There is little doubt that in civil multicultural societies a certain multiplicity of religious denominations and creeds must be maintained under the freedom of religion umbrella. This is particularly necessary where each religion corresponds to a legitimate cultural tradition of which this religion is an inalienable part. While one may look with great apprehension upon the newest waves of foreign-culture immigration to one’s country, a clear distinction presumably ought to be made in the case of cultural-religious diversity that had historically existed within the country’s borders even before there was a country itself. Yet, the catastrophic collapse of the formerly stable and relatively prosperous nation of Yugoslavia along religious, far more than ethnic, lines has taught us a history lesson in most recent times to the effect that deadly religious/cultural strife which can destroy whole nations is neither a dark memory of the past, nor a mark of hopeless backwardness. There can be no disputing that Yugoslavia had been a “perfectly” civilized country before it descended into chaos and dark-age barbarism.
It is objectively observed today that in certain Moslem countries there is a tendency to insist on cultural and religious homogeneity of society thus favoring Islam at the expense of all other non-Islamic religions. There is a similar, although somewhat more nuanced, effort being made in China. Now, there is an understandable uproar about this among nations whose religions are being thus discriminated against. However, to be quite honest, with the experience of Yugoslavia still fresh in our memory, such a tendency is also understandable, as social homogeneity is a prized condition in all societies where its absence has led to civil wars and milder forms of internecine conflict.
A little history and a dose of Thomas Hobbes are now in order. In his quoted passage below we see Hobbes owning up to his metaphor comparing the State to an individual man.
Here is that remarkable passage from the 31st Chapter of his Leviathan:
“Seeing a Commonwealth is but one person, it ought also to exhibit to God but one worship; which then it does, when it commands it to be exhibited by private men publicly. And this is public worship, which is to be uniform: for those actions that are done differently by different men are not public worship. Therefore, where many sorts of worship are allowed, proceeding from different religions of private men, it cannot be said there is any public worship, nor that the Commonwealth is of any religion at all.”
Leaving logical deduction aside, Hobbes shows himself as a practical philosopher as well. Considering the long legacy of deadly religious strife among civilized European Christians, produced by the Reformation, it is understandable that he shrinks with horror from any suggestion of multiculturalism or religious diversity in his Commonwealth. Of course, his tough stand in this matter seems totally unsustainable in our day and age, at least among the civilized Europeans. But I keep wondering, nevertheless, how the current excesses of multiculturalism in Europe (and specifically the unaccommodating and uncompromising Islamic invasion) had been made possible, making poor old Hobbes keep turning in his grave: I told you so! There are many people in Europe today who do not answer the description of bigot, yet who will wholeheartedly agree with Hobbes.
Let us therefore take a deep breath before we begin our indignant grandstanding in censuring the Hobbesian insistence on monoreligious uniformity. Perhaps, he understood something that modern Europe has failed to understand…
But, anyway, we can see right away one of the pitfalls of comparing the State to the homo sapiens, as, in the tricky question of religion, it is indeed inconceivable for one person to have more than one religion. Hobbes is rather disingenuous here, of course, as he is an Englishman living in a country known to profess more than one major Christian faith: Protestantism and Catholicism. (If we wanted to describe the situation accurately, we would find several conflicting denominations in British Protestantism, which have been no less resentful of each other than in their common attitude toward Rome.)
It may be useful to remember that Thomas More, a whole century before Hobbes had described his religious utopianism in multireligious terms. There is a complete religious tolerance in More’s Utopia (as long as the citizens of his commonwealth do not profess atheism!) More, obviously, had his own agenda in doing this, as he wished to reconcile warring religions in his own country, and from a purely humanitarian point this ought to make better sense. Hobbes, on the other hand, hated the “Papists” so much that he would not allow them anywhere near his Commonwealth, a very personal, rather than philosophical approach to the subject, yet in harmony with his “artificial man” metaphor.
From a purely practical point of view, and in contradiction to Hobbes, we might say that in all countries where Protestantism had taken root, it is impossible to maintain a single worship (even under my own principle “to each great culture its own religion”). All these cultures were not born at Wittenberg or Augsburg! They had been Catholic before they had become Protestant, and in any European culture that embraces Protestantism there had to be a state of split religious personality ever since. No wonder that Nietzsche marks the Catholic countries of Europe with a “talent for religion,” while denying this “talent” to the Protestant countries. Poor Hobbes probably failed to realize that only the Papist “artificial man” among all Christian nations (with the exception of the Orthodox, who trace their faith to the earliest and purest form of Christianity and denounce the Pope for corrupting it, while denouncing the Protestants for moving even further away from Orthodoxy) could be consistently monoreligious.
But even in the broad sense of multiculturalism, Hobbes is incorrect. It is possible for one Commonwealth to be multicultural and multireligious without stopping to be a single commonwealth, as Russia’s example has proved itself to be. The solution to the problem of social multiculturalism in the context of one country is simple: the separation of Church and State, which does not mean the abolition of all public worship, but only its restriction to the appropriate constituent cultures. Ironically, the case of the United States has ceased to be representative of a multicultural unity. American society is becoming increasingly fractured, and the process of erosion of a single national identity carries the danger of becoming irreversible.
The case of Russia is of special interest, as the existing duumvirate of the Russian Orthodox Church and the State clearly establishes the dominance of the Great-Russian culture over all other minority cultures, within the Russian commonwealth, without anybody to seriously challenge this incontestable fact of political and cultural reality. On the contrary, the officially recognized minority cultures (Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism) seem to like the arrangement, seeing in the strength of the great-Russian Church/State Duumvirate their best guarantee of protection against domestic bigotry and unwelcome foreign influences. By the same token, it is the dominance of Russian Orthodoxy which makes it feel secure and therefore exceptionally tolerant toward the non-Christian minority religions as long as they stay within their clearly established cultural borders.
But Russia is, as usual, an exception, rather than the rule, and the rule is that neither in the commonwealth of a single nation, nor in a compound commonwealth, such as the European Union or the United Nations of today, or in any supranational conglomerate of tomorrow, religion must stand in the way of a political unity.
Incidentally, nor can the world ever become one Commonwealth, but it must remain a loose community of nations, where no uniformity of political organization, or any kind of interfaith common religious worship can ever be imposed by any international corps of social engineers. Let the nations remain themselves, and they will want to come together. But try to mold them into a common mold, and they will explode even the best of these molds into a thousand pieces.
Having said all that, I am compelled to end this entry with a coda. Going back to the beginning of this entry, take a look at today’s Europe’s multicultural mess, and, perhaps, the “monoreligious bigotry” of Hobbes’s quoted passage will now be seen in a new light. Could he have been a prophetic seer of bad things to come?...
It is objectively observed today that in certain Moslem countries there is a tendency to insist on cultural and religious homogeneity of society thus favoring Islam at the expense of all other non-Islamic religions. There is a similar, although somewhat more nuanced, effort being made in China. Now, there is an understandable uproar about this among nations whose religions are being thus discriminated against. However, to be quite honest, with the experience of Yugoslavia still fresh in our memory, such a tendency is also understandable, as social homogeneity is a prized condition in all societies where its absence has led to civil wars and milder forms of internecine conflict.
A little history and a dose of Thomas Hobbes are now in order. In his quoted passage below we see Hobbes owning up to his metaphor comparing the State to an individual man.
Here is that remarkable passage from the 31st Chapter of his Leviathan:
“Seeing a Commonwealth is but one person, it ought also to exhibit to God but one worship; which then it does, when it commands it to be exhibited by private men publicly. And this is public worship, which is to be uniform: for those actions that are done differently by different men are not public worship. Therefore, where many sorts of worship are allowed, proceeding from different religions of private men, it cannot be said there is any public worship, nor that the Commonwealth is of any religion at all.”
Leaving logical deduction aside, Hobbes shows himself as a practical philosopher as well. Considering the long legacy of deadly religious strife among civilized European Christians, produced by the Reformation, it is understandable that he shrinks with horror from any suggestion of multiculturalism or religious diversity in his Commonwealth. Of course, his tough stand in this matter seems totally unsustainable in our day and age, at least among the civilized Europeans. But I keep wondering, nevertheless, how the current excesses of multiculturalism in Europe (and specifically the unaccommodating and uncompromising Islamic invasion) had been made possible, making poor old Hobbes keep turning in his grave: I told you so! There are many people in Europe today who do not answer the description of bigot, yet who will wholeheartedly agree with Hobbes.
Let us therefore take a deep breath before we begin our indignant grandstanding in censuring the Hobbesian insistence on monoreligious uniformity. Perhaps, he understood something that modern Europe has failed to understand…
But, anyway, we can see right away one of the pitfalls of comparing the State to the homo sapiens, as, in the tricky question of religion, it is indeed inconceivable for one person to have more than one religion. Hobbes is rather disingenuous here, of course, as he is an Englishman living in a country known to profess more than one major Christian faith: Protestantism and Catholicism. (If we wanted to describe the situation accurately, we would find several conflicting denominations in British Protestantism, which have been no less resentful of each other than in their common attitude toward Rome.)
It may be useful to remember that Thomas More, a whole century before Hobbes had described his religious utopianism in multireligious terms. There is a complete religious tolerance in More’s Utopia (as long as the citizens of his commonwealth do not profess atheism!) More, obviously, had his own agenda in doing this, as he wished to reconcile warring religions in his own country, and from a purely humanitarian point this ought to make better sense. Hobbes, on the other hand, hated the “Papists” so much that he would not allow them anywhere near his Commonwealth, a very personal, rather than philosophical approach to the subject, yet in harmony with his “artificial man” metaphor.
From a purely practical point of view, and in contradiction to Hobbes, we might say that in all countries where Protestantism had taken root, it is impossible to maintain a single worship (even under my own principle “to each great culture its own religion”). All these cultures were not born at Wittenberg or Augsburg! They had been Catholic before they had become Protestant, and in any European culture that embraces Protestantism there had to be a state of split religious personality ever since. No wonder that Nietzsche marks the Catholic countries of Europe with a “talent for religion,” while denying this “talent” to the Protestant countries. Poor Hobbes probably failed to realize that only the Papist “artificial man” among all Christian nations (with the exception of the Orthodox, who trace their faith to the earliest and purest form of Christianity and denounce the Pope for corrupting it, while denouncing the Protestants for moving even further away from Orthodoxy) could be consistently monoreligious.
But even in the broad sense of multiculturalism, Hobbes is incorrect. It is possible for one Commonwealth to be multicultural and multireligious without stopping to be a single commonwealth, as Russia’s example has proved itself to be. The solution to the problem of social multiculturalism in the context of one country is simple: the separation of Church and State, which does not mean the abolition of all public worship, but only its restriction to the appropriate constituent cultures. Ironically, the case of the United States has ceased to be representative of a multicultural unity. American society is becoming increasingly fractured, and the process of erosion of a single national identity carries the danger of becoming irreversible.
The case of Russia is of special interest, as the existing duumvirate of the Russian Orthodox Church and the State clearly establishes the dominance of the Great-Russian culture over all other minority cultures, within the Russian commonwealth, without anybody to seriously challenge this incontestable fact of political and cultural reality. On the contrary, the officially recognized minority cultures (Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism) seem to like the arrangement, seeing in the strength of the great-Russian Church/State Duumvirate their best guarantee of protection against domestic bigotry and unwelcome foreign influences. By the same token, it is the dominance of Russian Orthodoxy which makes it feel secure and therefore exceptionally tolerant toward the non-Christian minority religions as long as they stay within their clearly established cultural borders.
But Russia is, as usual, an exception, rather than the rule, and the rule is that neither in the commonwealth of a single nation, nor in a compound commonwealth, such as the European Union or the United Nations of today, or in any supranational conglomerate of tomorrow, religion must stand in the way of a political unity.
Incidentally, nor can the world ever become one Commonwealth, but it must remain a loose community of nations, where no uniformity of political organization, or any kind of interfaith common religious worship can ever be imposed by any international corps of social engineers. Let the nations remain themselves, and they will want to come together. But try to mold them into a common mold, and they will explode even the best of these molds into a thousand pieces.
Having said all that, I am compelled to end this entry with a coda. Going back to the beginning of this entry, take a look at today’s Europe’s multicultural mess, and, perhaps, the “monoreligious bigotry” of Hobbes’s quoted passage will now be seen in a new light. Could he have been a prophetic seer of bad things to come?...
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