[lit-ideas] To be, or not to be, religious?
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Anthro-L <ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2007 18:28:34 +0900
The Wall Street Journal reports on survey data indicating that
religious people are more likely to describe themselves as happy than
non-religious people.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110010672
Commenting on this piece on Newsvine, I write,
------
To be, or not to be, religious. That is the question. The alternatives
are the horns of a dilemma that has grown more acute as individualism
and the free-market economy have shaped modern societies. Sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman describes the dilemma in an article titled "On
Communitarianism and Human Freedom" (Theory, Culture & Society, Volume
13, Number 2, May 1996, p. 87). To see the force of Bauman's argument,
we have only to recognize that religious communities are, after all,
communities; some of us embrace what community offers, while others
strive to escape the burdens that community imposes. Here is what
Bauman says.
"The 'community' of the communitarian philosophers is expected to
enchant and attract for the same reason the nations of the nationalist
philosophers once did: for their homely cosiness, the promise of
mutual support and underestanding, harmony of interests, unity of
desires. Once more, the dilemma as old as modernity itself is left out
of account or glossed over: either 'community' is a result of
individual choices, an entity made and freely chosen....accidental,
made up, pasted together as the result of unpredictable coalitions,
unforeseen consequences, and missed opportunities....or 'community'
precedes all choice, in the sense of a priori predisposing the
individuals to stay loyal to its values and behavioural precepts
(through indoctrination, drill, control)--and thus the community
membership comes into direct conflict with individual freedom of
self-constitution, self-assertion and self-function.
"The dilemma signals a trade-off situation; the value acquired and
cherished needs to be sacrificed in order to gain the value missed.
But the homely cosiness of no-choice owes its allure solely to the
hardships of daily freedom. Without that freedom, the plight of
no-choice has all the attraction of prison life."
------
Over to you.
John
----
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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