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Reinventing the “Civil Religion”: Comte, Mill, Tagore

I. Toward a Liberal Civil Religion: Beyond Rousseau and Herder

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, as self-governing republics began to emerge across Europe, the search for new forms of fraternity became almost an obsession. What emotions might hold these new regimes together, no longer solidified by monarchical authority and fearful obedience? Nineteenth-century political thought soon became obsessed with the question of civic emotion. It was widely agreed that people are possessed by egoism; the task of building decent and stable democracies depends on combating their narcissism, extending sympathy. It was widely agreed, too, that this new public emotion-culture must both sustain democracy and assist the aspirations of democratic nations to global justice and peace. Of all such proposals, by far the most influential were those of Auguste Comte (1798-1857). A renowned philosopher and social scientist, Comte had a worldwide influence that is hard to credit today, so generally neglected are his ideas. Intellectuals from many nations, convinced that human progress required some type of humanistic “civil religion” to counteract the power of egoism and greed, rallied to his call for a new “spiritual power,” a “religion of humanity” that could guide nations toward progress through emotions of sympathy and love. In Bengal, as literary historian Jasodhara Bagchi puts it, his ideas had been “assimilated into the class subjectivity and common sense of the elite.”[1]

Comte offers illumination concerning the ways in which a public culture can extend sympathy. His enterprise, however, is full of pitfalls, prejudices, and even absurdities, so it must be approached in a critical spirit. Fortunately, two of Comte’s most distinguished enthusiasts, Mill and Tagore, do so approach it, and my aim is to ask what their proposals offer us as we face their problems in our own time.

II. Comte’s Religion of Humanity[2]

Comte ‘s positivism argues that the time for religion has passed. No longer need we explain our dealings with one another in the religious language of godliness and sin: instead, we learn to understand the laws of human social interaction through empirical research. To this he joins a normative argument: we are asked to recognize the equal worth of all human beings, and to acknowledge that a broader sympathy is more advanced, more mature, than the narrow sympathy with family and kin by which most people are animated. One way Comte makes this point is through a developmental analysis: we recognize that we begin as children with very narrow sympathies, and we see that there is something more mature about the extension of sympathy to a larger group of kin, and something still more mature, more quintessentially human, in the extension of sympathy to friends, spouse, and others. We should grant, then, that the most mature of all would be a sympathy extended to the entire species, past and future. For this extension to be real, we need two things: order, and a replacement for religion. Order is secured by government, which manages the economy (with the assistance of a capitalist class) and provides for bodily security and well-being. As for spiritual motivation: although Comte’s government protects legal freedom of speech, he is convinced that people need moral control, in the form of a new spiritual authority. Only a few highly trained people, capable of appreciating the arguments of Positivist philosophy, are likely to be able to attain correct moral answers. Comte therefore gives control over public moralityto a council of philosophers, maintained at state expense.

What Comte is after is not really a philosophical academy, a place of investigative critical argument, dissent, and exploration. It is, instead, a replacement for the pervasive social influence of the Roman Catholic Church and its clergy. The new spiritual guides, in virtue of their acumen and their lifelong study, are the only citizens who will really understand the more abstruse points of positivist doctrine. Comte assumes that anyone who understands the arguments will agree with their conclusion. On this basis the “philosophers” are to propound for the common people a total scheme of thought and practice that organizes their moral lives in its smallest details.

The general goal of the new religion will be to extend human sympathy by cultivating the spirit of universal brotherhood. Rather than thinking in terms of private rights of possession, people will learn to pursue a common good with all their hearts, in a spirit of universal love. A linchpin in the cultivation of this love is the imagination: we must become able to see each person’s fate in every other’s, to picture it vividly as an aspect of our own fate, and to conceive of the whole history of the human kind and its possible future as part of our own sphere of concern, through intense focusing on ideal images of human achievement.

Imaginative capacities will be developed very early in the family (through a curriculum for early education imparted by the philosophers to mothers!). Throughout life, however, the imagination must continue to be intensified and refined through the agency of art. He has a high regard for art in one sense: he sees that it is extremely valuable in creating emotions of the requisite sort and evoking them on suitable occasions. He does not trust artists, however: he thinks of them as self-serving and unreliable. So they must be kept under the watchful eye of the philosophers.

According to Comte, the new sympathy must, like traditional religion, include rituals that organize the day and festivals that demarcate the seasons of the year. Above all, it must have an object of worship. All this Comte provides, imagining an analogue for every motivationally efficacious aspect of Roman Catholic worship. As Mill says, “Here we approach the ludicrous side of the subject” (149).

The object of devotion will be humanity itself. To be imagined and addressed as a deity, however, it must have a singular name: Le Grand Être, the Great Being. The Earth, home of this deity, is now called Le Grand Fétiche, “the great adored object.” Comte understands the power of ritual to organize emotions, and so he prescribes a multitude of ceremonies, in the most detailed manner. The Christian year, of course, was organized around events in the life of Christ. The new Positivist year will be organized around events in the human life cycle: birth, maturity, marriage, parenthood, aging, death – and also around the stages of human history. Some will be “static,” stimulating the love of order; others will be “dynamic,” stimulating the desire for Progress (379). Additional celebrations will focus on the contribution of different classes to the well-being of society. All in all, there are to be eighty-four festivals, thus more than one per week. The arts will be entrusted with the design of these festivals, which will involve appropriate poetry, music, and visual representations. Comte gives the artists a very restricted compass, however, since he himself prescribes so much of the content and even metaphorical structure of these celebrations.

Catholic worship derives a great deal of motivational efficacy from the panoply of saints it recognizes. Praying to a saint brings the worshipper close to the truths of the religion by providing religious emotion with a conceivable and real human object, rather than a distant abstraction. For this aspect of Catholic practice Comte invents a precise analogue: the lives of noble human beings of the past. Just as Catholic believers are to some degree free to choose which saint to pray to, according to their particular motivational propensities, so too the positivist worshiper will be free to compose a personal form of prayer --- just so long as personal prayer occupies enough time. Comte assigns two hours per day to this activity, “divided into three parts: at rising, in the middle of the working hours, and in bed at night” (Mill, 151). He even prescribes the posture of the body: morning prayers will be said kneeling, nighttime prayers in the posture of sleep, so that the influence of prayer will extend into the believer’s dreams. Here we may turn to Mill’s account – which reveals a comic spirit that one usually does not see in Mill:

This brief abstract gives no idea of the minuteness of M. Comte’s prescriptions, and the extraordinary height to which he carries the mania for regulation by which Frenchmen are distinguished among Europeans, and M. Comte among Frenchmen. It is this which throws an irresistible air of ridicule over the whole subject. There is nothing really ridiculous in the devotional practices which M. Comte recommends towards a cherished memory or an ennobling ideal, when they come unprompted from the depths of the individual feeling; but there is something ineffably ludicrous in enjoining that everybody shall practise them three times daily for a period of two hours, not because his feelings require them, but for the premeditated purpose of getting his feelings up. The ludicrous, however, in any of its shapes, is a phaenomenon with which M. Comte seems to have been totally unacquainted. There is nothing in his writings from which it could be inferred that he knew of the existence of such things as wit and humour…[And] there are passages in his writings which, it really seems to us, could have been written by no man who had ever laughed. (153-4)

Mill’s example at this point is indeed hilarious. As a replacement for the Catholic gesture in which one makes sign of the cross over oneself, Comte proposes a gesture in which one touches the “principaux organes” of the body, expressing one’s devotion to the biological principles through which one is sustained in life. “This may be a very appropriate mode of expressing one’s devotion to the Grand Etre,” Mill concludes. “[B]ut any one who had appreciated its effect on the profane reader, would have thought it judicious to keep it back till a considerably more advanced stage in the propagation of the Positive Religion” (154-5).

After we finish laughing with Mill, however, we ought to step back and ask why these aspects of Comte seem ridiculous, and whether we are right to laugh. Mill is surely hasty in suggesting that it is always inauthentic or absurd to engage in a ritual performance for the purpose of stimulating or arousing certain emotions. Strongly influenced by Romanticism, Mill cannot imagine that a ritual performance of this sort could be other than superficial or even hypocritical. The history of religion, however, shows us that ritual is an extremely powerful device for the arousal of emotion – in large part because human beings are creatures of habit, and repetition increases the resonance of an image or thought. Ritual also provides a common ground among participants, creating areas of shared expression and memory.

Comte is on strong ground, then, when he insists on communal rituals and on engendering habits of devotion; and he is wise to call upon poetry and music for aid, rather than relying on the philosophers to make up suitable rituals on their own. Nor does there seem to be anything objectionable about the idea that one should perform certain rituals because they will inspire emotions that one wants to cultivate in oneself. Becoming virtuous is a matter of cultivating good habits, in emotion as in conduct.

So why do Comte’s ideas seem ludicrous? One reason is superficial: anything that derives its efficacy from habit is bound to seem funny or odd when presented for the first time/ Visiting the rituals of an unfamiliar religion, one typically feels alienation, embarrassment, or even a sense of the absurdBut it also comes , certainly, from the mania for control and homogeneity that the whole exercise involves, and from a certain contradiction in its purpose. In the name of reason and humanity, Comte treats people – even the artists themselves -- like submissive robots, closing off spaces for rational argument, new discovery, and individual creativity.

Another aspect of the comed y of Positivism is its utter indifference to the world’s many traditional cultures. Like Roman Catholicism, Positivism is supposed to be a worldwide religion – and yet it is all so very French. Comte does not pause to ask to what extent a religion ought to respect and incorporate elements of each traditional culture – as Roman Catholicism has done very shrewdly.

Both the neglect of culture and the neglect of the individual show up in Comte’s utter lack of a sense of humor. Mill is right on target here, and the humorlessness is significant, because it is an aspect of Comte’s tendency to treat people like interchangeable machines to be set moving by his orders, rather than as quirky idiosyncratic entities who might deviate from the prescribed course.

So far we have not considered a key aspect of his gender politics, Comte associates extended sympathy with the influence of the feminine (227-303). Unlike Mill and Tagore, however, he appears to believe that this association is not simply cultural, but profoundly natural. Women, Comte holds, are fit to become leaders of the religion of sympathy because they are naturally ruled by their emotions, and are profoundly sympathetic by nature, and only somewhat rational. Naturally mothers are not left to their own devices: Comte has a very detailed curriculum for them to follow in their home schooling (192-5). Indeed, Comte trusts them no further than he trusts the artists: they are to be functionaries of the Positivist program, and Comte cannot imagine that their insights could contribute anything new. Moreover, although women are revered – indeed worshipped – they are not to have any rights as citizens, or any chance to learn philosophy, but are to be confined entirely to the home.