Originally hosted and recorded by Nick Fabbri
Full transcript below
Religion and Society - Paul Monk
00:00 Paul: Writing for a largely Greek readership in the second century BCE, the great classical historian Polybius in the sixth book of his history of the rise of the Roman Empire, wrote:
"The sphere in which the Roman Commonwealth seems to me to show its superiority most decisively is in that of religious belief. Here we find that the very phenomenon which among other peoples is regarded as a subject for reproach, namely superstition, is actually the element which holds the Roman state together. These matters are treated with such solemnity and introduced so frequently, both into public and into private life, that nothing could exceed them in importance. Many people may find this astonishing, but my own view is that the Romans have adopted these practices for the sake of the common people. The approach might not have been necessary had it ever been possible to form a state composed entirely of wise human beings, but as the masses are always fickle, filled with lawless desires, unreasoning anger and violent passions, they can only be restrained by mysterious terrors or other dramatisations of the subject. For this reason, I believe that the ancients were by no means acting foolishly or haphazardly when they introduced to the people various notions concerning the gods and belief in the punishments of Hades, but rather that the moderns are foolish, and take great risks in rejecting them.”
01:26 These lines were composed well over 400 years before the Emperor Constantine took the first steps to making Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. Half a century after he did so, the Emperor Theodosius suppressed pagan religion and made Christianity the only legal religion around the Mediterranean Basin. Whether that was a sound or retrograde step for the Empire, or for Western civilisation, has been the subject of serious debate, ever since.
01:53 Nick: That was Dr Paul Monk reading from his occasional paper for the Rationalist Society of Australia, Religion and Society: Dilemmas of Our Time, which was published late last year. Paul, could you tell us a little bit about the Rationalist Society, your affiliation with it, and why you wrote this occasional paper, and why they published it.
02:11 Paul: Yes. Thanks, Nick. The Rationalist Society is actually quite an old body in Australia. It's been around for pretty much a century and if you want to encapsulate what it stands for and why it exists, you could identify it with that strand in British philosophy that many people might associate with Bertrand Russell. So, it’s a commitment to being systematically rational in terms of our understanding of reality and the way we approach public policy and for that matter private life.
02:40 The Rationalist Society is not a religious organisation. In many respects, you could probably say that it is not only a non-religious organisation but critical of the cast of mind that gives rise to religious belief.
02:57 I was invited a few years ago to become a member of the editorial board for its magazine, The Australian Rationalist, to which I contribute two columns in every issue in that capacity.
03:08 This occasional paper arose not, in the first instance, at the initiative of the Rationalist Society, but because a businessmen’s club, the Probus Club of Malvern, invited me to give them a talk about religion society. Most of its members are at least nominal Christians. They're elderly retired businessmen, and they approached me saying we talk about religion in our club and we're, between us, rather bewildered at the relationship between religion and contemporary society, and we wonder whether you might talk to us on that subject.
03:40 I was very happy to do that. I've given this subject a lot of thought for most of my life and the talk was very well received. So, on the basis of that, the President of the Rationalist Society, Meredith Doig invited me to turn it into an occasional paper which has become a publication of the Society and has been disseminated by it.
04:00 Nick: A couple of years before this paper was published, I interviewed you about your biography of your great teacher, Mark O'Loughlin, called The Secret Gospel According to Mark: The Extraordinary Life of a Catholic Existentialist. That book set the great questions of religion and society in the frame of reference of one man's life.
04:18 Today I'd like to discuss with you the larger questions of how 21st century societies, here and around the world, can deal with both the relationship between religion and science, and the clashes between different religious faiths and between any given one of them and secular norms. How, in the most general terms, would you characterise the relationship between religion and society in our time?
04:40 Paul: I think the simplest possible way to put it would be that that relationship is increasingly fraught. That is to say, it's conflictual, it's uneasy. That's why there would be some reason to discuss this. Really, that's the context which gave rise to the paper.
05:02 The interest one has from the point of view of let's say the Rationalist Society and, I would think, from the point of view of any good citizen of a modern society - and I include in that people of traditional religious beliefs is - how do we sort this out in a constructive way as distinct from taking an angry stance and saying, “Here’s the one right position and everybody else is just wrong," because that's part of the problem we've got at the moment. There are too many people doing that.
05:28 Nick: So, how would you characterise the relationship between what you describe as liberal or socialist democracies of the West and religion as it has evolved since the Reformation?
05:38 Paul: So, when I refer to liberal or social democratic societies, clearly I'm referring to those that we are most familiar with in Western Europe, in North America, in Australia, as distinct from many other countries which are either dictatorships or they’re underdeveloped and somewhat unstable countries, or they’re theocratic societies like Iran or they're communist states like Cuba, North Korea, China. It's only in the West that the traditions that we are talking about, of multicultural tolerance, have really arisen, which is not to say that there's never been any period before in history where there was relative tolerance, but as a systematic approach to mutual toleration between religions and separation of church and state, something quite unique has arisen in the West, largely since the Reformation.
06:34 Now, many people, it seems to me, make the mistake of thinking that arose because of the Reformation. It didn't. The Reformation was not a movement of people saying, "The Catholic Church is tyrannous and corrupt and therefore we want freedom of conscience in choice of religion and we want separation of church and state."
06:52 No, no. The Protestant reformers were hardliners who said, "The church is tyrannous and corrupt, but therefore back to the Bible. There is a strict orthodoxy and everybody should believe this."
07:04 That gave rise to savage religious conflicts for 150 years, not only between the Catholic Church and the Protestants but across societies really, in terms of what do we believe? What religion does the king or the prince have? How is this to be sorted out? Culminating in the Thirty Years War in the 17th century, from 1618 to 1648.
07:26 The idea that you needed a civil order in which these conflicts could be damped down or not occur arose because of those civil wars and among increasingly secular thinkers. That's crucial.
07:38 What we call the Enlightenment in many respects arose as a reaction against the wars of religion. One of the foremost documents of enlightenment in that particular regard is the work of John Locke in the late 17th century in England who articulated principles of religious toleration.
07:56 Now, it's notable from our point of view today, that when he wrote that document what he said was, the established church in England, which was of course the Anglican church, should tolerate non-conformists, should tolerate Puritans and Quakers and others, should tolerate Jews and Muslims, provided people of these different religions kept the civil peace. He pointedly excluded from toleration the Catholics.
08:24 Nick: Really?
08:24 Paul: From today's point of view, it seems a little odd that he would exclude Catholics and includes Muslims and Jews because you think, "Okay, how did that come about?" The reason it came about is because Muslims and Jews in 17th century England were a tiny minority and he felt perfectly comfortable saying, "Well, them too, yes, whatever." But the Catholics were a large party and seen as beholden to a foreign entity, seen as beholden to the Vatican, and that was seen as the core problem.
08:52 So, if you wanted a civil society that would be peaceful and orderly, it had to be one that respected the authority of that state, not another state, and the Vatican was seen - as indeed it was - as another state. The Papal State still existed then. Well, technically it still does in the Vatican but it was much more substantial then and had much greater pretensions.
09:11 So, that was the origin of what we regard as the broad principles of mutual toleration and it wasn't full toleration and it excluded the Catholics. Over time, that became extended and by the time you got 100 years later to the American Revolution, the founding fathers in the United States were largely people who were Deists or Epicureans or materialists. You know, they weren't people of a fervid traditional religious faith - Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, etc.
09:42 They said, "Yes, well..." and famously, you know, that, We are one state under God," but God was a very loosely used term in their vocabulary. It was perhaps a reference to the Aristotelian prime mover or the, you know, the idea of a Unitarian or Spinoza’s deity, that the intelligence that broadly governed the universe was not necessarily the God of the Bible.
10:10 Thomas Jefferson famously said in the early 19th century, "I think Unitarianism might end up the national religion of the United States." Well, if there was to be a national religion in the United States, one might fervently hope it would have been Unitarianism, but it clearly is not because the US was left open to the rise of revivalist faiths and cultic faiths and conflicting faiths and right now, the religious scene in the United States frankly is a bit of a mess.
10:39 Nick: Yeah. So, we might come back to looking at Locke later in the interview, but would you say we have achieved such a stable and peaceful balance now of religious toleration?
10:49 Paul: Only up to a limited point and it seems to me that things have been going backward for about a generation.
10:56 Nick: Yeah. Why is that the case? What's undermined that stability?
11:00 Paul: I think three things probably. The first and most obvious - which has been dramatic for some years now - is that after a period of time, through much of the 20th century in which the West was ascendant - for better or worse, it ruled most of the world through colonial empires - many secularists slowly came to the belief that religion - and they tend to think of this is Christianity and at a secondary level, Islam perhaps - would fade away with modernisation. As societies became more modern, they would become more secular and that was all to the good.
11:34 It's not the way things have worked out so far. The single biggest shift was surely when the Ayatollah Khomeini was able to pull off a theocratic Muslim revolution in Iran, in 1979. That inspired Islamic militants around the world, even though he was Shia and many of them were Sunni. So, for the last 40 years, there's been a lot of very militant and you might say increasingly militant and violently aggressive Islamic revivalism.
12:05 Nick: Funded by states...
12:06 Paul: Funded by states like Saudi Arabia and Iran. Of course, 911 was a spectacular instantiation of that militancy, but that's only one of the problems. There are two others.
12:19 One is that as the natural sciences advanced, traditional evangelical religion - notably in the United States but not confined to the United States - dug in its heels, you might say epistemologically, and denied that evolution was the way life came about and human beings evolved.
12:41 So, creationist defensiveness has not faded away. It has dug in its heels: the idea that the Bible is in some literal sense the word of God and that the moral code you can find in the Bible is true for all time and must be respected. The idea that there will be an End of Days, a Second Coming, an Apocalypse is held to be true and faith is extolled as if it's a virtue.
13:09 To those of a pious outlook, the word 'faith' tends to denote goodness and hope and vision, but epistemologically it's a vice. If you say, "I'm going to believe things even though there's no direct evidence for them, only because there's a textual tradition which announces them," then you've got a problem because we don't do that with the sciences. We don't do it with serious history; but in religion, it's rampant and it's got worse in the last generation or two, I would say.
13:37 The third thing, however, is something that has contributed to triggering those two militant religious movements. It is that in secularist society, there have been increasingly activist moves to directly undermine those codes of conduct, those principles and those beliefs and practices which have defined the traditional religions.
13:57 This became very evident recently with the major brouhaha around the world over gay marriage, but it comes to the fore in other things as well - with regard to genital mutilation, with regard to abortion or even contraception, with regard to divorce. Across the gamut of morality, the secularists have not simply been walking away from traditional religion; they've been openly and directly challenging it Some of them in the last 20 years in particular, I would say, have become almost as militant and activist and aggressive as their religious counterparts and so conflict has been growing rather than diminishing.
14:37 Nick: So, why do we come to a state of growing and crackling political and social tensions which sometimes overboil into violence, rather than, you know, political compromise?
14:48 Paul: Well, political compromise is the art form that liberal and democratic societies are supposed to be built on but because you have multiple parties, because you have free elections, because you have an education system that's relatively open, because you have continuing social and scientific inquiry, it should be easier. In some respects, it is - to resolve differences through inquiry and debate and compromise.
15:13 However, when you get militant parties that are determined that their view will prevail come what may, then compromise in the nature of the case becomes difficult. We've been seeing more of this cast of mind in recent years.
15:25 You see it among politically activist groups on US campuses and in the streets, for example, as you see it among the the militant religious, for example, who will besiege or attack abortion clinics or among Muslims who will fly planes into the Twin Towers in New York. How do you compromise with movements like that? In a sense, you can't and that's a real dilemma for us.
15:50 We have to think this through. The reaction to 9-11 of course was spectacular. It was two wars that turned out to be very long, very bloody and ultimately unsuccessful. We have to rethink our general approach, our social approach to the question of religion, and indeed our strategy in terms of tackling fierce and uncompromising opponents.
16:13 Nick: So, what about if we consider things from a religious point of view? So, isn't it the case that the western democracies and their approach to individual rights and conscience have their roots as much in the Bible as in Greek philosophy or Roman law, to say nothing of modern secularism?
16:29 Paul: Yes, I think that that's one of the areas where considered and scholarly discussion can help us, because there's not much doubt there is a pronounced strand in the Christian tradition, which emphasises individual conscience, individual dignity, the relationship between the individual conceived as a soul with a relationship to God and the whole idea of a vocation. You know, that there's a calling to an individual to play a meaningful role in life.
17:06 These are Christian traditions. What we derive from the Greeks, if you like, in that regard is the idea of citizen participation in public debate, which is not a Christian tradition. It's specifically a Greek democratic one - pre-Christian - and Roman law which recognizes property rights and individual rights under law and citizen rights. Those strands come together to form the basis of what we call Western civilization. It's quite distinctive. It's very different from Chinese or Islamic civilization, for example.
17:37 So, there ought to be a lot of room there for us to find common ground with one another in the West. By and large, we have in the modern era. However, there's a difference between drawing upon a tradition in which there are rich stories of the prophets or of the kings, of the disasters that the Bible reflects upon; or of the prophets calling upon people to emphasise that what really matters.
18:05 That's a rich part of our tradition. It's like reading Shakespeare or reading Greek tragedy. It's quite another to lay down the law and say belief in the dogmas of the Christian Church is incumbent on everybody.
18:17 As recently as the First Vatican Council, in 1871, the Papacy specifically rejected the idea of freedom of religion, of freedom of conscience with regard to religion and morality, of separation of church and state, of liberal education. These were rejected as anathema by the Papacy. It's taken a lot of work to find therefore common ground on those principles between the canonical Christian religions and secular liberal society. We don't have common ground at all in that regard with the Islamic world right now.
18:52 Nick: So, if you were to set an agenda for the reform of religion in our time to make it more reconcilable with secular society and natural science, rather than Vatican One and Pope Pius the Ninth, on what lines would you set it out?
19:06 Paul: Well, it seems to me there are two ways to approach this. One is you can lay out a program which ideally you would introduce. That's challenging enough but even if you lay it out - and I'll come back to that in a moment - even if you lay it out clearly, the problem is then getting it accepted.
19:26 So, let's start with what kind of program ideally you'd introduce. If we go back to the late 19th century right here in Australia, we pioneered the idea of an elementary education for everyone that would be compulsory, free and secular. Secular, I emphasise.
19:45 So, we won't go into having religious schools teaching sectarian dogma. That's changed and it changed for a number of reasons which would take too long to go over in this interview, but we now have many schools that are explicitly religious. We have Catholic schools, we have Jewish schools, we have Muslim schools, you know, we have Protestant schools. Many of them, simply as schools, are fine institutions, it has to be said, but their primary purpose is to perpetuate belief in and the practice of their particular religions.
20:20 If we want a secular society in which the foundational view that children grow up with of their world is cosmopolitan, scientific and rational, we've got an enormous amount of work to do. In the better institutions, there's been a blend between that and the religious teaching in the schools, but it's not an agreed and common curriculum and it's under challenge in many of those schools right now as religions dig in their heels a bit against secular society.
20:48 So, I would say, ideally we would revert to a situation where religion becomes a communitarian and private matter and schooling is conducted as something that is free, compulsory and secular - at the very least, in elementary school so the children's basic formation is to an outlook on humanity, on deep time and history and on science, that is not shaped as belief in innocence in the dogmas and traditions of any particular religion.
21:18 If, on the basis of family life or broader social experience or wider reading, they choose to embrace a religion, we could not deny them that liberty, but we will not actively encourage it because it happens to have a number of dubious consequences among too many people of religious persuasion.
21:39 Nick: Sure, but I mean, from a Christian perspective, if a Christian or another religious believer confronted you by saying they're just simply an atheist or even a Marxist, you know, you're really just asking them to abandon their beliefs and cherished traditions which are of the most, you know, fundamental prime importance to them and their families and their communities. How would you respond?
22:02 Paul: I would say personally I'm an atheist, but that I'm not requiring other people to be atheists. I'm simply saying that if we're going to have a society that is peaceful and civil, where mutual tolerance and common standards can apply, then we need a common educational formation, and that's not to be found in any specific religious set of beliefs.
22:27 It won't do to simply say, coming from the background of one of those sets of religious beliefs, mine is perfectly adequate; because that doesn't solve the problem of finding common standards.
22:38 If you're saying to such a person, by all means, go to your churches on Sunday or your synagogues on the Sabbath or your mosques on Fridays. We're not going to persecute you for holding your religious beliefs. If you really do practice what you claim are moral and inspiring traditions, you will turn up to be a good citizen and we want good citizens.
23:00 That's where we have common ground. Where we don't have common ground is if you say, "The world was created 6000 years ago..." or "There's going to be an apocalypse any tick of the clock... or that, "Homosexuality is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord therefore it must be a criminal offence”. That's something that we disagree about and therefore it cannot be part of the common moral order and it can't be part of our common set of beliefs about the world because those claims about creationism are simply not true. They're not true. No claim of faith is going to make them so. There is evidence here. There are approaches to what we can meaningfully claim as knowledge and faith doesn't cut it. That's what I would say to such a person.
23:46 Nick: Yes, but I mean, they are extreme examples of religious epistemological, you know, belief or even religious moral belief as well and, you know, there must be middle ground.
23:58 Paul: Yes, but the middle ground needs to be precisely that. I think where we've struggled in secular society now for some time is in pretending that tolerance means acceptance of the claims of religions. Tolerance, rather, in a secular society, it seems to me, needs to be understood as saying we don't, the rest of us, accept the claims you make as being true and we don't intend to argue endlessly with you about them. You have your beliefs. If you're determined to stick to them, that's your affair, but we do require you to conduct yourself in such a way that people who disagree with you can get on with their lives without being pestered or persecuted by you.
24:41 That's what's at stake. Where people are of a broad religious or cultural background - let's say Catholic because I came from that tradition, I understand it very well - and they see themselves as good citizens, as upright people, and they value, whether they're still observant or as people say lapsed or whether they become as I did, an atheist - they appreciate that tradition. They understand it, but they see the good bits of it. They love some of the music, the art, the architecture, etc. Then there's not a lot of basis for quarrel.
25:13 There will still be disagreements, however if observant Catholics say, "Abortion, contraception, homosexuality, gay marriage, these are not on," and many of them do that. That's Catholics. There are more hard-line people among Evangelicals and Muslims and Orthodox Jews. We need rules that enable a society to get along without those people imposing themselves on others. We need common rules. That's what needs to be negotiated.
25:43 Nick: So, is this an issue that's only arisen in the 21st century, or are there strands throughout history you can draw on for example?
25:49 Paul: Yeah, look, I would say there are many figures in the religious tradition and in the philosophical tradition in the West certainly and even in the Muslim world, at the margin, that should be common reference points here.
26:04 If you look at the great prophetic figures in the Old Testament like Micah and Isaiah, if you look at Jesus, what are they saying? Again and again, they're saying the Temple ritual, the dogmas, the letter of the law, the things that seem to be emphasised by the establishment; they're completely beside the point. What is it, says Micah, that the Lord God requires of you, but to act justly, love tenderly and walk humbly with your God? I've never heard a better or more concise summation of the best elements in the Bible which leaves aside all the stuff people quarrel about.
26:32 Isaiah said similar things. Jesus said similar things. If you come forward a little bit, you find in the Acts of the Apostles Gamaliel saying, "We should not persecute these followers of Jesus because if he was and they are doing the work of the Lord, then it would be wrong to persecute them and if they're not, then their work will fail of itself."
26:53 Now, he may or may not have been correct but it was certainly a magnanimous stance to take, right? You fast forward then to the Medieval period. One of the greatest Jewish sages, well worth reading for anybody of a Biblical orientation - Christian, Jewish or Muslim - was Maimonides who grew up in Cordoba in Spain, fled from there with his family because of Berber Muslim persecution of the Jews - he was Jewish - ended up in Egypt, still Muslim territory but more tolerant.
27:20 Maimonides articulated what he called negative theology. He said, "When we read the Bible, what we discover is that idolatry is discounted. You're not supposed to worship idols."
27:33 The problem is we do a lot of verbal and imagistic idolatry. We might not worship golden calves or statues, but we form these mental images of who God is, that are every bit as idolatrous. God doesn't have human characteristics. God can't be, rigorously speaking, identified and objectified.
27:54 This is really rigorous thinking and if you pursue that line - and remember, he is a venerated and deeply theological Hebrew sage/Jewish sage - you follow that line of thinking, you end up in territory where there's a lot of common ground with those who say, "We agree with you. That's why we’re atheists." This is not something at that point we need to quarrel about.
28:17 Spinoza, another great Jewish sage in the 17th century about 500 years or 400 years after Maimonides, spells this out and is condemned as a heretic for it by the Jewish synagogues, by the Protestants, and by the Catholics, but his view of how to understand the Bible and theology had enormous influence on the Enlightenment.
28:37 When Einstein, for example, talked about God, he went out of his way to say, "it's Spinoza’s idea of God I'm talking about, by the way. It's not the traditional hocus pocus."
28:46 Immanuel Kant argued the same thing. Wittgenstein in the 20th century essentially argues, "We've got a scientific view of the world and you can pin down what is so. Beyond that, there is mysticism," but you've got to be very careful what you claim in the name of mysticism. It's a way of experiencing reality, but you can't make dogmatic claims about it. This distances us from dogmatic, Pharisaic, letter of the law, oppressive religion, right?
29:14 We should be encouraging that. There's a ground in which we can have a very learned, very principled dialogue with any of the religions. Averroes in a Muslim tradition went down that path. He had almost no influence in the Muslim world. He had more influence in the West, where his work was translated into Latin and sparked the development of Aristotelian thinking by the schoolmen in the Middle Ages, but he was a remarkable thinker.
29:36 Nick: So, what do you make of the rich traditions of mysticism, prayer, ritual introspection and consolation?
29:43 Paul: They are rich, and it's worth remarking that in part, there's no question because I had a Catholic upbringing; something that I cultivated after I stopped thinking of myself as Catholic is an appreciation of these things from an anthropological point of view.
30:02 So, consider human beings over the millennia, as far back as we care to go, have done this thing we call religion. They've invented rituals to mark the various rites of passage in life - birth, marriage, death. They have done ceremonies, etc. Why do human beings do this? Because we are an open-ended creature. We have to invent ourselves, and we have to do it socially, so that we can live socially, so we can know what to do, what's appropriate, interact in a ritual way rather than a confused way.
30:32 That's what's happening when we see religion. Along the way, it has led to some beautiful and moving traditions and has led to some barbarous ones. I mean, animal sacrifice, human sacrifice. We've had to gradually work our way through; so, what rituals are we really prepared to accept, and why are we accepting them, and do they ultimately matter if you, as I said before, talk about Micah or Isaiah or Jesus or in the Chinese world you talk about Confucius? What they say again and again is that what really matters is ethical conduct, not bells and whistles, not incense and noises and gongs. You know, the great sages of the world come together on that. We as a society need to rise to that level.
31:13 Nick: Right. So, can science replace dogma, tradition and scripture in our education, without undermining our culture? i.e. our religious traditions and so on as well. Hasn't this been happening for some time?
31:26 Paul: Yes. Science, I believe, can in this respect. If we shift from an inclination, in a traditional dogmatic religion, to go to the Bible to tell us how the world began and how it's going to end and how it works and how we should conduct ourselves in the world, and instead we inquire into, well in fact, scientifically how did the world begin? How did the cosmos begin? How does it work? Right? How did life arise and how has it evolved and how do human beings emerge out of life, and what are we as creatures and how did our capacities and our behavioural traits emerge?
32:03 We now have an enormous body of knowledge around that. An open inquiry is ongoing. That's where to look. So, science not only can - it must - replace religious traditions in informing us about those things. Once it does that, there's very little need for any of the so-called holy scriptures, except at the margin as part of our traditions. We could regard them the way we do the Greek classics. Nobody believes in Zeus or Aphrodite or Neptune anymore, but we still love the Greek classics.
32:33 I think we need to get to a stage where one would say, "We appreciate the best aspects of the Biblical traditions, but we don't believe in Yahweh walking around in the Garden of Eden or causing punishments to people or talking to Job or Moses," any more than we believe that...
32:49 Nick: Zeus throwing thunderbolts...
32:50 Paul: Exactly so, right? Now, that's where a fervent believer will say, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. You can't surely think that the Bible is at the same level as the Greek classics." The answer is from the point of view of dogmatic belief, absolutely one does. If you're epistemologically serious about the nature of reality, you need to get to that place. Beyond that point, you can draw upon the best aspects of the tradition and if, as the prophets argued, what's really at stake is ethical conduct, then you're not going to lose that one because we all want you to be ethical.
33:20 Nick: Yeah. So, coming back to Locke and principles of religious toleration, do you believe that the agenda you suggest or have suggested in this interview has any better chance of renewing our civilization and reconciling the religious with the scientific and secular society, than was the case in the time of Locke and Spinoza, 350 years ago?
33:41 Paul: There's a twofold answer to that. The first is that we are much better placed to do it now than they were because we know so much more. In the 300 years or more since Locke and Spinoza, the natural sciences have flourished. They didn't have the understanding of deep time, geology, biology, cosmology, or for that matter, medicine that we've got now.
34:07 Secondly, we now have the technologies in terms of communications and in terms of research and access to information, in terms of research that they would just have died for. They would be gobsmacked by what we can do now.
34:24 So, we have both the knowledge and the means to transform things in a way that they could barely have conceived. However, we face very real challenges and the simplest way to encapsulate those is to say, as people are increasingly aware, that the very technologies that could be used, and to some extent are being used to deepen our collective awareness and cooperation, are being used to malign and confusing purposes by trolls and dictators and hackers and so forth.
34:55 There's an old saying that a lie goes all the way around the world in the time it takes the truth to pull on its boots. That's a problem for us in the 21st century because conspiracy theories and propaganda and lies and fears and tabloid reporting and sensationalism dominate social media at the expense of serious considered reading. A great many people, even university students and intelligent school students these days notoriously, will not read books. They're scatterbrained, and this is a serious problem.
35:26 Our neuroscientists and educators are increasingly trying to analyse what's happening here, right? We have to get to the bottom of it. So, the challenges are very big. The means are at our disposal and we need to take on that challenge, instead of being complacent and assuming that, "Oh, everything's working out," because it's actually not.
35:43 Nick: Yeah. One of the recurring themes in our discussions in these interviews is this idea of rising to higher standards and human beings as being a risen ape, rather than a fallen sort of being. Can you expand upon that a little bit more in this context and what actually rising would look like to those highest standards that Locke articulated?
36:04 Paul: Yes. I mean, that's a large question. There's probably three considerations that bear upon it. The first is that it can't be seriously disputed any longer, that our lineage is ancient, that genetically - biologically - we ultimately go all the way back, that our hominid ancestors go back seven million years to a common ancestor with the chimpanzee. Creationists can jump up and down about that. They simply don't have any ground to work on, right, except confusing those who listen to them.
36:37 We did evolve. That's not a demeaning story. That's an extraordinary story. It's far more dramatic and detailed and interesting than anything in the Bible, to say nothing in the Koran which is wholly derivative from the Bible.
36:50 So, if we met in that common ground, we could say, "We as humanity have come from a species that hunted with sticks and stones in small bands, to the point now where for better or worse, we command the planet, and we're sending out satellites."
37:09 Very recently, one of our satellites parked a few thousand kilometres above the surface of Jupiter, took stunning images of the landscape or the atmosphere of Jupiter, and sent these photographs back to Earth where they can be reproduced with high fidelity and circulated in the evening around the globe. That's staggering. That's who we are. That's who we are. That's how we've risen.
37:30 Have we risen morally? Well, in fact, although we still do terrible things to one another at times, we have risen. Consider that in the ancient world - and this was true of the Temple cult in Judaism as it was in Roman religion - animals were killed as sacrifices to gods - human beings and even children to some of these gods. It took a big struggle to convince people that blood sacrifices are an abomination. It took a big struggle for us to get to a point where there was even broad consensus that if religion means anything, it is about being in awe of the cosmos called God and behaving in an ethical way.
38:13 That, it seems to me, has led the best adherents to the great religions to actually live more upright lives. Many haven't. For many, it's eye-wash and they get on with sleazy or dubious behaviour, but that doesn't mean that as a species we haven't gradually created institutions that have made us collectively better informed, healthier, living longer lives, more cooperative in lots of ways. We couldn't run vast societies with hundreds of millions of citizens in cities with millions of people if we couldn't do these things. We do do them.
38:49 So, the story of humanity is a story of ascent and the problems we've still got arise because - let's face it - we came off the savanna, having evolved over millions of years as half human creatures and in the last 10,000 to 15,000 years since the end of the last ice age, we've gone whoosh. We've invented like you wouldn't believe. We've invented agriculture, cities, writing, music. It's just phenomenal. To be fully alive to that and see yourself as a member of that species is surely to be inspired. That's the future.
39:22 Nick: Yeah. Coming down from that deep history and context to a particular case or example in our political society now in Australia, what do you make of the religious freedom bill before the Australian Parliament at the moment?
39:36 Paul: Well, it seems to me in a nutshell, this piece of legislation brings home to us all the things we've been discussing. You know, it's the microcosm of that big picture.
39:46 So, why is it occurring? It's common knowledge, in Australia at least, that it's occurring largely because of the Israel Folau case, right, where this very talented rugby player made clear that he had very traditional Biblical moral beliefs, that he believed that homosexuals - and he added, though not much was made of this, adulterers, drunkards, you know, and atheists - will all go to hell.
40:10 This caused an enormous stink, because of his remarks about homosexuality being, you know, abominable. As a result, he was sacked. Without going into all the details, the result of his being sacked was that there was a groundswell of support from religious believers and free speech advocates saying, "You can't sack somebody just because he has religious beliefs that you don't share. This won't do it all. Where's this going to end?"
40:37 This caused a very considerable public debate. So, the parliament decided in its wisdom, "Well, we need some legislation that will better articulate what our standards are." That's why there is this piece of legislation.
40:49 The question is, of course, is this the right form of legislation? I don't personally believe it is. I think that if I go back to the Folau case - and I said this well before the legislation was tabled - if I'd been running Rugby Australia, you know, and I had the beliefs I have now; rather than making a big issue of this by sacking Israel Folau and saying it's unconscionable for him to say things like that, I would have simply said, “Israel Folau is a very talented footballer and he actually lives - according to his lights - an upright life. He happens to hold religious beliefs that we neither share nor endorse”, and move on because he's not physically assaulting anybody, he's not raping anybody, right? These things had been done by other rugby players who weren't sacked. He's expressing a religious belief. If we refuse to tolerate that and sack somebody, we're going down the wrong path.
41:42 Now, what the legislation is doing is saying people who hold religious beliefs must be allowed to discriminate against others in terms of their religious beliefs. That is to say, they must be able to behave towards others consistent with their own religious beliefs and this trumps any call for wider or more universal human rights. That's going down the wrong path and is going to fuel the problem, because it's going to lead not to less discrimination or less intolerance, but to more intolerance, more discrimination, more conflict.
42:16 What we need is a body of legislation, surely, that would be more consistent, if I may say so, with the principles I was articulating earlier; which is to say that there will be a body of civil law under which people's freedom to choose in important respects will be upheld - and that includes contraception and abortion, it includes sexual practices like homosexuality and identity - and this [freedom to choose] can't be infringed because some little sect happens to object to such things.
42:47 Moreover, people who were brought up in a religious sect or organization must be free to leave it, to apostatize, but we will not persecute people because they happen to have religious beliefs. That's a different matter, right? What we need to do is to find, as I've been saying, common ground where that can happen in reality.
43:08 To a very considerable extent, that has been happening. What's happened in the Folau case is that the clash between traditional and strongly held religious belief and militant political correctness triggered a crisis, right? Both parties need to learn from this, but a legislation that entrenches the right to hold sectarian beliefs and impose them on others is going down the wrong path.
43:30 Nick: Yeah. It makes me think about how you would restructure the curriculum in schools and universities, in the interest of bringing about both the religious literacy and secular balance you advocate, because it seems to me that your average layperson really doesn't have a sense of the issues as you've outlined throughout this interview.
43:50 Paul: It's a big challenge. I've been spending most of my life trying to think this through. I mean, I went to university - I've probably said this in a previous interview - many years ago to get a liberal arts degree, not because I wanted to be a boffin, not because I had a particular area that I wanted to dig in and become a specialist on - I wanted an overview. I wanted to understand how did we, humanity, get to where we are? What is religion? Why is there religion? What about modern revolution? What's communism? Why is there a Cold War? I explored all those questions at university.
44:20 One of the things that troubled me then and still troubles me is I had to cobble all that together myself, because nobody was offering a coherent curriculum - not at school, not at university, not in graduate school. I had to pull it together myself, ask the questions that I wanted answers to and then find the answers.
44:35 Now, that's a great thing to be able to do and you can't do it in a theocratic or dogmatic or dictatorial society, so I appreciate the liberties that I've had to do it, but I do think that we need a core curriculum that inducts people into responsible, rational citizenship, and it needs to start from primary school, and it can't be religious.
44:56 That's a direct challenge to religious institutions but it's also a challenge to those who are so actively or militantly anti-religious that they throw out the baby with the bathwater. They do not understand where these traditions have come from. They're not doing anthropology, they're doing activism.
45:15 We've got a witches' brew at the moment of all that stuff. So, I could design or attempt to design a curriculum. Getting people to accept it? Wow, that's a whole other game but you’ve got to play the long game here.
45:27 I'm 63 years old. In the best case, I might live another 20 years or so but they will be the years of my old age. They won't be the years of my youth. I cannot in those years, impose a vision on others. I wouldn't impose it if I could, but I do seek to contribute to an understanding - I'm right in the public realm - in an effort to communicate what's possible if you think these matters through in an open minded and tolerant way.
45:55 Will that vision prevail? Well, possibly not. Possibly not at all or possibly not anytime soon and, in any event, always partially but one has to keep chipping away. In order for us to chip away, we need an extended and shared common vision among those who are trying to solve these problems, rather than a militant and even violent activism. We need to find ways not simply to fight back against militant activism, but to douse it, right; to draw people away from it.
46:32 Although I don't want to digress into this subject, by way of a kind of metaphor it's worth recalling that I did my doctorate on counterinsurgency in the Cold War. The big issue that I found myself addressing was how well did those who were trying to do counterinsurgency think the problem through? As distinct from killing guys who they thought were bad, like the Vietcong, how hard did they think about why are were Vietcong? What's motivating our enemies? How can we find common ground? How can we sort out the problems that lead people to join their organization, instead of just killing them when they do join?
47:04 This was an ongoing issue through the Cold War and it's an issue, it should be added, for communist revolutions because when they seize power, they kill a lot of people instead of winning them over.
47:15 We don't want to kill people if we can possibly avoid it. We want a society in which people learn, cooperate and create. There's been a lot of that - you know, in the history as I said earlier of human civilization. We've made extraordinary strides. We still have a lot of work to do and those of us who want to see a better future need to do the good work.
47:33 Nick: One of the things that's always struck me about you, Paul, is the deep understanding and knowledge and mastery of a lot of subject matter that you have for Christianity and other world religions too. I'd say you're fluent in religious texts and traditions and things like that.
47:53 You know, but you are open about the fact that you're an atheist and you are an apostate from the Christian faith. Can you talk about your relationship with your Christian heritage in which you were raised?
48:05 Paul: Yes, I'm very happy to do that. One way into that is just to recall a little anecdote which I think throws some light on this landscape. At Easter this year - so only, you know, a few weeks ago - I was talking with an old school friend of mine who came from a Catholic family just like mine, and if anything, a little more conservative than mine and who rebuked me with real feeling when I stopped going to church many years ago.
48:29 He's long since stopped going to church himself. He said to me in a jocular tone at Easter, "So, how are you celebrating Easter? You know, are you doing any religious stuff?" This was not said as if to say I ought to be. It was a joke as if no, obviously you wouldn’t be, right? That's how far he's come.
48:47 I said, "Well, actually, every year at Easter, I make a point of listening to the great oratorios of Handel, Israel in Egypt and The Messiah in particular. This year I varied that slightly listening to Bach’s St Matthew Passion." What happened next astonished me, because he didn't know what I was talking about. He'd never listened to these things and he didn't know what they were. He said, "Oh, I don't really have any feel for opera." I said, "Oh, these aren't operas."
49:20 Nick: It's a very Parkville, inner-city Melbourne thing to say, isn't it?
49:24 Paul: I was fascinated that somebody who, like me, had grown up a Catholic and been more committed for quite a while than I was after leaving school, didn't know what Bach’s St Matthew Passion was, didn't know Messiah or Israel in Egypt, and to me these are wonderful pieces of music.
49:44 You don't, it seems to me, need to be a dogmatic believer to appreciate how wonderful this music is and how stirring the stories are. These are great stories. They're every bit as great as the Homeric myths and in some ways, more so. That's why they've had such a cultural influence for 2000 years. That's why I listen to them.
50:05 In the same way - to broaden the picture a little - when I read, for example, the work of Averroes, the 12th century Muslim philosopher to whom I referred earlier, I don't do it because I think maybe I'll convert to Islam. That's simply not in the deck of cards. I do it because this man 800 years ago was trying to think through how you reconcile the rationalism and the more or less scientific approach to reality of Aristotle, which seems compelling, with the Koran which is a completely different kettle of fish.
50:37 His answer, after a lot of very hard and rigorous thinking was well, if you reach a conclusion based on reason and science, that seems to be at odds with [a passage in] the Koran, you must give priority to reason and science. You can't do it the other way around. Therefore, you must assume of that passage that it needs to be interpreted allegorically or symbolically and not literally. That's good thinking. I relate to that kind of thinking.
51:03 So, I go back over these religious traditions to see the emergence of humanity, the efforts of humanity to shape institutions and moral codes and ritual practices that are dignified and that improve on paganism and on child sacrifice - all those things - which they do.
51:22 Does that mean I'm committed to believe in the Tridentine God or real presence in the Eucharist? Absolutely not. So, you have to separate out what's credible from what's humanly real and of enduring value, and that's certainly what I've attempted to do.
51:37 Nick: Finally, Paul, if a devout religious believer declared to you that he or she radically disagreed with you and thinks the secular society you imagine is based on errors or decadent morals, how would you respond?
51:49 Paul: I would say, "Let's have a conversation there, because I understand where that might come from." Let's bear in mind that the religious tradition all the way back to the Bible is founded on this idea: that a faithful and visionary minority break with what they see as an oppressive or corrupt society and seek to live by a code that will elevate their humanity; as the religious put it ‘in the eyes of God’.
52:16 I respect that existential stance. It's just that I don't think there's a white bearded guy up in the clouds or a vengeful humanoid up there who's going to punish you if you don't do this.
52:27 What can happen and to some extent in various secular societies and religious societies has demonstrably happened is that human beings mess things up. They become corrupt. They become decadent. They fail economically. Their societies fall apart. It's quite possible on present showing that for a number of complex reasons, the liberal democracies will flounder. They're doing, you know, a bit of heavy going right now.
52:55 Does that mean, however, that the answer is a dogmatic religion? I really don't believe that at all. It certainly isn't some literalist cultic religion that would say, "Believe on Jesus and you will be saved," because actually, you won't. That's rhetoric that might get a few misguided souls to gather around some cult leader. It might persuade large numbers of traditional Catholics or Muslims to rally around religious figures and pray or do religious observances. They won't solve the problem.
53:26 We have a lot of heavy lifting to do to construct a society in which the best values that religious believers would say they espouse in terms of integrity, compassion and justice, are flourishing and in which human beings are able to be fully alive, and that includes the complexities of human nature, some of which we've been exploring in recent years to do with gender and sexuality and with divergent opinions in which human beings can be free and creative, not oppressed and persecuted.
53:58 There's a lot of common ground to find there. If somebody - and I know people of different religious persuasions say, "But I have found elevation and purpose through this particular religion." I say more power to you or more precisely, you know, I hope that you continue to find that fulfilment, but I think you're mistaking general existential stability and purpose for truth.
54:25 So, I can quite understand how somebody might say, because there's such a rich tradition in the Bible and let's say in the Catholic Church - and I have a nephew who's made this move - you know, therefore I find stability, I find moral guidance, I find community etc, in belonging to the Catholic Church. I say I completely understand it, but it doesn't mean that the doctrines of the Catholic Church are the truth. It just means that they're stable, that they offer one option. There are other options, you know.
54:54 I think the biggest challenge of the 21st century is to be creative enough and rigorous enough to build new institutions, not simply to say either there's chaos or there's some old institution which we've got to cling to by our teeth, but rather we have to reinvent our civilization, because we've learned so much - so much - in the last 200 years.
55:16 As I said earlier in this conversation, if we really absorb and if our schools impart to us the immense richness of what we've learned about who we are as human beings, about the history of the planet, about the cosmos, about the methods that make it possible to learn such things, we're going to be able to build those new institutions, but if we hunker down and bunker down in old dogmatic religions, we're not going anywhere.
55:38 Nick: Thank you so much for your time this afternoon, Paul. I's always a pleasure.
55:42 Paul: You're most welcome, Nick.