I just saw someone’s tweet talking about how the decline of nation is caused by religion and it got me thinking and also “ick”.
As per my understanding and my stance, the absence of shared frameworks of meaning weakens society’s ability to proactively respond to challenges. Thus, this absence drives reactivity response rather (optimize for short-term solution) than proactive response (optimize and invest in long-term survivability). Civilizations need some unifying narrative to transform challenges into growth (this is somewhat including religion, culture, history and such)
While that tweet seems much more had a nuanced segmented towards “Islam wrongdoings”, historically nor empirically, over the past century, one of several reasons why there were so many “anti-movement” or whatever labels that put hate towards “Islam” was due to the muslims have the inability to appreciate their own strength, comprehend the reality, and struggle to adjust to rapid change. Only with rational way, muslims to become proactive to shape the future (Ziauddin Sardar)
By all means, it’s not arguing or nor abandoning religion altogether, but rather the problem is epistemic stagnation1, not belief itself
The absence of religion it’s one of the main reasons why society or civilization by itself is declining. Some nuances and also footnotes to refute holistically to that argument:
- Unless, you have something that equally binding or replace those religion with: strong philosophy, proactive welfare states, solid humanism, deep ethics and per se, society’s maybe has the ability to proactively respond to challenges — even without or abandoned religion
- In many societies or even history-based, religion has provided narrative foresight such as framing sacrifice, patience, or collective responsibility → conclude by a remarks that “the fate of civilizations is determined by their response to the challenges facing them” (Arnold J. Toynbee)
- Followed by other narrative which I’d believe that the decline of societies is not because of the religion doing, but somehow caused by civilization itself couldn’t overcome the challenges, “We always exaggerating the role of religious and cultural value systems while underestimating the importance of economic factors in shaping civilization” (Arnold J. Toynbee)
- History should be viewed as an revolutionary process, which indicates religions it’s one of it (Francis Fukuyama). When seeing from this perspective, religion has a role as a “main driver” since it’s adaptive towards social changes and challenges, thus, socieities must concsiously replace its function rather than abandoning it altogether
- Pessimism about humanity’s future is warranted because of humanity’s inability to control technology, not just religious aspects (Soshana Zuboff). In this case, decline much more correlated with institutional decline, techological disruption, resources or economy extraction without provision for their renewal, and such
Recited from Quran verses (Ali-Imran:190-191), which it can be framed and emphasized as “Ulul-Albab”, those who reflect or think deeply could be the key to refute the argument that religion is the main cause of decline of nation. And honestly, it’s quite contradicts the stereotype “religion = anti-rationality” itself. The implicit argument should be decline happens when religion is reduced to ritual without substance
Blaming one/or few aspects of religion is easy
Rebuilding foresight and acknowledging complexity is hard
Wallahu A’lam Bishawab
Footnotes
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One of the main highlights from this research, the decline in intellectual curiosity and scientific production caused by the social world of Islam become destabilized, allowing extremist idelogies to take root and separate between rationality and that sense of making rational becomes fragmented. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0738059319306261 ↩