Building Religions 32: Michel Foucault

There is nothing overtly religious about Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. It's primarily a history of penal systems, but although its focus is almost entirely secular, it enjoys some popularity among scholars of religion for the theories that he develops out of that history. Foucault's larger body of work does address religion more specifically (there's even a collection of his essays on the subject), but here, I would like to look at this one book as an example of how tangentially-connected material can inspire new ideas for worldbuilding.

The main thesis of Discipline and Punish is that the approach to dealing with criminality has changed over time from a system of exacting retribution on behalf of the monarch to one of correcting individual behaviour. In other words, it has gone from a method of punishment to one of enforcing internal discipline. In the Middle Ages, he claims, crimes were seen as an offence against the ruling authority; as such, they were met with violent force in the form of substitutes for the monarch protecting the rights of rulership. Slightly later, the population would be reminded of the potential for that force through secondary images (bodies in gibbets, illustrations of punishment in cities, proclamations of penalties carried out). Still later, when codes of law became more formal and less personal, the attitude was that punishments were the result of invisible natural laws, as inviolable as those of physics: commit a crime and suffer the results, seemingly without any human intervention.

Attending this transformation of punishment was the reimagining of the criminal himself. No longer was a criminal an individual who had simply offended the monarch; he was a type of person, someone whose flaws had to be identified and corrected through rehabilitation. This leads to the second part of Foucault's argument: that the penal system has changed over the centuries into a method by which criminals are identified, classified, and re-educated to fit with the values of society at large.

And this is where it gets interesting.

One of the first points that Foucault makes in Discipline and Punish is that power and knowledge are linked together. The power to classify people is a form of political power, so that if you can organize individuals into castes, groups, or subcultures, you can exert dominance over them. In other posts, I've mentioned that one of the roles of religion is to help establish categories through which to understand the world; applying Foucault's power-knowledge theory to that gives the caretakers of religion—the priesthood—influence not only over how people perceive their surroundings, but how they treat others in it. By labelling a group as barbaric, unclean, heretical, or simply less human than another group, the priesthood can alter political relations within society. Moreover, because this kind of labelling is treated as part of the divinely-established structure of the cosmos, it can act as an invisible sort of power, seemingly separate from the people who use it.

In the latter part of Discipline and Punish, Foucault looks at the invention of the Panopticon, a form of penal architecture in which prisoners' cells are arranged in a circle around a central tower in which a guard is able to observe them without being observed himself. Part of the effectiveness of this structure, he argues, is that the prisoners come to accept that they are always being watched, even if they can't see the guard—even, in fact, if the guard isn't present. Prisoners gradually internalize the idea of constant observation until they begin to regulate their own behaviour, never knowing whether or not they are under scrutiny from the unseen guards.

This system can work as a nice parallel to any religious belief in an omniscient, judging deity. If followers of the religion, like the prisoners in the Panopticon, believe that their actions are always being observed, they will act accordingly. If they do break the (moral or ritual) rules of the religion, they will do so with the knowledge that they have been observed doing so, and will accept the guilt that comes with that knowledge. Whether the deity ever intervenes to punish the crime is of no importance; the internalized belief is enough to prevent most people from straying.

So: these are two basic ideas that you can borrow from Foucault and apply to your own work. Again, I'll stress that they come from a book that isn't about religion at all, but about social structures that arose independently. If you're looking for inspiration in your writing, don't limit yourself to strictly religious sources. You can find ideas nearly everywhere.