Bunting on Buddhism and Burma

Madeleine Bunting suggests that events in Burma might 'help challenge the generalisation that religious belief can never play a positive role in politics'. She writes:

It's a welcome and inspiring contrast to the last few years of religiously inspired violence. After several years in which we have seen faith used to justify and legitimise violence across the globe, this offers the other side of the story - how faith can be a powerfully positive force in political life.

And then the inevitable twisting of the knife:

So one cannot help but wonder quite how the batch of critics of religion will interpret the role of the Buddhist monks. Christopher Hitchens has recently argued that religion poisons everything and goes on to insist that no progressive political movement has had any religious influence. He insists that a figure like Martin Luther King Jr was in no real sense a Christian. How will he explain the Burmese monks? Will Richard Dawkins accuse these monks of child abuse for encouraging young boys to join their monasteries?

Actually, Dawkins is on record as believing that Buddhism is better regarded as an ethical system or philosophy of life than as a religion: but Bunting has anticipated him there, declaring this to be 'an old and tired debate'. But is it? Buddhism is qualitatively different from the religions that Dawkins attacks in The God Delusion, because it isn't based on belief in a personal, creator god - which for Dawkins, is the root of religion's problems.

Not that Buddhism doesn't have a less attractive, superstitious side. In a footnote to his book, Dawkins quotes a report by Julia Sweeney of her conversation with a woman caring for a disabled boy in Thailand, in which the latter suggests that sympathy for the child is uncalled for since 'he must have done something terrible in a past life to be born this way'. As for Bunting's throwaway line about boy monks and child abuse: surely it's at least debatable whether removing children from their parents at a very young age and raising them in a closed institutional environment is entirely a good thing?

And without denying the bravery of the Burmese protestors, let's not get all starry-eyed about the political role played by Buddhist monks. As Sunny reported here, some Buddhist monks are non-violent, others violent and pro-war. And the support of Zen Buddhist monks for Japanese militarism and imperialism is a matter of record.

But hang on: hasn't Bunting used a straw man to trick us into arguing on her own ground? Who has ever denied that religion can sometimes play a positive role in politics? Far from being the 'generalisation' that Bunting claims, this is surely a minority view, even among secularists and atheists. As is usual with straw man arguments, there are no quotes to back it up, no references for us to check.

In fact, what secularists and atheists like Dawkins argue is not that religion has no role to play in political or public life (unlike many religious believers, secularists tend to be rather passionate about freedom of expression). Rather, they maintain that religion should not be accorded a privileged role - of the kind that it enjoys in Britain, where bishops sit in the upper legislative chamber, schools inculcating belief (but not those promoting secular openmindedness) enjoy government funding, religious representatives are routinely invited onto policy commissions, and religious commentators have guaranteed slots on TV and radio.

As one commenter at CiF has pointed out, being on the right side in a political struggle doesn't make a movement intrinsically virtuous (apparently even drug barons have opposed the regime in Burma), and it certainly doesn't give it a monopoly on virtue. There are believers and unbelievers on both sides in most political contests (another commenter reminds us that Burma is officially Buddhist and therefore it's likely that some regime members are as 'religious' as those who oppose them). Nor does a single virtuous action necessarily mean that the entire religion is, of itself, a good thing. It certainly doesn't make its beliefs 'true' - and as I've argued before, when it comes to religion, this (rather than whether it is positive, useful, life-enhancing, etc) is the only question that ultimately matters.

Bunting and Odone on faith schools

After last week's launch of a new campaign to outlaw educational segregation by faith and its vigorous welcome by Polly Toynbee, her Guardian colleague Madeleine Bunting responded yesterday with a lengthy defence of the 'strong ethos' provided by religious schools. Bunting's article was more even-handed and considered than many of her past outpourings, though it was shot through with her usual disillusionment with the modern world, as she bemoaned the 'desperate dearth of alternative narratives of transformation' in contemporary secular society.

Bunting's advocacy of faith schools clearly wasn't full-throated enough for her fellow liberal-Catholic-turned-Islamophile Cristina Odone, whose letter in today's paper contends that Bunting 'overlooks the impact these schools have on the Muslim community and in particular on Muslim girls'. Drawing on research appearing to show that state-sponsored faith schools 'increase the chances that low-income Muslim parents keep their daughters in schools', Odone argues that the alternative is parents withdrawing girls 'once they reach puberty, from what they regard as the dangerous playground culture of sex and violence found in secular state schools'. 

This is the kind of argument that looks conclusive on a first reading, but on reflection demands some serious unpacking. You'd need to look at the original research report to confirm whether these are the reasons that Muslim parents are actually giving for taking their teenage daughters out of school (rather than Odone's colourful interpretation of them). And even if this is the case, you'd need to ask whether their stated reasons correspond to their real reasons, or act as a convenient cover for them. Isn't it possible that there are other reasons (the kind you wouldn't necessarily share with a researcher), such as a belief in the segregation of the sexes at puberty, or a cultural prejudice against providing equal educational opportunities for girls? And if so, should the state bow to those beliefs and prejudices by funding religiously segregated schooling? Moreover, shouldn't the state both challenge misinformed generalisations about a 'dangerous playground culture' in state schools, and at the same time work to transform that culture so as to make it welcoming to all cultural groups, rather than simply giving in and accepting their self-exclusion?

Odone goes on to suggest that 'for young people who cherish Islam, the secular culture they experience in state schools can prove profoundly alienating.' But like it or not, it's a secular culture (meaning plural, multi-faith, open to a range of ideas) that we live in, and school is a key site for learning to flourish within it. And the roots of alienation may lie as much in the attitudes to secular society being inculcated at home or mosque as in the experience of school. Being schooled only with people from your own faith will surely increase rather than overcome that sense of alienation. 

Tories see red

These are strange times indeed, when David Cameron's latest policy guru is an advocate of 'red Toryism' who criticises Thatcherism and advocates policies based on social justice. Philip Blond is an academic theologian whose work (which is also scathing about Labour's managerial welfarism) has deliberate echoes of the 'third way' between socialism and capitalism advocated by early 20th century Catholic thinkers such as G.K. Chesteron and Hilaire Belloc. Interestingly, the 'distributism' that these writers advocated was as influential on the left (influencing Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement) as it was on the right.

Credit where it's due: the oft-derided Madeleine Bunting has written a fair and balanced article about Blond's ideas, and the interest they are currently stirring up on the left as well as the right of British politics (Jon Cruddas is apparently a fan). She even anticipates the objection that many liberals will have to this revival of conservative communitarianism - that it has a tendency to mutate into authoritarianism (Chesterton and Belloc were both admirers of Mussolini) - suggesting that Blond needs to sharpen up his thinking in this area.

I'd never heard of Blond before, but after reading Bunting's piece I looked him up. It was refreshing, in these bland multi-faith times, to discover that he has produced a thoughtful critique of Islam which many secularists would agree with, and can't be dismissed as simply a product of inter-faith rivalry. Rather less appealingly, he has also argued that only 'real' faith, rather than secularism, can combat the rise of religious fundamentalism.

The combination of faith, conservatism and communitarianism offers a heady mix that could prove very appealing in a time of economic uncertainty and political disillusionment. But the hostility to liberalism, secularism and individualism that goes along with it should be cause for concern. As Bunting suggests, we've been here before. When you add in the tendency of the original distributists to reject modern civilisation (leading distributist Fr. Vincent McNabb believed that 'The city is the graveyard of religion and the machine age is the doom of mankind'), then you have a beguiling but dangerous cocktail. I note that Bunting's fellow anti-modern pessimist, John Gray, is also a Blond fan...

Update

Blond on Blond: the man of the moment has written a letter to the Guardian, pointing out what he regards as a few inaccuracies in Bunting's article. He argues that the localism he advocates is the enemy of fascism, and claims that Chesterton and Belloc were 'Edwardian liberals' rather than conservatives, and refutes suggestions that both were antisemites. And he denies that his emphasis on community overrides a belief in individual freedom: 'I am utterly opposed to any kind of social authoritarianism'.

Restrained and unrestrained anti-secularism

Last week I took issue with William Dalrymple over his comparison of current western foreign policy with the travails of the British Empire in the 19th century. I mentioned that Dalrymple was one of a number of liberal Catholic commentators who can often be found these days either trying to 'understand' the root causes of Islamist outrage, or alternately engaging in tirades against contemporary secularism. (Isn't it interesting how those two tendencies frequently go together?)

This weekend saw articles in the media by two other members of this loose-knit group: Madeline Bunting and Cristina Odone, writing in The Guardian and The Observer respectively.

Credit where credit's due: Bunting's article was one of her more balanced pieces and was refreshingly free from her usual tendency to condemn as an 'Enlightenment fundamentalist' or 'aggressive liberal' anyone who dares to criticise any aspect of contemporary Islam. Mind you, she was interviewing Ed Husain about his new book The Islamist and it would have been difficult to take issues with criticisms of Islam voiced by a practising Muslim, and what's more one who has inside experience of fundamentalist Islamism. So most of the article is a fairly accurate account of Husain's experience and of his own conclusions from it.

Bunting reins in her usual attitudes with admirable restraint until the very last paragraph, when she can't resist this gentle dig at her interviewee:

One suspects the naivety which took him into Hizb-ut Tahrir has blinded him as to how his story will be used to buttress positions hostile to many things he holds dear - his own faith and racial tolerance, for example. A glance at the blog response to a Husain piece in the Telegraph reveals how rightwing racism and anti-Islamic sentiment are feasting on his testimony.

I find this suspicion of naivety faintly patronising and reminiscent of some of the reviews of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book, which also appeared to suggest that Muslims who criticise Islam are somehow responsible for how their opinions are received - and should maybe think twice before speaking out. Bunting's comment about the blog response may be accurate but she never allows that there might be a legitimate liberal, non-racist critique of aspects of Islam.

Odone's piece, in which she reflects on a recent encounter with Richard Dawkins, is much less nuanced. She tries to pin on him the kind of labels - dogmatic, extremist - that he attaches to religious believers. In other words, this is another of those attempts to characterise atheists and secularists as being just as 'fundamentalist' as those they oppose. The article starts to go badly wrong when Odone calls Dawkins a 'secular extremist', thus making the familiar but lazy confusion of atheism with secularism. How often does it have to be pointed out that you don't have to be an atheist to believe that in a modern, liberal and plural society, religion should not have a privileged place in the public sphere? And 'extreme' though he may be in his views, the implicit parallel with religious extremism doesn't work because Dawkins doesn't seek to impose his views with threats and violence.

Odone's confusion leads her to the peculiar conclusion that Dawkins' public criticisms of religion are somehow a threat to religious freedom. She thinks secularists and atheists aren't much of a danger in the US, where they're heavily outnumbered by believers. However:

In secular Britain, faith-bashing carries far more resonance and risks causing far greater damage. In this country, belief is a minority practice and believers a persecuted lot. The rabid attacks by Dawkins and his camp-followers spur even the most mild-mannered Christian, Muslim or Jew into a hard-line position.

This is overwrought in the extreme. Is Odone saying that atheists like Dawkins shouldn't be allowed a public platform because it might upset believers? And exactly what kind of 'damage' can a few books and TV programmes do to 'faith'? As for the statement that believers are a persecuted minority: well, we've been here before and, in a country of state-funded faith schools and bishops in the Lords, it hardly deserves a serious response.

But it's the final sentence in this paragraph, in which Odone spells out what she means by 'causing...damage', that is the most astonishing. She seems to be saying that non-believers shouldn't speak out because it might provoke otherwise 'mild-mannered' believers to take a 'hard-line' position. Oh, I see: if reactionary Christians get a TV programme taken off, or conservative Sikhs force a play to be cancelled, or fundamentalist Muslims threaten death over a few cartoons - then it's not their fault, it's the fault of those unbelievers like Dawkins who dare to disagree with them. What a strange argument to find articulated in a liberal newspaper!

It gets worse:

(T)he only hope for tolerance is for him to publish a stream of new titles - The God Solution, The Selfless Gene - and address cosy church groups as an apostate who has seen the light. With their loudest persecutor silenced, believers would see no need for hard-line posturing. They would once again feel like ordinary citizens rather than a hunted species that must bare its fangs to survive.

So religious fundamentalism is all Dawkins' fault. And what about that final sentence: believers a 'hunted species'. By whom? When was the last time a believer had to go into hiding because of death threats from atheists or secularists? As for 'bare its fangs', now that's threatening language. And how incredibly aggressive for a column written from a supposedly christian perspective.

As I've often wondered before: whatever happened to the 'liberal' in liberal Christianity?

We're all doomed

Another inspired pairing from the Guardian: Madeleine Bunting on Oliver James. One cultural pessimist reviewing another. In fact, Bunting is less fulsome about James' latest prophecy of doom than one might have expected, though she doesn't dispute his central thesis that people are generally less happy than they were a generation ago and that modern liberal capitalism is to blame. 

I find it difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is about Oliver James' ideas that I find so deeply annoying. Perhaps it's the de-contextualised positivist psychology which assumes that 'happiness' is an objective and quantifiable 'something' that you can measure scientifically, and with an unchanging meaning that means you can compare surveys taken 50 years apart in very different social circumstances. Or it could be the hint of class condescension - perhaps more evident in James' supporters such as Bunting - that seeks to deny the huge improvements in physical and emotional well-being experienced by the mass of the population, as a result of the material and social advances of recent times. (When members of my grandparents' generation told researchers they were 'happy' with their lot, they may have simply been reflecting the limited expectations that had been bred into them in an unequal society.) But it's probably just my irritation at hearing James recycle his non-analysis of the supposed sins of 'Blatcherism' (geddit?) in every interview, like a schoolboy repeating a joke that he's ever so proud of but which nobody else finds funny or original.

Anyway, it was heartening to see James' theories finally getting the drubbing they deserve from Oliver Kamm here.

The rhetoric of evasion revisited: strange logic in the gender segregation debate

The other day I was bemoaning the absence of Madeleine Bunting from the pages of The Guardian. Regular readers of Normblog will remember Our Maddy of the Sorrows (© Norman Geras circa 2005) as the leading exponent of a certain kind of world-weary, anti-Enlightenment 'liberalism', which often included a perverse desire to understand (what Norm, in her honour, dubbed ‘mbunderstanding’) the actions of religious fundamentalists.

But hey, who needs Madeleine Bunting when we’ve still got Priyamvada Gopal? Like Bunting, Gopal, a lecturer in English at Cambridge University, has a reputation for writing Guardian columns in which she ties herself in rhetorical knots defending the indefensible. Norm wrote about her efforts here, here, here, here, here and here, while my own humble attempts to understand Gopalian logic can be found here, here and here.

It was only a matter of time, surely, before Ms Gopal weighed into the debate about gender segregation in British universities. If you’ve ever wondered how a secular, liberal feminist might end up supporting the right of religious fundamentalists to segregate men and women in a place of higher learning, then you need look no further than her article about the issue, published earlier this week, not in the Guardian for a change, but (perhaps surprisingly) by the New Humanist.

Actually, the article is really an object lesson in how to avoid engaging with a contentious issue. Rather than taking on the arguments of the anti-segregation campaigners, or suggesting counter-arguments, Gopal uses some familiar rhetorical strategies to ensure that she doesn’t have to, which include:

Delegitimising the opposition

Gopal takes up a lot of space in this short piece, and certainly expends a great deal of linguistic energy, portraying those who campaigned against gender segregation in a negative light. She argues that the campaign has taken place in a context ‘heavily shaped by an intolerant Western 'liberalism’ passing itself off as ‘secular’, ‘enlightened’ and more knowing-than-thou.’ One wonders who she is talking about here: who exactly are these liberals who are somehow also ‘intolerant’ (how does that work?), who are only pretending to be secular and enlightened (so what are they really: religious, and living in the Dark Ages?), and who claim superior knowledge? Can we have some names, perhaps?

Having erected this straw man, Gopal moves on to specific accusations against those involved in the recent campaign. Her main target is Student Rights, which we learn is ‘an offshoot of the bullishly paternalist Euro-American think tank, the Henry Jackson Society’ and a ‘reactionary and opportunistic formation’ which has ‘cynically’ seized on this issue. Elsewhere she describes their campaign as ‘aggressive’, though she doesn’t substantiate this accusation. In fact, Student Rights was only one of a number of organisations taking part in the campaign, and hardly played a leading role, but it makes a very convenient scapegoat, especially as it can be tarnished with the brush of being both pro-American and right-wing. Never mind that many of those arguing against the ruling by Universities UK were non-western feminists. Later in the article, Gopal characterises the anti-segregationists as ‘so-called "muscular liberals" (generally, in fact, deeply conservative white males with a commitment to the idea that West is Best)’.  This will come as a surprise to Maryam Namazie and the other left-wing, non-white, female activists who played a leading role in the campaign. And once again there’s that completely unfounded suggestion that liberals who oppose religious fundamentalism are somehow patronising and superior, when there’s not an iota of evidence to support this.

By falsely linking her opponents with everything that her intended audience can be assumed to be against – America, conservatism, a certain kind of sexist masculinity (‘bullish…muscular…paternalist’) – Gopal seeks to undermine their arguments without ever having to confront them.

Changing the subject

Rather than take on the arguments of the anti-segregation campaigners, Gopal hurriedly moves the discussion on to a different set of issues. She claims that ‘the group’ – presumably she means Student Rights – ‘has not addressed greater gendered problems on campus, such as the pay gap or sexual violence’ and has been ‘silent about far more widespread forms of gender and economic segregation including the private, often single-gender schools for the wealthy’.  But Student Rights was set up explicitly to combat extremism on campus, not to tackle these other issues. Nevertheless, many of the other activists involved in the current campaign do have a good record of fighting against wider institutional sexism and inequality. But even if they didn’t, would that mean they weren’t allowed to discuss this example of gender discrimination? It's rather like criticising Rosa Parks for highlighting the issue of racial segregation on buses in the American South in the 1950s, rather than focusing her attention on the 'real' issues of black poverty and inequality. It’s a strange and self-serving kind of logic. 

Off-limits to outsiders

Gopal’s third rhetorical avoidance strategy is to suggest that those who campaign against gender segregation don’t really have the right to do so. Having established her own cultural street cred (‘I grew up in a context where gender segregation in many public spaces is common’) she adds: ‘It did not take the proverbial "decent, nice, liberal" Europeans to get us to ask what segregation meant in both ideological and institutional terms’. It sounds like Gopal is saying that western liberals and feminists should keep quiet about discrimination within minority communities. She bolsters this by characterising criticism of cultural practices – such as segregating men and women – as ‘selective attacks on our communities’. Elsewhere, Gopal accuses the anti-segregation lobby of ‘targeting’ Islamic student groups – when of course, these are the only groups that are actually enforcing segregation. Somewhere, buried in the dense and tortuous final paragraph of her article, is an appeal to women from minority communities to ‘express a dissenting view’ from religious traditionalists. At least I think that’s what she’s saying. But it's so wrapped up in qualifying clauses, and tangled up in the message to outsiders to mind their own business, that it gets lost in the thickening rhetorical fog.

Gopal’s smearing of the anti-segregation campaigners as a bunch of condescending white male conservatives is given the lie by two other contributions to the debate that appeared this week – both  written by women, one a secular white feminist, the other a liberal Muslim. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown offered her critique of the pro-segregation ruling here and celebrated its defeat here. Ophelia Benson takes Pryamvada Gopal’s arguments apart here and here. Ophelia ends with this appeal to Gopal:

Liberal universalists are not your enemy. We’re not the ones who think you should be at home instead of teaching at Cambridge … Why… are you ignoring Maryam Namazie and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Abhishek Phadnis and focusing on Student Rights who had nothing to do with the protest against gender segregation? Why are you ignoring the very possibility of international solidarity, and the reality of it that is so conspicuous in everything Maryam does? What the hell do you think that accomplishes? Why not drop the fake accusations of imperialism and just join Maryam and the rest?

Why not, indeed.

Scandals and secularism

The revelations of industrial-scale child abuse in Catholic-run institutions in Ireland are truly horrifying. The victims have been made to suffer terribly, firstly as children who were physically and sexually abused, then as adults, trying to have their stories believed and the perpetrators held to account. Needless to say, the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse is a massive body-blow to the reputation of the Catholic Church. Not only did clerical and lay church personnel commit unforgivable crimes against defenceless children, but their superiors covered up their offences and did little to stop them.

However, I disagree with those who regard the scandal as evidence for atheism. One of my bugbears, as regular readers will know, is the tendency of contemporary religious apologists to defend faith on the grounds of its personal and social usefulness, rather than its truthfulness. And one of my criticisms of some anti-theists is the way they muddle up arguments against the claims of religion with endless lists of the shortcomings of religious individuals and institutions.

To me, this has always seemed like a pointless and unresolvable argument. For every scandal I cite, you can produce a saint; for every rabid fundamentalist I mention, you will point to a thoughtful religious philosopher; for every authoritarian reactionary, a nice Christian liberal, and so on. But if we’re going to argue that the example of saintly believers doesn’t prove that Christianity is true, then equally we have to accept that the existence of wrongdoing by some believers - even wrongdoing as dreadful as revealed in the Irish child abuse scandal - isn't a clincher for unbelief either.

I don't say this very often, but Madeleine Bunting has actually written a half-decent article about the whole sorry affair, from the perspective of a Catholic whose faith has been sorely tested by this and other recent clerical abuses. She writes: 'For years now, I've had an intermittent conversation with an admirable and devout relative: How long can we hang on? When do our fingernails break?' A number of commenters on the article urge Bunting to let go and make the break with Catholicism. But surely the only valid reason for leaving a religious organisation is that you no longer agree with its core beliefs, not because of the antics (however terrible) of some of its representatives? In this sense, a church is unlike a political party, where beliefs have to be shown to 'work' to be valid. When Krushchev revealed the crimes of the Stalin era in the 1950s, thousands forsook Communism because the revelations demonstrated (in their eyes) that this political creed led not to liberty but to tyranny. Religious faith, by contrast, depends on the acceptance of core beliefs about the nature of the world and the purpose of life, and these aren't necessarily invalidated (though they may be tested to the limits) by the actions of its adherents.

However, even if it's not an argument for atheism, the Irish child abuse scandal is certainly an argument for secularism. One of the reasons why the abuse was able to continue for so long, and be covered up so effectively, is that the state virtually contracted out the care and rehabilitation of troubled and troublesome children to the Church, and allowed the values and priorities of the Church to stand in for those of the nation. The scandal should give pause to those who argue for 'faith-based' welfare as a viable alternative to state-run services.

As well as reinforcing calls for a stricter separation of church and state, the affair might also have the positive outcome of inducing a little humility in religious spokespeople, especially those who have the gall to suggest that secularists and atheists are 'not fully human'. Come to think of it, that's a pretty good description of those devoutly religious people who beat and raped children in Irish children's homes.

The Catholic blogosphere has been strangely silent about the whole affair so far. I'd be really interested to read the reflections of thoughtful Catholic bloggers, such as Martin M and Maria, on this sorry business.

Footnote

When I wrote the above, I hadn't read Martin Meenagh's post here - apologies.

An equivalence of extremisms?

Last week the British Library hosted a discussion between Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders to celebrate the library's current exhibition of sacred texts from the three religions. Chaired by Melvyn Bragg, the event seems to have been a fruitful exploration of commonalities and differences between the faiths.

However, some of those involved couldn't resist a dig at the supposedly secularist media for not broadcasting the event. According to the Independent Catholic News website, Lord Bragg 'voiced disappointment at how faith is sidelined in public debate in the media' and suggested that 'mainstream radio programmes were not interested in broadcasting the discussion'. Faith sidelined in the media? Does that sound right? What about the guaranteed slots for Thought for the Day, Songs of Praise, Sunday Worship, not to mention the regular discussion of religious issues on programmes like Bragg's own on Radio 4? Surely this is something of an over-reaction to not getting your event broadcast?

The Chief Rabbi, Dr. Jonathan Sacks agreed with Melvyn, accusing the media of not wanting to hear stories of believers of different faiths getting along:

They want to know something that resembles the public spectacles of Rome in its decadence, they want to throw Christians to lions, or lions to Christians, and so the voices that gain resonance in our culture and in the media are extreme secularists or religious extremists. And they're very comfortable with one another because the extreme secularists can point to the religious voices and say they're fanatics and the religious extremists can point to the secularists and say they're totally atheist decadentsetc, etc.

He may be right - 'Religious leaders get along' doesn't sound like much of a headline. But I hate the way he falls into the 'plague on both your houses' approach that is becoming a lazy rhetorical trope among anti-secularists (rather like 'aggressive secularism'). Seems to me like a neat way of avoiding having to condemn specifically religious extremists ('Ah well, there are fundamentalists on both sides...').

These sideswipes are instances of two key features in what I have defined as 'faith-ism' or religionism: firstly, a blurring of the differences between religions in order to present a united front to defend Religion plc or Faith Inc, and secondly the need constantly and defensively to pick a fight with the common enemy of secularism, mistakenly perceived to be growing in influence and vociferousness.

Coincidentally Martin Amis' review of Ed Husain's new book about his time as an Islamist foot-soldier (via Mick Hartley) also picks up this point about a false equivalence of extremisms. Amis likes the book but accuses Husain of painting a 'false dichotomy' :

He wants to be “free from the fanaticism of secularism or religion”; he wants to “oppose hatred of all forms, secular and religious”. In this view, fundamentalists are on one wing, atheists are on the other, and the supposed centre is occupied by moderate believers and a few laconic agnostics.

Amis takes issue:

Secular fanaticism, secular hatred – these equivalences are fictions. The humanist pitbull Richard Dawkins, I am confident, has very few affinities with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. One can afford to be crude about this. When Islamists crash passenger planes into buildings, or hack off the heads of hostages, they shout, “God is great!” When secularists do that kind of thing, what do they shout?

'Nuff said, I think.

As a footnote, today's Guardian carries a long diatribe by Madeleine Bunting against the 'New Atheists' (Dawkins, Dennett, et al) who just don't understand religion. As someone who is keen to keep clear the distinction between secularism and atheism, I don't want to get in the middle of this one. However, I found Bunting's defence of religion avowedly 'faith-ist', in that she didn't argue in favour of a specific religion, but for 'religion' generally. Moreover, like most religionists these days, she didn't attempt to argue in favour of religion because it might be true, but because it's good for you. Arguing for faith in these utilitarian, consumerist terms seems to me to be a slippery slope.

Karen and Maddy have a cosy chat

Karen Armstrong interviewed by Madeleine Bunting? Sounds like the pretext for a cosy fireside chat rather than an incisive interrogation. And so it turned out to be, as these two like-minded religious commentators came together in the book pages of Saturday's Guardian. No uncomfortable questions here about why Armstrong is so liberal and critical when it comes to examining her own faith of origin, as in her new book on the Bible, but so uncritical and defensive in her writings about Islam. But then Bunting's own columns on these issues have often been a mirror image of Armstrong's opinions.

As always, Armstrong is greatly exercised about the place of Islam in the modern world. But she has little to say about the wave of fundamentalism sweeping through the Middle East or the political Islam inspiring terrorist violence in the west. Instead, she adopts the classic root-causer strategy of blaming the west:

our rhetoric about Muslims reflects a blind anxiety about our own behaviour - anxieties about our own capacity for violence are projected onto Muslims, similarly our attitudes towards women.

This really is taking a postmodern attitude to 'reality' too far, and it's surely the height of patronising Orientalism to see Arab and Muslim attitudes as nothing more than a 'projection' of our own. Heaven knows 'our' (presumably she means western) attitudes towards women are not perfect - but it's stretching it a bit to compare them with the suffocating oppression of women in Saudia Arabia or southern Iraq.

In a similar denial of the agency of non-westerners, Armstrong repeats the argument she deployed in a recent article, to the effect that we shouldn't criticise Muslim fundamentalism for fear of making it worse:

Armstrong has a sense of urgency - "we should all be worried sick"; "there is so little time" - because, she argues, the history of religious fundamentalism over the past century shows, time and again, that when under attack such movements become more extreme. It was true of Christian fundamentalism in the 20th century as it withdrew from the mainstream into a hostile right-wing movement; it was true of the Muslim Brotherhood under persecution in Egypt in the 1960s. The danger now, Armstrong explains, is of more - and worse - incidents of terrorism involving perhaps nuclear devices; and yet western policies are only making such events more likely.

So the solution is - what? Keep quiet and fundamentalism and extremism will somehow go away?

Then there's the obligatory dig at critics of religion:

Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have set up a caricature of religion. This kind of aggressive secular fundamentalism feeds disdain which - as the Buddha might say - is not skilful. The test of any set of ideas must be whether they increase charity; do they help to create better understanding? - we don't need any more polarity.

I'm all for being nice to people, but surely the real 'test of any set of ideas' is actually whether it's true. On which note, it seems that although Armstrong no longer calls herself a Christian - she describes herself as a 'person of faith' - she now sees her mission as promoting the virtues of belief: apparently her next book will argue that 'we still need religion'. Thus Armstrong has become one of those people described by Richard Dawkins who, while not formally religious themselves, still 'believe in belief' and, having given up on persuading us of the truth of religion, are reduced to peddling its social usefulness, as a kind of superior therapy. 'All religions', she says, 'are designed to teach us how to live, joyfully, serenely, and kindly, in the midst of suffering.' To which the sceptic might reply: they might be designed that way, but they appear to teach many of their adherents the exact opposite.

No more burqas - but no ban

I loathe the niqab and the burqa and everything they represent. As Kenan Malik says: ‘The idea that in the 21st century women should be hidden from view for reasons of modesty or religious belief is both troubling and astonishing.’ When I see girls at my daughter’s school starting to ‘cover up’ on reaching adolescence – in one case so that only the young woman’s eyes were showing through a narrow slit in her black covering – it makes me both sad and angry.

I regard the burqa as the exact equivalent, for women, of the chain on the ankle of African slaves two hundred years ago: a visible token of servitude and control. It’s a feudal relic and should have no place in a society that has any claim to gender equality. Progressives and feminists should be deeply uneasy, rather than complacent, about its persistence on our streets and in our schools.

If I had a magic wand, I’d wish for the niqab and burqa to disappear from the face of the earth, along with the misogynistic religious mumbo-jumbo that sustains them, and which they reinforce. But I don’t have a magic wand, and nor do governments. Politicians sometimes fall into the trap of using the law as a means of wishing away things that bother them. However, not everything that is worrying or disturbing should necessarily be illegal. Moreover, there’s a danger that using the law as a blunt instrument to solve complex social problems can have undesirable and unintended consequences, such as limiting individual freedom, or causing suffering to the very people the law was intended to help.

That’s why, on balance, I don’t approve of the French government’s decision to ban the niqab and why I’m worried about campaigns to introduce similar legislation in Britain. I wouldn’t go as as far as Madeleine Bunting who says of the new law: ‘It sends a shiver down the spine’. What sends a shiver down my spine is the tendency among the pro-faith lobby (for whom Bunting is the cheerleader) to rush to the support of every new expression of religious fundamentalism. And I don't disagree with many of the things that French politicians, including some on the left, have said about the burqa/niqab and its deleterious effect on women’s lives. I often wish we had progressive politicians here who would be equally outspoken and not leave criticism of fundamentalism to the anti-immigration right. I also understand the support that feminists in Arab and majority-Muslim countries, such as the blogger Saudiwoman and the French organsaition Ni Putes Ni Soumises, have given to the proposal. For them, it's a small step forward in the long struggle against women’s oppression in their communities. If only we had more outspoken feminists saying such things in Britain, and getting media coverage for it - which is not to understate the fantastic work being done by Southall Black Sisters and the One Law For All (No Sharia) campaign, among others.

Sadly, discussion on these shores of the French plan has seen people slipping back into their comfortably polarised defensive positions: the ban has been supported most vocally by the anti-immigrant right (such as UKIP and Tory MP Philip Hollobone), while opposition to it, on the grounds of freedom and toleration, has become a badge of honour on the left. The Guardian's Gary Younge tweeted the other day along the lines that it was equally wrong for states to require women to force women to wear the burqa, and to prevent them from doing so. Fair enough, Gary, but the left should be just as vocal in pointing out that it's wrong for individual men, not to mention 'faith communities', to tell women what they can and can't wear - and the state has a role in protecting women against pressure to conform to patriarchal or religious requirements.

I don't think that every aspect of the French law is unworkable. The proposal that public institutions should be able to insist that both employees and customers uncover their faces seems eminently sensible. However, as Malik says:

If wearing a burqa is incompatible with the needs of particular jobs, then those particular employers – hospitals, schools, shops even - can legitimately demand that employees not be clad from head to foot. But again, one can impose dress codes for certain jobs without banning a type of clothing for everyone. After all, we don’t have judges and teachers wearing bikinis on the job either.

Similarly, one can applaud the French proposal to prosecute husbands and fathers who seek to control what their female relatives wear. But prosecuting women themselves for covering their faces in public risks making them victims twice over. And how exactly do politicians expect women who currently wear the burqa to respond to the new law? Will they defy the pressure of family, community and clerics and tear off the veil, so that they can go shopping, or work as teachers? A few brave souls might. But the danger is that others will simply be driven further back into the home, and become even less visible, even less active, in public life: which is presumably the aim of the burqa, and the whole plethora of patriarchal prohibitions that go with it.

If similar legislation were to be introduced in Britain, you can predict exactly what would happen. Firstly, there would be an intensification of fake Muslim victimhood, with the mullahs and their allies on the faith-bedazzled pseudo-left crying ‘Islamophobia!’ at every turn. Secondly, there would be a new focus for anti-immigrant feeling both on the 'legitimate' far right (UKIP, maverick Tories) and among the neo-fascists of the BNP and EDL, seeking to exploit the emotions whipped up by the debate. Needless to say, Muslim women would suffer most as a result: condemned by the fundamentalists if they comply with the law, or the racists if they don't.

So what’s the alternative? Well, I don’t have any easy answers, but I have a few suggestions, and would be interested to hear others from readers who, like me, are both anti-burqa and anti-ban.

Firstly, we should look to strengthen our gender equality and human rights law, making it a criminal offence for anyone, whether family member or religious leader, to force women to dress in a particular way, or to restrict their freedom of movement, employment or leisure outside the home.

Secondly, politicians of all stripes - but especially those on the left - should make clear their commitment to full gender equality and their opposition to customs and traditions that hinder women's freedom. They should stop appeasing conservative religious leaders in the name of 'community cohesion' or out of fear of losing the 'Muslim vote'.

Thirdly, gender equality, and human rights generally, should be a key plank of citizenship education, and all state-funded schools, including faith schools, should be required to promote it. This should have priority over the wishy-washy complacency of a 'multi-faith' education that teaches that all belief systems are to be 'respected', even if their practices contravene women's rights.

In other words, we need a broad strategy that may include some legislation, but is also focused on education and cultural change. As Kenan Malik says:

The burqa is a symbol of the oppression of women, not its cause. If legislators really want to help Muslim women, they could begin not by banning the burqa, but by challenging the policies and processes that marginalize migrant communities: on the one hand, the racism, social discrimination and police harassment that all too often disfigure migrant lives, and, on the other, the multicultural policies that treat minorities as members of ethnic groups rather than as citizens. Both help sideline migrant communities, aid the standing of conservative ‘community leaders’ and make life more difficult for women and other disadvantaged groups within those communities.

Update

Another Arab feminist voice in support of the ban: Egyptian writer Mona Eltahawy

Update 2

A surprisingly (?) balanced and thoughtful editorial on the whole affair from Catholic weekly The Tablet. It sets out the 'dilemma' facing multicultural societies such as France and Britain, caught between not wishing 'to be culturally imperialist by treating ethnic minorities with disrespect' and not wanting 'to set aside their own core values such as opposition to the exploitation and abuse of women.' Then it makes this very good point: 'A society like Britain which insists that girls from very conservative Muslim families should nevertheless be sent to school to receive a good education has already taken sides in that debate.'

The editorial ends with a similar message to my own in the above post:

The British would not tolerate something as dirigiste as a state-imposed dress code, even though many British people would personally deplore the suppression of female identity that the burka seems to signify. It is by education and cultural influence that the values of Western civilisation will prevail in the end, and anything that divides or antagonises minority communities is unhelpful.

Update 3

Via Bob, a thought-provoking contribution to the debate (with lots of useful links, especially to French sources) from Tendance Coatesy.

Dawkins in call for ban on bedtime prayers shock horror!

The Guardian has really got it in for atheists.

After Bunting's dig at Dawkins last week, yesterday saw Pankaj Mishra produce an almost identical argument, to the effect that the Burmese monk-protestors have 'proved' that religion has a role in politics after all. There were the same put-downs of 'militant atheists' with their 'salon wisdom', and the same sneering at 'devotees of science and rationality' who 'call for a religion-free politics'. At least Mishra's paeon to the political virtues of Buddhism, unlike Bunting's, acknowledged its role in bolstering militarism and reactionary nationalism in Japan and Sri Lanka. But both articles gave the same impression of tilting at windmills: in this case the fiction that atheists and secularists want to exclude religion from public life, rather than simply maintain a healthy separation between politics and belief, and a level playing-field for belief and unbelief in a plural society.

There was more straw-man construction going on today over at Comment is Free, where Theo Hobson was laying into Richard Dawkins' campaign to coax American atheists out of the closet. Hobson seemed keen to show that his recent thoughtful assessment of secular liberalism in The Tablet was a momentary aberration, and that he'd returned to his former pugnacious pseudo-tabloid style. Absurdly, Hobson caricatures Dawkins' call for atheists to form themselves into a political lobby as a wish for 'non-believers to gain disproportionate influence over political affairs.' (An example of the rhetorical strategy that I described in this post as attributing the characteristics of your own side to your opponent, or getting your retaliation in first: who do you think is more likely to have a disproportionate influence on US politics, atheists or believers?)

Then there's Hobson's hysterical, not to say hilarious misreading of Dawkins' call for end to the religious indoctrination of children in the education system:

Atheists reply that there is nothing dangerous or sinister in the desire to see more rationality, less superstition. Really? Dawkins was asked what he hoped an atheist bloc in the US might achieve, and this is the first part of the answer he gave: "I would free children of being indoctrinated with the religion of their parents or their community." Is this not amazing? I have seldom read a sentence that has induced such a sharp shiver of revulsion. This man evidently dreams of a state in which it is illegal to take one's children to a place of worship, or to say prayers with them as one puts them to bed.

Do I overreact? What else does he mean by wanting to "free" children from a parent's ability to "indoctrinate" them? He wants a culture in which saying bedtime prayers is considered child abuse. Presumably in this bravely rationalised new world, atheist teachers will encourage children to inform on their parents.

Of course, Dawkins never said any such thing: he was talking about faith schools, stupid. This Orwellian nightmare is the product of Hobson's own fevered imagination. At this point his rhetoric shifts from straw-man building to irrational scare tactics.

Breaking my silence?

‘It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.' – Alice in Wonderland

I’ve always felt an affinity with French-Moroccan author Marcel Benabou, who wrote a book-length treatise on why he hadn’t written more books: Pourquoi je n'ai écrit aucun de mes livres. In the same spirit, this is a blog post about why I haven’t written any blog posts recently – well, nowhere near as many as I used to write (only 20 posts in the past three years, whereas in 2009 alone I wrote more than 200).

My principal excuse for inactivity is that this is primarily a political blog – and my political beliefs are currently in a state of extreme flux. So what’s new, you may ask? Hasn’t this blog charted repeatedly (and probably tediously) my movement from youthful Tribunite Labour left-wingery, through Gramscian Marxism, to critical support for New Labour? Didn’t I once claim, in my normblog profile no less, that I started this blog ‘to help me work out what I think’? And wasn’t it precisely the experience of writing this blog that helped me to clarify the anti-totalitarian liberal-social-democratic politics that has characterised my thinking for most of the blog’s life?

Yes, but this feels different. The change in my political outlook feels more seismic this time. I’m reluctant to articulate the change too precisely, for fear that the sands may have shifted again in a few months, and I’ll have to recant any positions I espouse here. So how to characterise the change? Maybe it’s enough to say that these days I find myself reading Standpoint and The Spectator more frequently, and with more pleasure, than The New Statesman; that I tend to haunt websites such as Front Porch Republic and Ethika Politika; that having hero-worshipped Thomas Paine for years I’m much more sympathetic to his nemesis Edmund Burke; and that I now find Chestertonian distributism more attractive than any form of socialism. 

That last item is a partial clue as to why my views have changed. My re-engagement with religious faith in the past year or two has certainly made me more 'conservative' on some social issues, and while my re-awakened faith has helped to keep my passion for social justice alive, it has also made me more open to different ways of imagining and achieving it. But it’s not just about religion. Another way of describing the change in my politics is to say that my growing disillusionment with certain aspects of contemporary leftism – whether it be kneejerk anti-westernism in foreign affairs or ‘big state’ paternalism at home – has led over time to a questioning of the foundations of progressivism per se.

To put it another way, and please forgive this brief philosophical excursion by someone who’s by no means an expert in these matters: it’s partly about questioning the adequacy of the Enlightenment tradition. Like many others who have featured in my blogroll sidebar over the years, I began blogging partly out of a sense of alarm at the rising tide of irrationalism and moral relativism in contemporary political discourse, particularly on the Left – manifested in contorted attempts to ‘understand’ terrorism, a refusal to condemn misogyny and racism if espoused by non-westerners, and the abandonment of a sense of universal human rights. In this context, post-Rushdie, post-9/11 and post-Danish cartoons, it seemed important to rush to the barricades (or at least, the blogs) to defend the gains of the Enlightenment. Indeed, it became something of a badge of honour when, in a burst of tortuous illogicality, Madeleine Bunting (‘Our Maddy of the Sorrows’, to quote the late great Norm), one of the torchbearers for the anti-rationalists, condemned writers of our stripe as ‘Enlightenment fundamentalists’.

But what if an appeal to Enlightenment principles is not enough to roll back the tide of postmodern relativism? And going further: what if the Enlightenment, rather than being the solution, was itself the genesis of the problem? On the first point: it could be argued that the Enlightenment, for all that it began as a critique of religious thinking, actually depended on unspoken but deeply shared religious foundations. For example, its defence of reason, liberty and progress was founded on certain assumptions – that history has a purpose, that every human life is of value – that are inexplicable outside a Judaeo-Christian worldview. It could also be argued that, as those shared religious assumptions have weakened in the last two centuries, so the Enlightenment principles that were (implicitly if not explicitly) founded on them have also been shaken. In a post-religious world, and in the postmodern marketplace of ideas, the principles of the Enlightenment appear no more and no less ‘universal’ than any others. Bunting is not alone in her critique: plenty of more serious postmodern thinkers have argued (spuriously, of course) that Enlightenment ideas are 'merely' a reflection of the interests of a particular group of privileged, white and probably imperialist men belonging to a particular (and particularly oppressive) society and culture.

Which bring us on to the second point: that the Enlightenment may actually share some of the blame for this descent into the slough of moral relativism. How so? Well, once again, I’m not a philosopher, but I was struck by this paragraph in Rodney Howsare’s brief introduction to the ideas of the modern Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar:

For Kant, and the moderns in general, the notion that the unifying center of a thing really does appear in the individual thing was denied. When I see this particular tree, therefore, all I see is the appearance of this particular tree. If any generalisations are to be made about it, they will have to come from the side of the subject. This means that the classical transcendental properties of Being—unity, truth, goodness, and beauty—must no longer be conceived as properties of Being, but as characteristics attributed to Being from the side of universal subjectivity. All postmodernity has to do to achieve nihilism, it would seem, is to deny any universal subjectivity. Postmodernism is not so much an alternative to modernism as its reductio.

We’ve strayed somewhat from our discussion of the direction of contemporary politics. But what I take Howsare to be arguing is that it was the Enlightenment’s denial of transcendence and objectivity that paved the way for the postmodernist critique that eventually sank its claims to universality: in other words, Enlightenment thinkers sowed the seeds of their own destruction. This makes it increasingly difficult to ground a critique of the creeping relativism and irrationalism of much contemporary political thinking in a call for a return to Enlightenment principles. What is needed instead, perhaps, is a deeper kind of return: to a way of thinking grounded in a sense of the sacred and of an objective moral order. (I can imagine the objections already being tapped out on the keyboards of my more secular-minded readers...)

These are the kinds of issues I find myself wrestling with these days, as I struggle to find new foundations for my political thinking, and an alternative to the Enlightenment rationalism that has been the source of my politics for so long. I’m going to make a determined effort to use this blog, once again, as a vehicle for working out what I think. You may notice some changes – in the kinds of themes and issues I discuss, the sources I turn to, and the links that appear in my sidebar. If you were a fan of the ‘old’ Martin In The Margins, you may not find the new incarnation quite to your taste, in which case you should feel free to move on and I shan't be offended. But I rather hope you’ll stick around and share the next stage of the journey.