An interesting discussion. I think that religion itself is now facing a true reformation based on a much deeper understanding of spirituality itself. I do know that my own understanding regarding the physical nature of the spirit and the second tier of matter immediately opens the door to direct communication and the absorption of a uniform correct doctrine.
We are then talking about the acceptance of a fresh canon of scripture in particular. The ancient canons remain valuable but they have also succeeded as far as possible without dealing with spiritual reality.
We now need many teaching masters and healing masters and the occasional perfect master as well all communing through the rule of twelve.
What has happened is that the advent of modernism has opened up literacy allowing all to read their own scriptures and this ferment has been tapped by reaction that is naturally temporary. This is because organized religion can no longer sell their own failures. A thousand Muslims killing a thousand Muslims is no recommendation, but a serious rebuke.
The Religious Specter Haunting Revolution
We are then talking about the acceptance of a fresh canon of scripture in particular. The ancient canons remain valuable but they have also succeeded as far as possible without dealing with spiritual reality.
We now need many teaching masters and healing masters and the occasional perfect master as well all communing through the rule of twelve.
What has happened is that the advent of modernism has opened up literacy allowing all to read their own scriptures and this ferment has been tapped by reaction that is naturally temporary. This is because organized religion can no longer sell their own failures. A thousand Muslims killing a thousand Muslims is no recommendation, but a serious rebuke.
The Religious Specter Haunting Revolution
Friday, 19 June 2015 00:00
By Michael Ignatieff,
The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions, by Michael Walzer
Yale University Press, 172 pages, $26.
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/31475-the-religious-specter-haunting-revolution
Michael Walzer turned 80 this year, as vital, productive and
intellectually alive as ever. After 28 books, hundreds of articles,
decades of teaching at Princeton and Harvard, editing Dissent
as a nonsectarian voice of the democratic left, his work remains an
essential reference point in academic and public discussion of the most
pressing ethical dilemmas in international politics.
You can’t teach a class about just war and the ethics of intervention without using his Just and Unjust Wars
(1977); you will not think clearly about whether justice is local and
national or universal and cosmopolitan unless you have read his Spheres of Justice (1983); you can’t understand the vexed relationship between religion and politics without pondering The Revolution of the Saints
(1982). His work may range widely, but his allegiances have remained
stubbornly persistent. He has never wavered in his commitments to a
secular, pluralist “democratic left,” to an Israel that makes peace with
the Palestinians, and to a social theory that is practical, focused on
issues, and rooted in specific historical cases and situations. “I
follow the maxim about political life,” he has said, “that nothing is
the same as anything else.”
He’s also said, with disarming but false modesty, that “I have always
had difficulty sustaining an abstract argument for more than a few
sentences.” In fact, his work manages to combine extended abstraction
with masterful use of comparative examples. He shies away when called a
public intellectual, but he is a genuinely democratic thinker, with a
true teacher’s vocation for developing complex and nuanced arguments
that he takes care to make as clear as he can. A book by Walzer will
always be a pleasure to read, even when you find yourself shaking your
head in disagreement.
His latest project, first delivered as lectures at Yale, takes him
back to preoccupations that have defined his work for 50 years: why the
democratic left condescends to religious conviction; why secular
revolutions beget religious counterrevolutions; why in Israel, David
Ben-Gurion’s founding vision of a secular civic state, granting equality
to Jews and Palestinians alike, is now in retreat before an
increasingly intolerant and exclusionist political culture.
While Israel remains the central focus of The Paradox of Liberation,
Walzer has made a major contribution to the question of what’s
happening there simply by arguing that Israel may not be so special
after all: the same kinds of problems may be occurring in other states
created by national liberation movements. He compares what happened to
Ben-Gurion’s vision with what befell Jawaharlal Nehru’s in India and
Ahmed Ben Bella’s in Algeria.
In all three cases, he asks, why did secular liberation movements
fall prey, within a generation, to a religious counterrevolution? What
does this tell us, he asks in turn, about Zionism, the Indian Congress
Party and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN)? What was it
about religion that these movements failed to understand?
The paradox of liberation, Walzer argues, is that the liberators
looked down on the people they came to liberate. None of Kant’s “crooked
timber of humanity” for these revolutionaries: they all believed that
the timber made crooked by oppression could be planed straight as a
board. Liberation was always an ambiguously dual project: to free the
people from the colonial power and then to free them from their own
submissiveness and psychological subjugation.
The Algerian FLN’s Soummam conference platform of 1956 positively
seethes with scorn toward “the torpor, fear, and skepticism” of the
Algerian population in general. The revolutionary militants of the FLN
vowed that they would shock their people into militant consciousness and
awaken “their national dignity” after a century of colonial occupation.
If it took bombs and the assassination of collaborators with the French
to do this, so be it. Through this trial by fire, Frantz Fanon, the
Algerian revolution’s leading theorist, proclaimed, “a new Algerian man”
would be born.
The Zionist revolutionaries took a similarly millenarian view of
liberation: not just to throw out the colonial oppressors, in this case
the British, but to create a new kind of Jew. In 1906, for example,
Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote that Zionism’s “starting point is to take the
typical Yid of today and to imagine his diametrical opposite.. Because
the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum, we shall endow the ideal
image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty.” Zionism’s weird streak of
anti-Semitism, Walzer allows us to see, flowed directly from its idea of
what liberation had to be about. Achieving national independence was
not just winning self-government, but using state power to throw off the
dead weight of subjection burdening the very soul of the Jewish people.
This took the measure of the harm that the sufferings of exile had
done, but at the same time it condescended toward the sustaining beliefs
of the Jews the revolutionaries came to free. The roots of this
condescension, Walzer argues, lay in a deep misconception about
religion. In exile, in the diaspora, the Jewish faith had not always
been the willing accomplice of subjection and accommodation, as the
Zionists too often seemed to believe: Religion had also been a source of
resistance and affirmation.
In the Indian revolution, too, religion was dismissed as an obstacle,
never truly seen as a potential resource to fuel revolt. Nehru argued
that the major challenge of freedom was not just throwing out the
British, but liberating the vast mass of the population from the
stranglehold of India’s religion and their prevailing “philosophy of
submission . to the prevailing social order and to everything that is.”
Once religious traditionalism was challenged by a humane, progressive
reformist state, Nehru thought, its illusionary comforts would vanish,
in his words, “at the touch of reality.”
The other leaders of national liberation movements believed the same,
though as Walzer points out, there were nuances. The FLN conceded that a
free Algeria would be an Islamic democracy. The Zionists acknowledged,
sometimes reluctantly, that their movement’s support among the Jewish
masses depended almost entirely on the ancient biblical call, repeated
in everyday worship, to remember Jerusalem. Whenever the Zionist
leadership forgot the biblical warrant for a return to the Holy Land, as
the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl appeared to do when he gave serious
consideration to accepting a British proposal to settle the Jews in
Uganda, the Jewish masses in the shtetl responded with incredulity and
anger. There was only one Zion, the one promised in the Bible.
The secular leaders of national liberation realized they could only
succeed if they had support from Islamic, Jewish and Hindu traditions
among the poorest and most desperate of their supporters; yet their
accommodation of religion was tactical and condescending rather than
sincere. The secular revolutionaries believed that history was a story
of modernization and that freedom would inevitably win in a battle with
superstition, prejudice and backwardness. In such a story of progress,
religion was a vestigial attachment, “a haven in a heartless world” as
Marx so condescendingly put it, a haven bound to crumble in the face of
the ruthless forces of global capitalism and the relentless pressures of
a modernizing secular state.
In the liberationists’ desire to purge their people of the timorous,
abject, accommodating, credulous aspects of their character, they sowed
the seeds of their own undoing. There were strengths - endurance,
solidarity and faith - in traditional Islamic culture in
prerevolutionary Algeria, just as there was wisdom accumulated in the
Jewish experience of the diaspora, just as there was a language of
freedom and national pride in Hindu traditional consciousness. For the
national liberation movements, Walzer argues, none of these religious
traditions seemed useful. Instead, they were seen as obstacles to
overcome, dead weights to be thrown off. Once the revolutionaries seized
control of the state, they were confident that they could use state
power to safely relegate faith to a politically innocuous private
sphere, while educating a new post-liberation generation to do without
religion altogether.
In essence, the liberators were alienated from the people they came
to liberate. They were the privileged children of the empires they
sought to overthrow. All of them learned the doctrines of modern society
and reform from their colonial oppressors. During their battles against
the colonialists, they all sought support for their rebellions from
secular intellectuals on the other side. It was as if the inner
validation they valued most had to come, oddly enough, from the empires
they were seeking to overthrow. Ben Bella prized the decoration he
received as a veteran of the French army. It’s hard to know who was more
of an Anglophile, Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, or
Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Nehru (Harrow, Trinity College,
Cambridge and the Inns of Court) confessed to John Kenneth Galbraith
that he was the last Englishman to rule India.
Once these Westernizing revolutionaries seized power, once they took
control of the state, Walzer argues, their rule proved to be a painful
reckoning with the stubborn force of religious traditionalism. In this
reckoning, they were forced to shed many of their liberationist
illusions. The deepest one was that a secular, egalitarian citizenship
could transcend religious, caste and tribal divisions.
The Algerian revolutionaries promised a single secular code for all
Algerians. By 1981, they had conceded jurisdiction over family matters
to sharia law. By the late 1980s an Islamist party was challenging the
secular revolution in the name of Islamic democracy. In 1991, faced with
this challenge, the regime abolished democracy in order, it said, to
save the revolution. Barred from democratic politics, the Islamists then
went to war against the regime and it was only after a bloody battle,
lasting from 1991 to 1997, that the old revolutionary order prevailed,
now more autocratic and reactionary than ever. Their revolution had
prevailed but at the price of all the ideals for which the revolution
had been fought, and though the Islamists were eventually defeated,
Algerian society is now more Islamized than ever.
In Israel, the story is different. Democracy survived and for the
Jews who made aliyah, their transformation into Hebrew-speaking Israelis
kept alive, at least for them, the Zionist idea that political
liberation could also deliver inner transformation. But otherwise,
Zionist ideals are in full retreat. In December 1947, Ben-Gurion said:
“In our state there will be non-Jews as well, and all of them will be
equal citizens, equal in everything without any exception, that is, the
state will be their state as well.”
Who could honestly say that this promise of equality has been kept in Israel today?
Walzer is not clear about how this failure came about. Being
surrounded by unremitting Arab hostility on all sides certainly didn’t
help, but that can’t be the whole story. Walzer’s essay lacks a full
historical analysis of the decline of the inclusive Zionist ideal. One
reason surely is that after the astounding victory in the Six-Day War in
1967, hubris led the victors to ignore Ben-Gurion’s warning that
holding on to the newly occupied territories posed “a terrible danger”
to the future of the Jewish state. Ben-Gurion, then out of power, was
ignored and the pragmatic, secular Zionism that he stood for was
steadily displaced by an ever more religious and messianic settler
movement for whom the territories were not a dispensable trophy of
victory, as Ben-Gurion thought, but the heart and soul of biblical
Israel.
Walzer, for his part, essentially fingers the religious
fundamentalists, particularly the ultraorthodox settlers, those whose
first loyalty was to their faith, not to their state or even to Israeli
democracy, and whose ultimate allegiance was ethnic, particularistic,
exclusionary and, though Walzer does not use the term, sometimes
downright racist. These people have no interest in tolerance for
Muslims, secularists or anyone else, because they do not want them in
the state at all. They want a home in their own image, faithful in all
particulars to religious law.
The ultrareligious, especially the settlers, are the usual suspects
in this debate about what happened to the Zionist dream. It may be that
Walzer forces the division between secular Zionists and Orthodox
fundamentalists in such a way that he leaves little room for those in
between, religious Zionists who live their faith but are committed to
defending a pluralist and democratic Israel. Walzer does not give much
room in his analysis to people like this, but they exist and they may be
the source of what hope there is for reconciliation between politics
and religion in Israel.
Turning to India, Walzer tells the same story of an inclusive and
egalitarian secular ideal being defeated by religious counterrevolution.
He compares Ben-Gurion’s Zionism to Nehru’s vision of a secular civic
democracy transcending confessional and caste ties. In post-independence
India, Nehru insisted, Muslims must be given “the security and the
rights of citizens in a democratic state.” In reality, independence took
place against the backdrop of a murderous partition and horrendous
communal bloodletting. Gandhi met his death in 1948 at the hands of a
Hindu supremacist assassin enraged by his gestures of friendship toward
Indian Muslims. Today’s rulers of India, the Hindu nationalist BJP, have
governed inclusively, but no one forgets that they are actually the
ideological descendants of the Hindu supremacist who killed Gandhi.
These are not the heirs that the makers of the 1947 midnight hour
in India could have expected. The members of Nehru’s first Cabinet were
committed to containing Hinduism, not elevating it. They were secular
reformers determined to confront religious traditionalism head-on. They
discovered that support for traditional practices was not only
entrenched among the Indian masses but also among the nationalist elites
of the Congress Party. These Hindu elites closed ranks against the
likes of Rajkumari Amrit Kaur (a graduate of the Sherborne School for
Girls and Oxford), the minister of health who wanted to wipe out purdah,
child marriage, polygamy, bans on intercaste marriage and laws of
inheritance that discriminated against daughters and wives. All of these
practices were abolished by legislation, yet 80 years later many
survive in one form or another in India.
B.R. Ambedkar, who had risen through the Indian independence movement
from poverty as an untouchable outcast to become the drafter of India’s
first constitution, remarked irritably in 1951, “I do not understand
why religion should be given [a] vast expansive jurisdiction so as to
cover the whole of life.” “What,” he asked pointedly, “are we having
this liberty for?” When Hindu members of the Congress Party rose up
against Ambedkar’s attempt to control the effects of Hindu religious
law, Nehru backed down and Ambedkar quit in disgust.
Here surely is a case where secularists gave in to traditionalists.
Yet what exactly is the moral that Walzer wants us to take from his
story? Sometimes, as in this case, he suggests that the national
liberation movements failed because they gave in too often, while at
other times, he argues that they gave in too little. Overall, his
conclusion is that “it is the absolutism of secular negation that best
accounts for the strength and militancy of the religious revival.” Had
the modernizers sought a compromise with religion, he suggests, they
might not have provoked the counterrevolution that came a generation
later. “Traditionalist worldviews,” he writes, “can’t be negated,
abolished, or banned; they have to be engaged.” But the secular
modernists did “engage.” Nehru sold out the radical modernizers in his
own party, let sharia law stand and tolerated Hindu customs; Ben-Gurion
never took power over marriage and divorce away from the religious
authorities. The hard men in the FLN capitulated on sharia within a
generation of taking power.
In fact, you could argue - and this is the position taken by Marxist
critics like Perry Anderson - that the secular revolutionaries weren’t
“absolutist” enough. The revolutionaries, in this view, never had the
stomach, or even the desire, to take on the holders of traditional
power. They deferred far too much to religious authorities, traditional
landowners and privileged castes. Had they been more Jacobin, more
ruthless in their attack on tradition, superstition and privilege, they
might have forged an egalitarian civic culture robust enough to keep all
three permanently in their proper place.
Instead, in India at least, the Congress Party legislated a purely
formal legal equality for citizens, leaving caste and religion intact so
as to ensure that the vast electoral power of the masses unleashed by
democracy would never threaten the property and privileges of the Indian
elites. In the compromise that governed India after 1947, the Indian
state was never secular, Anderson argues, since Hinduism was clearly
privileged, but Muslims and Christians were accorded full confessional
freedom, so that intercommunal violence could be kept to a minimum.
Like Walzer, Anderson sees nationalist parties being dragged under by
the “confessional undertow” of the social struggles they unleashed and
selling out their original principles, but unlike Walzer, he argues that
the nationalist movements sold out, not to religious authority, but to
class privilege, and once they did so the classes in charge, in each of
these societies, had no difficulty in rallying the demons of faith to
defend customary and unequal distributions of power. The problem with
this is that Anderson’s explanation reduces faith to an instrumental
device in the service of class rule.
Religion is not a reliable servant of the powerful. When religious
doctrine contests the very supremacy of the secular state and the
legitimacy of its law and secular moral custom, it is a threat to the
powerful and a threat to their social order. If anything, the three
revolutionary movements - Algerian, Indian and Israeli - underestimated
the radical challenge that religious fundamentalism posed to each.
Then the question becomes, what could the revolutions have done
differently? Walzer thinks the revolutionaries were naive to believe in
the inevitable triumph of secularism, but they were right to “engage”
religion, to seek to enlist or co-opt its authority in the founding of
their new states. Yet Walzer fails to ask whether the fundamentalist
strains of these traditions - Hindu, Jewish and Islamic - were ever
really willing to “engage” with secular revolution. The fundamentalist
strains of these faiths never accepted the supremacy of the secular
state in the first place.
Fundamentalists of all faiths have an objection to the epistemology
of democracy itself, to the idea that political truth is contestable and
is arrived at through public debate. They also have an objection to the
fundamental moral norm of democratic debate, that there are no enemies
in a free politics, only opponents. For a true fundamentalist, truth is
divinely received and when a political opponent denies it, he becomes an
enemy, to be dealt with, if necessary, by the sword. These
epistemological and moral positions - which make it essentially
impossible for radical Islamic fundamentalists to accept democracy - do
not feature in Walzer’s discussion, but they may have made it impossible
for secular nationalists to find common ground at least with the
extreme fundamentalists among their religious opponents.
To this Walzer would say, what else could the revolutionaries do, but
compromise with faith in traditional societies so deeply ordered by
religious custom?
What is the moral of this story? One way to read Walzer’s essay,
though he does not say this himself, is that the “democratic left,” his
secular egalitarian idealists, failed to create a powerful and
convincing political culture that would offer what religious faith still
offers to those who remain in the tent, i.e., a spiritual home.
Another possible meaning to Walzer’s story is that the relationship
between secular revolution and religious counterrevolution is not
negative and antithetical, but positive and symbiotic. Secular
revolutions may not succeed fully, but to the degree that they do, they
make it impossible for religious counterrevolutions to entirely turn
back the clock. Where secular revolutions fail, their failures leave
nothing behind to restrain the fundamentalist impulses that lead the
religious into extremism when they gain power.
This becomes clear if you think about cases that Walzer does not
consider - the secular revolutions that failed. In Iran, the failure of
the Shah’s autocratically secular modernization prepared the way for the
furious intolerance of the Shia revolution. In Egypt, the Muslim
Brotherhood’s failure to govern inclusively when it finally won power
can be seen as a consequence not just of its intolerance, but of the
failure of every secular leader from Nasser to Mubarak to lay the
foundations of a political culture of pluralism and inclusion. Perhaps
only in Tunisia is there a remaining hope, in the Middle East, that a
constitutional order can emerge in which Islamist and secular parties
can compete peacefully for power.
If the story Walzer tells seems to be one of defeat, it needs to be
said that, in the cases he cites, the story is not over, indeed is never
over. This is because, in fact, the secular revolution initially
succeeded, and in doing so, laid down political expectations and a
political culture that fundamentalism may not be able to uproot. In
Israel, the religious and the secular, the Orthodox and the non-Orthodox
believers are still fighting, mostly peacefully, over what kind of
society their country should become. In India, Narendra Modi rose to
power trafficking in Hindu extremism, but the actual exercise of power
has so far forced him to respect Nehru’s legacy of intercommunal
accommodation. In Algeria, the revolutionary gerontocracy is aging, and
the Islamists are waiting for their time to come. When it does, however,
those who still remember the secular revolution’s achievements will not
surrender, without a struggle, to Islamic theocracy.
In other words, the successful secular revolutions that overthrew
empire have not finished their work, and neither have the religious
counterrevolutions that rose to contradict them. Only a pessimist would
believe that the ultimate outcome is a foregone conclusion and only a
dogmatist would want final, crushing victory for either side.
No comments:
Post a Comment