Taming the Gods Read online

  King’s social gospel was not just a product of the black churches but part of a tradition that had never quite gone away in America since the late nineteenth century, when the Baptist minister Walter Rauschenbusch, among others, preached against the evils of Gilded Age capitalist greed. His was the other Christian voice, which grew fainter over time, outgunned by louder voices preaching the gospel of wealth: Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, and others. King, Abernathy, and their brothers in arms revived this tradition to promote equal democratic rights for black citizens. Andrew Young: “Ours was an evangelical freedom movement that identified salvation with not just one’s personal relationship with God, but a new relationship between people black and white.”31 When this fine ideal ran into hard barriers of prejudice, often bolstered by references to the scriptures, especially in the South, some black activists turned to Islam for solace and a sense of self-respect.

  One thing American and Western European rebellions of the 1960s have in common, however, is the perception of those who opposed them that they were a metropolitan, elitist attack on the values of the ordinary, small-town folks, rooted in the native soil, the “little people” championed by a long line of populists, fascists, and religious zealots, from Abraham Kuyper to, as it were, Elmer Gantry. Special riot police from the provinces were bused into Paris in 1968 to teach the big-city students a lesson. The Provos of Amsterdam, with their long hair and white jeans, were mainly a provocation to the provincials who had never liked Amsterdam anyway. Hippies, Yippies, and other counterculturalists were based in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and the university towns. The man who shoots the hippie biker Billy (Dennis Hopper) at the end of Easy Rider is not a greedy capitalist but a God-fearing yokel in a pickup truck from the heart of Louisiana.

  When the backlash against social change came, sooner in some countries than others, it came as a populist reaction against the elites. The elites in Europe are blamed for dismissing national feeling in the quest for European unity and for allowing too many immigrants, especially Muslims, to “swamp” the cities of France, Holland, Britain, Denmark, and Germany. For the first time since the 1960s, religion became a contentious issue again.

  The fear of Islam, its intolerance, and its links with revolutionary violence have not yet provoked a Christian revival. Because Europeans have fought religious institutions for more than two hundred years in the name of freedom, a struggle for liberty against Muslim believers cannot be couched plausibly in religious terms. It would seem like a contradiction. For many secular Europeans, it is the strength of Muslim belief that causes anxiety, as though rational “Enlightenment values” and liberal democracy were under siege by irrational faith. There is, however, a curiously religious, even apocalyptic undertone in some of the anti-Muslim rhetoric, an accusation that secular Europeans are bound to lose an existential war because they no longer believe in values, have become decadent and nihilistic, and are indeed, in this respect, inferior to the Muslims who have the benefit of their faith. The fear is that Western democracy might collapse, not because of Islam but because of the Europeans’ lack of faith in their own civilization and their consequent refusal to fight for its survival.

  In the United States, the struggle for freedom and civil rights was fought in the name of God. And so is the counterrevolution, which began in the early 1970s when white Southern Baptists, shocked by the emancipation of blacks, deserted the Democratic Party and scrambled to the safety of large suburban churches. The message they heard in these giant malls of worship was an increasingly fundamentalist one. American identity had to be reasserted and taken back from the hands of effete, godless, urban elites who had done their best to destroy it. A vital part of this American identity is the notion of being free—the freest people on earth, free from big government, free to carry guns, free from foreign attack. Freedom, religion, and America, in the eyes of the many fearful Christians, go together. We were at war with “terror,” claimed the last Republican administration; if left to the secular liberals, this war would be lost, and the apocalypse will come.

  The gulf between Europe and the United States, then, is not as wide as might be presumed. Similar fears haunt anxious minds. Our histories are not the same and we have different notions of who we are. But everywhere people are trying to cope with the confusions of a fast-changing world by reaching for fixed—and quite often newly made up—identities based on race, religion, or national culture. This attempt to freeze ourselves into place is a challenge to the liberal society. Anti-liberalism can be directed against the alleged threat of Islam or against secular liberals. What is feared in both cases is a loss of identity, of something to believe in, of common bonds, ethical, cultural, or religious, without which people are afraid of being cast out, alone, into the state of nature. It is the kind of fear that drove the early American settlers into prayer tents, where the Elmer Gantrys of their day preached fire and brimstone and raked in the cash.

  TWO

  ORIENTAL WISDOM

  Matteo Ricci reached China in 1583. Dressed in mandarin robes of the finest silk, he and fellow Jesuit missionaries introduced the imperial court to astronomy, mathematics, and cartography, among other things. Teaching science to the Chinese as a way of converting them to the Christian faith was a remarkable enterprise with decidedly mixed results. Some were converted, but others, accustomed to thinking of China as the center of the world, regarded world maps that showed the fallacy of this idea as an insult. And back in Rome, there was a great deal of resistance to the Jesuit penchant for going native among the heathen upper classes, especially when Ricci published learned texts showing the antiquity and moral refinement of Chinese civilization. Ricci was especially interested in Confucian philosophy, and denounced Buddhism and Taoism as primitive cults. As far as ancestor rites were concerned, he decided that they were not religious but cultural and political traditions and thus permissible, even in the case of Christian converts. Not surprisingly, members of less refined Catholic orders protested, and accused the Jesuits of encouraging demon worship and idolatry.

  Although priests in Rome argued endlessly over this issue of rites, it was a minor problem compared to a much greater challenge from China to Christian dogma. If Chinese civilization preceded Christendom, which clearly it did, and if the Chinese had developed a code of behavior that was at least as moral as, if not superior to, Christian morality, then the Christians were faced with an agonizing choice. Either Spinoza and his followers were correct in thinking that moral behavior was entirely possible without believing in divine revelation, or it had to be proven that the Chinese believed in God.

  Naturally, despite their great worldly sophistication, Jesuits could not accept the first proposition, so they argued that the ancient Confucians had indeed believed in a supreme divine being but that faith in God had been corrupted by later schools of Chinese philosophy. Intellectual libertines and Spinozists, just as naturally, took the opposite view. Their Sinophilia focused on Chinese scientific discoveries and the supposedly Platonic nature of the Chinese state. The seventeenth-century Dutch scholar and librarian Isaac Vossius particularly admired a political system that allowed “philosophers and lovers of philosophy” to correct rulers’ mistakes. Indeed, “were the rulers to err, the philosophers enjoy such great freedom to admonish those things as formerly was scarcely even found among the Israelite prophets.”1

  So, not quite a democracy, as we know it, but a more open system than what most Europeans had known at the time. The idealization of Confucianism by European radicals is especially interesting in the light of what future generations of Chinese would say. In the early twentieth century Chinese intellectuals would come to see Confucianism as the main obstacle to their twin modern ideals, which they called “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy.”

  However, Vossius and others, such as the French thinkers Pierre Bayle and Henri de Boulainvilliers, were so taken by Confucian thought that they believed it should be universally applied. They identified Confucius
directly with Spinoza.2 Mankind would progress by studying the philosophies of both men. The Sinophiles of the early Enlightenment did not deny that the Chinese had some notion of a supreme power but argued that they, like Spinoza, identified this power with nature, which should be studied rather than worshiped. What was especially admirable about the Chinese, in the eyes of European philosophes, many of whom lived in aristocratic France, was the meritocratic nature of the state, whose officials were selected on intellectual merit, not the happenstance of birth.

  Voltaire, now better known for his Sinophiliac writings than Vossius or Boulainvilliers, took something from the Jesuits and something from the Spinozists. He accorded to the Chinese a form of Deism and paid the same tribute to the Indians: “It is most probable the religion of India was for a long time the same as that of the Chinese government, and consisted only in the pure and simple worship of a Supreme Being, free from any superstition and fanaticism.”3

  This dubious assumption tells us more about Voltaire than the civilizations of which he had only scant knowledge—which is not to say that he thought all Chinese, or Indians, were rationalists. On the contrary, like Matteo Ricci, Voltaire had no time for popular beliefs. The common people, he said, “governed by bonzes, are as rascally as ours. . . . [T]hey have a thousand ridiculous prejudices, as we do . . . [and] they believe in talismans and in judicial astrology, as we used to believe for a long time.”4 In a delicious thought experiment, Voltaire imagined how religious figures from all parts of the world would be judged in Heaven by a court of sages, including Confucius, Socrates, and Epictetus: “I saw troops of fakirs arriving right and left, Buddhist priests, white, black, and gray monks, who all imagined that in order to pay their court to the Supreme Being, they must either chant or scourge themselves, or walk stark naked. I heard a terrible voice ask them: ‘What good did you do mankind?’ This question was succeeded by a gloomy silence; no one dared to answer; presently they were all led off to the madhouse of the universe: that’s one of the biggest buildings you can imagine.”5

  It was superior virtue that Voltaire admired, not faith. The Brahmin, he thought, unlike the corrupt Christian clergyman, was a perfect example of detachment and meditative living. In Voltaire’s words: “There being so great a physical difference between us and the natives of India, there must undoubtedly have been as great a moral one. Their vices were in general less violent than ours.”6 This was pretty much how Voltaire saw Confucian mandarins too, and indeed how they saw themselves, as cultivated, moderate, reasonable, benevolent—anything but fanatic. Fanaticism, in Voltaire’s view, “is to superstition what delirium is to fever and rage to anger.”7 All religions—Jewish, Christian, as well as Buddhist—were prone to this madness, but Voltaire had a special loathing for sectarian dogmas of the Christian church, which had caused such mayhem in Europe.

  Although Confucius presented himself to his followers as a passionate man, he would not have disagreed with Voltaire’s picture of the great Chinese sage’s philosophy. Self-cultivation, moderation in all things, a critical spirit—all these were essential to the makeup of the Confucian gentleman (junzi). Toujours pas de zèle could have been Confucius’s motto, even though it was Talleyrand who coined it. As far as the metaphysical world is concerned, we don’t know exactly what he believed. When his disciple Zilu asked him how to serve the spirits and gods, Confucius replied: “You are not yet able to serve men, how could you serve the spirits?” When Zilu asked about death, the Master answered: “You don’t yet know life, how could you know death.”8

  This passage has been interpreted as proof of Confucius’s atheism. But this reading may well be false. All he was pointing out was Zilu’s ignorance, not that spirits and gods didn’t exist. The Sinologist Simon Leys, who translated it, believes that Confucius in fact regarded the Will of Heaven as “the supreme guide of his life,” so much so that Confucius saw his work as a political consultant to various rulers as a heavenly mission to restore ethics to a morally corrupted civilization.

  Be that as it may, the ethics he preached were secular in nature, concerning proper behavior of children and parents, and of the ruler and his subjects: benevolence, loyalty, filial piety, humanity, and so on. Moral codes had to be based on certain conventions, passed on from previous generations. A ruler had to be especially diligent about performing the proper “rites,” ceremonial customs designed to preserve harmony in his realm. To this day, the Japanese emperor—still in the ancient Chinese tradition—performs a ritual planting of rice every year, for without harmony in nature, there can be no harmony in society either.

  Leys argues that the actual meaning of li, or rites, corresponds less to rituals than to our idea of mores. These were more important to Confucius than laws. The observance of rituals, of traditional forms of proper behavior, is what holds a civilized society together. Laws are necessary to punish wrongdoers, but they cannot form a basis for civilized human discourse—that can only come from cultivation of virtue. In the Analects, Confucius is quoted as follows: “Lead [the people] by political maneuvers, restrain them with punishments: the people will become cunning and shameless. Lead them by virtue, restrain them with ritual: they will develop a sense of shame and a sense of participation.”9

  Leys observes that Montesquieu, author of L’Esprit des lois, held a similar view. Too much lawmaking is a sign of civilization breaking down. Religion is what keeps men on the straight and narrow. Tocqueville certainly would have agreed. He wrote in Democracy in America that, in general, “too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores.”10 American democracy worked, he believed, because Christianity gave people a common sense of morality.

  Spinoza would have disagreed. Since moral behavior is not of divine origin, and man in the state of nature is neither moral nor immoral but simply a lone animal trying to survive in the jungle, only laws can make people behave in a civilized fashion. Spinoza was not a Christian, of course, unlike Montesquieu, Tocqueville, or indeed Simon Leys. Then, nor was Confucius. Like Spinoza, he did not believe that man is born in sin—quite the opposite, in fact. He thought that man is born good, and society corrupts. This is where he differs from Spinoza, who was convinced that man is only capable of moral behavior in society. It is the duty of the Confucian official to rectify the moral corruption of society by polishing his own ethical behavior and criticizing the ruler if he strays from the path of virtue. “Government,” he said, “is synonymous with righteousness. If the king is righteous, how could anyone dare be crooked?”11

  Here again the Spinozists were wrong to identify their man too closely with the Chinese sage. For Spinoza did not believe you could rely on the virtue of a ruler. If you did that, you would soon find that the ruler would act out of self-interest and abuse his authority. Spinoza had grasped one of the most important principles of democracy in a way that Voltaire did not. But then Voltaire, although he was all for the freedom of thought, was no democrat. Nor did he have a deep interest in China or India per se. Like the Maoists and Ho Chi Minh enthusiasts in the West several centuries later, he used an idealized image of a faraway land to criticize conditions in his own country, which was still in the grips of an authoritarian church and an absolute monarchy. This is why he claimed that “the constitution of [the Chinese] empire is in fact the best in the world, the only one founded entirely on paternal power (which doesn’t prevent the mandarins from caning their children); the only one in which the governor of a province is punished when he fails to win the acclamation of the people upon leaving office; the only one that has instituted prizes for virtue, while everywhere else the laws are restricted to punishing crime.”12

  Voltaire was right about one thing, which had already been observed by early Christian missionaries: Chinese civilization was both ancient and blessed with a code of ethics, which shaped the behavior of one of the most sophisticated bureaucratic systems known to man. But as many Chinese intellectuals have argued since the nineteenth century, the Confucian tradition might have
been more of a hindrance than a help in the development of democratic rule.

  A little less than a century after Voltaire wrote up his thoughts on China and India in the Philosophical Dictionary, China was devastated by a religious rebellion unleashed by a failed Confucian scholar named Hong Xiuquan. After his third failure to pass the examination that would have allowed him to become a scholar-official, Hong had a dream. In his dream he was handed a sword by an old man with a blond beard and instructed to slay evil spirits by a younger man, whom Hong addressed as “Elder Brother.” Six years later, in 1843, when he failed to pass his exam for the fourth time, he read some Christian tracts that he had received from an American Protestant missionary in Canton. This sparked a revelation. The bearded man in his dream was clearly God, and his Elder Brother was none other than Jesus Christ.

  An energetic and charismatic figure, driven by resentment against the Confucian establishment, Hong soon began to gather converts as an itinerant preacher. After studying the Bible with another American in Canton, he roamed round the wild southern province of Guangxi, converting thousands of people, many of them from the Hakka minority like himself. From Guangxi, Hong worked his way up through Hunan, where Mao Zedong’s communist guerillas would operate with ferocious violence a hundred years later. The younger brother of Jesus set out to purge the lands of the moral depravity of the foreign Manchus, whose Qing Dynasty had poisoned China, in the view of Han nationalists, since they grabbed power in 1644. In fact, however, the rot had set in much earlier, according to Hong. Once, long ago, the Chinese had worshiped God, but their minds had been corrupted by Confucius and his followers. After striking out the Manchu demons, Hong promised to establish the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace (Taiping Tianguo). By 1849, he had 10,000 followers. In 1850 he had more than 20,000. A year later, it was 60,000. By the time the Heavenly Kingdom finally came into being in the southern capital of Nanjing, he had many millions of followers, ready to share their worldly goods, worship Christ, and renounce dancing, drinking, opium, and alcohol.