Once a month, The duty challenges philosophy enthusiasts to decipher a current issue based on the theses of a notable thinker.
The denunciation of wokism which has occupied the Quebec public debate for almost three years often uses religious analogy. Nathalie Elgrably wrote in December 2022 in the columns of Montreal Journal : “Wokism is a social religion whose followers flirt, at the very least, with madness. The religious dimension is also magnificently demonstrated by the philosopher Jean-François Braunstein in Woke religion. » The use of religious analogy to deal with movements or ideas which do not a priori relate to religion is not new. From the end of the 1930s, the American philosopher of German origin Eric Voegelin published Political religions, a book in which he analyzed the rise of totalitarianism and attempted to isolate its religious core. It is also the same Voegelin who, between 1953 and 1955, maintained a lively exchange with another philosopher of German origin, just like him exiled in the United States: Hannah Arendt. Their opposition focused precisely on the relationship between religion and politics in history.
The age of “secular religions”
However, it was the French philosopher and sociologist Raymond Aron (1905-1983) who offered, in several places in his work, decisive insight into what he called “secular religions”. Given the almost systematic and superficial mobilization of the religious analogy which too often serves to close the discussion and not to advance it, it is not useless to return to the use made of it by Raymond Aron and thus pose some milestones for a reasoned and regulated use of the comparison.
It was in 1944, in two articles published in Free France and subsequently brought together under the title “The Future of Secular Religions”, Aron used this expression for the first time. He then defined “secular religions” as “the doctrines which take the place of vanished faith in the souls of our contemporaries and locate here below, in the distant future, in the form of a social order to be created , the salvation of humanity.
It is not at first glance obvious what distinguishes them from the ideologies that Aron presents in The opium of intellectuals as “systems of interpretation of the social world which imply an order of values and suggest reforms to be accomplished, an upheaval to be feared or hoped for”. The difference between the two is not so much a question of nature as a question of degree in the commitment, the “fanaticism”, of individuals, but also in the relationship to history that the “dogmas” formulated by the secular religions involve.
Another difficulty concerns the place given to divinity, to the transcendent, traditionally associated with religion. Aron finds a way out of this aporia by shifting what is at the heart of religion: not an object (a divinity for example) towards which the individual turns, but individual experience itself. Involving in “The Future of Secular Religions” a fictitious sociologist or psychologist, he emphasizes that “one is not religious only when one adores a divinity but when one puts all the resources of one’s mind, all the submissions of his will, all the ardor of fanaticism in the service of a cause or a being become the goal and the end of feelings and actions. Further on in the text, he specifies the contours of his object and does not limit his definition to fanatical commitment to a cause: in fact, “certain doctrines of our time deserve the qualifier of secular religions in a more precise sense. These doctrines fix the final, almost sacred goal, in relation to which good and evil are defined.
Secular religions are therefore approached from the dual aspect of individual commitment and dogmatic content defended by an institution, a party, which claims the power to set the ultimate goals of a collective.
“Secular religions” as philosophies of history
If in “The Future of Secular Religions” Raymond Aron discusses the different variations of totalitarianism, his attention focuses on “Marxist prophecy” in The opium of intellectuals (1955), whose success in France and abroad matched the violence of the reactions it aroused. The book had something to ignite passions: “explaining the attitude of intellectuals, merciless to the failings of democracies, lenient to the greatest crimes, provided they are committed in the name of good doctrines”. If Aron recognizes that Europe, in the first half of the 20the century, was the scene of several political doctrines which manifested a religious character, “yet we do not find there the frameworks or the essence of religious thought. In this respect, communism is unique.”
To understand what, according to Aron, would make communism unique, we must first keep in mind that the expression “secular religion” is misleading and that the philosopher is ultimately dealing much more with a secular Christianity. Indeed, the analogy does not refer so much to the general category of “religion”, whose intrinsic qualities would be the subject of a transfer to politics, as to Christianity in its different aspects: its organization, its fundamental dogmas , its modes of investment by individuals and, this is the crucial point, a certain philosophy of history having as its starting point the conception of an oriented time. This is why in the 1944 definition cited above, Aron takes care in an incision to evoke the “distant future”.
The theme of the relationship to time surfaces several times in The opium of intellectuals : from the second chapter Aron asserts that “the myth of the left implicitly contains the idea of Progress and suggests the vision of a continuous movement. The myth of the Revolution has a complementary and opposite meaning: it nourishes the expectation of a break with the ordinary course of human things. And it is indeed the entire demonstration, culminating in the last chapter (“Intellectuals in search of a religion”), which crystallizes in the idea that “Marxist prophetism” is “conforming to the typical pattern of Judeo-Christian prophecy. All prophecy carries the condemnation of what is, draws an image of what must be and will be, chooses an individual or a group to cross the space which separates the unworthy present from the radiant future. There is therefore an elective affinity between Marxism and Christian thought, an affinity made possible by the fact that Marxism “combines the ideological themes most characteristic of Western thought,” writes Aron in his Introduction to political philosophystarting with the very idea of the liberation of man throughout history.
From Marxism to millenarianism
Despite this affinity, Aron does not make Marxism a secular religion by nature, but he sees it as the mark of a process inscribed in time. In the courses given in 1952 to students of the National School of Administration (ENA), grouped under the title Introduction to political philosophy, he evokes the hypothesis of a “transformation of Marxism into millenarianism”. If this designates in a primary sense a doctrine according to which the Messiah must return to the Earth to reign there a thousand years (a Millennium) before the day of the Last Judgment, it is by extension of meaning “the belief in a kingdom which “is not necessarily a thousand years, but which would mark a break with the course of human things.”
To understand the historical trajectory of Marxism, Aron evokes two factors: first of all the fact that secular religions took advantage of an “epoch when the spiritual vitality and authority of the Churches were declining”, so that “the ardor which , in other times, could have expressed themselves in religious beliefs, took political action as their object. With this comment, Aron clearly places his remarks within the broader framework of a discussion on the process of secularization defined as the progressive marginalization of religion, mainly Christianity, within Western societies. The second factor concerns the transition between two distinct orders: that of knowledge based on reason and that of faith. According to Aron, it was at the very moment that the “party-Church hardened doctrine into dogma, developed a scholasticism”, that it managed to rally “huge cohorts”.
The religious analogy, under the pen of Raymond Aron, is far from being just a rhetorical trick based on a simple transfer of vocabulary between two distinct universes and aimed at closing all discussion. On the contrary, it is a tool for understanding the totalitarian phenomenon. Through his various writings, Raymond Aron reveals the heuristic virtues of religious analogy, particularly when it comes to understanding how “Marxist prophetism”, like Christian eschatology, offers a vision of goal-oriented story. He handles the analogy in a spirit of prudence, guided by the refusal to give in to the easy way, that of peremptory and definitive affirmations.
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