who feel they have been left out can respond by listening to their problems and offering help to resolve them. But the leaders conversely can manipulate a political campaign of populism, which, after they become elected, can quickly morph into authoritarianism, and as Madeleine Albright has shown, a new form of fascism, only exacerbating the problem. This century also marks the most forced and uninvited cultural mixing in many countries due to massive displacement of different ethnic, national, racial, and religious groups, as refugees of war or the equivalent violent cultures, a cultural mixing that can be used by politicians to create fear.
As fear and authoritarianism oppose the growing pluralism or polarization in various countries, forms of absolutism become more solidified because of people’s inability or unwillingness to include others within their group. Sometimes people’s normal sensitivity to the basic human needs of others is bracketed out at least temporarily when they feel their vested interests are being possibly endangered. Here a detachment or hypothetical divestment of one’s peculiar if not happenstance interests and a sensitivity to others becomes imperative if humanity is to survive. It usually requires a re-evaluation of one’s values, honest dialog, and tolerance of difference.
Many national leaders, economic ideologies, political parties, and most religions tend toward absolutizing if not also becoming self-obsessed, although religions are usually the only groups that explicitly speak in absolutistic terms about their recognized authority. But they all have obstructed individuals’ freedom, sometimes gradually and subtly, perhaps at times unknowingly, but often even overtly and intentionally. Often, the more diversity is experienced and feared, the stronger are the absolutistic and authoritarian reactions against it, especially by religion. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have witnessed the most powerful intellectual and practical challenges to religions of the West, and have been met with new forms of authoritarianism and radically new means of indoctrination and violence, including terrorism.
Those who have the most power become the authorities. They often choose subtly or blatantly what they want to absolutize. By their delegated power, the leaders or “authorities” (whether political parties, government positions, corporate executives, religious institutions, or other) take over a huge system, and consciously or not determine the priorities of which laws or procedures or standards shall be the focus as well as the extent to which the “norms” need to be revised to meet their determined priorities. In order to absolutize both revisions as well as whatever parts of the inherited corpus they want to preserve, that body of law, tradition, and values must be presented apodictically, that is, not only as the best but totally and unconditionally incommensurable. It is not put up for a vote.
While fascism and autocracy are blatant opponents of a democracy, laws accommodating even a religious majoritarianism within a multicultural nation are also predictably inimical to the ideal of equality of all citizens. We have seen it in past ages in its violent manifestations in British–Indian and British–Irish relations. In fact, it still manifests itself in many countries such as India, where the majority Hindu population often feels threatened by the minority Hindus but especially by the minority Muslims. We have seen it recently in Myanmar where Buddhists drive Muslims out of the country. But religious majoritarianism is present in many other forms in countries around the world. Unfortunately, the weakened communal support many of the “majority” religion in the United States have experienced has left some of the most conservative feeling ever more “alienated,”6 even as victims.
Once people become convinced they have been marginalized and deprived of vital rights, they often react strongly. The attempts to counter this have been demonstrations of protest, revolutions, even “terrorism” committed against the perceived enemy. The need to give equal voice within a nation suffering from this malady has often itself turned out to be a mockery, with rigged elections or “emergency” political and military powers, which simply retain the present presumptuous leaders in place. Many “strongmen” national leaders today have learned new methods of dissembling, to stand for pluralism and equal voices of all, even for explicit democracy, while covertly undermining any of their citizens who differ with their deceitful tyranny.
The idea of allowing more voices into the mix itself often seems to these leaders only to suggest an unworkable plethora of opinions, dissatisfaction, and bitter criticism. But more than that, it poses a loss of power to those authorities. Of course, sometimes diversity of voices does bring inexperienced and unworthy leaders into a place of influence, making things even worse. Those occasions should not preclude the importance of a democracy’s adequate representation of its diversity. Meanwhile, even the economic majority or middle class may feel their freedoms as individuals continue to be truncated, while the leaders become more singularly powerful, simply forcing the middle class to accept an undesirable status quo, given off as the “best” society can expect, or blaming the lack of freedom on diversity per se.
If this raises the question of whether humans are capable of self-governance, most religions are quick to answer “No, humans are not capable!” and volunteer their Absolute as the answer. But should we not ask whether religious institutions are as involved, if not more, as in this reduction of personal freedom through their heteronomy and absolutizing as any agencies? Have they themselves become a chief element of the problem, since no institutions have been more absolutizing than most religions or more protective of their administrators or more secretive about their ethical mistakes? History reveals this; it is not mere cynicism to acknowledge that it has been true.
Countries rend themselves apart, with most of the intolerant adversaries issuing opposing claims of sole legitimacy based on ancient, outdated, and oversimplified ideologies and metaphysics of the past, that is, often using similar absolutizing retrospective interpretations, a method that they have actually opposed in those who uphold the status quo. Yes, that is irony. But many of these groups with ancient ideologies bear weapons from the future. Violence and wars are fought with neither respect nor formal declaration nor observable rules. Preemption, stealth, terror, torture, slavery, and inhumaneness reign. Tyrants order their forces to bomb schools and hospitals, threaten other nations with nuclear weapons, starve people with their children, or squelch the free press, even killing honest reporters. Do we need a universal ethic? Indeed! Do religions’ Absolutes only intensify the divisions in humanity?
Yet these leaders are even admired in some circles—by those who are only impressed with the exercise of authority or are adamant about retaining the status quo from which they have derived their disproportionate wealth or power. Disrespect, lying, and hatred of the “other” is thought to be justified by one’s feeling neglected, slighted, restricted, or left out—that is, feeling insufficient freedom or a least insufficient effectiveness. Suspicion, disrespect, and hatred of this often nebulous, different “other” can be even divinely approved by one’s sectarian reading of one’s own religion. But such hatred spawns more of the same.
It may seem anemic for this inquiry to address the question of absolutism vs. relativism, religion vs. humanization, heteronomy vs. autonomy, or whether people must negotiate from vested interests or a sense of equality. These may connote primarily private relationships, but they are not. All of these involve the most basic relating of one human to another, and then to multiple others in a social structure, so that the fairest and most obviously symbiotic relationship must first be established in one’s life and principles, one of honesty, trusting mutual autonomy, equal voice, and compromise.7 Where these are lacking, there is little hope for a peaceful or compatible family, state, nation, or world. Much of the present fabric of our cosmos seems to be unraveling as structures of trust and truth are replaced by suspicion and alternative “facts.”
Religions or any absolutized schemas cannot save humans from their ego-centered self-deceit, not as long as they operate “above reason”—in naive faith or sheer power. For those who doubt that religions that propose salvation, peace, integrity, and kindness are as responsible for or involved in the “collision” of values, Martin E. Marty’s When Faiths Collide (2005) is a good primer. Marty emphasizes that the divisiveness that is perpetuated or at least exacerbated by religions, with regard
