THE UTILITY OF THE IRRATIONAL
Since science is useful, rather than truthful, religion can be viewed in the same terms. Religion has provided succour to those who were oppressed, stability to entire societies over millennia, and strength for the persecuted. This is not to deny that religion has not had its dark side — but then so has the scientific endeavour. It was the use of physics during the Second World War that turned a young man, among other young men, off the subject, and towards a new direction. His name was Francis Crick.1
Vittorio Lanternari's The Religions of the Oppressed 2 stands as a lasting monument to the role of religious inspiration in the face of western colonialism. "The anti-Western attitude which emerges from this study is not the personal attitude of the author but that of the native peoples expressed through their own ideas and, often, in their own words. Their feeling toward the missions is only one facet of their general stand in regard to the white man."3
Thus, the doctrine of the benevolent civilisation described by the learned British historian Anthony Pagden receives a summary rebuttal from an Italian sociologist — or perhaps the entire volume adds up to one of those all-too-frequent deviations that western civilisation is prone to. "The movements analyzed here are concerned with a bitter and painful present as well as with a radiant future wherein all evil will be erased."4
This, the author recounts the African struggle, painting a vivid portrait of Simon Kimbangu (1889? — 1951), a nonpolitical prophet of the Bakongo people of the Lower Congo. Then Lanternari describes the plight of the Native Americans: "In the struggle of the American Indians against the white invaders, religion played a far more significant role than is commonly believed."5 Chief Sitting Bull, by means of the "Ghost Dance", gave his people the inner strength to struggle against the conquerors. However, when resistance failed, the Peyote cult emerged.
After the Civil War, the inexorable westward drive of the white people proved a harrowing experience. The author quotes John Collier: "beginning about 1870, a leading aim of the United States was to destroy the Plains Indians societies through destroying their religions; and it may be that the world has never witnessed a religious persecution so implacable and so variously implemented."6 (We must keep in mind that America then was a liberal democracy that had just emancipated all its slaves.)
In Indonesia, the convulsion of war and the return of the Dutch, led to a revival of the Mahdi (messiah) mythology. Religious prophets emerged who combined native tradition with messianic Islamic ideas. In Sumatra and Java, the population waited anxiously but did not know what they waited for. Groups of believers, spurred by their leaders, were seen racing through villages and cities. Apparently, Islamic prophecy had foretold that the Mahdi would appear after mass movement and popular agitation. The growing hatred for the Dutch finally assumed political form and helped to bring about the revolution of 1945-49.7
In conclusion, Lanternari observes: "Religious autonomy resolves the conflict between an outside power striving to destroy native culture and the culture's own power to resist and survive, between willful opposition to an alien culture and supine acquiescence in the demands of an alien ruling minority."8
Again, pace Bertrand Russell, religion appears to have made another great contribution to civilisation. Of course, Russell did acknowledge the contribution of the Egyptian priests by way of calendar-making: what he failed to see was that the Egyptian civilisation and Egyptian religion were indistinguishable.
Henri Frankfort has observed that the boast of Louis XIV — l'etat c'est moi — could have been made by the Pharaoh without any exaggeration. "There can be no doubt about this. The practical organization of the Egyptian commonwealth implies it; the texts and monuments proclaim it; and it is confirmed by the absence of any trace of revolution in three thousand years of recorded history. Pharaoh was no mere despot holding an unwilling people in slavery. He ruled in the strictest sense by divine right...."9 This fact is even more significant when we consider that the Egyptian "state" lacked an army until the Hyksos invasion of 1630 BC: only one of the two instances known in human history where a bureaucracy co-existed without an army to extract the produce to feed and equip the latter (the other was the neighbouring case of early Mesopotamia).10 If deep religious conviction can provide three thousand years of happy stability, then such religious conviction can not but be held in reverential awe.
Notes:
1 John Gribbin, Science: A History 1543 – 2001, Penguin, 2003, p. 563
2 Vittorio Lanternari, The Religions of the Oppressed, trans. Lisa Sergio, The New American Library, 1965
3 ibid., p. xxi
4 ibid., p. x
5 ibid., p. 63
6 ibid., p. 91
7 ibid., p. 212
8 ibid., p. 253
9 Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion, Harper & Brothers, 1961, p.31
10 S.E. Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 36
