We are discussing Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ 1995 book Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence. Read Monday and Tuesday’s posts and catch up on the entire Freedom under threat series starting here.
Each day this week, we are tackling 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?
This post consists simply of excerpts from the book. They are too good not to remember.
To get a better look at this, Sacks focuses on antisemitism,“not because it is the most important instance of religiously motivated hate, but because it is the one in which we can see these processes at work most clearly. Christian and Muslim victims of violence vastly outnumber Jews, whether in the age of the Crusades or today. It is, though, by putting antisemitism under the microscope that we can trace the sequence by which fear becomes hate and then murderous violence, defeating rationality and becoming both destructive and self-destructive.”
“Antisemitism is important because it illustrates more clearly than any other phenomenon the psychological and social dynamic of hate. It helps us understand what may be operative in human conflict over and above the normal clash of principalities and powers, nations and interests. Its return within living memory of the Holocaust signals more than a danger to Jews. It is, as it always has been, the first warning signal of a world order in danger of collapse.“
A social scientist and historian, René Girard had a thesis that “the most effective way by which two groups can end this cycle is by killing a third party, one who is neither a Montague nor a Capulet, who stands outside the feud, and whose death will not lead to another cycle of retaliation. The victim must be, in other words, an outsider, someone either not protected by a group, or the member of a group not in a position to inflict its own retaliatory violence.”
Pathological dualism occurs when you have the simultaneous presence of contradictory beliefs: “The particular combination of conspiracy theory and substitute victim involved in the creation of a scapegoat requires a difficult mental feat. You have to be able to believe at one and the same time that the scapegoat is both all-powerful and powerless.”
“For a thousand years, the scapegoat of choice in Europe and the Middle East has been the Jews. They were the most conspicuous outsiders: non-Christians in a Christian Europe, non-Muslims in an Islamic Middle East… Antisemitism is only contingently about Jews. Jews are its victims, but they are not its cause. The cause is conflict within a culture. It is the potential internal violence that, if expressed, has the power to destroy a society.“
“The greater the threat from the outside, the stronger the sense of cohesion within.”
“Wherever you find obsessive, irrational, murderous antisemitism, there you will find a culture so internally split and fractured that if its members stopped killing Jews, they would start killing one another.“
“The trouble with the use of scapegoats is that it is a solution that compounds the problem. It makes internal tension bearable by turning the question ‘Why has this happened?’ into the question ‘Who did this to me?’ If it is someone else’s fault, not mine, I can preserve my self-respect intact.“
“Jews became the test-case of this truth. They were different: monotheists in a pagan age, then non-Christians in a Christian Europe. Today they are the most conspicuous non-Muslims in an Islamic Middle East. The fate of Jewry through the ages has been the clearest indicator of whether a culture, faith or empire has been willing to accord dignity or rights to the one-who-is-not-like-them.“
“A minority everywhere, they kept their identity intact, becoming the only significant minority in history to survive without assimilating to the dominant culture or convert to the majority faith.“
“This is not an argument for powerlessness. A thousand years of persecution culminating in the Holocaust are sufficient to refute the notion that Jews, or any other nation, can survive without the ability to defend themselves. But to reach, as they did, the spiritual heights without any of the conventional accoutrements of nationhood and political self-determination is enough to tell us that religion and power are two different things altogether, even if both in their distinct ways and different senses are political.“
“Freud and René Girard argued that it is not religion that leads to violence. It is violence that leads to religion.
“Girard cast his net wider. Violence is born in what he called mimetic desire (from mimesis, meaning ‘imitation’). Mimetic desire is wanting what someone else has because they have it. Mimetic desire is not just wanting to have what someone else has. Ultimately it is wanting to be what someone else is.“
“Antisemitism is the first warning sign of a culture in a state of cognitive collapse. It gives rise to that complex of psychological regressions that lead to evil on a monumental scale: splitting, projection, pathological dualism, dehumanization, demonization, a sense of victimhood, and the use of a scapegoat to evade moral responsibility. It allows a culture to blame others for its condition without ever coming to terms with it themselves. The antisemitism flooding through the Arab and Islamic world today is as widespread and virulent as it was in Europe between 1880 and 1945, and it is being disseminated worldwide through the Internet.“
“As the mysterious, omnipotent, all-embracing enemy, Jews united the group, silenced dissent, distracted the mind from painful truths and enabled otherwise utterly incompatible groups to become allies. Today, for example, Islamist groups find it hard to win Western support for the imposition of Sharia law, the beheading of captives, the forced conversion of Christians or the sentencing to death of blasphemers. But when they criticize Israel, they find they no longer stand alone. This brings within the fold such strange fellow travelers as the far right, the anti-globalization left, and some notoriously politicized human rights organizations, surely the oddest coalition ever assembled in support of people practicing terror to bring about theocracy.“
