The final book in this series is Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. This book is absolutely outstanding and I cannot say enough good things about it, but it is complex and looooong. I learned so much from it that I have to split this post into five separate ones to prevent it from being too long to digest. Each day this week, we will tackle one of the topics below. All bold and underlining is mine. All of Rabbi Sacks’ words are in italics.
- Political religious extremism – what is it and why is it happening now?
- What social and psychological processes lead to altruistic evil?
- What is the first warning sign of a world order in danger of collapse?
- What does “apocalyptic politics” mean and what causes it?
- Where do we go from here?
Politicized religious extremism in the 21st century has caught the West unprotected and unprepared. How did we get here?
In the 17th century, we had the secularization of knowledge in form of science and philosophy. In the 18th century, we had the separation of church and state and the secularization of power with the American and French Revolutions. The 19th century saw the secularization of culture and the 20th brought about the secularization of morality (one may only intervene if to prevent harm to others).
“The 17th century was the dawn of an age of secularization. The 21st century will be the start of an age of desecularization.”
Why?
- Religion is better adapted to a world of global instantaneous communication than are nation states and existing political institutions.
- The failure of Western societies after WWII to address the human need for identity, meaning, direction, moral and spiritual life.
- Demography and birth rates of ethnic minority populations.
The traditional role of ethics has been replaced by the sanctity of the individual, by autonomy, rights, and choice. And what to do about morality? Just don’t think about it too much!
“What the secularists forgot is that Homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal. If there is one thing the great institutions of the modern world do not do, it is to provide meaning.
“Science tells us how but not why. Technology gives us power but cannot guide us as to how to use that power. The market gives us choices but leaves us uninstructed as to how to make those choices. The liberal democratic state gives us freedom to live as we choose but on principle refuses to guide us as to how to choose.
“Science, technology, the free market and the liberal democratic state have enabled us to reach unprecedented achievements in knowledge, freedom, life expectancy and affluence. They are among the greatest achievements of human civilization and are to be defended and cherished. But they do not and cannot answer the three questions every reflective individual will ask at some time in his or her life: Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? These are questions to which the answer is prescriptive not descriptive, substantive not procedural. The result is that the twenty-first century has left us with a maximum of choice and a minimum of meaning.“
Rabbi Sacks likens the current world situation to the war in France between 1562 and 1598 between the Catholics and the Huguenots, followed by the Thirty Years War between 1618 and 1648.
The unrest began with a revolution in information technology – Gutenberg’s printing press.
“Many inventions have changed the world, but when there is a change in the way we record and transmit information, the repercussions are more systemic, transforming institutions, cultures and even the way people think.“
Printing is to the Reformation as the Internet is to Radical political Islam.
So what ended those 17th century wars?
“Weapons win wars, but it takes ideas to win the peace. In the case of the seventeenth century the transformative ideas emerged from a series of outstanding thinkers, among them John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza and John Locke. Their key principles were the social contract, the limits of state power, the doctrine of toleration, liberty of conscience and the concept of human rights.”
Then, movement was against the Catholic Church in favor of the secularization of various social domains. Today the revolution is against secularism… secular nationalism in the Middle East and secular culture of the West (seen as decadent, materialist).
Why is this happening now?
“The world is changing faster than at any time in history, and since change disorients, it leads to a sense of loss and fear that can turn rapidly into hate. Our world is awash with hate.”
“In the West we tend to have a vague sense of what is happening without always understanding why. That is because, since the eighteenth century, the West, through market economics and liberal democracy, has produced an historically unusual way of thinking and a distinctive personality type: the rational actor who makes decisions on the basis of individual choice and calculation of consequences. For the rational actor there is no problem that cannot be solved, no conflict that cannot be resolved… What rules in this universe is interests. Sometimes they are individual, at others collective, but interests are what are at stake. What is missing is identity.
“Identity is always a group phenomenon. It comes laden with history, memory, a sense of the past and its injustices, and a set of moral sensibilities that are inseparable from identity: loyalty, respect and reverence, the three virtues undermined by market economics, liberal democratic politics and the culture of individualism.
“As one who values market economics and liberal democratic politics, I fear that the West does not fully understand the power of the forces that oppose it. Passions are at play that run deeper and stronger than any calculation of interests. Reason alone will not win this particular battle. Nor will invocations of words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. To some they sound like compelling ideals, but to others they are the problem against which they are fighting, not the solution they embrace.“
“In general, the West has suffered from the tendency to fight the last battle, not the next.” Our great behemoth of a nation is remarkably slow to change directions. Not only are we not ready… we are unprepared.
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You can read from the beginning of this “Freedom under threat” series here.
