Between the Current Thing and the Great American Safety Valve is another pathway to guiding desired social change. That of designing a grand new outcome, in its entirety, top-down, in one attempt. To decree a deity. Has it ever worked?
Or, to quote from Christopher Alexander, on “unselfconscious” and “selfconscious” cultures, why does it fail? From Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form:
“In slow-changing, traditional, unselfconscious cultures, a form is adjusted soon after each slight misfit occurs…. Unselfconscious design is a process of slow adaptation and error reduction…. Nobody makes a picture of the context, so the picture cannot be wrong. But the modern, selfconscious designer works entirely from a picture in his mind – a conceptualization of the forces at work and their interrelationships – and this picture is almost always wrong. To achieve in a few hours at the drawing board what once took centuries of adaptation and development, to invent a form suddenly which clearly fits its context – the extent of invention necessary is beyond the individual designer.”
Temples of Reason
During the French Revolution, the new state transformed Notre Dame and other Catholic churches into Temples of Reason, from which the new state religion, the Cult of Reason, would be celebrated.
The requirements of the French Revolution called for radical social change, which individuals thought through and planned. But making reason an quasi-religious but atheistic ideal meant changing the way people lived and died. Even the cemeteries had to note the change — each now installed a proclamation on their gates stating that “Death Is An Eternal Sleep.”
With quick social change, people unknowingly make careless mistakes. One of those mistakes involved the removal of statues from Notre Dame of what the revolutionary mob thought were French kings. These statues, dating from 1230 were actually Kings of Judea. Not knowing, the mob ceremonially decapitated the statues. (From A Cultural History of the French Revolution, by Emmet Kennedy, p 344.)
But, creating the Cult of Reason as a revolutionary, atheist church was just too much for people to support. The new non-religious religion didn’t last more than a year. If atheism couldn’t replace Catholicism, then a new religion would have to replace it instead. Such is the weaknesses of reason to explain all of the human condition.
To take that step, Robespierre, though not an atheist himself, but certainly not a fan of Catholicism, created the Cult of the Supreme Being. The Cult of the Supreme Being returned the belief in a god and immortality of human souls. There was intention behind the creation, namely Robespierre’s belief that morality and national formation required the belief in some type of god.
Here is part of Robespierre’s decree Establishing the Cult of the Supreme Being.
1. The French people recognise the existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul.
2. They recognise that the worship worthy of the Supreme Being is the practice of the duties of man.
3. They place in the first rank of these duties [the obligation] to detest bad faith and tyranny, to punish tyrants and traitors, to rescue the unfortunate, to respect the weak, to defend the oppressed, [and] to do to others all the good that one can and not to be unjust toward anyone.
4. Festivals shall be established to remind man of the thought of the Divinity and of the dignity of his being.
5. They shall take their names from the glorious events of our revolution, from the virtues most dear and most useful to man and from the great benefactions of nature.
7. It shall celebrate on the days of decadi [the new 10-day week] festivals to the Supreme Being and to nature, to the human race, to the French people, to the benefactors of humanity, to the martyrs of liberty, to liberty and equality, to the Republic, to the liberty of the world, to the love of country, to the hatred of tyrants and traitors, to truth, to justice, to modesty, to glory and immortality, to friendship, to frugality, to courage, to good faith, to heroism, to disinterestedness, to stoicism, to love, to conjugal love, to paternal love, to maternal tenderness, to filial piety, to childhood, to youth, to manhood, to old age, to misfortune, to agriculture, to industry, to our forefathers, to posterity, to happiness.
The Cult of the Supreme Being lasted only a few months until Robespierre’s death.
Witnessing the fallout from various modern social projects, we can sympathize (maybe) with how someone believed they could decree a deity.
The Picture Is Always Wrong
Like that picture in the mind of the designer that Alexander mentioned above, we can miss the overall system when we act top-down.
For 12 years of the revolutionary era, France used decimal time. That is, the calendar and clocks were organized around a 10 day week and a 10 hour day. But those changes, coupled with the loss of Sunday worship, had other effects on the population.
Here’s an assessment of what was really meant and then lost by the elimination of Sunday:
“‘The elderly ladies took advantage of the long journey (to church) to exchange old stories with other old gossips … they met friends and relatives on the way, or when they reached the county town, whom they enjoyed seeing … there then followed a meal or perhaps a reciprocal invitation, which led to one relative or another….’ But if that was the way it was for the old ladies, what did Sunday mean to ‘young girls, whose blood throbbed with the sweetest desire of nature!’ We can well understand their impatience, ‘they waited for each other at the start of the road they shared,’ they danced.
“Now, however, when the Tenth Day came around, ‘the men were left to the devices they always had:’ the old men went to the tavern, and they bargained. The young men drank and, deprived of their ‘lovely village girls’, they quarrelled. As for the women, they had nothing left to do in village. The mothers were miserable in their little hamlets, the daughters too, and out of this came their need to gather together in crowds. If the need for recreation is necessary because of moral forces… there is absolutely no doubt that village girls find it very hard to bear privations which are likely to prolong their unmarried state: ‘in all regions the pleasure of love is the greatest pleasure.'”
– from The Revolution Against the Church, From Reason to the Supreme Being, by Michel Vovelle, pp 158-159.
There’s another example from the book For Whom The Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway. Yes, this book is fiction and about the Spanish Revolution rather than the French Revolution. But, in the book we learn the stories of Communist supporters contemplating what life without religion would mean for them. Here’s one:
“I hope I am not for the killing, Anselmo was thinking. I think that after the war there will have to be some great penance done for the killing. If we no longer have religion after the war then I think there must be some form of civic penance organized that all may be cleansed from the killing or else we will never have a true and human basis for living. The killing is necessary, I know, but still the doing of it is very bad for a man and I think that, after all this is over and we have won the war, there must be a penance of some kind for the cleansing of us all.”
The new decimal calendar designers did try to bring rigor to their calendar by replacing each saint day with the name of an animal or plant. You can imagine how this would be difficult and yet how it would also create a tie to the old that they wished to displace.
Consider
- Who are the individual designers?
- What new religions have you seen set out to replace old religions?
- If you think the metric system is bad, think how bad metric time would be.