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Modernity and Evil: Some Sociological Reflections On the Problem of Meaning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Anthony D. Smith
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Extract

It is often said that religious disaffection is largely the result, not so much of intellectual doubts, as of the experiential sense of the world's suffering and injustice. Much of the Enlightenment polemic revolved around the problem of the theodicy and, according to a survey of the attitudes of German proletarians in 1906, the majority's religious disbelief appeared to stem from the failure of religious systems to cope adequately with the “‘injustice’ of the order of the world.”

In the same essay, however, Weber distinguishes three radical attempts to answer the problems posed by the world's imperfections. These, he claimed, “...give rationally satisfying answers for the basis of the incongruity between destiny and merit, the Indian doctrine of Kharma, Zoroastrian dualism, the predestination decree of the deus absconditus. These solutions are rationally closed; in pure form, they are found only as exceptions.”

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Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 18 , Issue 71 , September 1970, pp. 65 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © 1970 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 J. Lively (ed.), The Enlightenment, London, 1966, pp. 152-3.

2 M. Weber, "Social Psychology of the World Religions," in H. Gerth and C. Mills, From Max Weber, London, 1947, pp. 275-6.

3 M. Weber, op. cit., p. 275 and his Sociology of Religion, tr. by E. Fischoff, Methuen, 1965, pp. 138-150.

4 G. Obeyesekere, "Theodicy, Sin and Salvation in a Sociology of Buddhism," in E. R. Leach (ed.), Dialectic in Practical Religion, Cambridge Papers in So cial Anthropology, No. 5, 1968.

5 M. Weber, "Social Psychology…" in op. cit., pp. 293-4.

6 As pointed out by B. Nelson in his review of Weber's Sociology of Reli gion, A.S.R. 1965.

7 Classical and recent philosophical arguments are collected in N. Pike (ed.), God and Evil, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1964.

8 D. Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, X & XI, in R. Wollheim (ed.), Hume on Religion, London and Glasgow, 1963.

9 As M. Spiro argues in his "Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation," in M. Banton (ed.), Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, London, 1966.

10 Cf. Weber's Sociology of Religion, ch. 8.

11 H. Frankfurt et al., Before Philosophy, Middlesex (Penguin) 1957, pp. 12-14, 241-5; cf. also his Kingship and the Gods, Chicago, 1948.

12 According to Frankfurt, op. cit., p. 245, early Judaism partly broke with this conception in devaluing nature for history as the arena of the divine sal vation drama. But the Hebraic conception of "history' remained heavily ‘mytho poeic,' and later developments in Judaism, as well as in Christianity and Islam, all sought in varying ways to reintegrate the social and natural worlds into a cosmic whole around a more purposive axis.

13 M. Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, London & Glasgow, 1968, Collins (Fontana).

14 F. Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra, Pt. III.

15 T.J.J. Altizer and W. Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God, Middlesex (Penguin), 1968.

16 F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, No. 125.

17 W. Hamilton, "The Death of God Theologies Today," in T.J.J. Altizer and W. Hamilton, op. cit., p. 59.

18 P. Van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, London, SCM, 1963.

19 T. O'Dea, The Sociology of Religion, ch. 1, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1966.

20 For Burma's Buddhist transformation in the early twentieth century, cf. E. Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution, The Hague, 1964. For the conversion of Jewish religious messianism into historical Zionism, cf. A. Hertzberg (ed.), The Zionist Idea, New York, 1959.

21 Especially in his Ancient Judaism.

22 Isaiah 45; 7,9-10.

23 Cited in G. Roux, Ancient Iraq, Middlesex (Penguin), 1964, pp. 99-100.

24 A. McIntyre, "A Mistake in Causality in Social Science," in P. Laslett and W. G. Runciman (eds.), Politics, Philosophy and Society, 2nd series, London, 1963.

25 Genesis 18; 25.

26 Isaiah 40; 21.

27 F. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 2 vols., Harmondsworth, Middlesex, vol. I, p. 287 (tr. by David Magarshack).

28 A. Camus, The Rebel, pp. 50-8, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1962.

29 S. Runciman, The Medieval Manichee, Cambridge, 1964. (The use of the term "value" is not dissimilar to that of J. Levenson who opposes it to an emotional commitment to ‘history,' cf. his Liang Ch'i-Ch'ao and the Mind of Modern China, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967. But in the present analysis, ‘authority' replaces ‘history' as the focus of emotional commitment until the transformation destroys it.)

30 Sufism and Hassidism are good examples of a more optimistic imma nentism, cf. G. Scholem, "Mysticism and Society," Diogenes, No. 58, Summer 1967.

31 For the concept of ‘inheritance' after the expected demise of authority in the colonial context, cf. J. P. Nettl and R. Robertson, International Systems and the Modernisation of Societies: The Formation of National Goals and Attitudes, London, Faber and Faber, 1968, Pt. II.

32 A. Pope, Essay on Man, cited in J. Lively, op. cit.

33 A. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, Harper Torchboock, 1960, pp. 209-211.

34 Cf. L. Crocker, The Age of Crisis, John Hopkins Press, 1959, pp. 60-5; also P. Gay, The Party of Humanity, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964, pp. 117-26.

35 It should be clear that we have not put forward a monocausal argument, but only attempted to trace one set of relationships and their impact on traditional cosmic images. Humanist optimism was not the only ‘cause' of the disintegration of the latter, only a necessary condition; just as the scientific and technological revolution were not the only factors contributing to the new emphasis on human dignity, although a strong case could be made for their decisive importance. In this respect it is the application of science to social institutions, such as the bureaucratic state, which is crucial. Ancient Greece provides an interesting example of the muted consequences of its limited diffusion.