What Makes Religion a Force for Good or Evil?

By Terrence McNally and Robert Wright, AlterNet. Posted July 11, 2009.

TM: Within your own territory, self-interest serves morality, but strangers are a threat.

RW: Over the sweep of history, for reasons that I think are intelligible, social organization expands. You see more class differentiation and hierarchies of power grow more pronounced, but you also see movement toward a cosmopolitan ethos.

In America today, asked if most people of any race, creed or color are humans and should get minimal human rights, people say yes and mean it. They may sometimes honor it in the breach, but I believe the expansion of the moral compass in that one sense is built into the direction of history.

TM: Whereas long ago, someone from another tribe, someone you'd never met before, might not even be considered human.

RW: The language suggests that in some cases. Certainly they would not be accorded the rights that everyone in your village might take for granted.

TM: For the sake of perspective, many people would point to moral progress by saying we've done away with slavery. Yet, Kevin Bales, Ben Skinner, a lot of human-rights folks would say, not so fast, there are more slaves -- that is, people that have no control over their lives or their work -- than ever before, and they're valued less than they ever were. How does that fit into this evolution of morality?

RW: When there are huge differentials of power, you can get away without acknowledging the significance of someone. If you're doing business with people you have to give them minimal respect. If you're going to buy cars from the Japanese, you can't go around talking about them the way you did during World War II and treating them as if they were subhuman. That's a case where they have some degree of economic power, they're making something you need.

But when there are huge differentials of power, you don't get the same thing. Now, as it happens, there are some people in every race, ethnicity or nationality who have enough power that they merit some degree of respect. So that has discouraged people from ruling whole ethnicities and whole nationalities out of the realm of humanity. But it's certainly true that if huge discrepancies of power persist, individual people are likely to be exploited.

And modern information technology helps in some ways. More and more of this stuff is transparent; it's easier to document and make vivid.

For example, we now know much more about what's going on in China than during the Cold War. China wants to be part of the global economy, so they have to let people have cell phones and e-mail. They crack down on the Web, but it's porous enough that we know more about what's going on.

TM: We recently saw the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, which is still a secret to many people who live within China.

RW: The government certainly tries to keep it that way. The Chinese government doesn't want to cede power, but when Chinese peasants use cell phones and so on to organize demonstrations and even riots, which they actually do a lot, the government, just for reasons of self-preservation, sometimes tries to address their grievances.

TM: Let me go back to one of the big questions. You're willing to say that life or existence might have a larger or higher purpose. Now what do you mean by each of those terms, and where does religion fit into that for you?

RW: "Higher purpose" may be a misleading term, because I think when people think of higher purpose they think of some spooky, mystical force reaching down and messing with the system, and I'm not necessarily saying that.

In deism, which was popular among some of the Founding Fathers, there was a god that set up the universe, but it was like clockwork. He just wound up the clock, let it go, and forever after the material system unfolds. The kind of purpose I'm talking about could be something like that.

Particular kinds of directionality suggest purpose, but it doesn't need some intelligence to set it in motion. It could perhaps be an unfolding algorithm, and, for some reason we don't totally understand, it has these properties. I don't mean to depart from a purely materialistic explanation of natural selection and human history.

TM: And you don't need to.

RW: The technical term for purpose in philosophy is "teleology," and I think a lot of people don't realize you can have a purely materialist teleology.

Some philosophers are comfortable talking about organisms having a purpose built into them by natural selection. They might put the word purpose in quotes, but when an egg moves systematically toward maturation, they would call an organism a purposive system.

And they would say it was set in motion not by a creator, but by a system of natural selection. If I'm right, and the larger system itself has purpose, it could have been imbued by something like "meta-natural selection."

See more stories tagged with: religion, christianity, evolution of god, robert wright

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org). Visit his Web site,A World That Just Might Work, for podcasts of all interviews, and more.

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