Mini Philosophy: A.C. Grayling explains why we don’t need to bring back religion, we need to bring back education
Do we really need to be religious to run a society well?
After any revolution, there is a recalibration. When you push the pendulum one way, you have to wait for it to swing heavily back. At the start of the millennium, the revolution was the New Atheism, and the pendulum was given a mighty secular-humanist push. These were the days of the “Four Horsemen” — Richard Dawkins, Sam Harriss, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett, all public intellectuals who agreed that religion generally had nothing good to offer the world and we ought to abandon it. They spearheaded the New Atheism movement, which attracted a swell of non-believers in the 2000s and beyond. Organized religion seemed to be on the decline.
But now, the counter-revolution might be picking up steam. The “New Theists” argue that religion has not only historically been the greatest catalyst of progress but that, without religion, society (especially Western society) will stagnate. Religion, they argue, made the world great and we need to resurrect a more godly society.
A.C. Grayling disagrees. As an outspoken humanist and Vice President of Humanists UK, he’s far gentler than Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett might have been, but no less anti-religious than any of the Horsemen. I recently spoke with Grayling for the Mini Philosophy newsletter, and I suggested to him that the “New Theist” movement is built on two premises: The first is that there is a moral rot in society; the second is that irreligion is the cause of that moral rot.
Grayling thought both premises were nonsense.
The Moral Rot
At the end of last year, the historian and writer Niall Ferguson gave an interview where he argued that he had “lost [his faith] in atheism.” He said it happened, in part, after “realizing that no individual can in fact be fully formed or ethically secure without religious faith.” Ferguson argued that religion is necessary for being good and, by extension, for society to be good. In 2011, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued that religion was important to social cohesion. And when, two millennia ago, Seneca cynically penned the line, “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful,” he was nodding to the fact that religion does serve some instrumental value.
For Grayling, this is wrong for two reasons:
The first is to ask cui bono — “who benefits.” Grayling thinks that those who argue “society is better with religion” are guilty of a self-aggrandizing confirmation bias. If you’re religious, you will want people to think that religion is necessary and important. “They’ve got an agenda and […] have an interest in safeguarding, for whatever psychological or social reason, those things which keep a tighter hold on what people think and how they behave.” When there’s change — especially widespread, structural change that challenges existing power dynamics — those who have historically benefitted from that power will want to keep hold of it.
Neither correlative nor causative
Grayling’s second counterargument is that even if we accept this “putative moral degeneration,” there’s no strong reason to assume it’s because of irreligiosity. We can point to “the thousand years of classical Hellenic and Roman civilization in which religion was a very different thing, if it existed at all. Christian principles or Islamic principles belong to a relatively recent period in human history. Rome was organized beautifully, and the Greek polis, pretty well. And the Chinese have constituted about a quarter of humankind for quite a long time, and they had nothing like that kind of religion. Or, look at India. The great philosophical schools of India were atheistic mostly and nevertheless had ideas about ethics, social bonding, behavior, and about the organization of society.”
Grayling further argues that “religion” is almost always understood to mean Islamic or Christian ideals, and it takes a very cherry-picked version of history to argue that these ideals were exclusively important to human progress.
More education, not religion
Why, then, is there this perception of a kind of social degeneration? Of course, part of it is what Grayling points out as simple conservatism. But just because something is old or traditional doesn’t make it good. Over our conversation, we discussed another observable, and provable, trend: the lack of a “third space.”
A third space is where we gather with friends or like-minded communities outside our home (first space) or workplace (second space). For many people throughout history, a church, a mosque, or a temple has been the third place — a space of intelligent discussion and kindness as a default. So, if we take away religion, do we take away these psychologically important third spaces?
Grayling argues that this isn’t the real issue. The real issue is the lack of free, accessible, and fun educational spaces.
“I agree that the lack of a third space has rather dehydrating consequences. Interestingly, in classical antiquity, a ‘school’ actually meant something different. In ancient Greek, it actually means leisure. It means the opportunity to gather with others, chat, and discuss. You share some food and wine, talk about philosophy or just talk about anything, really. But after the ‘necessities’ of life had been dealt with, that’s what school was. And Aristotle said, ‘We educate ourselves so that we can make a noble use of our school time.’”
“But we’ve had this completely on its head, and now we go to ‘school’ to pass exams and get a job. And indeed, we’ve even given up on the idea of education in what Aristotle meant. We’ve lost this view of humanity where we can discuss and form opinions, listen to other people’s opinions, and so on. But now we tend to misname education as preparation for being foot soldiers in the economic battle. You know, the employability agenda has taken over.”
For Grayling, it is not more religion we need, but more humanism — especially one modeled on classical antiquity. We need to celebrate “school” as a space where we can meet to discuss the philosophical depth of life. We need places where we can discuss ideas and “activate” whatever learning we have. Because, as Grayling noted, when we learn by reading a book, listening to a lecture, or watching a YouTube video, that’s only half the job.
“You’ve got to go off and you’ve got to write something about it. You have to discuss it with other people. You’re going to come to the tutorial. You’ve got to tell all your friends back what you heard in the lecture.”
In other words, we need to celebrate education and not religion as one of the most essential elements of human flourishing.
A C Grayling's Discriminations Making Peace in the Culture Wars will be published by Oneworld on 3rd April.
More from Jonny Thomson
Learning keeps people surviving. Deprived of it, many just deteriorate, which is why dictators limit learning. Religion has often driven learning, as well as denied it. But it is not the only driver.
The most important part of education is to teach how to think. Religion teaches how and what to believe, that's the opposite of thinking.