According to Lenin religion was ‘spiritual gin’. He quite obviously inhabited a world of more drinkers than people who smoked up. Marx believed it was the opium of the masses so perhaps Karl’s era had more of the latter or perhaps he read with fury as a journalist of the way the English were forcing millions of Chinese to smoke up. Either ways his theory didn’t really hold in England, the capitalistic paradise he landed up in after being expelled from his Germanic homeland.
This post is about three sociological giants and their theories about religion and why Max Weber seemed to have rocked the religion theory towards the truth much better than the other two; it’s also about the British working class’s ability (god bless their honest, hard-working souls) to put many theorists and theories in their place with in their earthy commonsensical practice.
Emile Durkheim believed religion was the creation of the ‘sacred’ by society. Social acts were divided into the sacred (religion) and the profane (day-to-day life). Durkheim meant by profane something quite different than what is in common usage, profane in its Latin meaning is nothing but ‘outside the temple’ or day-to-day life that is lived outside the temple. He also added that religion in the final analysis was nothing but a worship of society itself. Society symbolized its values, beliefs, customs and integrating and uniting forces into God (s), rituals, symbols and signs – basically religion. Society then developed structures to support this – churches, divinely ordained rulers, laws and codes. Religion provided the status quo, security and stability needed by society.
Marx pretty much agreed with this, except the fact that religion did so pissed him off. For Marx’s opiatic views of religion we need to see how it fitted into his basic view of society itself. According to him, as we all know, history was nothing but an endless yin-yang of a class that owned the means of production exploiting another class that slogged it out by providing its labour. According to him religion was nothing but a tool for the privileged, exploiting class to maintain their supremacy. This is because religion either soothed the exploited classes or promised them a better life after death or simply justified their present condition as being God’s will. All this according to Marx completely suited the ruling classes and established an eternal status quo of supremacy, subjugation and exploitation. The exploited classes – soothed and acquiescent – never united to take up arms against their oppressors.
My heartfelt commendation to the British working classes at the top of this chapter was because the proles in London, the British proletariat in general in fact, quite disproved both Marx and Lenin by much preferring real gin to the spiritual one. Around the time of Lennin’s comments the working class in London were merrily getting sloshed on gin and not attending the spiritual gin offered by the Church of England. This has happened so much in the course of England’s history that I remember sitting in a quaint pub in the Lake District in England where there were, hung on the wall, copies of the proclamations banning gin in England down the ages. It seemed their preference was neither to form a unified, revolting (pun intended) class, that revolted against the means-of-production owning capitalist nor was it to devoutly believe the angelic after-life of the church and accept their status in life as a divine deal with earthly zeal. They instead went to pubs and got blown in a revolting fashion. God bless their souls!
And that leads me to Weber. According to me Max Weber hit the nail on the head by stating that no one clear theory explains the sociology of religion, instead, each society has to be looked at as a unique entity, with a history and social structure that has developed due to a special set of circumstances.
I began musing on this with the constant accompaniment of a steaming cup of coffee perched in my barsaati in Delhi. Began merging Durkheim’s basic thought of religion being an integrating force for an other-wise unruly bunch of homo sapiens. And the making of things sacred that would keep social stability and status quo going.
I then thought of Weber’s theory of unique responses for each unique society. I remembered reading Toynbee’s theory that each society’s history is its own unique reaction to the challenges posed by its environment.
I started thinking of two sets of religion – the desert religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and the Indian religion of Hinduism (I’m side-stepping Buddhism and Jainism for now as they were later responses to Hinduism’s excesses).
Let’s look at the way the religions have evolved; the sparse, harsh environment of scarcity in the desert must have lead to extreme infighting and bickering over very scarce resources. Let’s look at the response – all desert religions have one harsh God, who jealously allows his followers to follow no other (scarcity) and has very strict commandments and punishments (harsh laws to prevent the incessant in-fighting).
Now let’s look at Hinduism – the gangetic plains and endless rivers, the fertile soil and easy climate, the profusion of vegetation, the environment of plenty. Many gods, a god for knowledge another for wealth, another embodying fire another wind – plenty, abundance. The laws were harsh in some ways but also very flexible – harsh when it came to inter-marriage and mixing with the dark-skinned natives and therefore preserving their Aryan identity (therefore untouchability) harsh in terms of inter-mixing period – the caste system. Yet easy and overflowing with abundance - a profusion of paths and Gods. The path of bhakti (devotion), karma (work), Jnana (knowledge) and many more. In fact one could be accepted and affirmed as a naastik (atheist) as well.
Perhaps Weber hit the nail on the head by accepting the basic fact, that like many other things, religion too was very varied and its characteristics varied with different societies and their environments.
Both Weber and the English working classes basically proved the point that it’s not easy nor commendable to pigeon-hole the infinite variety of human social life and its manifestations like religion into three line summaries.
Sadly I’m a teetotaler these days, other-wise I could happily ended this post saying – now that the spiritual gin is dealt with, how about the real thing. Cheers!
No comments:
Post a Comment