Harry Potter and the Spitting Haredim:
How religion can make us moral or submoral
Note: this is a mash-up of two posts that originally appeared on livejournal.com in 2012.
I hate forms that ask you to tick a box for your religion. Apart from the fact that there’s never a box for “Wittgensteinian fideist”, or the fact that putting people into boxes according to religion is a first step to putting them in concentration camps, focussing on what religion people are distracts from what I think is really important, which is what their religion does. My militant atheist friends would say that is simple: religion makes people stupid and obedient at best and turns them into crazed killers at worst. But we could say the same about money, and that is hardly the essence of what money does. Like money, religion is a kind of universal motivator: it can make us moral, immoral or — and this is what really interests me — submoral.
Not In Harry’s Name: How Religion Makes Us Moral
I once quipped that religious wars were like the Lord of the Rings fans beating up the Harry Potter fans. Glib though that may be, I think examining the relationship between religion and fantasy may help us understood both of them a bit better.
Some years ago, my attention was caught by a picture of a chocolate bar bearing the slogan “Not In Harry’s Name.” It turned out to come from a successful campaign to get Warner Brothers to only use Fair Trade chocolate in their Harry Potter merchandising. As a result, I found myself joining the Harry Potter Alliance, “an army of fans, activists, nerdfighters, teenagers, wizards and muggles dedicated to fighting for social justice with the greatest weapon we have — love.” Sweet, aren’t they? Believe it or not, the HPA can give us an insight into religion, and specifically how religion encourages moral behaviour.
If you’re not a whack-job fundamentalist who thinks Harry Potter is a Satanist, you probably don’t think that the Harry Potter books promote any kind of religion, and you would be right. But the books, while not being Holy Scripture, operate in a similar way to religion. In fact, it’s tempting to say that they keep the good parts of religion while getting rid of the bad bits, like terrorism and child abuse, but that might be taking the argument too far.
Let us think of religion as a combination of three essential elements. The first is a moral vision. Every religion has some idea of what human beings are ideally like, including their relationship to each other and to the non-human world (Nature plus any gods, spirits etc. you may happen to believe in). Secondly, it has a set of practices which are thought to be helpful in realising that vision: prayer, fasting, meditation, holy war, church jumble sales etc. Finally, it has what I call its mythos. I originally used the term “supportive fantasy”, originally coined by Pete Carroll to refer to a magical belief that, regardless of whether you think it is literally true, is there to help produce a result. However, this risks confusing religion with literary fantasy, which relies on the convention that both writer and reader regard the work as not only untrue, but impossible. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are regarded by their believers as true — literally if you’re a fundamentalist, figuratively if you incline more to liberal theology. Nevertheless, what makes them religion rather than poetry or bad science is their function, not their truth value. Take the role of Buddhism and Taoism in China, for example. Buddhists hold that life is full of suffering, and you’ll have to repeat it in countless incarnations unless you curb your desires, live a blameless life and meditate a lot. Taoists believe that life is just dandy, so to attain immortality (or at least longevity) you should curb your desires, live a blameless life and meditate a lot. Hmm.
Leaving aside the question of whether any particular religious belief is true in the sense that Boyle’s Law is true, it seems clear that when religion works well, it is like the Harry Potter Alliance on steroids, or whatever illegal performance enhancers kids at Hogwarts take. The HPA uses a popular fantasy as a way of creating a sense of community, providing fictional role models and generally motivating people to do good. Just imagine how much more powerful that would be if people not only enjoyed the fantasy but believed Harry Potter was a real person. OK, they would be stark raving bonkers, but they would be a potent force for good (so long as they could conceal the fact that they were stark raving bonkers).
Is religion, then, a kind of controlled insanity which — when it is not doing indescribable evil — can be harnessed as a force for good? Not quite, and not just because a belief in gods or spirits is not as obviously nutty as a belief in, say, horcruxes. I would say it was rather more like a placebo. You take the big red pill that you believe is a powerful medicine, so you get better. The pill is not a real medicine because you only get well because of the placebo effect. But if the placebo effect means you get better because you took the big red pill, then the pill really is medicine. And the fact that it is big and red is important; studies show that big red pills work better than small blue pills. It may sound like I’m just playing with words here, but I think there’s an analogy with religion. (And more than an analogy with magic; for all practical purposes, the placebo effect is magic.) If my faith in some god lets me work miracles, then is it justified? The pill-as-object and the pill-as-healing-agent are different, and we believe in them in different ways, or as Wittgenstein might put it, in different language games.
This leads us to the problem with liberal theology. While it is better than illiberal theology (largely because it doesn’t kill people) it is weaker. Kelly McGonigal informs me that you can be cured by a placebo even if you know it’s a placebo, but I would assume the effect would be less potent. This doesn’t seem to apply so much to fantasy/religion because, as we have seen, people can still be motivated by the Harry Potter books even though they don’t believe in their literal truth, but liberal religion still packs much less of a punch than literalism. It’s the difference between saying “Well Harry Potter represents some noble qualities of the human soul, such as courage, compassion and a sense of justice, so it’s ironic that people are using him to sell chocolate produced in an exploitative way” and “Harry Potter is real and HE’S REALLY ANGRY with Warner Brothers!” The first one is just so C. of E. The best we can hope for, I suppose, is something like this headline from the HPA website:
DID YOU EVER WISH THAT HARRY POTTER WAS REAL? WELL IT KIND OF IS.
Spitting On Schoolgirls: How Religion Makes Us Submoral
In 2011, an eight-year-old Jewish girl, Na’ama Margolese, was shouted at and spat on while entering her primary school. Not just once, but every day. The mob hurling abuse at her were not Neo-Nazis; they were Haredim — not a nation of Middle-earth but Ultra-Orthodox Jews. They thought she was immodestly dressed, even though the girl was herself from an Orthodox family, this was a religious school, and her dress would make Amish girls look like sluts. I am used to the idea that certain people of a religious persuasion are overly concerned with how much skin their neighbours reveal (motes in eyes and all that) but this was so extreme as to be not just comic but creepy. We are talking here about an eight-year-old girl being castigated as a whore. Does that mean Ultra-Orthodox Jews are a bunch of paedophiles? I think not, but in that case, why do they demand that little children cover themselves up as though they could wreck marriages just by hanging around the school gates?
We have seen, thanks to Harry Potter, how religion can make us more moral. A brief look at history can also show us how religion makes us capable of monstrosities in the name of morality. But this is something different. The people spitting on schoolgirls are not, I think, in the mold of Torquemada, who tortured and killed from a fervent moral conviction. This seems to be more submoral, a word which has been used in various ways, but which I take to mean the following: a submoral person is one who, while having moral intuitions and being capable of moral reasoning, elects to let them atrophy in favour of a set of quasi-moral principles for behaviour. Of course we all do this a lot of the time because thought is hard; we might even argue that it is the normal state of tradition-bound societies. What is interesting here is that the people concerned have thought very carefully about their religion; they are just refusing to reason about the moral basis of their actions. What we have is religious kitsch, by which I mean not plastic Virgin Mary table lamps or glow-in-the-dark crucifixes but a certain attitude to religion which is in a way a failed version of the Harry Potter Alliance. To explain this, we need three tools: moral reasoning and intuition, the idea of kitsch, and the view of religion I put forward earlier.
Philosophers and neurologists may debate endlessly about the nature and validity of moral intuitions, but it is plain that nearly all of us have them; not to have feelings that certain things are right or wrong is pathological. We react at a gut level against murder, incest, and torturing cute puppies. We also have moral reasoning, by which we argue from general principles to specific cases and strive (usually unsuccessfully) for consistency in our moral judgments. This is what enables us to decide that gay people have rights even if we may personally find the idea of gay sex totally icky, or that it is as bad to torture your enemies as it is to torture cute puppies. Again, everyone has this capacity, albeit in varying degrees. Both moral intuition and moral reasoning can be wrong, but we are generally better off with them. To be submoral, then, is to refuse to use both of these moral faculties. The submoral person may even do the right thing, but by chance, because the particular moral code they have, for non-moral reasons, adopted, happens to prescribe it.
How kitsch applies to morality and religion is less straightforward. I’m using it in a broader sense than just tacky art, of course. I actually started thinking about it in a broader context while proof-reading a book written by my friend Ulrich Steinvorth. Steinvorth examines the idea of kitsch put forward by Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a long passage which I’d skimmed over at the time because I find polemics in novels irritating, and besides, I was more interested in seeing how far things would go with Tereza and Sabina. The key idea is where Sabina describes the reaction to a sentimental painting:
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
Steinvorth expands this idea:
First, we may wonder why the picture of fluffy kittens or a sunset is kitsch while real fluffy kittens or a sunset that look exactly like the pictures are not. Similarly, a Gothic cathedral is often great art, but the same cathedral rebuilt in our time is felt as kitschy. The reason is the picture or copy is made to trigger not so much a first emotion as a second one that indulges in our agreement with what we consider all mankind’s love of kittens or the love of Gothic cathedrals by all people of our ilk.
(draft of The Metaphysics of Modernity. What Makes Societies Thrive)
Kitsch is a lot more than tacky art. Steinvorth argues that when we descend into kitsch, we stop doing things for their own sake (which is the theme of his book) and start doing them for our sake. When we go “awww” at a fluffy kitten, our focus is on the kitten; when we hang a picture of fluffy kittens on the wall, our focus is on ourselves. We are not saying “Look, a fluffy kitten!” but “Look, a person who thinks fluffy kittens are adorable!”
To return momentarily to Hogwarts, the epitome of kitsch is Dolores Umbridge, with her cat-themed china collection. And as J.K. Rowling herself points out, “a taste for the ineffably twee can go hand-in-hand with a distinctly uncharitable outlook on the world.”
To apply this to religion, let’s recap the pragmatic view I described earlier: a religion combines a vision of what people should be, a set of practices designed to bring us closer to this, and a mythos; i.e., a system of beliefs which motivate and provide meaning to the first two elements. When it works like this, whether in its liberal or literalist forms, the practice of religion may often be wrong, but it is not kitsch. The focus is on the belief, but with the aim of becoming a better person, however the religion defines “better”. Torquemada may have been totally evil and depraved, but he was not in the least kitschy; his problem was in his view that torturing people over theological niceties fell within the parameters of being a good person. Religious kitsch leads to more mundane, but much more widespread badness; it is what we could call “religiosity”.
Artistic kitsch focuses on the feeling of satisfaction that we get from having certain feelings, which is what leads to its disregard of aesthetic standards. Similarly, religious kitsch moves the focus from moral or spiritual behaviour to the feeling of satisfaction we get at feeling like a moral or spiritual person. The Voodoo syncretist who puts a plastic Virgin Mary lamp on their altar because they think it works magic is not being kitschy; the good Catholic who puts it on their bedside table may well be. The lamp says “See, I am a good Catholic who loves the virgin Mary!” but this is not mere show because we say it to ourselves as much as to others. We all do this to some extent, but when it becomes the main focus, then we become submoral, because we have abandoned moral reasoning, and even perhaps moral intuition, in favour of feeling moral about being moral.
This is why people can spit at schoolgirls. They probably are not demented Torquemada types who, after consulting with their conscience, really, truly think an eight-year-old is the Whore of Babylon. They are simply being spiritually kitschy.