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.
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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.
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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.
There is, as I show in chapter 5, a way of thinking that we can trace back to a set of narratives in the book of Genesis, shared at least loosely by all three faiths. Here is where the problem was born. To ignore these narratives is impossible. But to reinterpret them is very possible indeed. We can go further: the very texts that lie at the root of the problem, if properly interpreted, can provide a solution. This, though, will require a radical re-reading of those texts, through an act of deep listening to the pristine voice of monotheism itself.
Part II is that re-reading. I argue that these narratives are more profound than they have been taken to be, and that much religiously motivated violence throughout the centuries has been the result of a failure to understand these texts in their full depth and challenging complexity. Part III then looks at the other key challenges to Abrahamic monotheism in the global age. What will it take for the children of Abraham – Jews, Christians and Muslims – to live together in peace, and what is at stake if we fail?
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What made this book possible is knowledge of the transformation that has taken place when Jews, Christians and Muslims face one another in their full humanity.
In the case of Judaism and Christianity it took the Holocaust for this to happen. The result has been dramatic. Today, after an estrangement that lasted almost two millennia, Jews and Christians meet much more often as friends – even (in the word selected by recent popes) ‘brothers’ – than as enemies.
Likewise with Islam. As I was writing this book an event happened that moved me greatly. On Friday 9 January 2015, an Islamist terrorist entered a kosher supermarket in Paris and killed four Jews buying food for the Sabbath. A Muslim employee, Lassana Bathily, saw what was happening and, out of sight of the gunmen, hid twenty Jewish customers in a cold storage room, saving their lives. Commended for his courage, he replied, ‘We are all brothers. It’s not a question of Jews, Christians or Muslims. We were all in the same boat, we had to help each other to get out of the crisis.’
Like Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani-Muslim girl who fought for women’s rights against the Taliban, surviving an attempted assassination and becoming in 2014 the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize, Lassana is one of the heroes of our time. What they and millions like them represent is the ability to let faith strengthen, not damage, our shared humanity. It sounds simple, but history tells us that it is not. Religious people in the grip of strong emotions – fear, pain, anxiety, confusion, a sense of loss and humiliation – often dehumanise their opponents with devastating results. Faith is God’s call to see his trace in the face of the Other. But that needs a theology of the Other, which is what I offer in this book.
There is nothing accidental about the spread of radical politicised religion in our time. It came about because of a series of decisions a half-century ago that led to the creation of an entire educational network of schools and seminaries dedicated to the proposition that loving God means hating the enemies of God. The end result has been a flood of chaos, violence and destruction that is drowning the innocent and guilty alike. We now have, with equal seriousness, to educate for peace, forgiveness and love. Until our global institutions take a stand against the teaching and preaching of hate, all their efforts of diplomacy and military intervention will fail. Ultimately the responsibility is ours. Tomorrow’s world is born in what we teach our children today. That is what this book is about.
It begins with the simplest of questions: What makes people violent in the first place?
2
Violence and Identity
What a chimera, then, is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sewer of uncertainty and error, the glory and the scum of the universe.
Blaise Pascal
Two friends are walking in the jungle when they hear the roar of a lion. The first starts thinking of places they can hide. The second puts on his running shoes. The first says, ‘What are you thinking of? You can’t possibly run faster than a lion.’ The second replies, ‘I don’t need to run faster than the lion. I just need to run faster than you.’
That is the joke told in the film The Imitation Game by Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who conceptualised the computer and helped break the German Enigma code during the Second World War. But it took an earlier figure, Charles Darwin, to see that this was more than a joke. It expresses one of the fundamental tensions in the human condition. It was the single biggest challenge to his theory of natural selection.
The first man seeks a collective solution. He tries to think of a way of saving both him and his friend. The second opts for natural selection. He thinks of a solution that will save him at the cost of his friend. He knows that, come what may, one of them will die and he prefers it not to be him.
This is, in essence, the human dilemma. Which comes first? Altruism or survival? The common good or individual self-interest? Are we, under the skin, saints or sinners, angels or demons, moralists or Machiavellians? The joke trades on the fact that we are both. It is the central ambiguity of the hum
an situation.
Darwin’s problem was this: if natural selection is correct, if evolution is a competition for scarce resources such that only the best adapted survive and pass on their characteristics to the next generation, then we should expect to see the selfish survive. The altruists, those who take a risk for the safety of all, would on average die earlier and fail to pass their genes on. They are the ones who get eaten by the lion.
As Darwin put it, the bravest, most self-sacrificial individuals ‘would on average perish in larger numbers than other men’, and the noblest ‘would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature’.1 So altruism should become extinct over time. It is a bad survival strategy. Let others take the risks. Make sure you, at least, are safe.
Yet Darwin knew that altruism was admired in every human society of which he was aware. Even animals take risks for the sake of the group. The one that emits a cry to warn of the presence of a predator helps the group escape while making its own detection more likely. In the language of today: how could selfish genes come together and produce selfless people?
We can arrive at the same problem from the opposite direction. Since Socrates, philosophers have asked: Why be moral? Plato thought it was knowledge. People do wrong only through ignorance. Aristotle thought this implausible. We often suffer from akrasia, weakness of will. So we become good people the way we become good tennis players or violinists, through practice until the behaviour we aspire to becomes natural and instinctive. Being moral means acquiring the habits of the heart we call virtue.
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