William James on the conciliation of religion and science; also, mathematics and pragmatism

I'm presently reading William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. Like much of James' writing, some of it can be rather pedestrian and ponderous but then certain sections jump out like great glowing epiphanies. I like this section from the end of lecture 5 on "The religion of healthy-mindedness" in particular:

The experiences which we have been studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? But why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled by different men, and will each time give some characteristic kind of profit, for which he cares, to the handler, while at the same time some other kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed. Science gives to all of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in preventing and curing a certain amount of disease. Religion in the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons. Evidently, then, the science and the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure-house to him who can use either of them practically. Just as evidently neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other’s simultaneous use. And why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or by quaternions, and each time come out right? On this view religion and science, each verified in its own way from hour to hour and from life to life, would be co-eternal. (99-100)

This brief note on mathematics reminds me of Isabelle Stengers' regular insistence on the importance of the fact that A. N. Whitehead was a mathematician. Far from granting transcendent access-authority to a higher realm of ideas, in this understanding mathematics heightens only one's capacity for perspective-shifting—that is, for pragmatism.

The common ground between secular and religious -- some belated reflections on the religious mode of existence and how it can improve (as)sociology

One of the more challenging chapters in Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence is that on religion. I initially found this section to be very frustrating but have come to appreciate it more with time. If I am reading it adequately, and this post should establish whether or not that's the case, it is a line of thought with considerable political importance but also with some major problems in its existing iterations.

Latour's theology must be read, I think, by taking very seriously the claim that his whole project is an exercise in diplomacy -- that is, in building a middle ground between hitherto ontologically irreconcilable groups (in this case those hitherto known as the secular and the religious).

The need for such a mediation exercise is obvious. Many religionists stereotype secularists as cold, uncaring, self-interested, amoral or even actively immoral, interested only in their own pleasure and short-term well-being (this being a relatively mild version). Likewise, for many secularists (particularly of the atheist-humanist variety), the religious are figured as babbling lunatics seething in an ear- and reason-clogging soup of their own violently self-certain and irrational existential dogma (this is a fairly common version).

As a way out of this collective impasse, Latour proposes to transform the concept of religion. His theology is based upon the argument, I think it can be said, that the secular are religious and the religious are secular. That is, it is based upon two argumentative moves that cut across each other.

First, the larger part of his theological writings are dedicated to divesting religion of its vulgar or 'abusive' transcendence; that is, of its claim to 'another world' above or behind the merely manifest one. To the religious Latour says: 'you are also secular'; secular in the sense of the Latin saecularis "worldly, pertaining to a generation or age." The religious are secular because they are of this world; they have no transcendent realm to appeal to as though it were some kind of cosmic supreme court, nor another, higher world to escape to as though this grubby, fallen sphere were not good enough for them (here his Christianity is strikingly and ironically Nietzschean). The only world is this sublunar world; however, crucially, religious experience is found to be reconcilable with this statement; indeed, Latour seems to argue, it is only by reconciling the religious and the worldly that religion-proper can be rediscovered. Transcendence, far from enshrining religious experience, crushes it.

Second, an equally important though less extensively developed portion of his argument follows on from Michel Serres' return of 'religion' to its etymological roots, the word deriving from relegare (to go through again, reprise), religare (to attach) or religiens (careful, opposite of negligens). Serres suggests that religion inherits particularly from the latter: "Whoever has no religion should not be called an atheist or unbeliever, but negligent" (The Natural Contract, p.47-8). To the secular Latour says: 'you are also religious'; religious in the sense of being care-imbued and loving creatures of intimacy and mutual personification. In his Gifford Lectures on natural theology (the Facing Gaia lectures), Latour suggests that coexistence and civilisational persistence on this earthern orb will only be achieved by taking up religion once again, urgently radicalising a radically reconstructed religiosity.

The price that the religious have to pay for this accommodation is relinquishing their other-worldly transcendence. The price that the secular have to pay is losing their (insufficiently) secularised theological concept, Nature. Both must concede the easy, knock-down arguments that they habitually aim at their Other. The mutual gain is a common ground where neither Nature nor God can serve as a unilaterally imposed court of appeal and disputes must be worked out and alliances must be forged in a common manner (or in a manner of becoming-common while remaining plural); that is to say, diplomatically.

This, I think, is a profoundly important argument. However, my initial frustrations haven't entirely dissipated. To put it simply, in reading this ground-building exercise between the secular and the religious I, as one of the godless, get the feeling of reading a letter that is addressed to someone else. I see elements of relevance to my life's experience within it but this seems almost coincidental. In other words, one side of Latour's middle ground seems a smoothly paved plaza while the other is, at best, a dusty, bumpy track.

The way that the theological ideas are presented in AIME seem largely directed towards only one of the groups that are being brought together: the hitherto 'religious.' That is, the text seems overwhelmingly preoccupied with convincing the religious that they are secular and gives short shrift to the equally necessary argument that the secular are also religious. This second element becomes almost subtextual.

The key conceptual and imagistic meeting point that Latour gives the two sides is the equation of love-talk and the religious experience. He explains it thus: When one lover says to their partner 'do you love me?' and the other replies 'of course I do' their relationship is rebuilt anew; if, however, the latter replies 'why are you asking me this? I told you so on the third of November!' they mistake the opening to relational reinforcement for a request for information. This category mistake, for Latour, typifies the misunderstanding of religion. Thus one can say (and this is not an uncommon posit in general) that the religious experience is love.

In his book Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech, Latour refers to the lovers' affirmations as a "scale model" of the religious experience (p.118). In this phrase a middle ground is affirmed but, at the same time, also rendered rather uneven. It would be interesting to know on what scale this relationship functions on; 10:1, 20:1, 1000:1? The argument that Latour seems to be furthering here is that formalised religion, when properly enacted, institutionalises, intensifies, extends, links, joins and safeguards the world-, bond- and person-forming experience of love. However, the suggestion of this is therefore that those who play no part in organised religion are somehow less taken by the religious love, less caught up in its mode of existence; which, if the dual move is followed through fully in both directions, should not be the case.

The Inquiry is silent on non-traditional forms of love-instituting, which seems to imply the religionists' prejudice as detailed above -- specifically, that the secular are somehow less loving, caring or interested in those around them. This is, in my opinion, the Inquiry's biggest diplomatic failing. However, it is far from unameliorable.

Latour regularly (and often polemically) quotes Margaret Thatcher's infamous declaration that 'society does not exist.' Of course, the meaning that he takes from the phrase differs somewhat from that of its originator. While for Thatcher this meant that, as she went on to say in the second and less quoted half of that sentence, 'there are only individuals and their families' -- i.e. that any sense of social solidarity between communities or classes is an irrational illusion that must be (and was) crushed --, for Latour the absence of society as an ontologically sui generis form of reality means that sociality must be continually constructed, assembled, composed by materially and modally heterogeneous means (not by 'social bonds' which is, for him, a semantic vacuity).

Society is not a 'there' that can be leaned on, presupposed; it is fragile. It can be (and has been) devastated by the machinations of Thatcherian, neoliberal politics. Thus we would do well to better understand it.

The family, for Latour, is, therefore, not necessarily any more or less sociologically real than the neighbourhood, the nation, the race, the class, and so on. In order to understand what is real in any given scenario we must 'follow the mediators'; that is, abandon nomothetic theorising (searching for abstract laws) and embrace idiographic or casuistic analysis (examining concrete cases).

However, if we understand sociology not only as the study of how the world is held together through heterogeneous associations but, in addition, as the study of how bonds of communal solidarity are achieved then we must surely bring the concept of religion into the picture. I previously wrote about conceiving solidarity as kinship but it could equally, on the basis of the above arguments, be termed religiosity.

A study of social, secular religiosity -- of the loving bonds that hold together not just lovers and churches but communities of all sorts (bonds that are inextricable from but also irreducible to political interest) -- would go a long way towards answering the charge of conservatism that is often levelled at the actor-network version of sociology. It would also complete the second move required to fully reconcile the secular and the religious.

Sloterdijk on the non-existence of 'Religions'

From You Must Change Your Life:

European Enlightenment—a crisis of form? An experiment on a slippery slope, at any rate, and from a global perspective an anomaly. Sociologists of religion put it quite bluntly: people keep believing everywhere else, but in our society we have glorified disillusionment. Indeed, why should Europeans be the only ones on a metaphysical diet when the rest of the world continues to dine unperturbed at the richly decked tables of illusion? 

[...] a return to religion is as impossible as a return of religion—for the simple reason that no 'religion' or 'religions' exist, only misunderstood spiritual regimens, whether these are practised in collectives—usually church, ordo, umma, sangha—or in customized forms—through interaction with the 'personal God' with whom the citizens of modernity are privately insured. Thus the tiresome distinction between 'true religion' and superstition loses its meaning. There are only regimens that are more and less capable and worthy of propagation. The false dichotomy of believers and unbelievers becomes obsolete and is replaced by the distinction between the practising and the untrained, or those who train differently. (p.3)

In contrast to Latour's translative theology, Sloterdijk's concentration on "regimens that are more and less capable and worthy of propagation" refocuses attention entirely away from the past. Religious truth conditions become entirely presentist: is this regimen worthy or not? It doesn't matter, in and of itself, how many years hermeneuts have agonised over this or that crumb of biblical dogma. There is no prejudice against the nouveau riche of religiosity. If these stratified ponderings upon ponderings going back millennia have generated a rich, beautiful, jumbled jungle of immuno-psychic possibilities then great! However, that is merely the means to the end of the successful religious dispositif, not the end itself.

Religion, in this iteration, becomes fully relativistic and thus fully secularisable and is, therefore, a better diplomatic proposition (from my godless point of view) that the one Latour proposes as [rel].

Religious transcendence: Bug or Feature?; Secular [REL]?; [REL] is an amalgam?

I just finished reading chapter 11 of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence.  Wow, it was hard work!  (And I started his book Rejoicing today too - no rest for the wicked...)  There's a huge amount to say about the chapter but I think the main thing to ask is this: is religious transcendence a bug or a feature?  That's what it comes down to.

Latour insists that it is the former, that what religion (or Christian religion, anyway) is 'really about' is the immanent process of proselytisation, of converting others by translating the Good News, thus bringing them closer together and thus making them into 'persons.'  This process is intrinsically transformational both in terms of the words used and the subjects involved.  If either words or subjects fail to be transformed then REL atrophies and its institution is gradually lured into 'belief in belief' - the apparently crazy supposition that religion is a set of tenets that its believers 'hold' (and hold still, static); referential beliefs about how reality is (i.e. 'there is a God; homosexuality is a sin', etc.); doxa qua ontology.  The idea that prior to the scientific revolution the declarations of plump religious authority figures were all people had as reference to the far away (and that reference wasn't superimposed on something else as a category mistake but was simply outcompeted by a far better model) isn't considered.

The suggestion is that Jesus was put on the Earth to do this work (or kick start it) and at some unspecified point in the past (presumably beginning from some time shortly after the year 0 and extending an unknown number of years) there was a Golden Age where this is what the institution set up to nourish this value - namely, the Church - did: proselytise, immanently and without reference or belief.  I'm not an expert on the history - I'm not even really an amateur on the subject - but this strikes me as largely bullshit.  Correct me if I'm wrong.

Here's the thing: Latour's philosophical nemesis, the godfather of the Moderns died a full four centuries before Jesus was even born.  Yes, Socrates.  It seems to me that he pretty much is 'Double Click' [DC].  Moreover, the Church has had strong Platonic influences from its very beginning.  So when was this age when the values were nourished and the oh so obviously false allure of transcendence was kept at arms' length?  This 'empiricist' philosophy has no answers.

The other major issue is the fact that, taken at an analytical level, at the level of technicalities, the institutions of religion do not seem to 'own' the REL mode.  A couple's assurances of love constitute 'personification' in a sense that Latour articulates and then uses to define the REL trajectory - acts of REL personify similarly; REL is love writ large is the suggestion (but only that).

So, on that level it seems perfectly possible that while religion may typify REL - that is, Christian proselytisation may be the archetypical, classic instantiation of the mode - it does not own it; that secular religious talk, secular personification is possible.  However, the entirety of the rest of the argument utterly buries this possibility.  The whole mode is constructed out of purely Christian (and largely Catholic) words and concepts (even though, allegedly, REL must be reproduced always using new words! it must never stay the same!...).  No further mention of any kind of REL outside of religion is given.  By the end the idea seems entirely implausible.

There are two possibilities: either (a) secular REL exists or (b) it doesn't.  If (a) then why not mention it?  Why build the entire mode out of one institution's iteration of it (and an institution that is admitted to have done a very bad job of looking after it over the years).  That would be a monumental failure of diplomacy.  But then if it's (b) then there are two further possibilities; either (1) the non-religious, since they don't participate in the rituals, don't get to be people, or (2) the non-religious are personified by REL without knowing it, somehow.  The latter is seemingly impossible for any Latourian metaphysic; the former is either a tremendous insult to the non-religious or becoming a 'person' isn't all that important after all.

None of those options seem like especially good ones.  Are some humans deprived of personhood?  And if so how come nobody noticed until now?  Does it even matter?  And if not why take up such a large chunk of my Sunday making me read all about it?  (Why sum up the chapters on REP and REF so wonderfully succinctly and then spend oh so many pages saying basically the same things over and over again on the subject of religion?  Am I meant to be converted out of sheer boredom?  'Yes, please, make it stop, I'll accept Jesus into my heart just stop talking!')  Maybe I'm personified because I was Christened (against my will, naturally) as a small child.  However, I have, in adulthood, distanced myself from all churches as far as possible (I am still regularly accosted by Jehovah's Witnesses in the street but that's seemingly unavoidable), so is personhood a lasting quality?  If so, how?  Nothing else is.  Am I personified by love?  Rather a kitsch idea.  And there are certainly times where my personhood would have scattered like so much dust in the wind were that the case...  I'm sure that I'm not alone in that (at least).  Are orphans who have not experienced romantic or familial love not people?  Certainly they often suffer from self-esteem issues and have difficulty forming relationships but that's not the same thing. I'm clutching at straws, I know, but that's all I'm left with.

All in all, a complete mess.

Regardless of the fact that I wildly disagree with most of it there is far too much packed in to one mode.  What has personification (as Latour describes it) got to do with the eternal?  What has any of that got to do with 'accessing what is close at hand' as opposed to 'far away'?  For a chapter that set out to reach some conclusions that a '7 year old' could understand it must surely be considered a failure (or I'm not as clever as I think I am - that's always a possibility).

It seems to me that REL is an amalgam.  It's a poorly conceived mode.  It seems to come more from wish fulfilment than from any ontological, empirical necessity.  In fact it has to fight bitterly against experience just to get a foot in the door.

I suppose we could say that this chapter isn't really 'for' me - it's for the religious, it's addressed to their needs, their values, their insecurities - but then it isn't much of a 'diplomatic' effort, is it?  I'd quite like to be a person, please.  So I really have to pay attention to this mode, whether I like it or not.

There's one good thing I can think to say about this chapter: I like the idea that there may be values within religion as it was practiced before the scientific revolution that have been lost and not replaced in contemporary, secular society.  That idea is excellent.  However, this articulation of it is terrible.

Yes, I'm a 'tough sell,' for sure.  I can't even begin to understand what the purpose of religion without transcendence is.  It's a deflated balloon, without form or content.  Take away the promise of Transcendence and Truth (and with that Power and Authority) and the churches will empty and fall into disrepair in a matter of weeks.  They'll revert to what they currently are in most British towns and cities: places for Scout troops to meet, yoga lessons to take place and homeless people to sleep.  Oh, and weddings.  A provider of draughty, crumbling local infrastructure.  The Bible would be just another work of literature.

Religious transcendence: it's not a bug, it's a feature.  It's the only reason anyone's ever heard of a Jesus of Nazareth.

Defending objects; Sorting our [REF] and [REP]; A pagan Christian

Levi Bryant kindly responds to my recent comments and corrects my misunderstandings!

I've not finished the aime book yet either; it's slow progress but I'm getting there.  It's a very readable tome but I keep having to put it down and let some of the ideas sink in (and then fly off in all directions).  Good books have that effect, I find.  They can be difficult to concentrate on because they spark trajectories that fly away from themselves.  Textual fecundity can be distracting.

It's a quite remarkably explosive book in terms of concepts - 'explosive' in the sense of the Cambrian explosion!  There's been this slow, gradual evolution of his work since the late 70s.  Looking back retrospectively you can clearly see it building up to this point.  And, actually, I wasn't that surprised when I learned of the modes project; it had become quite obvious that he was treating law, politics, science, etc. according to different standards, it just wasn't clear what those standards were or how they linked together.  The whole 'post-ANT' debate in STS has been leading in this direction since the 1990s.  The modes of net, reference, politics, religion, law, technology and morality are all thoroughly precedented and, to some extent, aime can be understood as a synthesis, rectification and systematisation of all this past work.  However, the larger part of the modes framework is startlingly new.  Quite revolutionary, albeit a revolution with a long genesis (and many influences - James, Whitehead, Serres, etc.).  I have some reservations about it and some enduring criticisms but for the most part I'm just enjoying the ride.

The biggest problem seems to me to be how the beings of the different modes come together, both in terms of how they conflict and co-evolve but also in terms of how they are able to create highly cohesive composite trajectories despite being different beings - because they are not modes of a single substance; every mode pertains to a distinct being.  That I don't really understand.  Is it only habit [HAB] that unites us?  Is that sufficient to make our buzzing, dashing confluences of things and modes hold?  Habit is the mode of black boxes; it pertains to individuation, certainly, but I'm not sure that it's a complete account of the problem.

Well, this question - individuation - brings us back to perhaps the central disagreement between Latour and all the OOO/OOM/OOP lot!

The way Latour uses the terms 'subject' and 'object' actually seems to owe a lot to structuralism and to sociology (despite what he claims to think of these discourses).  In the traditional philosophical order of things, subjects are substantial beings.  Human beings have agency, reflexivity, etc. and therefore are subjects.  One human, one subject.  In the sociological or post/structural vocabulary 'subject' is detached from any individual body and rendered relational in terms of socio-linguistic structures.  Thus any individual person is simultaneously many kinds of subject.  For instance I, as a Brit, am simultaneously a citizen (of the British state) and a subject (of the Queen - whether I want to be or not!).  Citizen and subject are really two different kinds of subjectivity, two different overlapping social assemblages that produce subjectivities (with capacities and obligations) that I embody but which are not reducible to my physical person.  I am also a subject of the English language, of the university that I work for, etc.  In short, subjectivity is social, multiple and variously embodied.

Latour effectively does the same thing with subjects and objects and then pulls the rug out from under them both by eliminating the body-qua-material-substrate and making the physical body into another mode.  Yes, I certainly do embody legal subjectivities and I do have a physical body but that is a LAW/REP crossing, not an embodiment of a transient mode by a single, underlying substance.  Subject and object become meaningful only within a mode.

To go back to his infamous assertion that Ramses II couldn't have died from tuberculosis because that hadn't been discovered then we can now see that as a confusion of modes, a confusing crossing.  Tuberculosis only became an 'object' once it existed for a subject in 1882.  Yes.  But that is only tuberculosis as object of knowledge, of REF.  It says nothing of tuberculosis as object of REP, which surely did pre-exist its discovery.  Hence he is now able to make this claim:

Beer yeasts were in no way prepared to become the experimental material through which the “yeastists” in Bordeaux made them capable of making themselves known. These yeasts had been making grapes ferment as long as there have been grapes, and producing grape must as long as there have been farmers, but they had never before caused brains to ferment, or contributed to the writing of blog posts and articles. (89)

A bit further along Latour goes on to say that “object and subject are then no longer the causes but only the consequences of the extension of such chains and, in a way, their products.” I.e. object and subject only exist in relation to an epistemic process, an instantiation of the REF mode, that produces both. Object and subject are not the ontological basis of knowledge but are the products of the process of reference.

This must mean, then, that the yeasts prior to documentation in articles and blogposts or tuberculosis prior to discovery in Koch’s lab were not 'objects'. Yeast and tuberculosis only became ‘objects’ (of knowledge) once they became known [REF], however that doesn’t mean that they did not previous exist [REP].

This relativity of objectivities in terms of modes gets rather complex.  It'll be interesting to see how it's tied together.  I'm not sure that it makes sense to me just yet.

On religion, I've not read Latour's 'Rejoicing' book yet but I have it waiting to be read.  He defines religion as a mode so very abstractly that it can seemingly be completely detached from religious practice.  Anywhere one agonises over the fidelity of one's transformations then religion qua mode seems to be present.  How this helps religious institutions I'm not sure.  Maybe it isn't supposed to.  Indeed, the kind of religion that Latour ends up articulating seems much more pagan than Christian!

I think his attack on the Modern epistemological rejection of religion is a blow that lands.  He's hardly the first to argue that comparing religion with science is effectively a category error - and he may well be right.  However, what is to stop atheists from simply shifting their stance and saying 'well, okay, [REF] and [REL] are different things, fine.  But I still refuse to organise my life and my world around something so fundamentally arbitrary; viva la référence!'

An atheist is free to argue that religion is nothing but an agonising over origins plus a tradition of fictions and habits and this is consistent with Latour's ontology.  The REL mode doesn't tell us why the worship of a deity is necessary or desirable - only that it's possible without reference.  It actually does nothing to bolster the case for religion at all, despite how its narrated.

More on Religion and Reference

A commenter, Alonzo, pokes some valid holes in my last post:

In Latourian fashion let me propose a symmetry: 1)Latour's ideas about science are not shared by most scientists; 2)Latour's ideas about religion are not shared by most religious people. Both of these are true enough. I assume you have no problem with 1. You are not a Sokalist. So why is 2 any different? Why is it a defect in Latour's thinking about religion that his ideas are not commonplace? 

People, religious or not, do often think about religion as essentially concerned with subjective beliefs about objective realities. This is quite antithetical to Latour's philosophy. It is not that he does not know that people speak of themselves as holding "fairly straightforwardly literal beliefs" but that there is no place for that sort of thing in his own thinking. Where others see literal beliefs he sees things far richer, more complicated, tangled, active; not to be confined to subjectivity. He finds a simplicity at the heart of religion, but it is not something to be found in belief.

It's not that the rarity or non-descriptive character of Latour's version of religion is a defect as such -- at least not so simply.  My objection is more complicated than that.  I take your point though; I've given the impression of a double standard.  I'll try to restate my argument differently.

Latour attempts to describe both science and religion (and law, etc.) as they are practiced -- as practical complexes of gradual, fragile, incremental network building with their own, specific modes of existence, extension, connection, relation, endurance, etc.  His findings lead him to substantially contradict the abstract, generalised, conventional self-understandings of both scientists and the religious.  And this, of course, is exactly the right way to work.  Far from invalidating his arguments, the rarity and unexpectedness of what he describes is what makes his work worth reading.

What I find implausible, however, is the claim that references to God as an actually, necessarily existing, powerful deity and references to religious dogma as items of guaranteed existential fact are extrinsic to religious practice.  Of course, Latour does not and cannot claim that the nominally religious never engage in such acts of reference; clearly they do.  His claim is, instead, that when the apparently religious are doing so they are not being religious -- that the 'religious' are not acting religiously.

I take the view, on the contrary, that acts of reference to God's existence or to religious dogma are intrinsic to religion as practised.

Imagine a Christian leader standing proudly before his congregation, one arm raised upwards, finger thrusting towards the heavens, the other hand tensed into a fist, crashing down on an altar, eyes aflame, lips snarling, tongue proclaiming 'God has willed it, thus it is so' -- to Latour this kind of thing, regardless of how often it occurs under the guise of religion, is not truly religious; to me this caricature is the religious act par excellence.

We both agree that science and religion should be described as they are practised, not as they are commonly thought to be practised  where we disagree is in our interpretations of what makes religion tick, what stokes its fires and puts fuel in its belly.  Latour thinks that religion is nourished by kindly, liberal, pacific proselytisation and that acts of 'religious reference' are at best irrelevant and at worst poisonous to truly religious modes of action.  Contrariwise, I take the view that both the apoplectic preacher, screaming about fire and brimstone, and the velvet-voiced vicar, kindly extending the hand of kinship through the tale of Good News, are both equally religious; that both do the work of extending and translating religious networks and both do so religiously.

So, the problem is not that Latour's description of religion doesn't resemble other religious peoples' descriptions of religion, it's that he cordons off and partitions the majority of religious life in order to retain a purified, pacified inner kernel of religiosity that he finds agreeable.  I don't accept that this inner kernel really exists in isolation from the rest and am therefore compelled to view religious practice more holistically.

To demonstrate the point let's go back to the article I linked to before, which claims that millions of Americans think that tackling climate change is futile because the world will only end with God's Apocalypse, which humans are powerless to prevent -- either climate change predictions are a sham or they're the will of God; either way, human intervention is pointless.  For Latour, these only nominally 'religious' climate sceptics (or climate apologists, perhaps more accurately) have confused the modes of Religion and Reference -- they have taken religious dogma to be a fixed mono-semantic truth that must be obeyed rather than a dynamic spiritual heritage that must be translated.  What they should do, instead, is interpret religious texts more flexibly, interpretively, religiously; they should translate religious texts instead of taking them to be literal-minded guidebooks telling us what was, what is and what will be; they shouldn't take religion to be in competition with science but should "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" and put each mode in its place, avoiding category errors, by taking scientific, referential truths as seriously as religious, communal ones and making the two programmatically and politically compatible, even complimentary.

I think we can all agree that it would be overwhelmingly preferable if more religious people followed this particular mode of religion -- but it is, in my view, a mode of religion, not religion per se; it is a kind of religion, not religion itself as a kind of existence.  And it's quite a weak and rarely observed kind of religion at that -- and this is what presents the greatest problem for Latour's Religion: If pacified, translational proselytisation , shorn of claims to eternal truths, is what feeds religion and makes it strong why are so many actually existing religious practices so deeply and unapologetically referential?  If claims to reference don't feed but instead poison proper religious practice then shouldn't religion-without-reference be more easily observed than it is?  Indeed, why would anyone follow religious dogma if they didn't believe that it referred to something 'beyond'?  What is the point of (Christian) religion without transcendence?  What's the point of a god who is so weak that he requires his followers to construct incarnation for him?

Though raised in a Christian family I am not religious, so it isn't really for me to answer these questions; however I really can't see why anyone would practice a religion that was completely removed from any kind of reference to a reality beyond human existence.  Indeed, without these things why even call it 'religion' at all?  Perhaps my incomprehension speaks to the limitations of my imagination -- but, then again, given that people flock to harshly and unquestioningly 'referential' religions in their millions maybe it's not just me.

In my view religion is a human cultural practice -- that is, a practice that cultivates human existence -- like any other.  Of course it has its own dynamics, its own history, its own specificities -- but I don't think it has its own mode of existence.  And this is all coming from an atheist who sees no need to grant religion ontological foundations or to make it sui generis, abstracted from other similar practices.  I just think that although religious groups are wildly different in scale, intensity and temperament from, say, pop culture fan clubs they're not different in kind.

Followers of Jesus and fans of Doctor Who certainly realise their passions in different ways but both are passionately, textually and ritualistically devoted to their cherished cultural artefacts and to the cultivation of life that their practices incarnate.  That may seem offensive to those who believe religion to be inequivalent to any other institution but that isn't my problem.  Religious pretensions offend the irreligious too.  Life is full of offence.  Agreement is nice, it isn't necessary; disagreement needn't and ultimately can't be avoided.

What we must avoid is a situation where our modes of existence and/or our cultural practices put us at each others throats when there are far, far bigger fish to fry.  What we must avoid is becoming unnecessary enemies when we are, together, facing far greater dangers than mere theological disagreement.

And this brings me, by an oddly circular route, back to wanting to endorse Latour's religious mode -- and the political mode it adjoins -- as an ideal.  It would be wonderful if his model of spirituality were more widely realised instead of the stubborn, jealous and reactionary forms we so commonly encounter.  It'd also be fine with me if more people gave up on god entirely and found other ways of cultivating life.  But, either way, the priority has to be forming alliances to tackle larger problems, not pettily feuding over who's right and who's wrong in some grand, theological sense.

However the assemblage is to be constituted it must be constituted.  Latour imagines a religion that is at once more religious and more secular than religion as it commonly exists -- a religion that could stand not ahead or behind but alongside science and other institutional forms in facing common enemies: violence, poverty, inequality, injustice, pollution, climate catastrophe, etc.  He thus imagines a way to constitute the political assemblages, or the 'collectives,' that we so desperately need.  This is all good stuff.

So, if you'll permit me the contorted, over-extended and somewhat tortured chain of reasoning, I think Latour's Religion is descriptively misleading but prescriptively honourable.  I do not believe that religion has a sui generis essence -- a particular mode of existence -- in the manner Latour describes.  However, the world would be a much better place if his version of religion came to prosper over what religion has existed historically; it doesn't really exist, but the world would be better off if it did.  Then again, given the unanswered questions I raised above I fail to see much growth potential in it.

The epic stories, grounded certainties and grand, terrifying, godly power of referential religion are intoxicating in a way that is hard to give up.  Humans are hooked -- and, imbibing from this teat, they become stubbornly insensitive to the inconvenient facts that are generated by irreverent institutions.  And the deeper this opiate dream, the closer we all come to suffocation.

Atheists such as myself should celebrate any mutation within religion that makes it more readily assemblable with science and politics as this will be to the betterment of the world.  However, we should be neither shy or embarrassed in suggesting that religion is not a mode that must endure but a phase that can be superseded -- that it is just one kind of culture, one form practice that cultivates human existence and, consequently, that it is dispensible and can be improved upon.

Of Religion and Reference

Levi's latest diatribes against religion reminded me of this: "Belief in the Second Coming means many Americans see efforts to tackle climate change as futile"

I'm not sure I agree with him entirely but the above would seem to bear out the general point Levi is making.  Indeed, I had a similar reaction when reading through Latour's Gifford lectures.  He insists that the religious mode has nothing to do with the mode of reference -- he says that religion is only really about spreading 'Good News' and thus converting strangers to kin within a religious community.  But that simply isn't true for the vast majority of Christians that I've ever met (friends, family, acquaintances, etc.).  Many and perhaps even most of them really and truly believe that God exists ‘out there’ and that various items of religious dogma are literally and straightforwardly true -- creation, the apocalypse, morality, etc.  Their faith may waver -- they may harbour uncertainties -- but that is more of a quantitative distinction than a qualitative one.  (In other words, I may be uncertain whether I have any milk left in the fridge but my uncertainty doesn't change the referential character of the truth; likewise, just because someone isn't sure whether or not God exists doesn't necessarily change what they mean by 'exists.')

Of course, Latour is arguing against mainstream Christianity as much as he is against scientism or atheism but the fact remains that his ‘religious mode’ doesn’t describe religious practice as it exists, it rather identifies an essence to Christian religion that is allegedly obscured by the intrusion of other modes, chiefly reference.

But the simple fact is that most Believers don’t hold intellectualised, philosophised, hermeneuticised religious beliefs but fairly straightforwardly literal beliefs about the actual structure of the world.  In my experience, most people operate within a single mode for the most part; the multiple modes idea is more of a partially realised ideal than an accurate description.

An objection that any atheist always runs up against when arguing positively for atheism (and thus against religion) is: 'oh but that's just a caricature of religion, we don't really believe that'.  And to an extent that's a valid objection because religion is an enormously varied and complex phenomenon.  But at the same time it gives non-atheists unlimited leeway to shift the goalposts -- they can never be pinned down to any particular position; they can always shift the ground of conversation; from existence to meaning to belief, and so on.

So, yes I think Levi is probably arguing against a caricature but (a) that's unavoidable and (b) that caricature does apply quite well to an awful lot of people, as the above article concerning climate change demonstrates.

Latour's Religion, more like Culture?

I'm just working my way through the text of Latour's Gifford lectures.  Not got a lot of time for this so it may take me a while.  Only part way through the second one right now so there's a long way to go but here are some initial thoughts (it'll be interesting to see if these still stand up when I get to the end!).

In the second lecture Latour takes Hume for his thought-he-was-Modern-ist punching bag:

For [Hume], it seems, there is just one regime of speech that he may use exactly in the same fashion to ask his butler if he should carry an umbrella to visit his friend Adam Smith; if his mistress loves him for good; if Cromwell was born the 25th of April 1599; or if God is a spider, an architect, or a giant vegetable. One size fits all. And yet rational discourse is not to treat everything in the same dispassionate tone, but to learn how to detect the different tones adjusted to the different situations so as to be able to sing all of them in the right tune.

So far so straightforward -- science and religion are different regimes of truth, modes of existence, felicity conditions, etc. and treating one in terms of the other is a category error.  A familiar argument.  Instead of taking a singular, referential mode to be germane to all instances Latour insists that we instead become sensitive to differences and learn to both hear and speak the several tongues, become modally plural, make our 'mother tongue,' whatever it may be, one tongue among many rather than the one that speaks the others.  To put both information transfer (science) and incarnation (religion) in their proper places.

[Religious] talk is not about carrying information (Is there an ultimate cause? Is it a deity, a giant spider, a benevolent Providence or a ‘blind watchmaker’?), but about transforming, converting, resuscitating those who are talked to.

Hume fails to even understand what religion is.  'Do not speak about religion,' proclaims Latour, 'but speak religiously -- passionately, compulsively, obsessively -- spread the Word!'  Ventriloquising Pamphilus, speaking against Hume's Philo, Latour says:

You have transformed the only speech act able to generate proximity into a vain quest for accessing far away regions — a quest which will never have the efficacy of the natural sciences.

When science and religion get mixed up "religion is transmogrified into an unfathomable mystery".  Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and all that.

I'm puzzled by how Latour associates science with the transcendent (or the 'far away' as he puts it) and religion with the immanent (or 'close at hand').  The "far away" is "accessed ... beautifully by the sciences" while the "near at hand" is "accessed ... efficaciously by Religion Two".  What he ends up suggesting is the confirmation or disconfirmation of the existence of religious entities in a referential sense is something beyond religious practice (and presumably scientific practice too, for all its "efficacy" in that area) -- and that reference is therefore irrelevant to religion.  The religious may speak referentially but in so doing they are ceasing to speak religiously, they are only aping science.

What, then, is religion without reference, without transcendence?  It's about "transforming, converting, resuscitating" the hitherto untransformed, unconverted and asphyxiated -- a (in every sense) religious outward projection of the Word of the Faithful -- a performance that creates 'persons', i.e. a process of evangelical subjectivation.  At root this is all pretty standard stuff: religion is about joining people together, creating community, establishing a network of faiths and values and, above all, proselytising like it's going out of fashion.  It's a liberal religion that's all about building a People in an ever changing, dynamic constructive process rather than submitting anybody to an absolute, unchanging authority.

[T]he entity around which the Church [of Religion Two] assembles bears no relation to the others [of Religion One], since it shares none of its characters of unity, universality, indisputability and immutability. On the contrary, it’s best characterized, as far as we can tell, by a chain of successive and radical metamorphoses, mutations, and conversions, of reprises, in the very definition of what any entity is. Even when this chain is artificially segmented in successive events — God, Son, Holy Spirit, Church, none of them may be defined as a stable substance. The label ‘Trinity’ does not help much at this point, except that it underlines how far it is from the already unified ‘God’ implied by Religion One. Most importantly, grasping each of its sequences requires a highly specific movement of appropriation and of retelling, so that the whole narrative of incarnation can be carried one step forward in time and space in a new refreshing way. While Religion Two is defined by a succession of events taken up one after the other, Religion One strives to define a distant and stable object. And it has no other way to define it except by choosing words that have to be as independent as possible from the distant target. By contrast, in Religion Two, the realisation of the event — in all the meanings of ‘realization’ — depends on a logos, that is, on how to retell the narrative, how to address and more exactly to convert the faithful, how to spread the Good News of the Gospel. Here again the discrepancies between the two meanings of religion are baffling. The thing told and the word telling it are one and the same — that is, ‘the Word’ with a capital W, this Word that stands ‘at the Beginning’ of John’s scripture.

Continuing the translations and transformations faithfully -- not attempting to fix dogma as though there were some pure point of origin followed by misinterpretation but taking the translational process to be the very point of it all.  All familiar Latourian themes.

At the root of his critique of Religion One is the contradictory nature of this religion being split between immance and transcendence -- between an absolutely existing, indisputable, universal and all powerful deity 'out there' and contingent, dynamic, ritualistic performances of faith 'in here'.  But is this really a contradiction?  Don't the two halves actually rely on each other in religious practice?  Doesn't the one side fuel the other?  Is 'information transfer' really irrelevant to religion?  By abandoning reference and information to the scientific mode hasn't he actually abandoned religion to a plane of meek, pious and unpresuming but also unquestioning performativity?  In fact, what's the point of a deity that isn't 'outside'?  What's the point of religion without transcendence?

In Latour's religion God (as a being that is existentially verifiable in any way, shape or form) is dead but his shadow lives on, borne by the performative practices of his worshippers.  It's as though he turned to Nietzsche and said 'sure, God is dead -- but he's alive in our hearts!' -- our songs, sermons, ceremonies, etc.  'Dead but alive in our hearts' -- this is one of the ways that people rationalise death in lieu of god and an afterlife!  An odd admixture -- a secular, religious mourning and resurrection of God -- all at once.

So, the practice of religion does not require the verification of God's existence both because this is impossible and because referential verification is a completely different mode of speech to the religious mode.  Through such a settlement, Latour seems to hope that the imperia of science and religion can draw their lines in the sand and find peace.

However, one could also ask: if the practice of religion does not require verification of its entities then does it require a belief or faith in a god at all?  If the verity of a god is irrelevant to the religious practice, properly and modally conceived, then why is a god even needed?

In a nutshell, Latour's 'religion' is a performative practice of cultivating the common; fabricating a people or a Church and earnestly, eagerly spreading that way (or form) of life to the unconverted -- who are not presumed to be always already subject to a universal God but must be actively woven into the fabric of His religion.

I think that a better word for Latour's 'religion' would be culture -- not as in movies, TV, celebrities (or, rather, these are but a few forms of culture) but as in horticulture, agriculture, cultivation.  Latour is arguing for religion as a cultural phenomenon.  If it's absurd to speak of an atheist religion we can easily speak of an atheist culture that does most if not all of what 'religion' does.  So why keep speaking of 'religion' at all if the verity of its referential assumptions are no longer of any importance?

These are really just a jumbled series of thoughts but they leave me with some questions as I press onwards.

Since it's not at all difficult to point to utterly godless cultural practices that perform most of the same operations as Religion Two will Latour allow godless cultures to participate in the religious mode?  If so then he really should drop religion as a term and take up culture instead; if not then I think this will sunder his schema since it's absurd.  If religion is "the only speech act able to generate proximity" then either there are a lot of godless religions around or us godless folk are radically estranged and alienated from one another (which may be true but only incidentally so since godful folks also seem to struggle with such existential cruelties!).

At some points Latour makes it seem as though his God depends upon his worshippers for existence -- what is the point of such a pathetic deity?  It's one thing making Him 'inside' insofar as he can only be thought through the practices and processes of interpretation and worship (and insofar as he is transformed as his Word is translated) and quite another to reduce him to his own worshippers (or, more accurately, to bracket out questions of his existence in excess of his manifestation in practice).

By bracketing off reference absolutely from the practice of religion isn't Latour making his cherished faith little more than a fan club for a pop star that may or may not exist -- his fans preferring not to raise the question?  If the universe is not 'unified' enough to speak of a Godly creator but the god of each religion must rely on his followers to unify the universe and bring a more godly existence into being then what's the point of having a god at all?  These gods are so weak as to be laughable.  What's the point of a god who presides over a disunity so chronic that he relies on a few billion bags of flesh on one miniscule rock in an obscure corner of an unremarkable galaxy in a nearly infinite universe to piece things together for him?

What's the point of a god in thrall to humanity?

Finally, how will Gaia (who is yet to make much of an appearance in the second lecture, unlike the first) map on to this not secularised but 'culturalised' religious mode?