The Authoritarian Secularism of John Stuart Mill

I am constantly coming across new information that I should have been taught in college. For instance, my class covering European history from the French Revolution to World War I conveniently elided the atrocities of the Jacobins and the popular royalist uprising in the Vendee--despite the course being taught at a Jesuit university, with the fleur-de-lis everywhere. Such elisions were also common in how most of the original texts were taught. We were instructed in Plato's Republic without Aristotle's Politics, Rousseau's Social Contract without Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Alexander Hamilton's system of checks and balances without any thought at all given to the theory of the mixed constitution.

So I am not surprised when I come across enlightening interpretations and critiques of texts that would have been so helpful in classroom discussion, had I only known about them. Such an example is this riveting essay(in PDF format) by Georgetown's George W. Carey on John Stuart Mill's religious propensities and antipathies. It turns out that Mill was not a typical indifferentist British subject, but in fact believed in a version of Comte's "religion" of postivism. His writings, therefore, are truly to be read as fundamentally subversive of "that old-time religion." The contradictions within his corpus are but the inconsistencies of a propagandist who wishes to overturn gradually the order of things, without revealing his true sympathies in public.

In a paragraph that might make even the most stalwart Objectivist reassess his disdain for "altruistic" Christianity, we see Mill criticize Christendom for not being altruistic enough:

His most basic criticism of Christianity—one that fit in very well with his “strategic” plans for promoting the ascendency of his Religion of Humanity—was what he took to be its inherent selfishness. In Mill’s view, [Linda] Raeder writes[in _John Stuart Mill and the Religion of Humanity_], “Christian ethics, whose conception of divinely administered rewards and punishments, as well as its emphasis on personal salvation, taints moral action by encouraging self-interested behavior
or outright selfishness.” This selfishness, moreover, ran counter to the very goal he sought, namely, a society in which altruism, fueled by “social feeling,” would flourish. Indeed, she observes, he perceived a basic “moral dichotomy between the evil of the selfish (associated with Christianity) and the good of the social (associated with the Religion of Humanity).”

And here's Mill noting his explicit, though indirect, attack on regnant Christianity in Britain:

Raeder, it is important to understand, is not engaging in “secret reading”; she takes pains to document her charge throughout, using Mill’s own words. Her task in this regard is not at all difficult because Mill is quite open in his correspondence with Comte on this matter. On one occasion, he writes, “Today, I believe, one ought to keep total silence on the question of religion when writing for an English audience, though indirectly one may strike any blow one wishes at religious beliefs.” On another, “You are doubtless aware that here [in England] an author who should openly admit to antireligious or even antichristian opinions, would compromise not only his social position, which I feel myself capable of sacrificing to a sufficiently high objective, but also, and this would be more serious, his chance of being read.” Mill goes so far as to inform Comte not to take his treatment of “philosophical issues” in his soon to be published Logic at face value because he was “forced” to make “concessions . . . to the prevailing attitudes of my country.” In discussing the prudence of publishing one of Comte’s pamphlets in England, he again cautions: “The time has not yet come when we in England shall be able to direct open attacks on theology, including Christian theology, without compromising our cause.” The pamphlet’s message, he concludes, “would turn away a great number of minds from positivism.”

And we see a foreshadowing of the humanitarian welfare-warfare state:

Mill even attributed the belief in life after death to the widespread recognition of the injustice of this world. For him, this irreconcilability was self-evident; it was the basis for most of his thrusts against traditional religion. It also justified massive human intervention, guided by a moral framework of distinctly human origins, to remedy the wrongs.

Claes G. Ryn, in his America the Virtuous(extensive post on Ryn hopefully coming soon), has alerted me to the unpleasant fact that for most putatively conservative ideals there are revolutionary interpretations thereof. Free speech is one ideal that, though it can be supported by conservative arguments, can also be supported by the most radical of agitators. Here's evidence that Mill speaks of freedom of discussion in the revolutionary sense:

While Raeder deals extensively with other arguments in Utilitarianism that bear upon Mill’s design, enough has been said to indicate that On Liberty must be interpreted anew. To understand one of its major purposes, Raeder believes, we would do well to recur to Saint-Simon’s belief that “liberty of discussion [is] an indispensable element of the transitional stage, essential for the destruction
of old beliefs and the engendering of new truths of the organic age aborning.” Along with Hamburger, Raeder sees Mill employing Saint-Simon’s tactic in On Liberty by advocating “the absolute freedom of discussion that would prove fatal to the preservation of traditional religious belief.” She also sees, particularly
in Mill’s criticisms of Christianity that abound, a veiled effort to advance his Religion of Humanity. Viewed from this perspective, the frequently noted inconsistencies in Mill’s argument vanish. For instance, Raeder observes, Mill championed “a general freedom not, as it appears and is generally thought, from the restraints of all social conventions, but merely from convention and custom derived
from traditional religion.” In this regard, and as we might expect from our knowledge of his ultimate goal, Raeder calls attention to the fact that he “was far from averse to employing the social sanction of public opinion in suppressing what he regarded as socially undesirable (‘selfish’) behavior and encouraging what he regarded as its opposite (‘altruism’).”

And Professor Carey notes the impact that Mill's fellow travelers have had in America:

Leaving to one side what Mill’s impact has been, it seems clear that the United States has, since the emergence of Progressivism, followed the path Mill marked out. Our politics has been thoroughly secularized; we now have, as Raeder puts it, “a centralized government charged with godlike power and duties and the thoroughgoing politicization of social life. Modern government has replaced God as the object of petition and the bestower of blessings.” The collective good and service for humanity have taken on all the force of “religious” obligations for the modern American liberal.

Mill's altruism, of course, has failed to materialize. His altruism is but a walking shadow of Christian love, and his works have only promoted the rise of a distant, impersonal governmental bureaucracy that cannot love at all.