On dryness
Kenan Malik points out that fundamentalism is an idea, not a biology.
Secularism and fundamentalism are not ideas stitched into people’s DNA. They are not born so. Secularist ideas and religious beliefs are like any values: people absorb them, accept them, reject them. A generation ago there were strong secular movements within Muslim communities and fundamentalism was a marginal force. Today secularism is much weaker, and Islamism much stronger. This shift has been propelled not by demographic trends but by political developments. And political developments can also help reverse the shift.
Kaufmann doesn’t deny any of this. But, he insists, nothing can stop the inevitable demographic triumph of the fundamentalists. Why? Because ‘we inhabit a period of ideological exhaustion’. The ‘great secular religions have lost their allure.’ In their place we have ‘relativism and managerialism’, outlooks that ‘cannot inspire a commitment to generations past and sacrifices for those yet to come.’
This gets us to the heart of the problem. For the real issue at stake is not demography but politics. I do not accept the secular ideologies amount to ‘religions’. But Kaufmann is right to suggest that in our post-ideological age, secularists find it much more difficult to inspire a sense of purpose and collective direction.
Yes, and ironically, fundamentalism itself fills the gap – fundamentalism does a brilliant job of reminding secularists why secularism is worth having and defending.
Not just the obsession with demography but the very fear of Islam expresses the lack of conviction in a progressive, secular, humanist project. The spectre of ‘Eurabia’ is really an admission that the critics of Islam lack the wherewithal to challenge the fundamentalists. Or, as Kaufmann puts it, ‘Dry atheism… can never compete with the rich emotions evoked by religion.’
I’m not so sure about that…But if it is right, then that’s another way “New” atheists are not such a bad thing after all. Part of what the Be Quieters hate about us is precisely our lack of dryness – our energy, our enthusiasm (in the older sense, the one that Hume and Mill senior were so wary of), our heat, our zeal. I can understand all that – enthusiasm and zeal are of course one short step away from more sinister qualities, or to put it another way, like so many things (respect, tolerance, liberty), they are only as good as they are: used for the right purposes they are good but used for bad ones they are a nightmare.
But all the same – I think in fact the current revival (so to speak) of atheism really is useful for altering the perception and perhaps the reality that atheism is dry while religion is full of rich emotions. I think we are doing at least a little to make it clear that atheism is not dry; that it too can evoke rich emotions. Atheism – at least in a context where the alternative is so visible and ambitious and competitive – is not just a negation, not just a no-god shrug. It is a liberation. It is the rejection of authority, tyranny, patriarchy, of bossdom of all kinds. It is the repudiation of the idea that there is a Superbig male Boss squatting at the top of everything and that we have to obey and worship and grovel to it. Freedom from that idea brings a lot of good things with it. Kenan indicates why.
The irony is that, for all their poisonous hostility towards Islam, the Eurabists express considerable admiration for Islamist arguments. Melanie Phillips is militantly opposed to what she sees as the ‘Islamic takeover of the West’ and ‘the drift towards social suicide’ that supposedly comes with accepting Muslim immigration. Yet she is deeply sympathetic to the Islamist rejection of secular humanism, which she thinks has created ‘a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets.’
Phillips is talking idiotic nonsense. What does she think the culture was like before? What does she think 19th century culture was like? Or 16th century, or 11th century? What does she think life was like when the vast majority of people were dirt poor and illiterate and without rights? Does she think the whole world was a drawing room out of Jane Austen? This debauched and disorderly culture is one that is capable of improvement over time, and fairly short time at that; it is flawed but reparable; it comes with freedoms and rights and responsibilities that used to be reserved for one or five or ten percent of the population. Secularism is a big part of the reason for that; secularism makes belief in progress (not perfection, John Gray please note, but progress) more tenable and realistic.
There is nothing like a vivid sense of the alternative for making secularism and atheism seem about as dry as Niagra Falls.
I’m sorry, I think Malik is largely wrong. This is the way he ends his essay:
It’s not a matter of being out-thought. The Islamists have already been out-thought. That’s not the issue. The question is whether liberal society can survive the kinds of threats that militant Islam can bring to bear. The majority of Western muslims may be moderate, but the violent minority wing has already nearly silenced criticism of Islam. This is a very dangerous situation.
It’s not Eurabia, and demographic victory we should be concerned about. This is all suppositional at best. But the very real effect of very real threats of violence is where the problem lies. Is liberalism, and, are liberals, ready to face the violence that may follow criticism? Islam itself is a spent force as a form of thought. But as a form of violence it still has much farther to go, and more damage to inflict. This has nothing to do with thought, but with murder and threats of murder. It has a far more chilling effect than thought ever did, and the fact that it is daily committed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and throughout the “Muslim World”, is a standing threat to the rest of us. Most thoughtful people have taken it to heart, and have fallen silent. This is the real danger point.
It’s less that Islam has succeded in silencing criticism, more that the wider culture has capitulated to a vocal – and violent – minority of spokespeople and ‘community leaders’ rather than dealing with religious minorities as individuals.
Malik has taken this line since the Rushdie affair. Broadly, he’s correct. This isn’t about demographics because it’s a minority among the minorities who are making unreasonable demands.
It astonishes me how many people view passionate advocacy of Enlightenment values as somehow uninspiring.
But if it is right, then that’s another way “New” atheists are not such a bad thing after all. Part of what the Be Quieters hate about us is precisely our lack of dryness – our energy, our enthusiasm (in the older sense, the one that Hume and Mill senior were so wary of), our heat, our zeal.
Yes, but, by definition, it gives one nothing to live for*. Religions offer an identity; an ideology; a brotherhood. ‘Course, you can wrap all of those things around atheism, but doing so suggests that – to borrow a phrase – ur not doin’ it right.
[*] To be clear, I’m not implying that atheism – necessarily, at least – demands a void of morality, transcendence <i>et cetera</i>. It’s just that, alone, it’s the absence of belief in deities.
The bitter irony is that a careful reading of Jane Austen reveals a world of quiet but inescapable suffering for a lot of her characters. Women left destitute because they are women and that the family’s source of income can only be left to a male relative. Girls whose only hope to escape poverty and social scorn is to accept a loveless marriage. A widow turned out of her house when her husband dies and the house goes to a male relative, not to her or her daughters. A child born in a poor family who is taken from her parents “for her own good”, ostensibly to be educated in the home of wealthy relatives, but where she is, in effect, tolerated as something between a pet and a servant. And intelligent, talented women who can only pursue their interest in study or art if their husband gives them the permission to do so. And on, and on. Even the horrors of world history, of the stage, shape the background, from the bloody Napoleonic wars (from which so many sons and husbands never returned) to the slave plantations in Jamaica, where some characters have the source of their wealth. But, hints the author, when they loose that wealth because of the abolition of slavery at the time the novel is set, it’s hard for them but not to be regretted if one thinks things straight, because of the inhumanity of the institution of slavery.
Even if one never studied history, the dark shadows of our past are still very visible in the literature of the times. And often in books written by devout Christians, such as Austen!
Pedantry corner: “because of the abolition of slavery at the time the novel is set,”
No, slavery in the British colonies was not abolished until the early 1830s, by which time Austen had been dead some 15 years or more.
On the ‘Eurabia’ point, it amuses me, in a cynical way, to see people making a basically pre-1914 argument about ‘outbreeding’, in a context where others of very similar general disposition could be found making comments about homosexual ‘recruitment’ diminishing the stock. The racist supposition that immigrant populations are made up of mindless zealots unable to take their own life-decisions is really one of the most tiresome aspects of the whole thing.
Does anyone think there is something to be said for the idea that being provocative toward Islam is just being counter-productive? As in offending Muslims might just make them more likely to become outraged anti-Western Islamists? That perhaps we should be killing the Islamists with kindness? That has not been my MO thus far, but I think perhaps it is a good question. There is a facebook event called “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day” in support of Matt Stone and Trey Parker, and I’ve got some ideas for some public works, but I don’t want to just end up fanning flames.
”Does anyone think there is something to be said for the idea that being provocative toward Islam is just being counter-productive?”
Not really. Respect towards religion is a bottomless pit. The demands will keep growing and you’ll get nothing in return.
Europe and America didn’t shuffle off the religious yoke (to large extent anyway) by being quiet and hoping it just went away. Keeping opposition vocal and public makes it easier for those within religion to leave, or at least move towards the more liberal fringes.
Irene, quite – I had that in mind; the choice of Austen was deliberately ironic.
Slavery wasn’t yet abolished but the abolition was under discussion – there is that bit where Fanny alludes to it, as does Mrs Elton, defensively.
And it’s not just that there was pervasive poverty and misery; there was also plenty of just the kind of vulgarity and greed that Phillips cites – women frankly marrying for money, mothers and uncles pushing their daughters and nieces into marriage for money and status, vicars groveling to the upper classes, etc etc etc. Fielding, Swift, Austen, the Brontes, Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray – they all present a world absolutely riddled with cruelty, exploitation, cruelty, dishonesty – not some Christian paradise of good will and high thoughts that Phillips seems to imagine.
The claim that we live in a post-ideological age should not be allowed to pass. We live in an age where the dominant ideology of ‘marketization’ is propagated and imposed via the WTO, IMF, World Bank and, of course, governments and major corporations. Perhaps when an ideology is so pervasive it becomes invisible to some people? How can someone pose as an intellectual when they can’t challenge the unsupported assumptions of the culture they inhabit?