Excerpt

Introduction

James Walters

The imaginations we live by

None of us look at the world purely empirically. We all perceive and interpret the physical world around us through the various imaginative frameworks that we have inherited and which organise our thoughts and attitudes. One such framework may be that of nation state borders and of the social contract among those living within them. Through the course of history such concepts have shaped people’s sense of identity and their actions towards others, compelling them in extremis to fight fellow human beings and give their lives in wars. On this basis, the American theologian William Cavanaugh has argued that politics is fundamentally a practice of the imagination: ‘We are often fooled by the seeming solidity of the materials of politics, its armies and officers, into forgetting that these materials are marshalled by acts of the imagination.’1 Alternatively our thoughts and perceptions may be shaped by an over-optimistic imagination of social progress and of the ability of science and technology to eliminate human want and suffering on their own. These ideas have come to dominate the Western imagination since the Enlightenment and, in spite of the crises of our times, persist in hubristic accounts of humanist potential such as Steven Pinker’s 2018 book Enlightenment Now.2 None of these imaginative frameworks represent demonstrable or proven descriptions of the world as it actually is, but they are organising paradigms through which we make sense of everything. The philosopher Mary Midgley, whose work attends particularly to the imaginative frameworks of science, terms these structures ‘the myths we live by’ and argues that the way in which we imagine the world ‘deter- mines what we think important in it, what we select for our attention among the welter of facts that constantly flood in upon us’.3

For the vast majority of the world’s population, religion plays a major part in this organising imagination. Well over 80 percent of human beings follow one of the main religious traditions. This is not to say that religious beliefs are necessarily the only or even dominant motivating forces in their lives. However, religious traditions are powerful symbolic systems that shape both collective memory and our vision of the future. As such they form individuals and communities in their personal habits, social attitudes and political beliefs in multiple ways. Scriptural texts, practices of prayer and collective acts of worship build a picture of the world and the place and purposes of the believer within it. The fact that these narratives and practices are concerned with ultimate, transcendent realities elevate their significance beyond the merely pragmatic or utilitarian frameworks of much scientific or political thinking. The religious imagination engages life and death, material and metaphysical, earthly and heavenly.

Western theories of international relations and global order have tended to overlook this significance. They have grown out of the European tradition of the apparent relegation of religion to private life. When the early modern Wars of Religion were resolved in the Treaties of Westphalia, religious sectarianism was subordinated to a regulating nation state, which came to be seen as secular in nature. Religion was viewed as a matter of personal, private choice, largely inconsequential to citizenship and public life. This approach was combined with another unempirical imaginative assumption: the conviction that the spread of science, education and affluence would progressively erode religious affiliation. Theorists of global order and political economy who were informed by this enduring assumption could not conceive that religion was (let alone would remain) a major force in global movements, conflicts and alliances.

The realist and neorealist schools of international relations see violence and power as the principal drivers in foreign policy. They see nation states as the primary actors and religion as a mere epiphenomenon resulting from failure of states to control the inherent anarchy of the international system. Meanwhile, liberal and neoliberal schools see economics as the main driver. Working primarily from Max Weber’s secularisation thesis,4 they view religion as irrelevant to the motivations of states within a global system that evolves as a rational process, forging agreements on international law and trade. None of the dominant schools of thought have considered religion to be a serious force in international relations, in large part because they begin with the modern Western-European understanding of religion as an essentially private matter – personal rather than social, spiritual rather than political, supplementary rather than fundamental to everyday life.

1 William T Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (London: T&T Clark, 2002), p. 1.
2 Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Science, Reason, Humanism and Progress (London: Allen Lane, 2018).

3 Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 2004). 4 See: Max Weber, Science as a Vocation (1917).