Cultural idiosyncrasies (I)

In the next two weeks, our Maison will host a debate on Cécile Laborde’s book on French republicanism and the question of religious pluralism, and a conference on Darwin and Lamarck. We are going to encounter some of the most publicised controversies in our two countries.

Darwin, God and Dawkins are battling for attention in the forefront of the media and in the windows of bookshops in the UK, the Darwin year providing a topical occasion for such controversies. In France, the debate on the consequences of Darwin’s discoveries do not so much focus on the question of the existence of God, as on the religious approaches to the ethics of genetic manipulations. Should we conclude that France is further advanced in secularisation, or that current British scientists are still engrossed in the metaphysical polemics of the 19th century?

To some of the more radical and ideological upholders of the separation of “Church and State” in France, it is true that the constitutional ideal of the State’s religious neutrality has often served as a convenient blanket for their own outright atheist positions. In the 20th century, with the influence of communism in some French intellectual circles, it can have been confused with the state-atheism that was the state-religion of communist dictatorships. That this should be in open contradiction to the spirit of the constitutional principle of “laïcité” is not so often openly challenged in French public debate, or rather: the compatibility of “laïcité” (and therefore of citizenship) with personal religious feeling has been reasserted only in the past couple of decades as a natural and inherent component of French republican values. The quasi-monopoly of atheists and religious fanatics in the debate on “laïcité” is being challenged by religious organisations and individual scholars, and this is definitely a major step in the pacification of relations between French republicanism and the religious elements of French society.

Interestingly, though, this ongoing social and political discussion fails to interact with the philosophical debate on the existence of God. Has the issue of that metaphysical conundrum in Britain anything to do with the existence of an established Church, though a loosely established one? The existence of theology faculties and departments inside the universities, the practice of public worship in schools, the presence of religious education in school curricula apparently expose scientists and most citizens with the questions raised by the religious to society, mankind and science, in whatever order you quote them. But is the power of religion on British minds so constraining that some authors need to tip science against God in such a spectacular way, but also in a style that is so reminiscent of Darwin and Wilberforce?

In France, the anti-theist show is led by a philosopher, Michel Onfray, whose ubiquitous media and publishing presence popularises his rewriting of the history of the world, of philosophy and of religions. Onfray is constantly harping on the cultural delusion created by the dominance of religion over education (its absence from the French primary and secondary educational system betrays the reverse obsession in the system) and the content of literary, historical and philosophical teaching. When one reads Onfray’s jeremiads, one gets the impression that France is, in the words of one of Stephen’s relatives in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “a priest-ridden country”. Sensualism, moral autonomy, are presented as the victims of the “God delusion” à la française. Rethinking the history of Western culture from the sole point of view of sensual atheism and individual-centred ethics is Onfray’s grand-design.

(To be continued)