Government of the people

An excellent post on Comment is free by Asim Siddiqui, who discusses some of the ideas in Who needs an Islamic State, by the Sudanese, Abdelwahab el-Affendi. That author asks the question

Why is it that Muslims can only be 'good Muslims' under a dictatorship? Surely submission to Islam must be voluntary and come from the heart, not [be] imposed by political force.

A question that the Catholic Church had to face, first answered one way and only recently changed its mind. Siddiqui ends his article by claiming that the 21st Century will see more attempts at Islamic government, more failures and recourse eventually made to Western political models, which he dares to call "universal".

I was reminded of the Catholic Church because its accession to political power occurred mostly through the absence of an alternative. Despite Constantine's adoption of Christianity in the early 4th Century, it was really only in the dreadful years after Rome's decline that the Church became the only true political centre of Western Europe. There was to be little else for several centuries to come.

Siddiqui doesn't mention the fact that Western political models have already been tried in much of the Middle East, and signally failed. The rise of political Islam is, in fact, a reaction to a previous costly failure to modernise. As in Western Europe after the fall of Rome, there seems to be no alternative. I agree with him that Islamic governance will not succeed either, at least as it is envisaged by its more militant adherents. Nonetheless, whatever form of government does manage to do the trick, I would guess that Islam, in one form or another, will have to play some part. Surrey on the Tigris is just not a realistic prospect.

I found this article via Harry's Place. The post there quotes a reply comment by Asim Siddiqui that is a splendid example of the sort of thinking necessary in times like this. A commenter has pointed out that

... the Prophet Muhammad was an 'Islamist'. After all, he was a statesman as well as a religious leader, he negotiated peace treaties and conducted wars. He established a state based on Islamic laws. Did he 'politicise Islam' or was Islam from the outset political?

Siddiqui's reply is a wonderful 'Yes, but ...'

Our Beloved Prophet was both a temporal political leader and a recipient of revelation. There were numerous occasions when he would be asked by his companions if an opinion he had was from revelation or from his own judgement - where it was the latter the companions would be free (and did) to challenge him and suggest alternatives. There were also occasions when 'political' decisions were made guided by revelation.

However, revelation ended with him. No subsequent leader can claim divine guidance or an insight into God's mind on any political decision they make. Hence, my point is that all leaders must be accountable to the people, not claim they are accountable to God (which in reality means accountability to no one and allows them to get away with murder, literally).
[My emphasis]

A model of damage limitation. Well, that may be a little cynical on my part, but, you see, I'm with the Grand Inquisitor (a bit): organised religion is a necessary protection against enthusiasts like Jesus and Mohammad. They promise too much; they demand too much.

Is killing God serious?

Frank Furedi thinks that the controversy over The Golden Compass is yet another example of the infantalism that has infected public discourse in matters that were 'private' until not so long ago. With regard to the state of public debate, I can only agree. However, I don't think that he is right about The Golden Compass.

He quotes Pullman as saying that the Dark Materials trilogy is ‘about killing God’, but doesn't find this credible.

An atheist takes the view that there is simply no divine being or beings. In Pullman’s books, there is more than a hint of a divine presence. God exists, but He has an undistinguished and undignified role to play in the text. This is a God that is not worthy of praise. It is almost as if the author is pulled towards a mirror-image depiction of divine authority. Pullman’s critique of theological authority offers a hollowed-out version of the Word. His is a vision of a religion without any redeemable features.

Furedi is correct in pointing out that God is explicitly present in these books. According to Pullman's 'theology', the being addressed as God is not the creator, but merely one among many angels - an alpha-angel, so to speak, who took on sceptre and crown, gave himself out to be the Creator, and generally played up in the absence of an incredibly negligent Supreme Being.

I think this is merely an indication of Pullman's failure in his real, and very serious purpose - to undermine monotheistic religion through the genre of fantasy. Remember that the great practitioners of this form, the authors Pullman rails against, created and moulded this genre for quite the opposite reasons. From George MacDonald, arguably the first, though to Tolkein and Lewis, the intention was to depict a world soaked in God. The characters live and grow, fight and win in battles that are spiritual and whose outcomes are more or less those of Christian in Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come.

This is implicit in the form of most fantasy novels in that the actions of one character will affect the whole created world. In Pullman's trilogy, for example, it is through Lyra that the Fall brought about by Eve will be reversed. Lyra will redeem the Flesh so long oppressed by the evil (male) forces of Adamic religions. But to suppose that this can happen is to presuppose a meaningful universe, ie a universe unified and made meaningful by the existence of a Creator, one moreover more than a little interested in his creation.

Pullman doesn't want this. He has Lyra's mentor (ex-nun, physicist) assert the non-existence of the being that makes Lyra's whole story meaningful. This is the thrust of so much of the authorial interference that makes the third book a litle tedious. And when Lyra announces the republic of Heaven in the last line of the book, there is no hint at all that God might even be given an honorary post of life senator.

Nonetheless, the whole structure of Pullman's universe is built on the existence of a being that gives that universe meaning. I haven't read a huge number of fantasy books, but I've never read one that wasn't structured in the same way. If you want to kill God, fantasy is not the genre or place to do it - He goes down, so does your fantasy.

So I think that Pullman is serious in wanting to 'kill God' and that it is something about which believers are justified in saying their bit. I also think that Pullman's artistic vision is far superior to his politico-religious vision and that the second is fatally undermined by his own work.

[Saw the film yesterday with No. 2 Son. Will write soon.]

Limited stories

I'm going to provide links to three articles, all of which are confronting the same issue from the same angle. All three are saying that religion, far from the force for evil that some claim it to be, is the very thing we need most here and now. I would put it in the form of a question, one that I have asked myself (a materialist for almost as long as I can remember) many times: can a secular society built on Christian-inspired ideals survive when it has cast off those ideals?

I have wondered about this for a long time, especially since I recognised that Anglo-Saxon liberalism is not essentially an ideal in itself. It is a negative philosophy, a recognition of the inevitable fallibility of all individuals and of the institutions that they create. Far from asserting the equality of all men and women (which seems to me a metaphysical asssertion), it rather rests on acknowledgement that no-one is, or can be, in a position to claim that anyone else is not equal. We are equal before the law only because we have made it that way; it is neither inevitable or necessary that it be so. As a materialist, I must admit that we exist within an enclosed circle of our own making - we assert democracy, equality and the value of individual life and, because we are powerful, we can maintain and defend that assertion and have done so far.

That enclosed circle is not, in fact, impermeable. It must confront the same challenge that all life faces: change. Now, one of the greatest attributes of this system built on fallibility is that it is able to adapt. Because it is not constructed of Temple marble, but of wood, which is more flexible and can be easily replaced piecemeal. However, despite my own confidence that this is the system best suited to its environment, that doesn't mean it always will be or that there are circumstances that will favour other ways of organising things. There are many who believe that we are faced with these circumstances now.

William Rees-Mogg (like Osama bin Laden and Pope Benedict to name but two others) thinks that the West is spiritually impoverished and lacks the means to extricate itself from its self-made 'poverty' trap. (One of those above believes that this will guarantee him victory in the end.) Larry Siedentop, on the other hand, thinks that Europe has fallen into an unfortunate misunderstanding in opposing its secular civil rights to religion. In fact, that "secularism [is] an embodiment of Christian moral intuitions" and the problem is that Europeans in particular are "out of touch with the Christian roots of their liberalism".

Neil Postman goes via the argument of need. We need a Grand Narrative, one that only a god can provide. We need a story which puts us securely inside something far greater than ourselves, with a beginning, middle and end that includes something of our own will. [You will rebut that just because we need it doesn't mean it's true. Maybe. However, it may mean that it is useful.] But he is not urging any final revelation upon us.

He quotes Galileo

The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.

And Pope John Paul II

Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.

[This is what Benedict was on about in the Regensburg Address.] And then puts out his stall

Science and religion will be hopeful, useful, and life-giving only if we learn to read them with new humility - as tales, as limited human renderings of the Truth. If we continue to read them, either science or Scripture, as giving us Truth direct and final, then all their hope and promise turn to dust. Science read as universal truth, not a human telling, degenerates to technological enslavement and people flee it in despair. Scripture read as universal Truth, not a human telling, degenerates to Inquisition, Jihad, Holocaust, and people flee it in despair. In either case, certainty abolishes hope, and robs us of renewal.

It's worth a few moments' thought.

(The first two via Ninme)

The Second Coming

Why The Second Coming is, and is not, about Iraq.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats

Though this poem has a few memorable phrases, it is them rather than the poem that stay in the mind. It doesn't sing; though I don't suppose in its grimness it should. It is heavy-footed and too visionary. There are too many symbols and they all seem yanked together. Quite different from the exquisite miniatures of Long-legged Fly, which is just as visionary, but set in the opposite civilisational moment, and entirely successful.

(via Pajamas Media)

Meaningful inauthenticity

It would be easy to be cynical about what is happening here. Picturesque remains of a bygone age combined with the sentimental illusions evoked by a white wedding. "Who do they think they're kidding?" would be one reaction. "Mostly themselves" would be the automatic reponse.

Maybe. Maybe not. Obviously, none of us can have the slightest idea about the reality of this choice from the point of view of those involved. Without figures to hand, I cannot say how many people go for the picturesque setting to celebrate their wedding. There's a Unitarian chapel in Styal that in Spring and Summer needs a conveyor belt to manage the wedding parties passing through it. The villagers tend to sneer at them but I have some sympathy with folk who really don't have much consumer choice here.

What most of us think we're doing when we get married is very traditional: we're choosing a partner for life, someone that we're going to live with until we live no more. On the scale of the choices we make, not much comes close to that one in its consequences. We reach out for reinforcements, for the warmth of companionship to reassure us that we are not alone. Lots of people help, especially the ones that have known us and will continue to populate our little world. Others' eyes witness what we do and, in some way, guarantee it.

With our friends and family taking the secondary roles in our story, we acknowledge that there wouldn't be a story without them. But there are other narrative threads that must occupy the foreground at times. One of these is generational: the previous generation giving way to the current one just as the current one must one day give way to the next. This is one of those fundamentals that are so easy to forget if we persist in the delusion that 3.5 billion years of evolution are all about us. A wedding taken seriously will make you feel the star of the show, but will also remind you of you place in the scheme of things. And the scheme of things goes way back.

That's one story, but there are others, ones you could identify with culture or tribe and family. A ritual, an agreed and long-lasting set of actions, words and images, perform this function. All of these things are part of the bedrock of the structure you start to build with the wedding; they are a hedge against the uncertainty of the future you are making a claim on.

In the deracinated lives that most of us live, within the most revolutionary culture that has ever existed, we don't have much choice when it comes to long-lived, charged-with-meaning rituals. Intellectually, it is all too easy to undermine them, deconstruct them - you don't even have to understand much about them to do so. What we're less good at is building the bigger story that we can call on and all can make use of. What is left then but to rope in the unthreatening, but reassuring remains of a past that was more proficient in this field?

I took this photo at Fountains Abbey in July. I have no idea who the people are. In the unlikely event that they can be recognised, I hope that they take no offense at my use of them for idle reflections.