Monday 26 March 2012

Taxing the Sacred


On the night of George Osbourne’s budget, James Purnell said that the government would ‘need to raise taxes a lot more than they’re doing’ in order to pay for the things that many people feel ought to be done: universal welfare provision, NHS, foreign aid and carbon reduction targets (Purnell 2012). This raises an interesting question: do people care enough to pay? Adam Dinham, Director of the Faiths & Civil Society Unit, recently said to me in an email that he felt welfare had become ‘a sacred totem’ (Dinham 2012).  In this short piece I reflect on how and whether these ideas and institutions could become sacred, and what the implications for policy.

Let’s begin by putting some parameters around the sacred. In my piece entitled What Counts as Sacred?,  I introduced Scott Atran’s notion of the sacred as ‘that which is believed in for non-instrumental reasons’ (Stacey 2012). What I did not mention there, but which is most poignant here, is that according to Atran a sacred belief is reinforced, indeed rendered more trenchant, if the beholder is asked to give up that belief in the face of a material cost or benefit (Atran 2010). While he does not explore exactly why this is the case, it is implicit that the very idea of something’s being sacred demands that one pay heed to it by enduring any cost and forgoing any reward. Of course also implicit is the idea that if something is not sacred, not much cost or benefit will be endured or desisted

The idea of extending what counts as sacred to areas of public policy is not unprecedented. Atran himself suggests that in Iran the right to attaining a nuclear bomb may have become sacred. But one complication is that all of the above ideas provide people with material benefits: universal welfare was designed deliberately to appeal to the self-interest of the middle class whilst serving the working class. The NHS ensures that people are treated according to need – not ability to pay. As for aid and carbon reduction targets, while they actually increase cost in the short-term, and while most of their benefits seem to go to other countries or future generations, they have often been sold on the premise that they will create long-term benefits: in terms of aid, preventing violent extremism and increasing trade; in terms of carbon reduction, increased health, resource independence, and job-creation. It is therefore difficult to know why people “believe” in aid and carbon reduction.

Another complication is that the world of policy is never as simple as that of research. Atran works out what ideas count as sacred simply by asking people whether they would give those ideas up in the face of any benefit or cost. But people are never presented with a simple choice such as “would you give up your belief in the NHS for an increase in your earnings of 20% a year”; or “would you maintain your belief in the NHS at a possible decrease in your earnings of 20% a year”. Although some polling and focus groups take place before most policies are decided, for the most part taxes are introduced to us not as questions but as statements. But this limitation itself brings about a new possibility for gauging whether or not beliefs are sacred.

For Durkheim sacred beliefs are totems by which societies understand themselves. When those totems come under threat, society erupts into protests or riots (Cladis 2001). We can therefore gauge whether ideas are sacred according to whether their coming under threat induces protest or riot. But Durkheim had in mind concepts rather than ideas with tangible benefits. So again, because the ideas we are looking at seem to provide material benefits, the reasons for rioting appear instrumental. If we look at the protests across Europe in response to cuts, it seemed to be for the most part people affected by those cuts out on the street. Common sense would suggest that people do not riot over reductions in foreign aid either because foreign aid is of no tangible advantage to those at home or because the victims are not present at hand. On the other hand, people do undertake (often violent) protest on account of the environment at great cost to and with few tangible advantages for the protestors. Perhaps then, we require this double qualification: that to count as sacred, ideas must be both non-instrumental and capable of inducing large, collective reactions.

From what has been discussed so far though, football seems to be sacred. As any football fan knows, the police have long regulated exits from games so as to avoid groups of fans fighting over something completely non-instrumental. Roger Caillois and George Bataille think the sacred must more deeply reflect the way a society understands itself (Caillois 2001; Bataille 1985). A football team adequately represents the way that the football fans understand themselves, and its appeal can be quantitatively impressive; many who have travelled to parts of the Middle East and Africa will have met locals as fanatic about Manchester United as Mancunians themselves. But football is qualitatively limited in its ability to represent the way we understand ourselves as a society.

If Adam Dinham’s previous work is anything to go by, his reasoning for welfare’s being a sacred totem might rely on something similar to Caillois and Bataille’s understanding of the sacred. In his Faiths, Public Policy and Civil Society, Dinham offers an extensive account of how government came to take on public service and welfare provision from the church over the course of the 20th century (2009). Now given this process on its own it is conceivable that government welfare provision might slowly become a sacred totem by which UK society understood itself and its covenant with government. But coinciding as this process did with shifts towards secular belief, the idea that the government - and specifically not the church - provided welfare may have reinforced this totem. This story would seem to give a much more nuanced and therefore convincing account of how just one idea might become sacred. It seems to rely on something similar to Caillois and Bataille’s approach because it implies that an idea must broadly represent the way that a society perceives itself in order to be sacred for that society.

This nuanced approach is useful for two reasons: it gives us an idea of when and how something becomes sacred; and it gives us insight into how complicated the process is. Dinham considers the NHS in the same history of how government came to take on public services. But can we consider foreign aid or carbon reduction in a similar way? As with public services, government has displaced the church as the major provide of foreign aid. Yet for the reasons already suggested foreign aid is less emotive.

Since carbon reduction has proved to be non-instrumental and collective and has always been led by business or government, it remains the special case. We must therefore interrogate where its sacred elements might have come from if we are to agree it has such elements. The obvious place to turn is the green movement.  In his Green Politics is Eutopian, Paul Gillk explains how the green movement arose as a spiritual response to ideas of civilization (2008).

In order to explain how this response was spiritual, it is worth leaning on Nietzsche’s reflections concerning how to cultivate a sense of the sacred in human activities. Nietzsche was particularly interested in how religions engage the whole person: diet, ritual, thought (1990). Picking up on how these reflections might be relevant for ostensibly nonreligious activities, Bataille thought of how the military and avante-garde groups similarly looked to engage the whole person (Bataille 1985). With this in mind, it is worth reflecting that the green movement was not just about government reform but also about collective self-reform. I bring about a change in the way I live my life in the hope that others will do their bit and follow my lead.

So perhaps what makes all of these ideas special is that they are underpinned in some way by ideas that are non-instrumental and collective. The trajectory of how each idea came to be sacred differs. This might explain why some ideas seem more sacred than others. While some ideas, like the NHS, seem almost indestructible, we are told that people’s interest in the environment is proportionate to the health of the economy.  Perhaps then, the sacred is a spectrum, and how sacred an idea is will tell us something about how much of a burden people are willing to carry in its name.

Author

Timothy Stacey

Works Cited

Atran, Scott, Talking to the Enemy, HarperCollins, London, 2010

Bataille, George, Visions of Excess (trans. Allan Stoekl), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1985

Caillois, Roger, Man and the Sacred (trans. Meyer Barash), University of Illinois Press, Champaign, 2001

Cladis, Mark, ‘Introduction’ to Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Oxford UP, Oxford, 2001

Dinham, Adam, Faiths, Public Policy and Civil Society, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2009

  (a . d i n h a m [at] g o l d. a c . u k), (14 March 2012), RE: Sorry new copy, [online]. Email to Timothy Stacey (t I m o t h y j s t a c e y [at] g m a i l . c o m).

Gillk, Paul, Green Politics is Eutopian, Lutterworth Press, Cambridge, 2008

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil (trans. R.J. Hollingdale), Penguin, London, 1990

Purnell, James, interviewed by: Jeremy Paxman, Newsnight, BBC2, 21st March 2012, 22:30

Stacey, Timothy, (2012) What Counts as Sacred? College of Sociology, [online], Available from: <http://collegeofsociology.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/what-counts-as-sacred-message-from.html> [Accessed 26 March 2012].



 




Monday 19 March 2012

What counts as sacred? A message from the Editor.

The College of Sociology is advertised as promoting "Sacred Sociology, implying the study of all manifestations of social existence where the active presence of the sacred is clear". The College calls for “items in any media format, including but not limited to, short essays, notes, short stories, pictures and videos”. The submissions page stipulates that “all items will be considered by the Editor according to the following, simple criteria: Does it highlight the sacred? Does it consider how the sacred underpins the collective?” But what counts as sacred?


It is the intention of the College to take a wide-berth to what counts as sacred. I worry that placing constraints on what counts as sacred will limit innovation. But Adam Dinham, Director of the Faiths and Civil Society Unit at Goldsmiths College, a centre of excellence linking research, policy and practice in the field of faith-based social action, pointed out that “one response might be how to designate the sacred without simply calling everything that feels important sacred!” Moreover, it might be in the interests of converting present readers into future writers and artists that I give some idea of what we’re looking for. Let us try then, to flesh it out a little.

What I want to do is take the reader from a solid starting point to an acceptance of the wide-berth point of view promoted by the College. For Scott Atran the sacred is simply that which is believed in for non-instrumental reasons (2011). The sacred cannot be analysed in terms of rational action theory or in terms of evolutionary biology. To put it (a little too) simply, people do not have sacred beliefs because they benefit from those beliefs and nor because those beliefs increase the likelihood of passing on their genes. People will not give up their sacred beliefs for any instrumental benefit such as money or land. Indeed often beliefs are held at great cost to the beholder, such as when people are willing to undergo persecution and even death for their beliefs. And sometimes the beliefs themselves seem to be costly, such as when Christians concentrate on success in a next life.

According to Atran’s model the sacred is not the reserve of religions. Many people see their children as sacred. Atran himself suggests that in Iran the belief in the right to have a nuclear bomb may be becoming sacred.

The extension of the sacred to nonreligious activities such as protest is not new. Emile Durkheim believed that in early 20th century France, the revolutionary values of liberty, equality and fraternity had become sacred (2008). The College de Sociologie was set up in order to explore the ways in which the sacred extended to nonreligious activities just as was the revived College of Sociology. These activities may be as varied as riots, raves and football fanship.

Once we begin to explore this extension, a problem emerges; namely, that just anything that is deemed important can be called sacred. This creates legal difficulties: what sort of ideas deserve Equality and Human Rights protection? Could insulting someone’s football team become a prosecutable offence?

My thought is that Atran’s definition also fails to specify the importance of stressing the collective. For Bataille, it was not possible to achieve the deepest religious experiences without the collective (1985). This also had a moral dimension. For although some individual practices could bring us close to the deepest religious experiences, solitary meditation for instance, these practices are counterproductive because the point of the sacred is to underpin the collective. Similarly today there seems to be a sacred veneration for commercial products. Can we really be happy with this development? For Roger Caillois the sacred is essential to social cohesion (2001). To squander it on individualism is irresponsible. 

In these senses then, Atran’s description seems too loose. But the purpose of the College of Sociology is not to presuppose what counts as being sacred. Rather it is to provoke people to see the importance of the sacred and to explore what counts as sacred.

Perhaps then, Atran’s description is in fact too tight. Weber showed us how Protestantism created a strong work ethic, while the Church of England since the sixties sees part of doing God’s work to be fighting for social justice. At times then, the sacred is at least bound up with instrumental success.

Rudolph Otto had a far looser understanding of the sacred, seeing it is anything that is simultaneously mysterious and tremendous, anything that provokes awe (1958). But once we begin to get this loose, again we seem to lose any reason the sacred should be promoted. One might ask, why talk about the sacred at all if it will not serve any social benefit? But one might equally ask, are we really talking about the sacred if what we are trying to achieve is a social benefit?

I want to know people think is sacred, and perhaps a little of what they think should be sacred. I hope that the debate can continue here and I ask once more for any articles, pictures or videos from anyone who may know of an interesting human activity in which the sacred is present.

Author

Tim Stacey

Works Cited

Bataille, George, ‘The Sacred’ in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939 (ed. Allen Stoekl), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1985

Caillois, Roger, Man and the Sacred, University of Illinois Press, Champaign, 2001

Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1958








Monday 12 March 2012

Inaugural Address: The College of Sociology (2012 - …)


In the late 1930s the dual decline of Christianity and the world economy had left a vacuum being filled by cultish politics of both left and right. In response, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois and others set up the College de Sociologie to identify, understand and harness the power of the sacred for good. The College explored sacred ideas from around the world, trying to discover something essential and transferable. The College itself disbanded when war broke out and partly because Christianity proved more resilient than originally thought; partly because new faiths arose to fill the vacuum; partly because economic circumstances improved; and partly because people’s aversion to Christianity had turned out to be only part of a wider aversion to hierarchical representation of the spiritual, the ideas of the college slowly became unpopular. Yet today in a new age of spiritual and economic uncertainty, many of the same problems identified by the college are coming to the fore once more. Moreover the resilience of Christianity and the emergence of new faiths may turn out to be an advantage in the project: we can learn lessons from people with whom we share a common language and culture. With this in mind, I propose to revive the College of Sociology.

Against the backdrop of the decline of Christianity, much work towards identifying, understanding and harnessing the power of the sacred had already been undertaken by Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss and Gustave le Bon. Michele Richman tells us that while Durkheim and Mauss certainly influenced fascism, we know that the more cynical work of le Bon was actually read by Mussolini (2002). Although much of the rational support for fascism was economic, as a movement fascism filled a spiritual vacuum. In Russia, communism was similarly taking on spiritual dimensions. The most famous response at the time was surrealism. Surrealism began in the early 20th century as a response to excessive rationalism. It proposed to convey the deepest thoughts possible, undisturbed by rational ideas. As fascism arose, the conveyance of the deepest thoughts possible remained important as a way of criticising control.

The College of Sociology felt surrealism’s response was inadequate; it was too subjective. For the College, the only way to convey the deepest thoughts or to experience the most intense feelings was as a collective. Surrealism’s ability to convey the deepest thoughts possible could not adequately criticise fascism because the latter was more equipped to convey those thoughts. Instead a response to fascism had to beat it at its own game - it had to create a collective euphoria more powerful than that of fascism. Fascism had itself been a spiritual response to excessive rationalism in politics. So as Dennis Hollier explains, the College wanted “to find out what united men and to study the sacred…human activities “as they create unity”” (1979: xi). This often meant denouncing art that encouraged individualism - surrealism, the novel generally - as much as celebrating that which encouraged unity - theatre. It also meant denouncing liberal democracy. By promoting individualism, liberal democracy had disintegrated unity to the extent that when threatened with war, the French lacked an intense reaction (1979: xv).

The “ sacred human activities” that the College studied in the hope of restoring unity ranged from the clergy and the military to cults and secret societies and avant-garde art communities, of which the College considered itself one. Today we can extend this to community organisations, football supporters, book clubs, riots, raves and many more.

Despite its interest in hierarchically structured groups, and is critique of liberal democracy, the College tended to denounce top-down unity in favour of bottom-up communities. Moreover, while Caillois seems to continuously seek something essential and transferable in the sacred, Hollier has related Georges Bataille to poststructuralism (1992: ix). Although sacred human activities are always collective, the form, structure and style these activities take is different for each time and people.

Today the work of the College is once again significant. One broad reason for this, Benjamin Noys explains is that “rather than the [Second World] war violently resolving the political debates between proponents of fascism, democracy and communism, it violently put an end to those debates’ (2000: 54) Another reason the work of the College is significant is we are once again in a time of spiritual and economic uncertainty, and the vacuum is being filled by cultish groups of both left and right. Sticking to the UK, we have the BNP and EDL on the right, Islamic fundamentalism sat somewhere in the middle between Fascism and Marxism, and more moderate groups such as the Green Alliance and Citizens UK on the left.

Fortunately we also have more material to work with today: Christianity has remained resilient; other faiths have come to fill the gap where Christianity has declined; and other institutions and activities have come to serve the spiritual needs of those that remain radically individualist. Like the original College de Sociologie, the intention of the College of Sociology is to raise awareness of, critique and honour these various movements, as well as promoting "Sacred Sociology, implying the study of all manifestations of social existence where the active presence of the sacred is clear" (Hollier 1979: 5). We will look at movements in religion, spirituality, philosophy, sociology, politics, art, literature, film, theatre and more. 

Why a College?

The College of Sociology was not so called because it provided formal education – it did not. Rather it was a college in the sense of an organised group of professionals with a shared set of aims – rather similar to a think-tank. Yet the name “college” remained important because it suggests unity of purpose. Today the name College of Sociology is important for another reason: it recalls the good work of those thinkers that originally set it up!


It was the intention of the original College to make its work accessible to people in the fields it studied, meaning it had to be accessible to those outside the field of academia. In honour of this intention, this blog will call on writers from all fields: experts and laymen, academics and casual observers.


Perhaps most importantly, the College sought alternative ways of exploring sacred human activities and beliefs: in novels, erotica, poetry and plays. The new College of Sociology aims to go a step further, asking from contributions not just from writers of all fields, but also for pictures and videos from artists, graphic designers, architects, dancers, whoever thinks their work or leisure represents sacred human activities. Send a picture of an act you have observed, post a video of the crowd at a football match, this site hopes to be a hub for exploring everything and anything anyone or anything deems sacred. 

Author

Timothy Stacey

Works Cited

Hollier, Denis, The College of Sociology (1937-39), University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1979

                        ---Against Architecture: the writings of George Bataille, MIT, Cambridge, 1989

Noys, Benjamin, Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction, Pluto Press, London, 2000

Richman, Michele, Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the College de Sociologie, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2002