This month we explore the question “Is there community without religion?” through pieces from Margaret Hickey and James Bradshaw. Margaret Hickey reviews John Gray’s The New Leviathans in which the author opines that the only hope left for society mired in the chaos of post-liberalism is the “Leviathan” of very powerful government. For someone like Gray “mired in a nihilistic atheism”, as Hickey puts it, the State is the only remaining glue for societies fragmented and atomised by the loss of a common religious framework.
James Bradshaw looks at how this same fragmentation has been playing out here in Ireland. Sadly, as he points out, those who cheered on the demise of traditional Catholicism here in Ireland did not stop “to consider the social implications of the former communal focal point of each community essentially becoming a disused museum”. And if the statistics are to be believed, those social implications are indeed dreadful for a country: “where more than 40% of Irish adults now have a mental health disorder, and where Irish people now rank fourth in the world when it comes to cocaine consumption.”
Bradshaw provides a striking quote from the 1931 social encyclical Quadragesimo Anno in which Pius XI almost prophetically saw that Leviathan would invariably end up becoming the nanny to the lonely citizens of atomised societies:
[B]ecause things have come to such a pass through the evil of what we have termed “individualism” that, following upon the overthrow and near extinction of that rich social life which was once highly developed through associations of various kinds, there remain virtually only individuals and the State. This is to the great harm of the State itself; for, with a structure of social governance lost, and with the taking over of all the burdens which the wrecked associations once bore, the State has been overwhelmed and crushed by almost infinite tasks and duties.
The process described here by Pius XI is precisely what has come to pass, except that he of course could not have foreseen how this process would be greatly enhanced by, as Hickey puts it, “the emergence of ever new classes of ‘oppressed’ groups and sub-groups, all needing to be championed by an expanding network of agencies and services, underwritten by public funding.”
Where Pius XI suggests that the State is forced to take on the role of nanny because citizens have lost the willingness or capacity to organise themselves, perhaps it is now clear that the State is in fact delighted at the prospect of aggregating to itself more and more control over the lives of its citizens. In Alasdair MacIntyre’s words, echoing Lord Acton of course, “All power tends to coopt and absolute power coopts absolutely.”
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Perhaps the event which most accelerated the process of atomisation of Western society was the Reformation, with its rejection of community in favour of the “sola” of “sola fide” and “sola scriptura”. Tim O’Sullivan reviews A People’s Tragedy. Studies in Reformation a collection of essay on the Reformation by the Dundalk historian Eamon Duffy, already very well known for two previous works on the Reformation: The Stripping of the Altars (1992) and The Voices of Morebath (2001). Here in A People’s Tragedy, Duffy continues to assert, as he did in those two previous works, that there is “a growing awareness of the existence of widespread discontent with and resistance to the Reformation process, which is now understood as a long labour, not a rapid and popular push-over.”
We also carry a second review by Margaret Hickey this month, a life of the “warped bird” (in the words of P.G. Wodehouse) that was George Orwell. Certainly from this review alone there does seem much in the life that was “warped”, or perhaps tortured. The biography is D.J. Taylor’s Orwell: The New Life. Orwell was clearly unique in his capacity to critique what was warped in the politics of the world of his time, but always with an underlying pessimism. As Hickey speculates, “His bleak view of the world and its inhabitants may be traced to his rejection of the God of mercy and grace as much as the extraordinary acuity of his insight into the human psyche during a revolutionary period of history. Perhaps the same atheism and disenchantment are connected to, maybe even rooted in, the quality of his own moral life?”
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Finally we also carry this month an interesting piece from Dr Holly Ordway in which she recommends five books: two works of non-fiction, two classical works of fiction, and one prayer-book. Obviously being a review of books Position Papers is in the business of recommending certain books to our readers, and it is nice to receive a collection of several books like this. As Ordway writes: “And so I’ve offered these five books, out of many that I read and enjoyed in 2023, in the spirit of encouraging wide-ranging, relaxed reading – the kind of reading that enriches one’s life and doesn’t come with any strings attached.” In future issues of Position Papers we will carry more such articles in which someone kindly shares with us a bunch of their favourite books.