Authors: Jonathan Sacks
What printing was to the Reformation, the Internet is to radical political Islam, turning it into a global force capable of inciting terror and winning recruits throughout the world. The extremists have understood that in many ways religion was made for the twenty-first century. It is a more global force than nation states. Religious radicals use the new electronic media with greater sophistication than their secular counterparts. And they have developed organisational structures to fit our time.
Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom argued in
The Starfish and the Spider
that leaderless organisations will dominate the future. The starfish and the spider have similar shapes but different internal structures. A decapitated spider dies, but a starfish can regenerate itself from a single amputated leg. That is what has happened to the many successor movements of al-Qaeda.
So it is worth returning to the seventeenth century to see what ended the wars of religion then, giving birth to the modern world and transforming the West into the vanguard of civilisation, overtaking China on the one hand and the Ottoman Empire on the other.
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.
Not all of these thinkers were religious. Hobbes and Spinoza were both considered atheists in their time. Milton was one of the great religious poets and Locke was a Socinian Christian. Nonetheless, all four drew their political ideas primarily from the Hebrew Bible. One of their most important principles, found also in the Qur’an (
Al-Baqara
256), is that there should be no compulsion in religion.
Those principles remain valid today, but there is one major difference between now and then. In the seventeenth century, the primary movement was against the religious power of the Catholic Church in favour of the secularisation of the various societal domains. Today the revolution, at least in the Middle East, is against secularism of two different kinds. The first is the secular nationalism of Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak in Egypt, Assad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, regimes widely seen to be corrupt and oppressive. The second is the secular culture of the West, judged by those for whom tradition resonates to be decadent, materialist and soul-destroying. To put it simply:
The seventeenth century was the dawn of an age of secularisation. The twenty-first century will be the start of an age of desecularisation
.
The twenty-first century will be more religious than the twentieth for several reasons. One, as we have seen above, is that in many ways religion is better adapted to a world of global instantaneous communication than are nation states and existing political institutions.
Second, as we will see in the next chapter, is the failure of Western societies after the Second World War to address the most fundamental of human needs: the search for identity. The world’s great faiths provide identity. They offer meaning, direction, a code of conduct and a set of rules for the moral and spiritual life in ways that the free-market, liberal democratic West does not.
The Abrahamic monotheisms in particular offer ordinary
individuals – and we are, most of us, ordinary individuals – a sense of pride and consequence. A creed that tells us that we are no more than selfish genes, with nothing in principle to separate us from the animals, in a society whose strongest motivators are money and success, in a universe that came into existence for no reason whatsoever and for no reason will one day cease to be, will never speak as strongly to the human spirit as one that tells us we are in the image and likeness of God in a universe he created in love.
The third reason has to do with demography. Not a single member state of Europe has a replacement-level birth rate (2.1 children per female). Having dropped at one point to 1.47, the European average is now 1.6 (the increase largely being due to immigrant populations), but this means that the native populations of Europe are all in long, slow decline. The gap will be filled by immigration and the high birth rates of ethnic minority populations.
Worldwide, the most religious groups have the highest birth rates. Over the next half-century, as Eric Kaufmann has documented in
Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?
, there will be a massive transformation in the religious make-up of much of the world, with Europe leading the way. With the sole exception of the United States, the West is failing to heed the Darwinian imperative of passing on its genes to the next generation.
All of this means that we can no longer defer the task that was essentially avoided in the seventeenth century. What then stopped Catholics and Protestants from murdering one another was
to deprive religion of power
. The theology that led to conflict in the first place was, by and large, left untouched. It lay dormant like frozen DNA. For four centuries people have known that religious doctrines might be harmful in many ways, but since power had been taken out of religious hands, there was little damage they could do.
That is no longer the case. In a world of declining superpowers, sclerotic international institutions, a swathe of failed or failing states and a Hobbesian chaos of civil and tribal wars, religious
extremists are seizing power. This means that we have little choice but to re-examine the theology that leads to violent conflict in the first place.
If we do not do the theological work, we will face a continuation of the terror that has marked our century thus far, for it has no other natural end
.
It cannot be ended by military means alone. Moisés Naím, in his seminal work
The End of Power
, makes this absolutely clear. Wars, he says, are becoming increasingly asymmetric, large armies against smaller, non-traditional ones. They are also being
increasingly won by the militarily weaker side
. A Harvard study has shown that in asymmetric conflicts between 1800 and 1849, the weaker side in terms of soldiers and arms achieved its aim in 12 per cent of cases. In the wars between 1950 and 1998, the weaker side won in 55 per cent of cases. Hence Naím’s conclusion that ‘when nation-states go to war these days, big military power delivers less than it once did’.
12
The work to be done now is theological. The point was made in an historic speech at Al-Azhar University at the beginning of 2015 by Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Calling for a ‘religious revolution’, he said, ‘The Islamic world is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost. And it is being lost by our own hands.’
The challenge is not only to Islam, but to Judaism and Christianity also. In November 1995 a young Jewish student, Yigal Amir, assassinated Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, whom he saw as endangering the future of the State by the peace process in which he was engaged. Like Barukh Goldstein, who killed twenty-nine Muslims at prayer, Amir was university trained, religious, and acting on religious principle. Goldstein, as far as we can surmise, believed he was fulfilling the command to ‘wipe out the memory’ of Amalek, the biblical symbol of evil (Deut. 25:19). Amir regarded Rabin as a
rodef
, that is, a threat to the welfare of others, or a
moser
, a traitor to his people. I believe with perfect faith that Judaism is a religion of peace. But not everyone interprets a religion the same way. None of
the great religions can say, in unflinching self-knowledge, ‘Our hands never shed innocent blood.’
As Jews, Christians and Muslims, we have to be prepared to ask the most uncomfortable questions. Does the God of Abraham want his disciples to kill for his sake? Does he demand human sacrifice? Does he rejoice in holy war? Does he want us to hate our enemies and terrorise unbelievers? Have we read our sacred texts correctly? What is God saying to us, here, now? We are not prophets but we are their heirs and we are not bereft of guidance on these fateful issues.
Why has this happened now? Because 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. The Internet, alongside its many blessings, can make it contagious. You can spread hate globally through social media. You can have worldwide impact through YouTube videos of burnings and beheadings.
The multiplication of channels of communication means that we no longer rely for news on established newspapers and television channels. Broadcasting is being replaced by narrowcasting. The difference is that broadcasting speaks to a mixed public, exposing them to a range of views. Narrowcasting speaks to a targeted public and exposes them only to facts and opinions that support their prejudices. It fragments a public into a set of sects of the like-minded.
The Internet also globalises hate. Events that would in the past have had purely local impact now send shockwaves around the world. A provocation somewhere can create anger everywhere. Never has paranoia been easier to create and communicate. It is easy to portray an unintentional slight as a deliberate insult if you are communicating with people thousands of miles away who have no means of checking the facts.
Nor has it ever been easier to demonise whole populations so effectively. Jihadists and suicide bombers are recruited by non-stop streams of images of the humiliation of Muslims at the hands of others who then become the Greater or Lesser Satan and can be murdered without qualms since you see them as persecutors of your people. Even at an everyday level, the Internet has a
disinhibition effect
: you can be ruder to someone electronically than you would be in a face-to-face encounter, since the exchange has been depersonalised. Read any Comments section on the Web, and you will see what this means: the replacement of reason by anger, and argument by vilification. Civility is dying, and when it dies, civilisation itself is in danger.
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. All we need to do is sit down, brainstorm, work out alternative scenarios and opt for the outcome that is maximal for all concerned.
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.
To put the argument of this book as simply as I can: there is a connection between religion and violence, but it is oblique, not direct. Why this is so is set out in
chapter 2
. There is, though, a different and deeper connection between Abrahamic monotheism and the three religions to which it gave rise: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Tracing this back to its roots is the task of
chapters 3
to
5
. In them I examine the social and psychological processes that lead to altruistic evil, of which violence in the name of God is a key example. There is, in these chapters, an emphasis 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.
The relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam has been historically a poisoned one, and I seek to understand why. In these chapters I explore three phenomena: mindset, myth and sibling rivalry. First, there is a specific mindset that makes altruistic evil possible: dualism. This is incompatible with monotheism, but it has nonetheless from time to time found a home there. Second, there are myths that feed this mindset, and they are surprisingly durable and adaptable, moving from one religion to another and even to secular cultures. Third, there is the unique relationship between the three Abrahamic faiths that has set them in tension with one another.
Each initially assumed the others would disappear
. Their
members would either convert or acknowledge the primacy of the new faith. Christians expected that Jews would become Christian because the founder of their faith was a Jew. Muslims expected that Jews and Christians would become Muslims because their faith incorporated Abraham, Moses, Jesus and elements of their teachings. But they did not disappear. Some converted, but most did not. Jews remained Jews. Christians remained Christians. The result is that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are each challenged, even threatened, by the existence of the others. For much of the time this hardly matters. Jews, Christians and Muslims have lived peaceably together for most of their history. But at times of intense turbulence and stress it matters very much indeed.