These four principal subjects are so clearly set out that one is inclined to overlook the one who sets them out so clearly. Lloyd Geering is a writer of great lucidity who has so immersed himself in the thought of these four subjects that he is able to express them with a freshness that excites and invites the reader once again into the originality of their thought. A booklet well worth buying and studying! - Stephen Warnes FAITH IN A BLUE BERET Don Cupitt The world has changed so suddenly during the past five years. Throughout the Cold War period it was dominated by two ideologies, capitalism and communism. Both of them were rooted in the Enlightenment and were modernizing, optimistic and internationalist. They both claimed to possess a knowledge of human nature and of the secret of what brings about progressive historical development.
This larger, more rational world-view transcended all merely local and traditional perspectives. So, between them, capitalism and communism carved up the world, keeping nationalism, tribalism and communalism in check so successfully that we will no doubt remember the period between the late forties and the late eighties as a time of exceptional prosperity.
Politicians and military men were wont to argue that the peace was being maintained by the nuclear stalemate between the Great Powers. But I am suggesting that more important was the hegemony throughout the world of a set of beliefs derived from the European Enlightenment that came to be built into educational syllabuses, and the language of politics and trade. Everywhere people felt that something bigger and more universal than their traditional culture and world-view had arrived and was going to prevail. It was science-based education, medicine and industrial development. It was modernization, it was progress: it caught one up in its advance; it was almost tangible.
But suddenly, it failed. Marxism collapsed and capitalism is foundering. Faith in "development" crumbles when whole areas of the world are caught up in a downward spiral of worsening poverty, when major strongholds of Enlightenment optimism from east Germany to Russia are discovered to be horribly poisoned by industry, and when all the world knows that there is a plague abroad that defeats Western medicine.
In his Utilitarianism (1861) John Stuart Mill declared that "All the grand sources...of human suffering are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely, conquerable by human care and effort". All that was required was applied science and a comprehensive rationalization of life. So the United States and the Soviet Union, in their different ways, made immense efforts to carry out this programme.
Each country claimed to shine as a beacon of hope for mankind; but in each country urban decay, desperate poverty, violent crime and environmental degradation are not disappearing but spreading.
I have been suggesting that over much of the world we have seen a sudden loss of faith. For around forty years after World War Two the world was Hegelian. People felt they were caught up in the world-historical advance of Western Reason - Western science, technology, management, economics, education and so on. Capitalism and communism offered somewhat different versions of much the same ideology. It was so potent that it promised to supersede all traditional ethnic identities, cultures and faiths. The way in which the new order first overwhelms and then encapsulates the old can be seen very vividly in places like Hong Kong and Singapore.
Its sudden death - if that is what has happened - is an event like the death of God. (Remember that for Hegel it pretty much was God). Inevitably, people respond by falling back upon and reaffirming their traditional ethnic identity, faith and world-view. It seems to them that they have no alternative. For nearly a century we have seen religious communities - Jewish, Protestant, Muslim - feeling threatened by modernism and Westernization, and struggling to reassert and defend themselves. But now we are seeing everywhere the upsurge of an ethnic or cultural version of fundamentalism. Everywhere people seem to feel embattled. In these times there is one overriding imperative: communities must divide along religious and ethnic lines, and you must above all else side with your own people and take up arms against the hated Other.
Just at the moment, religion over much of the world - and especially around the fringes of the former Soviet Union and Islam - is definable as that which compels people to take sides. Religion is becoming conspicuously militarized, a phenomenon which is leading many of us to look with great interest and sympathy at the men in blue berets. Who are they, what do they stand for, and what can they believe?
There are over thirty major conflicts at present and nearly all of them are ethnic-religious. The United `In the time of the death of God, priests are needed more than ever' Nations is involved in over fifteen of them as an agency offering mediation, humanitarian relief and, perhaps, peacekeeping forces.
The people who serve the United Nations obviously cannot take sides, and must as it were forget their own nationality and any private religious beliefs they may or may not have. They have become the anonymous servants of an organization that confers no medals or honours and does not memorialize its own dead, and, in a world in which religion has become that which requires you to take sides with your own people against the Other, they are therefore necessarily outside religion.
But what makes their situation even more interesting to us is that they are the priests of a dead god. They are leftovers. They represent a lost cause, a dream that has died, the dream of a universally acknowledged rational world-order and code of human rights. They seem uncomfortably naked and unsupported. No doubt that is why the Serb militias in Bosnia feel able to treat them with such disdain. In our world of tribalism and religious terrorism the Serbs feel at home. People like them will soon be calling the shots everywhere.
So what is touching about the men in blue berets is that the very conditions that make their presence anomalous also make their presence necessary.
Because the old internationalist faith, depending on the idea of an objective cosmic order of reason, law and values, has broken down, the men in blue berets have lost much of their old ideological backing and respect. And because all this has happened, ignorant armies clash by night and the men in blue berets are desperately needed to struggle (maybe hopelessly) for peace.
In the time of the death of God, priests are needed more than ever.
Don Cupitt is making good progress in his recovery from a major operation. He wrote this article for the magazine as UN relief convoys were still held up outside Srebrenica in March. In the next issue he writes on Art and Sacrilege. `The world is my country and my religion is to do good' Thomas Paine POST Ill SCRIPTS See you in July...