Gods That Fail, Revised Edition: Modern Idolatry and Christian Mission

By Vinoth Ramachandra

The globalizing world of late modernity is heavily awash with pseudo-gods. Gods That Fail provocatively deploys the theological concept of idolatry to explore the ways in which these gods blind their devotees and wreak suffering and dehumanization. Many of these pseudo-gods have infiltrated the life of the Church and compromised its witness. Combining lively social critique with fresh expositions of familiar biblical stories, this book engages with a variety of secular discourses as well as the sub-Christian practices that accompany and undermine Christian involvement in the public square.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Feb 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781498282154

Vinoth Ramachandra

Vinoth Ramachandra lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He holds both a BS (summa cum laude) and a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of London. An Anglican lay-theologian, writer, teacher and human rights advocate, he combines multiple interests in his international work with IFES, a global partnership of over 150 university-level Christian movements.

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GODS THAT FAIL

Modern Idolatry and Christian Mission

(Revised Edition)

Vinoth Ramachandra

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Gods That Fail, Revised Edition

Modern Idolatry and Christian Mission

Copyright © 2016 Vinoth Ramachandra. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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Table of Contents

PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION

Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION: MODERNITY & IDOLS

Chapter 2. THE WORLD AS CREATION

Chapter 3. JOB & THE SILENCE OF GOD

Chapter 4. RELIGION AND IDOLS

Chapter 5. THE VIOLENCE OF IDOLS

Chapter 6. SCIENCE AND ANTI-SCIENCE

Chapter 7. IDOLS OF REASON AND UNREASON

Chapter 8. THE CROSS AND IDOLS

PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION

This book first saw the light of day in 199 6 , having been published by Paternoster Press in the UK and, a year later, by InterVarsity Press in the US. It arose out of talks given to university student audiences, both Christian and non-Christian, in various countries, and has been widely used in churches, colleges and seminaries to promote critical reflection on modernity and postmodernity from within the biblical Christian tradition.

In this revised edition, I have tried to find a balance between keeping the original text and its contextual setting (always important) and bringing some of the egregiously outdated examples and statistics up to date. Most quotations have been retained, and while my thinking about certain areas has deepened since I first wrote, I have refrained from turning this into a different book altogether. The reader can judge how successfully this has been achieved. The main structural revision has been to interchange chapters 2 and 4 in the original, as I believe this makes for a more logical progression.

In the Introduction I state that my aim throughout has been to provide my fellow-pilgrims, who are attracted, repelled or confused by cultural developments, with a few historical and biblical compasses that may help them in their journey beyond modernity to the counterculture of the kingdom of God. Also, in keeping with the introductory and essentially bridge-building character of the book, I have chosen to dispense with detailed footnotes (apart from, of course, references to sources) and the endless qualifications that must necessarily attend a more academic presentation.

Gods That Fail was my first full-length book; and I would consider it my most successful in that it captivated a Danish woman working in India who invited me to teach parts of it in a college program she was leading, and who eventually became my wife.

I am grateful to Wipf and Stock for their enthusiastic support in restoring this work to circulation.

Vinoth Ramachandra

Colombo, Sri Lanka

January 2016

1. INTRODUCTION: MODERNITY & IDOLS

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbances of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air all that is holy is profaned . . .

—K. Marx & F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto (

1848

)¹

These famous words, written a century and a half ago, are still an apt description of social changes taking place all over the world. Modernity has come to encircle the globe, its effects felt in the most remote rural villages and not only in university campuses, urban shopping malls and government bureaucracies. It is not simply one civilization among others, but the first truly global civilization to emerge in human history.

For Karl Marx, modern conditions were those created by technological progress and the ever-expanding commerce of nations. Capitalist production was the nerve-centre of the monster of modernity. Ancient communities were uprooted and people thrust into competition with each other in the new jungle of a capitalist social order. But, for Marx, the horrors of modernity also contained a potent promise. The collapse of all fixed, fast-frozen relations liberated modern human beings from the ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions of traditional peasant life. It created a historic opportunity for humankind, represented initially by the new industrial working class, to seize control over its existence through collective revolution and thus put an end to all irrational and arbitrary authority. The monster of modernity could not only be tamed (since it was, after all, a human creation) but would become a necessary means to human liberation.

Another well-known image of what it feels like to live under modern conditions was given by Max Weber (1864–1920), one of the founders of modern sociology. For Weber capitalism was part of a broader phenomenon of increasing rationalization, appearing for the first time in the West in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Like Marx, Weber believed that capitalism was a historically specific economic form, not a universal human drive. Unlike the pursuit of gain or ruthless expropriation common to most human cultures, the modern epoch of capitalism was a system of rational rule-governed behaviour, organized around a central motivation—the continuous accumulation of profit as an end in itself. Modernity was like an iron cage that drew an ever-tightening noose of impersonal, abstract, instrumental rationality around its victims, leading to the suppression of spontaneity, diversity, and mystery, and the widespread disenchantment of the world.² This is an image that came to dominate much of the fictional and sociological literature of the twentieth century. It bred a widespread mood of pessimism and near-fatalism.

Marx and Weber were notorious for their Eurocentric readings of history. A number of recent historians have argued that modernity should be seen as a multi-centred enterprise, involving the active participation of many societies around the globe.³ The East was more advanced, technologically and economically, than the West between 500 and 1800 and played a crucial role in enabling the rise of modern Western civilization. None of the major players in the world economy at any time before 1800 was European. Ironically, European colonial expansion was made possible by the assimilation of Arab, Chinese and Indian scientific ideas and nautical technologies. In order to solve the massive challenges posed by ocean sailing, the Portuguese and the Spanish turned to the East for help in ship design and navigation.

Islamic science found its way to the Portuguese court via the many Jewish scholars who had fled there from Spain in the fourteenth century. Many of the technologies that proved crucial to the agricultural, military and political revolutions in Europe from medieval times to 1800 diffused from the East—for example, the stirrup, the horse-collar harness, the watermill and windmill, the iron ploughs and horseshoes, guns and gunpowder, cannon, compasses, square ship hulls and multiple mast-systems, paper-making and movable metal-type printing presses. It was only in as late as the mid-nineteenth century that Europe caught up with Asia and the Ottoman empire. A hundred years before the first European conquistadors set sail for the Americas and the East Indies, China controlled half the world’s oceans. India and China were industrial powers long before the industrial revolution gathered momentum in Europe; and their de-industrialization accompanied nineteenth-century British colonialism.

Consequently, the neat polarisations of Eastern and Western, national and foreign, are as misleading as the popular distinction between the secular and religious. The origins of modernity lie not exclusively in Western economic, political and intellectual developments but in the complex, historical interplay of European and non-European civilizations that intensified from the eighteenth century onwards. The origins of change in world history have always been multi-centred. Modernity thus has a global history.

However, half a century after the end of European colonialism, many are still held captive by Eurocentric narratives. We talk of China’s emergence from centuries of backwardness to be a global economic power today. Even the most ardent nationalist is fired by models of development and progress that have been defined by European nations, economists and institutions. India’s popular call-centres replay the familiar colonial pattern: young English-speaking Indians toiling at night to enlarge the profits of Western corporations. The mega-malls of Asian cities, into which teenagers slavishly imitating the latest European and American fashions flock in droves, display luxury goods bearing mostly Western brand names but manufactured in Asian sweatshops. The recent rapid economic growth in China that frightens European and American workers has itself been fuelled by Western corporations, and China’s insatiable appetite for oil means that it will follow the same path of European colonialism in Africa.

So, we should speak of modernities (plural) rather than modernity (singular). But, given the dominance since the nineteenth century, at least among political and academic elites around the world, of a secularizing, Western Enlightenment understanding of modernity, it will be the latter sense of the term that will be deployed throughout the present book, unless we qualify it.

An alternative image to both Marx and Weber is offered in the writings of the British sociologist Anthony Giddens. He likened life in the modern world to being aboard a careering juggernaut . . . rather than being in a carefully controlled and well-driven motor car.⁴ The English word juggernaut comes from the Hindi Jagannath, one of the titles for the god Krishna. A huge chariot was used to take an idol of the deity out of its temple in Orissa once a year, and as it trundled through the streets devotees would throw themselves under its wheels and be crushed to death. The modern juggernaut is an engine of enormous power which collectively, as human beings, we can drive to some extent but which also threatens to rush out of our control and which could rend itself asunder.⁵ The ride is by no means unpleasant. Riding on the juggernaut of modernity is often exhilarating and rewarding, but there are times it veers away violently in directions one cannot foresee or control. It crushes both its devotees and all those who stand in its way.

Giddens refused to identify capitalism with modernity, seeing the former as simply one of a cluster (an institutional nexus) of movements that constitute the complex affair we call modern life. The most significant others are industrialism (the transformation of nature into created environments through science and technology) and the growth of the nation-state (with its control of information, supervision of the population, and monopoly of the means of violence). If it is the case then, as some allege, that we (urban elites around the world) have moved into a new epoch of postmodernity, this can only imply that the trajectory of social development has taken us beyond these modern institutions into a new and distinct type of social order.

Giddens was sceptical that we have moved beyond modernity into a postmodern social universe, but he did recognize a few glimpses of the emergence of ways of life and forms of social organization which diverge from those fostered by modern institutions.⁶ Instead of using the term postmodernity, which is thus misleading, he preferred to speak of the radicalization of the consequences of modernity at the end of the twentieth century, so that we are living in a period of late or high modernity. As for the related term postmodernism, also in vogue today, it is "best kept to refer to styles or movements within literature, painting, the plastic arts, and architecture. It concerns aspects of aesthetic reflection upon the nature of modernity."⁷

1.1 The End of Modernity?

Western sociologists disagree as to how to describe the transformations of modernity that have gathered pace in recent years. For those who accept some version of the modern-postmodern distinction, once again it seems that all that is solid melts into air. If we follow Giddens’ juggernaut metaphor, postmodernization is best understood as a continuation of the processes of modernization but with increasing intensity and scope; but the result of that intensification has been to erode the stability of modernity and to throw it into some confusion. No longer subject to control and prediction, its cultural and institutional effects may even be reversed.

No doubt aspects of the premodern, modern and postmodern will co-exist well into the twenty-first century, in societies rich and poor, but in varying and bewildering configurations. Announcements of the death of modernity are premature and, to paraphrase Mark Twain, somewhat exaggerated.

In addition to postmodernists, the intellectual landscape in recent years has been peopled by post-structuralists, post-Marxists, post-industrialists, post-Fordists, post-humanists and other apostles of a new dispensation. The irony has often been pointed out that those who see a fundamental global transition having occurred in recent decades, with postmodernity superseding modernity, have invoked the very thing that they have declared to be impossible under postmodern conditions: namely, giving to history an intrinsic and immanent coherence, and being able to locate ourselves within its relentless movement. For one of the characteristic emphases of the postmodernist intellectual temper (dominant more in the humanities than the sciences) is that all universal theories, truth-claims and teleological readings of history—totalizing metanarratives, in the jargon of the day—are obsolescent. Writers who speak of a new postmodernist epoch are still employing a master narrative to celebrate the demise of all master narratives. They still operate within the same conceptual framework, since sceptical subversion of traditional narratives has been as much a part of the world of modernity as is the creation of overarching storylines.

It has often been remarked that modern men and women have little sense of history. We are all prone to consider our own generation as somehow special, unmatched in the depth of its crises no less than in its achievements. So it comes as some surprise to be reminded that many of the themes that dominated the second half of the twentieth century were first conceived in the European cultural crisis of the 1890s. Amidst the declining glory of Hapsburg Vienna, for instance, there emerged the study of the subconscious and its role in the irrationalities of everyday life, the notion of nationhood as the basis for political identity, and a preoccupation with language and its effect on the construction of reality. The decade also saw the rise of sociology as an organized scientific discipline with its inquiries into mass urban culture, rationalization and bureaucracy, suicide and anomie.

Significant as recent global socio-economic changes are, especially in the past three decades, they should not be exaggerated. For, as even that Guru of the new knowledge society, Daniel Bell, admitted in a footnote in his famous book, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, "In terms of daily life of individuals, more change was experienced between 1850 and 1940—when railroad, steamships, telegraph, electricity, telephone, automobile, radio and airplanes were introduced—than in the period since when the future is supposed to be accelerating. In fact, other than television, there has not been one major innovation which affected the daily life of persons to the extent of the items enumerated."⁸

Those who subscribe to the radical postmodernist creed also hold that long-held distinctions between reality and appearance, truth and falsehood, valid and invalid reasoning, ethical principle and social convention, are relics of a now-discredited Platonic-Christian-Enlightenment (Kantian, Marxist, or whatever) heritage in the West. The argument sometimes starts on the premise that truth-claims have often gone along with a notion of privileged access by an elite who have used their intellectual authority and political power to impose their version of the truth on others. It ends with variations on the Nietzschean theme that truth is nothing more than the product of a specific human discourse, with postmodern life the belated recognition and celebration of multiple and conflicting discourses.

Hence the American pragmatist Richard Rorty’s cheery recommendation to his fellow philosophers that they join theologians in giving up their deluded notions of dealing with matters of ultimate truth, and rejoin the cultural conversation of mankind on equal terms with sociologists, literary critics, novelists and others who never entertained such high-minded ambitions. We should substitute solidarity for objectivity, a sense of shared consensus-based values and beliefs for the attempt to get things right from a critical standpoint. Talk of truth now becomes simply a rhetorical device, a label of convenience attached to those ideas which currently enjoy widespread approval. It can be re-defined for all practical purposes as good in the way of belief.⁹

Such recommendations have a less than benign aspect when we consider how easily public opinion can be manipulated and consensus-values engineered to serve some very illiberal forms of political behaviour. Those versions of the pragmatist-postmodernist creed which are suspicious of outworn ideas such as truth, critique and ethical accountability, are simply unable to discriminate between a true consensus based on beliefs arrived at by open argument and debate, and a false consensus that rests solely on collective prejudice, mass-media distortion and the force majeure of propaganda. Like those fashionable slogans proclaiming the end of history and the end of ideology they end up serving to legitimate the cynical interests of American realpolitik.

Thus Francis Fukuyama, a Rand corporation protégé, became an overnight celebrity on the US lecture circuit—in those heady years between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the First Gulf War (1989–1991)—by pronouncing, with splendid assurance, the end of history.¹⁰ Since the whole world-or the world that really mattered—had now embraced free-market capitalism and liberal democracy, ideological conflict was now a thing of the past and history had effectively come to an end. Of course there would be those awkward trouble-spots around the world which refused to accept the New World Order, and critical intellectuals everywhere who still indulged in Canute-like gestures to fend off the tidal waves of change, but these could be consigned to the scrapheap of history. In a later article on the First Gulf War, Fukuyama wrote:

A large part of the world will be populated by Iraqs and Ruritanias, and will continue to be subject to bloody struggles and revolutions. But with the exception of the Gulf, few regions will have an impact—for good or ill—on the growing part of the world that is democratic and capitalist. And it is in this part of the world that we will ultimately have to make our home.¹¹

Here is the classic pattern of ideological scapegoating: the projection of blame on to a racial or cultural Other (the Iraqs and Ruritanias in the new geopolitical order), which enables us (that civilized part of the world which we will ultimately have to make our home) to live with an easy conscience, convinced of our moral superiority despite all the evidence of Western connivance and complicity in the bloody struggles and revolutions in the non-Western world. Barbarism always resides elsewhere. Fukuyama’s end of history sloganeering disguised the massive hypocrisy, political betrayals, economic blackmail and proxy violence that have so often attended Western talk of defending democracy and exporting human rights.

For those of us unfortunate folk who happen to live among the Iraqs and Ruritanias of the twenty-first century world, the perspective is rather different. The political naïveté of writers such as Rorty and Fukuyama raises searching questions about the postmodernist paradigm. Is all such talk of truth and reality as being fictive and imaginative constructions, having no extra-linguistic reference (often advanced, paradoxically, as a genuine and liberating insight), simply a reflection of the pervasive influence of the electronic media today? In other words, has the cultural ascendency of advertising agencies, public relations experts, opinion-poll samplers, and virtual—reality engineers, lent plausibility to such notions, a plausibility that is lacking in earlier phases of modernity and in those countries that have still to fall completely under the spell of the electronic high-priests? I am inclined to think so.

Writing over fifty years ago of a famous CBS radio war bond sales-drive, the American sociologist Robert Merton observed shrewdly that these propagandists were technicians of sentiment and warned that a society subjected ceaselessly to a flow of ‘effective’ half-truths and the exploitation of mass anxieties may all the sooner lose that mutuality of confidence and reciprocal trust so essential to a stable social structure.¹² It is open to serious question whether any participant democracy can function for long on the basis of consensus-values derived via the mass media. Today’s technicians of sentiment have achieved a level of sophistication so great that, for the bored youngsters of the affluent world, PlayStation and WhatsApp have become the paramount reality. Madonna, of course, was the great icon of postmodern sensibility: a kaleidoscope of shifting images (the femme fatale, the vulnerable Monroe, the Androgyne, the gangster moll, the arch-capitalist, et al.), a celebration of fragmentation and the loss of depth that, as we shall see, are the hallmarks of the contemporary world.

Having rejected both a biblical theology of creation and humanist talk of a universal human nature, writers such as Rorty were hard pressed to find a moral framework within which we can locate a sense of place and of human solidarity. Rorty could only fall back on a pragmatist appeal to nationalist sentiment as a basis for policy. Thus he remarked on the attitude of contemporary American liberals to the unending hopelessness and misery of the lives of the young blacks in American cities: "Do we say that these people must be helped because they are our fellow human beings? We may, but it is much more persuasive, morally as well as politically, to describe them as our fellow Americans—to insist that it is outrageous that an American can live without hope."¹³

Whether such appeals are persuasive to the inhabitants of Fukuyama’s Iraqs and Ruritanias—who are now being wooed into the benefits of liberal democracy and respect for universal human rights—is open to serious doubt. It is paradoxical that just as talk of progress has historically been used to consolidate power by dividing people into enlightened us and backward them (a point stressed repeatedly by postmodernist critics of modernity), here even the language of solidarity serves only to cement a narrow sectarian outlook.

1.2 Secularist Modernity as Paradox

The late Czech philosopher, novelist and statesman Vaclav Havel once identified the most distinctive feature of modern life as a loss of co-ordinates. He wrote: I believe that with the loss of God, man has lost a kind of absolute and universal system of coordinates, to which he could always relate everything, chiefly himself. His world and his personality gradually began to break up into separate, incoherent fragments corresponding to different, relative, coordinates.¹⁴

Havel was reflecting on the inherent weaknesses of modern Western societies, the very model his newly independent country was being persuaded to follow. He saw the consumerist culture of the West to be as oppressive to the human spirit as the repression Eastern Europe had suffered for most of the present century. The recent history of Eastern Europe, he believed, held up to the West a convex mirror, giving a grotesquely magnified image of the West’s own inherent tendencies. Modernity had let loose forces that bred conformity, a herd culture, either in the overt form of totalitarian regimes or the covert homogenizing pressures of consumerism. The banal freedoms of choice, represented by the ubiquitous Coca-Cola ads, shopping malls and MacDonald’s fast-food chains (which have become the universal symbols of modernity), conceal a loss of human freedoms at deeper, more profound levels. For every achievement of modernity, there is also a demonic underside. Liberal capitalism and Marxism were actually twin aspects of the same phenomenon, generated by the loss of coordinates in the modern world. They followed the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power-the power of ideologies, systems, bureaucracy, artificial languages and political slogans.¹⁵

Havel’s mathematical imagery is interesting. Co-ordinates express the way things are related to each other. They provide a point of reference, a scale by which entities may be measured and seen in their true proportions, a map which helps us find our bearings and our way around reality. The belief in God had been the traditional unifying focus for such a system of coordinates in Western culture. So, in one important perspective, the modern condition is characterized by a displacement of God from that focal position. It is not the case that God has been explicitly expunged from modern consciousness (though this was vigorously attempted, for instance, by the French version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment¹⁶ and also by the latter’s Marxist successors in the twentieth); but rather that God has been pushed to the fringes of consciousness, and his function taken over by surrogate deities (e.g. Nature, Posterity, The State, The Market, and so on).

The historical origins of modern secular culture are still a matter of scholarly debate, and I do not propose to venture into this complex terrain. What has become increasingly clear, however, is that the popular self-image of modernity, namely as representing a radical break with a Christian worldview and the emancipation of human reason from the oppressive grip of ecclesiastical interests, lacks historical plausibility. There seems to have been more intellectual freedom in the late medieval period in Europe than in the heyday of the French Enlightenment, more participatory citizenship in the medieval free cities of Europe and the holy commonwealths of Puritan New England than in many of today’s so-called advanced democracies.

The roots of European modernity itself were nourished by Christian theology as much as by the pre-Christian philosophies of Greece and Rome. Max Weber’s famous thesis that Puritan rationality and piety furnished the character-formation necessary for the rise of a capitalist economy is now recognized to have been greatly exaggerated, but it has served to draw our attention to the unique intellectual climate in which European modernity emerged.¹⁷ This is seen especially in the rise of experimental natural science. Not only were Christian values embodied in scientific practice, but it has been cogently argued that the enterprise of experimental science itself was founded on a specific understanding of God, human beings