Freedom, Religion and J.S. Mill

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

—John Adams

In the December 2009 issue of Quadrant, Mervyn Bendle drew our attention to the fact that J.S. Mill’s On Liberty is now 150 years old. He also rightly stressed the importance of Mill’s ideas on the subsequent history of Western politics. The very fact that I am free to write and publish an essay critical of some aspects of Mill’s doctrines is itself due in no small part to the successful implementation of Mill’s ideas. We should not demean the advantages of a liberal democracy but neither should we ignore its weaknesses and its potential fracture points. Regarding the latter, there are several antinomies inherent in Mill’s general ideas and, today, we are witnessing the final playing out of these mutually antagonistic elements. One important area in which this end-game is manifesting itself is in the area of religious freedom, and the problem has been highlighted in recent Quadrant articles by Cardinal George Pell (January-February 2010) and Shimon Cowen and Julian McGauran (October 2009).

The more general problems inherent in Mill’s ideas on liberty of the individual have long been known. One of the best-known and highly regarded of recent scholars on the Victorian era in general and of Mill in particular, Gertrude Himmelfarb, went as far as to claim two opposing personalities in Mill in order to explain the many inconsistencies in his philosophy. Moreover, she pointed out the flaw in Mill’s radical claim for individual liberty—“that the sole end for which mankind are [sic] warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection”. This “liberty of action” of which Mill speaks includes liberty of thought and liberty of speech. He believes that these latter attributes are essential for the survival of truth. But, as Himmelfarb rightly points out, by making truth so dependent upon liberty, the upshot has been to make all opinions, true and false, equally valuable and equally worthy of promulgation.

Other commentators are well aware of this problem. Leszek Kolakowski, for instance, points out the inexorable logic leading to what he calls “the self-poisoning of the open society”. Mill’s liberalism implies an openness to other points of view, even those points of view whose very purpose is to destroy liberalism. This sort of tolerance is a prescription for suicide. As Kolakowski says, “it is difficult to protect democracy by democratic means”.

And so, when Mervyn Bendle contrasts his own reading of On Liberty (as well as the works of Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper) as a student in the “radical” years spanning the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the much more popular works of Marx, Mao and Marcuse championed by the majority, he needs to realise that the enthusiastic followers of totalitarianism in the West were no less the philosophical children of J.S. Mill than were those more conservative souls like himself. Very obviously, the outcomes might differ, but the young students who rebelled against the philosophical, religious and social ideals of their parents or grandparents were simply following ideas which, they mistakenly believed, would liberate them. In so doing, they were following Mill’s guidelines.

This is the paradox of Mill’s radical notion of human freedom. Carried to its extreme, it leads to the exact opposite of freedom. It can lead, and has led, not just to the relativisation of truth, but to the relativisation of morals as well. Virtues have been demoted to values, and values are a matter of individual taste—de gustibus non est disputandum. The results in our own age are all too familiar. Under the banner of “doing your own thing” all manner of social evils have been let loose. True enough, humans have always been involved in such evil, but at least under the aegis of an earlier tradition these things were known to be wrong and commonly invoked a sense of guilt. Christendom may have been earnest in its sinning, but it was even more earnest in its repentance. Today, these evils are commonly blamed on some aspect of “social environment”, and individual responsibility for wrongdoing is thereby diluted.

Mill’s insistence that social and moral sanctions are as much encroachments on liberty as are legal and physical sanctions is a direct consequence of his hugely optimistic view of human nature. It is worth repeating a passage from On Liberty which demonstrates this unwarranted optimism:

To say that one person’s desires and feelings are stronger and more various than those of another, is merely to say that he has more of the raw material of human nature, and is therefore capable, perhaps of more evil, but certainly of more good. Strong impulses are but another name for energy. Energy may be turned to bad uses; but more good may always be made of an energetic nature, than of an indolent and impassive one. Those who have most natural feeling are always those whose cultivated feelings may be made the strongest. The same strong susceptibilities which make the personal impulses vivid and powerful, are also the source from whence are generated the most passionate love of virtue, and the sternest self-control. The danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.

As Himmelfarb points out, the argument here “rests on the transmutation of quantity into quality”. In other words, the larger the stock of “strong impulses”, the greater is the potentiality for good. Mill locates the source of virtue in the passions, desires and “natural feeling” of the individual; the more traditional and conservative view, reaching back to Socrates and perhaps earlier, saw these as impediments. This earlier view saw virtue in self-restraint, conscience and the proper exercise of reason. It is not just that Mill “took human solidarity for granted” (Mervyn Bendle quoting Isaiah Berlin). He extolled “natural feelings” and “personal impulses” as the great source of virtue in a total reversal of some 2000 years of philosophy and theology which had preceded him. Like those breakfast cereals on the television ads, Mill’s humanity was “full of natural goodness”. As stated above, one of the obvious consequences of such a view is to shift the blame for wrongdoing or human weakness from the individual to society as a whole.

It is worth reflecting upon the fact that the sort of freedom espoused by Mill is a very recent phenomenon and that, for almost all of recorded history, humans lived by quite different notions of what it means to be free. Thus, it is important to note how the notion of freedom in the Christian tradition of the West differs from Mill’s conception. For Christians, freedom is necessary because only by the voluntary restriction of such freedom, or resignation to any lack of such freedom as a form of sacrifice, can the individual attain salvation. Freedom, in the sense of simply following every whim of the senses, is actually antithetical to a higher freedom which St Paul calls “the glorious liberty of the children of God”. Nor is this idea of the voluntary restriction of human freedom limited to Christianity. Elements of it are to be found in almost all religions. By way of example, the religion of the Plains Indians included fasting and other self-imposed restrictions which were necessary for a full communication with the spiritual world.

Exactly where did Mill’s virtues—those human qualities necessary for the operation of a civil society—come from? The short answer is that they were derived from the very Christian tradition which Mill wished to demolish, but drained of any transcendental reference. So does liberalism believe that religion is necessary for the establishment and maintenance of a moral and ethical order? Today, it is difficult to find an answer to this question because most modern liberals are noticeably coy about the whole idea. Without question though, the liberalism of J.S. Mill is antithetical to the idea of a transcendental religion as a beneficial organising principle in society. As Himmelfarb says of Mill’s views on this matter:

As a matter of private belief and practice, religion and the morality derived from religion are fully protected by the principle of liberty. But as soon as they impinge upon the individual from the outside, in the form of legal sanctions or social pressures, they jeopardize liberty and contribute to the evil of “social tyranny”.

Both Mill himself, and all of his enthusiastic supporters up to the present, seem not to understand the unwarranted assumption involved in the above statements. That assumption has to do with a basic ordering of priorities. Up until the time of the Enlightenment, it was everywhere accepted that religion provided the rationale for all human behaviour, so that politics and economics, for instance, gained their principles from religious ideas. To suppose that one could step outside of a religious tradition so as to judge it from some higher vantage point (in this case, a secular society) was simply ludicrous. Historically, natural law (at least the paradigmatic theory of it) has always had its setting within a tradition, even though its main tenets might be derivable from human reason and considered as universal in application. When, in the fifth century after Christ, Vincent of Lerins wrote: Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est, he was speaking for not just his own times, but for the next thousand years of Western history.

Today, when supporters of Mill’s liberalism point out the inequalities and injustices of the past (especially medieval Christianity, which they despise), they suppose that some peasant in twelfth-century Europe felt the same lack of freedom that they would feel if transported back to that era. But this is nonsense. I daresay that if the twelfth-century peasant was transported to our own era, he or she would be appalled by our self-imposed servitude to the machine and our infatuation with the fantasies of the flickering screen. There is no great Pisgah of the mind which allows us to look down from some superior and wholly detached vantage point. This point has been admirably argued by the present-day philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.

Critics will, of course, argue that a tradition-bound rationality and moral order is therefore subjective since it varies from tradition to tradition. This misses the point that any such assessment can only come from someone who is also in a rival pseudo-tradition—the fragmented tradition of secular modernity—and thereby claims some illusory higher vantage point. Such an understanding is hardly new. About a thousand years ago, the great Islamic scholar Al Ghazali put the idea in another way:

There is no hope in returning to a traditional belief system after it has once been abandoned, since the essential condition in the holder of a traditional belief system is that he should not know he is a traditionalist.

This is precisely why, for MacIntyre, we are currently faced with a plethora of moral dilemmas in the West. Once our moral order becomes detached from our tradition, it loses its ultimate reference point and bogs down in the mire of subjectivity (see his book After Virtue). The supposed higher vantage point turns out to be a form of emotivism and nothing more.

But for J.S. Mill, those moral and ethical principles that are necessary for the maintenance of a civil society are either taken for granted or posited in an entity which he calls “the religion of humanity”. In his second Essay on Religion, Mill is at pains to insist that traditional religion is merely a sort of conduit or central clearing house for a pre-existing set of moral principles developed as part of the process of attaining a civil society (which is putting the horse before the cart perhaps). These principles are not transcendent—they develop “in nature” as it were. Actually Mill supposes that they come from “authority, education, and public opinion” but this, of course, gets us nowhere because we need to know exactly where “authority, education and public opinion” obtain their ideas. If they are not obtained from religion, then they must ultimately be posited in nature. This supposition by Mill seems almost entirely at odds with his contention, in the first Essay, that:

the doctrine that man ought to follow nature is unmeaning; since man has no power to do anything else than follow nature; all his actions are done through, and in obedience to some one or many of nature’s physical or mental laws.

In the other sense of the term, the doctrine that man ought to follow nature, or in other words, ought to make the spontaneous course of things the model of his voluntary actions, is equally irrational and immoral. Irrational, because all human action whatever, consists in altering, and all useful action in improving, the spontaneous course of nature: Immoral, because the course of natural phenomena being replete with everything which when committed by human beings is most worthy of abhorrence, any one who endeavoured in his actions to imitate the natural course of things would be universally seen and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men.

Half a century before Mill, Jefferson had warned of the danger of removing the nexus between liberty and religion: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?” The decisive judgment on this question was issued by Nietzsche—no friend of Christians. He saw clearly that the attempt by Mill and his followers to secularise morality was bound to fail because the very morality they championed was wholly conditional upon that religion which Mill had characterised as a “tyranny”. Mill he called a “flathead” and George Eliot a “little moralistic female”. Mill was a “flathead” because his noble vision of “the religion of humanity” supposed that the virtues of self-control and self-discipline were some sort of innate characteristic of the truly liberated individual. Nietzsche, of course, had no such pretensions. The only solution for him was to move beyond good and evil. Once the “slave morality” of Christianity was truly abandoned (not feigned as with Mill) then the Übermensch would arise, obeying no master but the will to power. Nietzsche, then, is a central figure in any critique of modernity, and MacIntyre has referred to him as “the canary in the coal mine”.

It is important at this stage to say a little more about Mill’s “religion of humanity”. Mill is often regarded as an atheist but this is not strictly true. He was enormously influenced by Auguste Comte’s “positivist religion” and corresponded with Comte regularly. That Mill later distanced himself from the more insane utterances of Comte does not detract from the fact that he agreed with Comte on the need for some “religion” to take the place of Christianity. For Mill, the solution was “the religion of humanity”, based very much on Comte’s ideas.

The importance of this new, intramundane religion to Mill’s philosophy has been demonstrated in a recent book by Linda Raeder (John Stuart Mill and the Religion of Humanity). Raeder draws her evidence not just from Mill’s better-known works, but also from his correspondence with Comte and many others. What emerges is a concept of Humanity (conceived as something akin to Comte’s le Grand Etre) as a full substitute for the traditional schema of a transcendental God. It is “The Great Being of Humanity” whose service “is to be the law of our life”. The following extract (from The Utility of Religion) gives some indication of Mill’s religious fervour:

To call these sentiments by the name morality, exclusively of any other title, is claiming too little for them. They are a real religion; of which, as of other religions, outward good works … are only a part, and are indeed rather the fruits of the religion than the religion itself. The essence of religion is the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an ideal object, recognized as of the highest excellence, and as rightfully paramount over all selfish objects of desire. This condition is fulfilled by the Religion of Humanity in as eminent a degree, and in as high a sense, as by the supernatural religions even in their best manifestations, and far more so than in any of their others …

It is not only entitled to be called a religion: it is a better religion than any of those which are ordinarily called by that title.

For, in the first place, it is disinterested. It carries the thoughts and feelings out of self, and fixes them on an unselfish object, loved and pursued as an end for its own sake. The religions which deal in promises and threats regarding a future life, do exactly the contrary … Even the Christ of the Gospels holds out the direct promise of reward from heaven as a primary inducement to the noble and beautiful beneficence towards our fellow-creatures which he so impressively inculcates. This is a radical inferiority of the best supernatural religions, compared with the Religion of Humanity; since the greatest thing which moral influences can do for the amelioration of human nature, is to cultivate the unselfish feelings in the only mode in which any active principle in human nature can be effectually cultivated, namely by habitual exercise: but the habit of expecting to be rewarded in another life for our conduct in this, makes even virtue itself no longer an exercise of the unselfish feelings.

Here, and in other parts of his published corpus, Mill elevates an abstract, statistical entity to the status of a deity (his “ideal object”). One is reminded of William Blake’s earlier and very apt description of such a god as Nobodaddy!

After a detailed analysis of Mill’s views on religion, Raeder concludes her work with this summary of Mill’s work:

Mill’s is a confused and confusing legacy. He spoke the language of the liberal tradition while radically eviscerating its spiritual ground—a transcendent source of existence and value that alone sustains the value of the individual—as well as its moral and legal foundation … In addition, individual liberty, limited government, and the rule of law cannot be sustained without a resurrection of the “in-itself” morality that Mill despised, the belief that an action is right or wrong in itself—because it violates the order of being and not because of its social consequences.

In view of its very recent origins, political liberty of the sort endorsed by Mill is properly described as an experiment. Indeed, one commonly finds the term “experiment in democracy”. “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty,” George Washington said, “is finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American People.” That it is a very noble experiment does not detract from the fact that it represents a break from more than two millennia of Western history dating back to ancient Greece. We have no warrant to assume, as Mill has done, that such a system of human secular political organisation represents some stable end state. It is experimental precisely because it jettisons the religious underpinnings that supported previous modes of human political association whose flaws and shortcomings were at least susceptible to some long-term analysis. We cannot assume that Mill’s liberalism, as a relatively new “work in progress”, is internally stable. Indeed, all the evidence suggests otherwise. The preservation of both Mill’s version of individual liberty and religious freedom represents a very unstable balance. They may be mutually interdependent, but in another sense, they are antagonistic. All experiments demand careful monitoring but potentially unstable ones require added safeguards. “Most schemes of political improvement,” Dr Johnson noted, “are very laughable things.”

Some experiments, though, are no laughing matter. Imagine being present at a meeting of the Philosophes and their cronies at Baron d’Holbach’s Parisian salon in the 1770s or 1780s. These, after all, had laid much of the groundwork for Mill. There you would very likely meet a bevy of most reasonable and intelligent men—Diderot, Condillac, Condorcet, perhaps Rousseau, and learned British visitors like Adam Smith, David Hume, John Wilkes and Edward Gibbon. Life was good—plenty of food and wine and plenty of idle time to plan a glorious future. Most of these worthies were confident that the future under the secular state was to be a most wondrous thing. People would be loosed from the shackles of religion and would at last be free to realise their full potential. And the state would protect them. “Glory to man in the highest, for he is the master of things,” sang Algernon Charles Swinburne some time later.

Within a decade or so, the view from that Parisian salon would have changed more than a little. The people did indeed realise one of their human potentials, and the mob would now be battering down the salon door. Madame la Guillotine—“the national razor”—would be busy dealing with those citizens deemed less equal than others. The Terror had come, turning the Enlightenment dream into a nightmare. All this in the space of a decade or two! The war in the Vendée saw hundreds of thousands of Catholics killed by the new, anti-clerical French state—perhaps the first modern genocide. Within my own lifetime, in the heart of civilised and sophisticated Europe even worse nightmares became realities and, in part at least, they were made possible by the previous operation of the Kulturkampf from the time of Bismarck. Not all the victims were Jews—all religions suffered. There were 2600 Catholic priests sent to Dachau from twenty-four countries; most died there. Here, of course, it was not liberalism which perpetrated the crimes, but it was a system of political organisation which had also thrown off the perceived yoke of religion.

It is, of course, easy to point to similar atrocities amongst the various religions themselves—the Wars of Religion in Europe, for instance. This is to miss the point. Part of the motive for the establishment of the secular state and the privatisation (or persecution) of religious belief was to bring to an end just such human conflicts. Secularisation, of itself, has not achieved this. Indeed the record from last century demonstrates quite the opposite.

One of the other unfortunate legacies of Mill’s vision (as part of a more general Enlightenment vision) has been what Leszek Kolakowski called “the erosion of historical consciousness”. Part of this certainly has to do with abandoning that older conservative vision of the past exemplified in Edmund Burke’s term “the wisdom of our ancestors”. We no longer see ourselves as owing anything much to those ancestors other than their convenient help in the transferral of genes. Kolakowski, though, has other things in mind too:

I have in mind the progressive decline of the awareness that our spiritual life includes the sedimentation of the historical past as its real and active component and that the past is to be perceived as a never-fading frame of reference in our acts and thinking … We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are … Once we let ourselves be convinced of the idea that the past is pointless because it fails to provide us with reliable prescriptions for solving any specific current problems, we fall into a paradoxical trap. On the one hand, by losing the clear awareness of the continuity of culture and thus losing the historical frame of reference for our issues, we lose the ground on which those issues can be properly stated at all; on the other hand, we easily imagine that the past … is not a real obstacle to our dreams of perfection … and that all human worries are soluble by political means.

                                    (The Idolatry of Politics)

There are echoes here of Alasdair MacIntyre’s insistence that all meaning is tradition-bound.

We are now at a very dangerous juncture in the West (or what sad elements of it remain). The great liberal experiment, championed by Mill, has thus far survived on what is often described as moral capital accumulated (albeit with many a detour or setback) over a vast period of human history stretching from pre-Socratic Greece to the Enlightenment. Its triumph over the totalitarian regimes of last century has tended to lull us into a false sense of security but it is now time to take stock of our situation. I find it difficult to disagree with MacIntyre’s thesis that this capital is not so much spent as wholly fragmented and incoherent and the poverty of our moral situation is everywhere apparent.

What characterised this earlier period of human history was a reliance on metaphysical principles standing above the merely human order. This, in fact, was the principal characteristic of that other great political tradition, conservatism. But such has been the total triumph of liberalism that what we now call “conservatism” is merely a less radical form of liberalism. In short, conservatism has been engulfed by a sort of political cannibalism such that most of today’s conservatives are merely “old-fashioned” liberals. Part of this is undoubtedly linked to the fact that both conservatism and liberalism fought a common enemy for most of the twentieth century—totalitarianism. It is no mere accident that the Liberal Party in Australia should be seen as “the conservative party”.

Today, the dangers of Mill’s liberal vision to religious freedom are all too obvious and we have seen recent examples of attacks on such freedom under the spurious demand for “rights”. It is worth reflecting that nowadays, in theory at least, it is quite legal and proper in some places for an art teacher to display a copy of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ to an art class in a public school, but illegal to hang a crucifix on the wall. One is considered as “art”, the other as an attempt to introduce religion. That Christians regard Serrano’s work as blasphemous means nothing at all because they have no “rights” in this regard since religion is a “private” matter. Contrariwise, that such a work of “art” can be displayed is an expression of artistic freedom and is therefore protected. This is one small example of how Mill’s great liberal vision has worked itself out 150 years later.

MacIntyre has set the alternatives facing us in a dramatic way by suggesting that we have only two choices—“Nietzsche or Aristotle”. By this he means that we either abandon the whole attempt (as with Nietzsche) of fashioning a workable moral system or we return to some teleological approach in which those virtues required for proper human flourishing are given some objective context. The attempts to perform this feat outside of some traditional metaphysical setting have so far met with little success.

What is the solution? For Christians, at any rate, MacIntyre has a suggestion. We need to consider the idea of a religious community as a sort of civic entity. By this I take him to mean something like the notion of community as it applies to Aborigines in Australia today. Just as they have separate communities designed to protect their tradition and culture, perhaps Christians need to consider the same but without any geographical isolation from their fellow citizens. After all, can’t they regard their particular religious tradition as a “culture” and therefore demand their rights to fully express their culture in this most liberated of multicultural societies? This, at any rate, is what MacIntyre seems to suggest. He further supposes that this is a sort of a survival mechanism against the spiritual barbarism of our age while we wait for another, albeit very different, St Benedict. It seems a long shot but then again, it was a long shot in the sixth century when Benedict’s influence was to provide the first gleam of light in the dark night of history that followed the fall of the Roman empire.

B.J. Coman’s most recent article in Quadrant was “Why Philosophy Buries Its Undertakers” in the October issue. His history of the rabbit in Australia, Tooth and Nail, was recently published in an updated edition by Text.