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**Alchemist** · 12-28-2010, 12:32 PM

Another Myth associated with secularism is that it is more befitting of the "Science" persona. Nothing could be further from the truth:

RELIGION AND SCIENCE

If secularization is to show up anywhere it must show up among scientists! In an earlier study, my colleagues and I examined evidence that the conflict between religion and science is largely fictional and that scientists are not notably irreligious, being as likely to attend church as is the general public. Even more revealing is the fact that among American academics, the proportion who regard themselves as religious is higher the more scientific their field. For example, physical and natural scientists, including mathematicians, are more than twice as likely to identify themselves as "a religious person" as are anthropologists and psychologists (Stark et al. 1996, 1998). But, aren't some scientists militant atheists who write books to discredit religion - Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan, for example? Of course. But, it also is worth note that most of those, like Dawkins and Sagan, are marginal to the scientific community for lack of significant scientific work. Arid possibly even more important is the fact that theologians (cf., Cupitt 1997) and professors of religious studies (cf., Mack 1996) are a far more prolific source of popular works of atheism.

Recently, quite amazing time series data on the beliefs of scientists were published in Nature. In 1914 the American psychologist James Lueba sent questionnaires to a random sample of persons listed in American Men of Science. Each was asked to select one of the following statements "concerning belief in God" (all italics in the original):

1. I believe in a God to whom one may pray in the expectation of receiving an answer. By "answer," I mean more than the subjective, psychological effect of prayer.

2. I do not believe in God as defined above.

3. I have no definite belief regarding this question.

Leuba's standard for belief in God is so stringent it would exclude a substantial portion of "mainline" clergy, and that obviously was intentional on his part.(4) He wanted to show that men of science were irreligious. To his dismay, Leuba found that 41.8 percent of his sample of prominent scientists selected option one, thereby taking a position many would regard as "fundamentalist." Another 41.5 percent selected the second option (many of whom, as Leuba acknowledged, no doubt believed in a somewhat less active deity), and 16.7 percent took the indefinite alternative. Clearly, these results were not what Leuba had expected and hoped. So he gave great emphasis to the fact that, as measured, believers were not in the majority and went on to express his faith in the future, claiming that these data demonstrated a rejection of "fundamental dogmas - a rejection apparently destined to extend parallel with the diffusion of knowledge" (1916: 280).

In 1996 Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham (1997) replicated Leuba's study exactly. They found that nowadays 39.3 percent of eminent scientists selected option one, which is not significantly different from the 41.8 percent who did so in 1914. This time 45.3 percent chose option two, and 14.5 percent took option three. Thus, over an 82-year period, there has been no decline in a very literal belief in God among scientists. Secularization, indeed!

**Alchemist** · 12-28-2010, 12:40 PM

Another myth that people adhere to is the false statement: "Religion gets shoved down people's (childrens) throats and is forced upon them but with secularism there is "objectivism" and people are allowed to choose what they want". This means that given time people will become less "fanatical" and "zealous" of their religious doctrine and eventually become "neutral". This is False!

The New Religious State
Mark Juergensmeyer
Comparative Politics > Vol. 27, No. 4 (Jul., 1995), pp. 379-391

"Secular nationalism began to replace religion several centrues ago as the ideological agent of political legitimacy. But the form in which we know it today -- as the ideological ally of the nation-state - did not appear in England and America until the 18th C. Only by then had the nation-state taken root deeply enough to nurture an ideological loyalty of its own, unassisted by religious or ethnic identifications, and only by then had the political and military apparatus of the nation-state expanded sufficiently to encompass a large geographic region.
The changes of the late 18th and 19th centuries included the development of the technical ability to knit a country together through roads, rivers, and other means of transportation and communication, the economic ability to knit a country together through roads, rivers and other means of transportation and communication, the economic ability to do so through an increasingly integrated market structure, an emerging world economic system which was based on the building blocks of nation-states, the development of mass education which socialized each generation of youth into a homogeneous society and the emergence of parliamentary democracy as a system of representation and expression of the will of people. The glue that held all these changes together was secular nationalism: the notion that individuals naturally associated with the people and place of their ancestral birth in an economic and political system identified with a nation-state. Secular nationalism was though to be not only natural but also universally applicable and morally right. Although it was regarded almost as a natural law, secular nationalism was ultimately viewed as an expression of neither god nor nature but of the will of a nation's citizens. The ideas of John Locke and about the origins of a civil community and the "social contract" theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau required very little commitment to religious belief. Although they allowed for a devine order that made the rights of human possible, their ideas did not directly buttress the power of the church and its priestly administrators, and they had the effect of taking religion - at least church religion - out of public life.
At the same time religion was becoming less political, secular nationalism was becoming more religious. It became clothed in romantic and xenophobic images that would have startled its Enlightenment forbears. The French Revolution, the model for much of the nationalist fervor that developed in the 19C , infused a religious zeal into revolutionary democracy, which took on the trappings of church religion in the priestly power meted out its demagogic leaders and in the slavish devotion to what it called "the temple of reason." According to Alexis de Tocqueville, the French Revolution "assumed many of the aspects of a religious revolution." The American Revolution also had a religious side: many of its leaders had been influenced by 18 C Deism, a religion of science and natural law which was "devoted to exposing [church] religion to the light of knowledge." As in France, American nationalism developed its own religious characteristics, bleding the ideas of secular nationalism and the symbols of Christianity into a "civil" religion." The 19 C fulfilled de Tocqueville's prophecy that the "strange religion" of secular nationalism would, "like Islam, overrun the whole world with its apostles, militants, and martyrs." It was spread throughout the world with an almost missionary zeal and was shipped to the newly colanized areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America as part of the ideological freight of colonialism. It became the ideological partner of what came to be known as "nation-building". As the colonial government provided their colonies with the political and economic infrastructures to turn territories into nation-states, the ideology of secular nationalism emerged as a by-product of the colonial nation-building experience.
As it had in the West in previous centures came to represent one side of a great encounter between two vastly different ways of perceiving the sociopolitical order and the relationship of individual to the state: one informed by religion, the other by a notion of a secular compact
In the mid 20th century, when the colonial powers retreated, they left behind the geographical boundaries they had drawn and the political institutions they had fashioned. Created as adminstrative units of the Ottoman, Hapsburg, French, and British empires, the borders of most Third World nations continued after independece, even if they failed to follow the natural divisions among ethnic and linguistic communities. By the second half the 20C, it seemed as if the cultural goals of the colonial era had been reached: although the political ties were severed, the new nations retained all the accouterments of the westernized countries. The only substantial empire to remain virtually intact until 1990 was the Soviet Union.

...
In Egypt, following the revolution of 1952, Nasser was caught in a double blind. Since his support came from both the Muslim Brotherhood and the modern elite, he was expected to create a Muslim state and a modern secular state at the same time. His approach was to pain an image of an Egypt that was culturally Muslim and politically secular, and he cheerfully went about "Egyptizing along with modernizing", as a professor in Cairo put it. The compromise did not work, and especially after Nasser attempted to institute "scientific socialism," which the Muslim Brotherhood regarded as anti-Islamic, the Brotherhood became Nasser's foe. Nasser's successor, Anwar Al-Sadat, repated the pattern, which turned out to be a tragic and fatal mistake. Like Nasser, SAdat raised Muslim expectations by currying favours with the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1971 he released many of them from jail. But by 1974 he and the Brotherhood were at loggerheads, and again the organization was outlawed. Sadat attempted to wear the mantle of Islam by calling himself "Upholder of the Faith," announcing that his first name was really Muhammad rather than Anwar, and promoting religious schools. None of his attempts really worked. Sadat was thought to be a Muslim turncoat. With this image in mind, members of the al-Jihad, a radical fringe group of Muslim Brotherhood, assassinated him in 1981. His successor, Hosni Mubarak, tried to steer more of a middle course, making no promises to the Muslim activists, but no new secular or socialist departures either.
In India, three generations of prime ministers in the Nehru dynasty- JAwaharlal, his daughter Indira Ghandhi, and her son Rajiv - have all tried to accomadate religion as little as possible. Yet there have been times when they have been forced to make concessions to religious forces almost against their wills. Jawaharlal Nehru seemed virtually allergic to religion, putting secularism alongside socialism as his great political goal. Nonetheless, the Indian constitution and subsequent parliamentary actions have given a great of public support to religious entities. Religion political parties have elected legislators to national and state assemblies; religious schools have been affiliated with the state; and temples and mosques have recieved direct public support. In general, the indian government's attitude has been defined, not by indifference, but instead by an effort to treat each religion with equanimity; as Ainslie Embree puts it, "advocates of secularism in India always insisted...that far from being hostile to religion, they valued it." Even so, these concessions have not been sufficient to stem the tide of religious politics in India. The 1980s was a decade of tragedy in this regard. Hindu nationalists wanted more and more access to power, prompting defensiveness on the part of Muslim and Christain minorities and a bloody rebellion on the part of the Sikhs. The assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv did not put an end to their sense of dissatisfaction, and the election of 1991, which brought to power a Hindu nationlist party in several of India's states, demonstrated the potency of the Hindu right.
In Sri Lanka following independs, the urbane and western-educated leaders of the new nation realized that they would have to give a Sinhalese Buddhist aura to their secular political stance in order for it to be widely accepted. Perhaps no Sri Lankan leader attempted to give in to Buddhist demans as much as did S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, but even he lost his life at the hands of an irate Buddhist Monk. The present rulers in Sri Lanka face the same dilemma as their predecessors, they need Sinhalese support, but they feel they can not go so far as to alienate the Tamils and other minority groups.

...The problem with all these attempts of secular leaders to accomadate religion is that they lead to a double frustration: the leaders are considered traitors from both the a religious and a secular point of view. Moreover, these compromises suggest that spiritual and political matters are separate, which most religious activists see as a capitulation to the secularist point of view. They sense that behind the compromise is a basic allegiance to secular nationalism rather than to religion. Religious activists are well aware that, if a nation starts with the premise of secular nationalism, religion is often made marginal to the political order. This marginality is especially onerous from many revolutionary religious perspectives, including the Iranian, the Sikhs, and the Sinhalese, because they regard the two ideologies as unequal: the religious one is far superior. Rather than to start with secular nationalism, they prefer to begin with religion.
The implication of this way of speaking is not that religion is antithetical to nationalism, but that religious rather than secular nationalism is the appropriate premise on which to build a nation, even a modern nation-state. In fact, virtually every reference to nationhood used by religious nationalist assumes that the modern nation-state is the only way in which a nation can be construed.

**Alchemist** · 12-28-2010, 12:44 PM

Another great myth of Secularism is that it brings peace. Actually the reverse is true. Secularism is the cause of war!

War, Progress, and Sociology in the Age of Ideology
Lee Trepanier 155.138.1.57

In the preface to The Quest for Community, Nisbet explained the theme of his
work, “I have chosen to deal with the political cause of the manifold alienation that lies
behind the contemporary quest for community (QC, vii).” Although economic, religious,
and cultural factors played a role in modern man’s alienation, the role of the state was
preeminent in severing the ties between the individual and his kin, church, and local
associations. Supplanting traditional communities, the state was able to reorganize
society with its ideology of individualism, secularism, and progress that was aimed at
imperial expansion. The growing concentration of power in the state allowed it to
penetrate successfully into “man’s economic, religious, kinship, and local allegiances”
and dislocate “established centers of function and authority” with its own mandate and
bureaucratic organization (QC, viii). The decline of traditional communities, and the
corresponding rise of individual alienation, was a direct result of the concentration of
power and the complete sovereignty of the modern state.

....

The War State
For Nisbet, the state was an artificial construct that was opposed to traditional
communities and arose out of force in the conditions of war (QC, 100). The state’s
expansion of power during times of war was especially evident to Nisbet, “Everywhere
the state, as we first encounter it in history, is simply the institutionalization, and
projection to wider areas of function and authority, of the command-tie that in the
beginning binds only the warrior-leader and his men” (AF, xxi). The rise of the state was
often at the expense of kinship, as illustrated by Homer, whose epics painted “Greek
society just beginning to face the pangs of conflict between its age-old kinship structure
and the pressing needs of war. Eventually the political state won out” (AF, xxi-xxii). In
Athens itself, the state’s victory was assured with the Cleisthenean Reforms that
abolished kinship and replaced it with the polis, individualism, and contract. Roman
history was no different than Greek when it came to the “conflict between patria
potestas, the sacred and imprescriptible sovereignty of the family in its own affairs, and
the imperium militiae, the power vested in the military leaders over their troops” (AF,
xxxiii). When the empire replaced the republic, the state triumphed over traditional
kinship. Civil and religious life became one when Augustus was anointed Pontifex
Maximus, and the Institutes of Justinian codified the sovereign as the sole source of law
and above it. As Nisbet described the Roman family during this period, “By the fifth
century, the once-proud Roman family had been grounded down by the twin forces of
[the state’s policies of] centralization and atomization . . .” (AF, xxxiii).
The rediscovery of the Institutes of Justinian during the early modern period
greatly influenced the re-militarization of society; and with this re-militarization came
war, which in turn assisted in the state accumulating more power at the expense of
traditional communities (TA, 167). Under the conditions of war, these communities
became subordinated to the state, and “Only through the State’s penetration of traditional
social authorities to the individuals who live under them can its authority be said to be
manifest” (SB, 385). Individuals were to express their loyalty and identity first and
foremost to the state rather than to their kin, church, or local association. As Nisbet had
observed, war provides the most intense sense of community among its members, “the
kind of community that is brought into existence by emergency and then reinforced by
shared values and emotions which reach the depth of human nature” (P, 309). But this
new sense of community was at the price of the traditional ones, with innovation and
invention replacing custom and tradition (P, 309-11). Over time, “we see the passage of
the State from an exclusively military association to one incorporating almost every
aspect of human life” (QC, 101).
Besides the state’s penetration into traditional communities, the condition of war
also promoted the democratization of society: “Democracy, in all its variants, is the child
of war” (P, 312) . As Nisbet recounted, the Cleisthenan Reforms created the first
democracy, Imperial Rome furnished entitlements to its citizens, and the first mass
infantry was formed during the late Middle Ages and had a direct affect on modern
democracy’s notion of egalitarianism. Once a society had become democratized, it had an
affect on the nature of war, with twentieth conflicts identified with popular and moral
aspirations. As Nisbet observed, “When the goals and values of a war are popular both in
the sense of mass participation and spiritual devotion, the historic, institutional limits
war tend to recede further and further into the void” (QC, 39). War now had become a
type of crusade in the name of the nation, with its martial character more intense and
reach greater in range because it had become more popular.
The affinity between the conditions of war and the democratization of society led
to the state’s centralization of power. The state’s removal of intermediate political and
civil institutions created a condition in which men were equal in role, status, and
function. In Nisbet’s words, “the very centralization of monarchical and State power
could not help but create the conditions for a growing interest in personal equality” (QC,
107). By restricting the authority and power of intermediate institutions, the state can
stress “upon the impersonality and equality of the law, to create a scene in which many
traditional medieval inequalities had to be diminished” (QC, 108). The state’s
centralization of power promoted a passion of equality among its citizens where “All that
has magnified equality of condition has necessarily tended to abolish or diminish the
buffers to central power which are constituted by social classes, kindreds, guilds, and
other groups whose virtual essence is hierarchy” (TA, 209). The flattening of hierarchies
in traditional communities resulted in a national community of equality where the state
becomes the sole source of power and authority.
The disappearance of traditional communities coincided with the rise of alienation
among citizens: the individual was “uprooted, alone, without secure status, cut off from
the community or any system of clear moral purpose” (ST, 265). People felt powerless to
influence their own lives or the lives of others and therefore withdrew from social and
political organizations (SB, 264-265). Lacking institutional resources, the individual had
to rely upon his own subjectivity to direct his life, which often collapsed either into a
philosophical relativism or hedonistic calculations. Instead of cultivating genuine
individuality and creativity, the individual took “mechanical roles he is forced to play,
none of them touching his innermost self but all of them separating man from this self,
leaving him, so to speak, existentially missing in action” (ST, 266). Without any
intermediate institutions, the individual viewed the state’s impersonal bureaucratic
institutions as remote, incomprehensible, and fraudulent.
In addition to acting as barrier to the state’s power, intermediate institutions
served as the venue to cultivate values such as love, honor, and loyalty that cannot be
taught effectively by the vast, distant, impersonal state. In fact, when the state attempted
to indoctrinate such values into its citizenry, the result was a degradation of traditional
dogmas, traditions, and values (TR, 130). Humans learn and acquire meaningful skills
and values in concrete contexts which only intermediate institutions, like the family or
churches, can furnish. Without such groups that point to higher purposes, humans reduce
their relationships to contractual ones, with property or currency being the common
denominator. Values of honor and loyalty become replaced with what Nisbet referred to
as the “cash nexus”: “Every act of service, responsibility, protection an aid to others is an
act presupposing or calling for monetary exchange, for cash payment” (PA, 86).
It should come to no surprise that the state’s centralization of power preceded and
made possible the existence of capitalism. Capitalism required the context of “a single
system of law, sanctioned by military power, to replace the innumberable competing laws
of guild, Church, and feudal principality” (QC, 105). The vast power of the state, and
therefore its attractiveness, was its ability to standardized objects and men, whether it was
currency, property, or rights. The imposition of uniformity upon both objects and men
For both Nisbet and Tocqueville, the rise of individualism and the state’s
concentration of power were not contradictory impulses in democratic societies but rather
complementary ones. Individualism – the mature and calm feeling that leads citizens to
withdraw from society in order to pursue their private affairs – was the greatest opponent
to liberty, especially in democracies where social and class structure was eliminated (at
least psychologically among the citizenry). With the equalization of inheritance,
democrats were forced to a life of economic independence, after which they had
achieved, led them to believe that they were masters of their own destinies. The ties to
intermediate institutions, the sentiments of obligation and loyalty, were transformed into
independence and self-interest (II: 104-106). Yet this newly-won independence became
subsumed under the politics of majority tyranny, because democratic citizens believed all
are endowed with an equal capacity for judging and evaluating truth. Thus, “the greater
truth should go with the greater number,” with “the majority its ministering prophet” in
politics (II: 11-12).
This new form of politics was aptly described by Foucault as “bio-politics,”
where the state guided and managed citizens according to a rational criterion of its own
determination.3 With the decline of intermediate institutions, the state slowly assumed the
role of supervising, structuring, and directing the lives of people. Under the “responsible
management” of the state, the citizen was reduced to a passive entity: individuals were
categorized by social sciences and then fitted into an assortment of institutions to better
serve the state. At the center of this process was an architecture of control with multiple
networks of power centers that treated citizens as objects and with nothing escaping its
surveillance. With its access to technology, a vast bureaucracy,and an ideology of
individualism and progress, the state now had acquired the capacities to equal its
ambition to implement a politics to affect an entire population. From birth to death, the
citizen’s life was under the administration of the state.
The emergence of the administrative despotic state usually occurred in times of
war, as Nisbet observed, “Most of the great wars in the modern West have been attended
by the gains in the political and social rights of citizenship as well as by increased
nationalism and centralization of power” (MM, 133). Creating a vast bureaucracy to
oversee its war objectives, the state not only penetrated into every aspect of society but
the “stifling regimentation and bureaucratic centralization of military organization is
becoming more and more the model of associative and leadership relationships in time of
peace and in nonmilitary organizations” (QC, 43). When citizens become reduced to
equal, homogeneous entities, the state can manipulate and incorporate them into its most
effective and efficient goals. Genuine individuality becomes replaced with timidity and
industry for the sake of the “national community.”

The emergence of the welfare state was an example of a bureaucracy modeled
after the efficiency of the military to further the state’s objectives. Social reforms such as
“the equalization of wealth, progressive taxation, nationalization of industries, the raising
of wages and improvements in working conditions, worker-management councils,
housing ventures, death taxes, unemployment insurance plans, pension plans, and the
enfranchisement of formerly voteless elements of the population” were administered by
the state. Furthermore, these social reforms were usually implemented during times of
war or in the name of war (QC, 40). According to Nisbet, 75 percent of all national
programs in the last two centuries in western countries have been designed to equalize
income, property, and opportunity that first arose out of the “war state and of the war
economy” (TA, 220).

After the United States was attacked by Al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001, the
Bush administration was in a position to centralize more power in the national
government because the state was at war. In the name of national security, civil liberties
were curtailed, the national bureaucracy expanded, and another war was justified. Rather
than being immune to the state’s drive for war, the United States under the Bush
Administration was merely another example of a state that expanded its power in an
ideology of exceptionalism and progress. As Nisbet noted, ideologies were the
justifications of a centralized, bureaucratic, national state. This transformation began in
war time conditions and has been sustained by subsequent wars in order support the
state’s ideology. The problem for society was that wars can be justified on ideology as
fed by intellectuals rather than evidence.
The Bush doctrine that emerged after September 11, 2001 “called for offensive
operations, including preemptive war against terrorists and their abetters, more
specifically against the regimes that had sponsored, encouraged, or merely tolerated any
‘terrorist group of global reach.’”7 Like Wilson, Bush’s foreign policy contained a moral
component in the promotion of democracy, as in the case of Iraq. The most articulate
justification of the Iraq War can be found in The National Security Presidential Directive
entitled “Iraq: Goals, Objectives, and Strategy” that the President signed on August 29,
2002.8 The United States’ objectives were to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, to
prevent Iraq from being a threat to regional stability,to liberate the Iraqi people from
tyranny, and to create a society based on pluralism and democracy. Undersecretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz believed that “it was necessary and it would be relatively easy”
to topple Saddam Hussein because, in Vice-President **** Cheney’s words, the United
States would be “greeted as liberators.”9
This ideology of exceptionalism and progress – that the rest of the world
eventually would become part of the liberal democratic and capitalist order – was the
centerpiece to the neo-conservative’s ideology.

...

By the nineteenth century, the concept of progress had degenerated into an article
of popular faith with the divine entirely disappeared. Social evolutionary theorists
dominated the age with their redefinition of progress as something completely natural,
directional, immanent, continuous, and necessary (SC, 168-188). Progress solely resided
in the realm of historical necessity that was accessible only by reason, and more
specifically, scientific reason. With the introduction of the comparative method, Western
civilization became measured against its own past as well as against other civilizations
were evaluated to determine the progress of human development. Unstated and assumed
was that contemporary Western civilization – alienated individuals, a centralized state, an
ideology of secularism – were the criteria against which other past and present
civilizations were to be measured against. This assumption would be exposed and
somewhat dismantled in the twentieth century after two World Wars and the rise of
postmodernism.

In its quest to create a national community, the state centralized power at the
expense of intermediate institutions with an ideology of individualism, secularism, and
progress. The introduction of egalitarianism into society destroyed the established
hierarchies of traditional communities and fostered alienation among citizens where they
have no recourse to fulfill their communal longing other than in the national state. The
result was individualism where people pursued private interests instead of public
obligation, leaving those tasks to intellectuals and bureaucrats. Not conceiving of
anything higher than the state, both the intellectual and bureaucrat promoted secularism
in order for the citizen to find meaning and significance in the realm of historical
necessity; and this history had become redefined as progressive where the state would
provide its citizens security and prosperity in the future.
The emergence of this ideology coincided with the state’s centralization of power
– a process that was accelerated in times of war. The destruction of intermediate
institutions and the removal of transcendence from the public sphere allowed the state to
defined wars in moral and spiritual terms; and the democratization of society enabled the
state to mobilize all resources of the population towards war, thereby making it a mass,
ideological movement. Rather than the exception, the United States has been exemplar of
these processes of democratization, centralization, and ideological justification. With its
belief in exceptionalism and progress, the United States since President Wilson has
conceived of history as one of necessity that inevitably will lead to liberal democracies
and free-market economies.
The ideology of “making the world safe for democracy” contained a statesanctioned
moralism that enabled the United States to justify its wars to its citizenry.
Wars are presented to the American public in ethical, moral, and sometimes even in
spiritual terms to rationalize the curtailment of civil liberties, the nationalization of
industries, or the monitoring of intermediate institutions. In the name of national security,
the state was permitted to centralize its power; and with the promise of progress, the state
was able to ask its citizens for sacrifice and commitment to its national cause. In the end,
we are left with Tocqueville’s administrative despotic state and Foucault’s “bio-politics”:
citizens are guided, supervised, and directed by the state from their birth to their death.
This ideology of individualism, secularism, and progress has even penetrated into
the American military establishment, with its belief that bureaucracies some day will be
able to guide and direct human events with perfect informational certainty. The practical
consequences of such a belief were investment into technology, weaponry, and
information systems instead of the cultivation of character and training of soldiers in
intermediate institutions, where such values as honor and loyalty were best developed. As
a consequence, the United States military was poorly prepared in confronting the new
type of conflicts that emphasized flexibility, prudence, and the propaganda of ideas.
Rather than relying upon a vast bureaucracy to control and dictate events, the United
States military was forced to reinvent itself to make decisions not by certainty of
information but from the contingency of events.
The inability for the United States military to diagnose the post-Iraqi situation
correctly was due to this ideology of individualism, secularism, and progress. The
emptying of transcendence from the public sphere has allowed ideologies to take its place
under progressive causes, like “making the world safe for democracy.” This process of
eliminating spiritual history from politics and society emerged during the early modern
period with the introduction of nature and reason as equal metaphysical and
epistemological realities to the realities of God and faith. By the nineteenth century,
reality was conceived solely in the realm of historical necessity that was given
significance and meaning by social evolutionary theorists and other ideologues. Progress
became an immanent process, which contents could be filled by anyone’s speculative
fantasy.
This removal of the Christian philosophy of history, with its two sets of account
as historical and spiritual, reduced reality into the single realm of historical necessity.
With this new condition, the re-introduction of religion into the public sphere now was
understood not in the spiritual realm but only in the historical one: the city of God has
been infused into the city of man. Spiritual progress became understood in the terms ofhistorical

progress. Thus, we should not doubt the sincerity of the religious declarations
of political and intellectual elites, but we should question in which city did they
understood their spiritual and religious views to be.
For Nisbet, significance and meaning in the realm of historical necessity was not
possible, because “Patterns, rhythms, trends are inescapably subjective. There is no
inherent relation to the data” (SC, 285). Theories, as found in social sciences, that claim
progress existed in history should be regarded as suspect. History was a series of discrete
events with no inherent, intelligible laws. Whether it was the bureaucrat or intellectual,
the attempt to discover such a meaning in history for Nisbet was hopeless.
The correction to this age of ideology was the recovery of the social sciences on
classical foundations in order to diagnose the fundamental problems of society. Nisbet
established the foundations of sociology on the traditions of political monism and social
pluralism, with his understanding of unit-ideas as the new basis of this discipline. By
taking into account culture, economics, and political factors into his methodology, Nisbet
was able to avoid the intellectual reductionism of neo-conservatives in understanding
reality, but he still was able to give preeminence to ideas as the primary motivating force
in history. Nisbet also avoided the speculative fantasies in his analysis because he
rejected the notion that history had any pattern or directional change inherent within it. In
this sense, Nisbet’s sociology was able to provide us a diagnosis of reality without
reductive analyses or extraordinary projections about it.
The quest for community was a permanent and constant one in human nature for
Nisbet, so any attempt to eradicate this desire was impossible. The question that
confronted him was where would this longing be fulfilled: in the state or in intermediate
institutions? Clearly for Nisbet, it was intermediate institutions like the family, the
church, and local associations. But for us, the problem is even more complicated because
we lack the conceptual apparatus to make sense of our own alienation in this age of
ideology. Nisbet also recognized this plight, which is why he sought to establish
sociology on the classical foundations of nature and transcendence. The challenge before
us now is whether we can follow in Nisbet’s footsteps.

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