The Evils that Infest Religion
Mary Midgley's reflection on the problem with powerful institutions
“It turns out that the evils that have infested religion are not confined to it, but are ones that can accompany any successful human institution.”
- Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By
It was fashionable at the onset of the twentieth century to blame just about every cultural problem on religion - several intellectuals launched media careers peddling the story that this was our key problem, and all we had to do was eliminate religion and a golden age would dawn. This wasn’t exactly a new claim. Didn’t John Lennon sell the same snake oil in 1971 - now half a century ago? In fact, we can trace the ‘blame religion!’ industry back centuries further, to the very same forces that caused the term ‘scientist’ to supplant ‘natural philosopher’, and for very similar reasons. It is far from a coincidence that Latin, the language the Catholic Church had used to maintain a mystique of special insight during the Middle Ages, became the official language of biology and medicine.
My philosophical mentor Mary Midgley saw clearly that attempts to scapegoat religion for human folly were both doomed and misleading. As the opening quote makes clear, the evils we associate with religion manifest every time a human institution attains sufficient success. This is why, for instance, I can draw parallels between Galileo’s trial in 1633 and the behaviour of the US Centre for Disease Control in recent years. The moment you empower an institution to become the sole arbiter of truth, you permanently damage the practices of human knowledge.
Midgley’s insight is one that people find difficult to accept, especially those who are riven with hatred for the practitioners of religion. How could it possibly be that such nonsensical ways of understanding our planet might be defensible? How could we, who place our trust in scientific knowledge, possibly be at risk to the same kinds of excesses as historical Christianity? Few appreciate how our own worlds are inevitably wrought from the same components as any religion - a mythology for understanding our world, principles for living a good life, and a community of practice.
Far from ‘religion’ being a special category, what chiefly marks something out for this term is that it has been around for centuries. For some, this is a point of suspicion: it’s old, so it can’t be any good. Oddly, we tend not to think this about the human species, which has been around for several hundred thousand years and has spent a few millennia feeling pretty chuffed with itself. This, more than anything, is the truth about Midgley’s remark about “the evils that have infested religion”, as she herself would have been happy to explain: it is because we are human that there are dangers - evils - that accompany our successful institutions.
What can we do, once we recognise these risks? A little under a century ago our species came up with a potential solution: make promises about what we will or will not do to one another. These ‘human rights’ became highly successful. So we can hardly be surprised that by the twenty first century, these promises to avoid harming one another became pretexts for invading and killing other humans, for denying aid to people who needed it, and even for usurping the autonomy of the individual over their own body. Human rights agreements became successful institutions - and thus predictably became beset with the evils that have infested religion.
Ultimately, ‘successful institutions’ are those that gain power and influence, and Midgley’s insight is parallel to the remarks made by Lord Acton in a letter to Bishop Creighton in 1887: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” Midgley saw clearly that this problem is not solely about individuals, it is baked into the nature of human institutions that they risk causing evil whenever they attain a sufficient scale. Promising was not enough to defend against this, and given the enormous scale at which global institutions now operate - dwarfing even the largest contemporary religions - we need more than ever to stand ready to dismantle any institution that becomes infested.
AGREE #TEIRagr_1: Institutions as Sole Arbiters of Truth
“The moment you empower an institution to become the sole arbiter of truth, you permanently damage the practices of human knowledge.”
COMMENT
Given the inherent limitations of human perception vis-a-vis objective reality, it should be clear to everyone that no single individual can be a arbiter of truth; that even a rough corralling of truth requires a coordinated group effort. The problem is that when a group is part of an institution it takes on the attributes of a single group mind. Various strategies can be used to ward off this structural drift toward error.
AGREE #TEIRagr_2: Need For Mythology
“Few appreciate how our own worlds are inevitably wrought from the same components as any religion - a mythology for understanding our world, principles for living a good life, and a community of practice.”
COMMENT
All human thought is circumscribed by human perception and the fundamental limitations of neuronic brains. We’ve constructed plausible models of how everything came to be, and how everything ages. But we have no evidence based rational answer to: “Why we are here?” or “Why I am here.” For this we create myths.
AGREE #TEIRagr_3: Institutional Danger
“Human rights agreements became successful institutions - and thus predictably became beset with the evils that have infested religion.”
COMMENT
It’s not just that institutions fall into the chasm of group truth; but like individuals, institutions are susceptible to the sin of excessive self-importance.