These are notes from a lecture I presented on “Religion In the Maxim Society” in Ron Howard’s class on Voluntary Social Systems (no class website that I could find).
In case you’re wondering, a maxim society is one in which every law flows from the maxim that “peaceful, honest people have a right to be left alone.” It is a theoretical society without any coercion and with maximal freedom. If you weren’t in the class, this won’t make much sense to you–my apologies. I put this online to help out the students from the class, not to educate the Internet at large about my hypothetical musings on theoretical societies.
If you were in the class, these notes should be close to what I said but not completely identical. Two reasons: I didn’t deliver my notes verbatim and I tweaked one or two points in response to some of the questions that let me know where I had been unclear. Also, in these notes I have attempted to provide all my sources and to hyperlink any references to make it easy to check me out.
Academics Often Ignore Religion (foolishly)
In the world of academics, religion is often overlooked. This point is illustrated quite strikingly by British economist Ernst Schumacher in the opening lines of his book A Guide For the Perplexed:
On a visit to Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. From where I stood, I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace of them on my map. When finally an interpreter came to help me, he said: “We don’t show churches on our maps.” Contradicting him, I pointed to one that was very clearly marked. “That is a museum,” he said, “not what we call a ‘living church.’ It is only the ‘living churches’ we don’t show.”
It then occurred to me that this was not the first time I had been given a map which failed to show many things I could see right in front of my eyes. All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no interpreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps. (E.F. Schumacher, A Guide For the Perplexed page 1)
Today I want to help you take a look at the likely nature of religion in a society in which all laws flow from the maxim, “Peaceful, honest people have the right to be left alone.”
Or, to flesh out the terms in the maxim: “People who do not use force on others and who fulfill their contractual obligations to others have the right to not be coerced.”
Such a society is a staple in the genre of science fiction. As a science fiction fan, I’m always amazed at the widespread assumption in such tales that religion will have at most a marginal role in future societies, and that if religion does survive it will be in a virtually unrecognizable form.
The reasons for such an assumption are myriad, and I could spend the rest of this class period raising and countering them.
I’ll give you just two reasons why such an assumption is naïve.
Continue reading “Religion and the Maxim Society”
This Wednesday Paula and I drove up to Sparks, NV to preach at