Why does secularisation mean less blame?
In a world without religion society is less eager to afford blame and responsibility.
In 1973 design theorists Rittel and Webber founded the ‘wicked problem’. This was a new concept to describe problems that held so many interdependent factors that they seemed impossible to solve. Ahead of climate change and today’s globalised world this was a prescient moment.
What followed was an increasing awareness of our problems’ complexities yet at the same time a decrease in society’s propensity to afford responsibility and blame. If anything the ‘wicked problem’ has led to ‘wicked fatalism’, and for this we can blame secularisation.
The problems our ancestors faced were no less impossible to solve.
Over twenty thousand years ago Pompey conquered the city of Jerusalem and entered the Jewish Temple on Mount Moria. What followed presented an impossible quandary for the Jewish people.
This was the mountain upon which Abraham had been prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac, and where as a result God had promised that his offspring would be ‘blessed’. It was an angel who had informed Israel’s King David of this location when establishing Jerusalem as his capital. This was the site where Solomon built the temple and placed within it the Israelite’s greatest treasure: a gilded chest made to precise specifications set by God himself, and in which his presence was manifest on earth.
Pompey did not destroy the Temple. But entered, cleansed it of the marks of battle, and appointed a new high priest. There could be no bigger problem for the Jews of the city who asked their God why ‘you did not restrain him when the sinner struck down the walls’. God had allowed his house to be stormed and the most sacred place tainted by a polytheistic.
To find an explanation was seemingly impossible.
The same was true for the Muslims of Baghdad who watched their Caliph be destroyed and the religious capital subjected to forty days of continuous killing, pillaging, and enslavement. A contemporary chronicler wrote how the Mongols left the dead to ‘lay as mounds in the street’ and revealed the extraordinary suffering of Muslims in a city supposedly afforded ‘divine favours’.
Once peace was proclaimed, survivors, ‘their faces disfigured’, came out from hiding. ‘Their colour had changed, their minds shocked by the sight of the horror that no words can describe. They were like the dead emerging from their graves fearful hungry cold’. Poet Sams al-Din wrote ‘the blood of Islam was shed’. 800,000 people had been killed.
A little later and problems were still just as impossible to solve. For the Christian Community of Valencia, its city council was worried. Meeting in July 1395 it was faced with another outbreak of bubonic plague. Deaths were climbing and a solution was desperately needed. This was part of the Black Death epidemic which killed in total one-third of Europe’s entire population.
To those that experienced them these were wicked problems - in both senses of the word. The destruction they wrought was immense and yet despite initial perplexity, all three societies eventually found an answer over whom to blame: themselves.
Fatalism and Responsibility
This involved accepting a degree of fatalism as well as responsibility. Christians of Venice concluded that God had caused the plague as a result of their sins. In March 1395 the council announced that ‘in the opinion of many’ it was the sins of bad legal representatives that provoked God to send disease.
In July those responsible for this ‘divine anger’ was extended to individuals sustaining ‘pimps, bad women and gamblers, from whom there had been a group of demons’. As a result, the council organized charitable donations ‘to placate divine anger,’ and a procession to the chapel of Our Lady of Mercy to ‘beseech divine mercy for the said plague’.
Jews explained that God permitted the actions of Pompey because their people had strayed. The explanation for this was found in scripture which wrote that the charge laid upon the Jewish people by God had been ‘a blessing and a curse – the curse if you disobey the commands of the Lord’.
Critics of the temple priests accused them of ‘defiling the Lord’s sanctuary’ and said they had ‘profaned the offerings to God with lawlessness’. People argued that only if the priests repented of their greed would they all be spared.
A similar justification was found amongst the Muslims of Baghdad. The poet Taqiaddin Ism'il ibn abi'l-Yusr pointed towards God’s involvement behind the Mongol conquest. He wrote that ‘God knows that the people of Baghdad were made negligent by what they enjoyed of divine favour. So they grew heedless of the wrath of the Almighty’.
Whilst responsibility for such destruction - affording blame onto the sinners of Baghdad - abi’l-Yusr was also fatalistic. He asked wistfully if there was anyone who could have saved the city’s inhabitants against God’s summons to judgement and lamented that ‘destiny had intervened’ to keep him alive after judgement day.
This element of fatalism is redolent of what we hear today when discussing the pandemic. Open any conversation with criticism of the Government and very quickly someone will explain how this was an unprecedented event in which little could have been done. Some are even reluctant about a public inquiry as ‘it could never have been stopped’. Thus despite secularisation and a greater capacity to understand the causes for misfortune, society still settles with the same fatalistic answers.
Whilst we share this similarity with our ancestors, we have however stopped short of what they would do next. If alive today these heavily religious communities of the past would accept the fatalism of our situation – accepting nothing could be done to stop God’s divine anger - but also paradoxically seek to afford blame. In the case of these three examples, they blamed themselves for the sins they had committed.
Today however we seem hesitant to afford responsibility for our mistakes. Society has adopted a ‘wicked fatalism’ where we fall back on the comforting assurance that events are unprecedented. This is a dangerous position to find ourselves in. For it is the most unprecedented event of all – climate change – that will define our future and for policy to be effective, responsibility and accountability are key elements to success.
It would be remarkable if our secularised world creates a society that affords less blame and accountability than a time that fatalistically afforded much destruction to the providence of God.