfish utility maximizers (pursuing in a more or less enlightened way their own incommensurable ends, each not admitting of negotiation or compromising with anybody else’s), Interesting stuff, that contrasts with some other decidedly (and more vocally) antireligious thinkers which may have shared some of Durkheim’s outlook, but didn’t have a problem in denying that religion really needed to have a “real” referent, something really existing to point to (I’m thinking here on Freud, that similarly was inspired by anthropological descriptions of Australian totemism but both in Totem and Taboo and The Future of an Illusion didn’t have any problem deciding that, for all its potential uses as social agglutinator religion was, as the first title mentioned clearly implied, an “illusion”, and even worse than that, a symptom of collective neurosis -it has to be noted that Freud was a notoriously dissembling author, and his books on religion are specially heavy in unfounded deductive chains and thinly veiled flights of fancy). Of course, the moment you subtract the element of truth such practices and sets of beliefs may have you are much less inclined to attempt to preserve them, and are much more likely to minimize the losses of getting entirely rid of them.

But what really caught my attention in all this was its import to my theory of the organization (Organization I, Organization II, Organization III, Decadence of organizations, Organizations & DR), which is one of the backbones of the book I already mentioned I’m currently working on. if Durkheim’s understanding of religion (not that different from Freud’s, as I just highlighted) is correct, that would collapse what I was considering two distinct types of organization into one: if religion is but an effective way of identifying members of the group so they can better coordinate with each other, religious organizations (marked by what they believe is really existing out there, and the kind of attitude it calls for) and political organizations (marked by the sense of belonging to a common group, and acting to improve the material lot of that group against others) would ultimately be the same. There could be no viable political organization without a distinct and unique set of beliefs that purported to be about “what there really is” but ultimately were about “who we are and how we distinguish ourselves from others”.

After thinking hard and long about it, I don’t think Durkheim is right, and I still think it makes sense to keep both types separate, but I’ll need to explain why in another post, as this one has grown beyond my very lax standards already. Stay tuned.