Indeed, as the research of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has shown, in his and David Campbell’s book American Grace, it is specifically in religious communities in the United States that you find the strongest reservoirs of social capital, willingness to help strangers, to give to charity for both religious and secular causes, and to be active in voluntary associations, neighbourhood groups and so on. His view is that this has to do not with religious belief as such, but rather with membership in a religious community.
Add to this the demographic research of Eric Kaufmann, already referred to in the previous chapter, that throughout the contemporary world, the more religious the group the higher its birth rate, and we see the power of religion to sustain community over time. The converse is also true. Michael Blume notes:
Although we looked hard at all the available data and case studies back to early Greece and India, we still have not been able to identify a single case of any non-religious population retaining more than two births per woman for just a century. Wherever religious communities dissolved, demographic decline followed suit.8
So religion performed, and continues to perform, a task fundamental to large groups. It links people, emotionally, behaviourally, intellectually and spiritually, into communion and thus community. It follows, incidentally, that the first fully articulated religions were integrally linked with politics, a word that itself derives from polis, meaning ‘city’. Religion was the metaphysical grounding of the social structure, and thus the basis of political order. The head of state was the head of the religion. The king, ruler or pharaoh was either a god or a son of the gods or the chief intermediary with the gods. Civilisation had to undergo a revolution before it learned to separate the two. That was where Abrahamic monotheism came in, but that is a story for a later chapter.
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We can now answer the question of the relationship between religion and violence, as well as that of the dual nature of human beings, capable of great good but also of great evil. We are good and bad because we are human, we are social animals and we live, survive and thrive in groups. Within groups we practise altruism. Between them we practise aggression. Religion enters the equation only because it is the most powerful force ever devised for the creation and maintenance of large-scale groups by solving the problem of trust between strangers.
Violence has nothing to do with religion as such. It has to do with identity and life in groups. Religion sustains groups more effectively than any other force. It suppresses violence within. It rises to the threat of violence from without. Most conflicts and wars have nothing to do with religion whatsoever. They are about power, territory and glory, things that are secular, even profane. But if religion can be enlisted, it will be.
If, then, violence has to do with identity, why not abolish identity? Why divide humanity into a Them and Us? Why not have just a common humanity? This, after all, was the utopian hope of prophets like Zechariah who imagined a time when ‘The Lord will become king over all the world. On that day the Lord will be one, and his name will be one’ (Zech. 14:9). A world without identities would be a world without war.
There have been three major attempts in history to realise this dream, and it is immensely important to understand why they failed. The first was Pauline Christianity. Paul famously said, ‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female’ (NIV, Gal. 3:28). Historically, Christianity has been the most successful attempt in history to convert the world to a single faith. Today a third of the population of the world is Christian. But nations continued to exist. So did non-monotheistic faiths. Another monotheism arose, Islam, with a similar aspiration to win the world to its understanding of the will of God. Within Christianity itself there was schism, first between West and East, then between Catholic and Protestant. Within Islam there were Sunni and Shia. The result was that war did not end. There were crusades, jihads, holy wars and civil strife. These led some people to believe that religion is not a way of curing violence but of intensifying it.
The second attempt was the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. After a devastating series of religious wars there was a genuine belief among European intellectuals that the divisions brought about by faith and dogma could be transcended by the universal truths of reason, philosophy and science. Kant produced a secular equivalent of the idea that we are all in the image of God. He said: treat others as ends, not only means. He also revived the prophetic dream of Isaiah, turning it into a secular programme for ‘perpetual peace’ (1795). Its most famous expression was Beethoven’s setting in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, with its vision of a time when Alle Menschen werden Brüder – ‘All men become brothers.’
This too did not last. The age of reason was succeeded by Romanticism and the return of the old gods of nation and race. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries three substitutes for religion emerged as the basis for new identities. One was the nation state. A second was the ideological system. The third was race. The first led to two world wars, the second to Stalin’s Russia, the Gulag and the KGB, and the third to the Holocaust. The cost of these three substitutes for religion was in excess of a hundred million lives. After that, no one who argues that abolishing religion will lead to peace can be taken seriously.
The first two attempts were universalist: a universal religion or a universal culture. The third attempt, the one we have been living through for the past half-century, is the opposite. It is the effort to eliminate identity by abolishing groups altogether and instead enthroning the individual. The contemporary West is the most individualistic era of all time. Its central values are in ethics, autonomy; in politics, individual rights; in culture, postmodernism; and in religion, ‘spirituality’. Its idol is the self, its icon the ‘selfie’, and its operating systems the free market and the post-ideological, managerial liberal democratic state. In place of national identities we have global cosmopolitanism. In place of communities we have flash-mobs. We are no longer pilgrims but tourists. We no longer know who we are or why.
No civilisational order like this has ever appeared before, and we can only understand it in the light of the traumatic failure of the three substitutes for religion: nationalism, communism and race. We are now living through the discontents of individualism and have been since the 1970s. Identity has returned. The tribes are back and fighting more fiercely than ever. The old sources of conflict, religion and ethnicity, are claiming new victims. The anti-modern radicals have learned that you can use the products of modernity without going through the process that produced them, namely Westernisation. Meanwhile the energy of the West has been sapped by the decay of the very things religion once energised: marriage, families, communities, a shared moral code, the ability to defer the gratification of instinct, the covenant that linked rich and poor in a bond of mutual responsibility, and a vision of the universe that gave rise to the social virtue of hope.
The tendency of humans to form groups, of which religion is the most effective agent, is a source of violence and war. But the alternative – humanity without groups or identities – is impossible because unbearable. The thinker who saw this most clearly was French sociologist Émile Durkheim. In 1897 he published a remarkable book entitled Suicide. Intuitively we think that the choice of ‘to be or not to be’ is the most intensely personal decision of all. It has everything to do with mind and mood, and little to do with the world outside.
Durkheim argued otherwise. He said that in a society undergoing anomie – the loss of a shared moral code – more people will commit suicide. We cannot bear the absence of public meanings and collective moral identity. Faced with the prospect, vulnerable individuals will choose death rather than life. Though Durkheim could not have foreseen it, a variant of this is happening in our time. It is the reason why seemingly normal, well-educated and adjusted people with careers and families ahead of them become jihadists and suicide bombers, choosing
death rather than life.
Vast research since the events of 11 September 2001 has shown that jihadists and suicide bombers are not for the most part people driven by poverty or social exclusion. They have no recognisable psychological profile. They are not psychopathic, nor are they driven by religious extremism as such. Many of them did not have a religious education. As children, they did not attend madrassahs. Some of them know very little about Islam.
If they are suffering from anything, it is from what they see as the emptiness, meaninglessness, materialism and narcissism of the contemporary West and the corruption of secular regimes in the Islamic world. As Eric Hoffer noted in The True Believer (1951) and as Scott Atran has shown in his study of suicide bombers, Talking to the Enemy, individuals join radical movements to alleviate the isolation of the lonely crowd and become, however briefly, part of an intense community engaged in the pursuit of something larger than the self.9 They are motivated by genuine ideals. They feel the suffering, the pain and the humiliation of their fellow believers. They seek to dedicate and if need be sacrifice their lives to end what they see as the injustice of the world and to honour the memory of those they see as its victims. As Michael Ignatieff wrote in The Warrior’s Honor, the book he wrote in response to the Balkan wars, ‘Political terror is tenacious because it is an ethical practice. It is a cult of the dead, a dire and absolute expression of respect.’10 Holy warriors are altruists, and what they commit is altruistic evil.
We have seen in this chapter how altruism leads us to make sacrifices for the sake of the group, while at the same time leading us to commit acts of violence against perceived threats to the group. Good and bad, altruism and aggression, peace and violence, love and hate, are born together as the twin consequences of our need to define ourselves as an Us in opposition to a Them. But we have a way further to go. Something more than simple identity is needed for good people to commit truly evil deeds.
3
Dualism
Exaggerate each feature until man is
Metamorphosized into beast, vermin, insect.
Fill in the background with malignant
Figures from ancient nightmares – devils,
Demons, myrmidons of evil.
When your icon of the enemy is complete
You will be able to kill without guilt,
Slaughter without shame.
Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy (1986)1
One day between November 1946 and February 1947, a young Bedouin shepherd, Muhammed edh-Dhib, in the company of a cousin and a friend, discovered a number of ancient decaying leather scrolls in a cave in Qumran, amid the mountains that border the Dead Sea. The story Muhammed told was that he was tending his animals when he noticed that one had strayed from the flock. He idly tossed a stone into the small opening of a cave and became frightened when it made an unusual noise, as if it had hit not the bottom of the cave but a jar inside. Unnerved, he fled, but later returned with his two companions, climbed into the cave, retrieved the scrolls and brought them back to his family. After drying them, his father took them to some local dealers. One declared them worthless. A second bought three for low prices. A further scroll came into the possession of the Syrian archbishop of Jerusalem, who showed them to a scholar who realised their value and significance.
This prompted a dramatic search for other caves and scrolls against the background of Israel’s War of Independence. It continued under Jordanian auspices until 1956. Eventually eleven caves were found to contain documents, yielding a vast library of 981 different texts. Among them were by far the oldest manuscripts of biblical texts then known, dating from the third or second century BCE (subsequently even older fragments dating to the sixth century BCE were discovered at Ketef Hinom), together with other previously unknown ancient documents.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are one of the great discoveries of modern times. Most believe that they were the work of a small community of separatists who had taken the decision, sometime in the second pre-Christian century, to leave Jerusalem and live in seclusion until the day when Israel’s enemies and its own corrupt religious establishment would be overthrown and the reign of righteousness restored. Some believe they were a branch of the Essenes, others that they were a dissident group of Sadducees, yet others that they were a group in their own right, one of many in those turbulent, fissiparous times.
Less well known is another major manuscript discovery some two years earlier near Nag Hammadi, a settlement in upper Egypt. It was there in December 1945 that Muhammad Ali al-Samman and his brothers had gone to dig in Jabal al-Tarif, a mountain honeycombed with caves, for the soft soil they used to fertilise their crops. As they were digging, their spades hit a red earthenware jar containing thirteen papyrus books bound in leather. From there on the story becomes obscure. The brothers had been involved in a blood feud and were afraid that the police, investigating murder, would find the manuscripts and confiscate them. Eventually the manuscripts found their way onto the black market, but as news of their existence leaked out, the Egyptian government eventually tracked most of them down and deposited them in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.
Part of one of the codices was smuggled out of Egypt and placed for sale, attracting the attention of a Dutch scholar, Gilles Quispel, who pieced the fragments together, deciphered one of the texts and realised that it was an edition of a text hidden for many centuries, the Gospel of Thomas. Altogether the Nag Hammadi manuscripts represent Coptic versions of fifty-two early Christian texts, many of them hitherto unknown, including the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel to the Egyptians, the Secret Book of James, the Apocalypse of Paul and the Apocalypse of Peter.
Written in Coptic, they were translations, dated between 350 and 400 CE, of originals written in Greek and dating back to the second century. The reason they had been hidden soon became clear. They embody a theology radically at odds with the beliefs that became mainstream Christianity. Indeed, many of the newly discovered texts had been denounced as heretical by Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, around the year 180.
These two libraries, hidden for centuries, belong to two quite different religious traditions, one Jewish, the other Christian. But they have one very unusual feature in common – one of the reasons that they were hidden in the first place. Judaism and Christianity are both monotheisms, but the Qumran sectarians and those of Nag Hammadi were dualists. They believed not in one power governing the universe, but in two.
Among the Qumran scrolls is one describing a war between the Children of Light (the Israelites or such of them as remained after their various defeats and exiles) and the Children of Darkness, the Ammonites, Moabites, Amalekites, Philistines and their allies. The Children of Light would be victorious, darkness would be vanquished, and peace would reign for ever.
The Nag Hammadi gospels are more radical, turning the conventional world of the Bible upside down. In them, the creator of the physical universe was not God but a demiurge, a secondary power, a fallen angel who had got out of hand. It was he who made the material world with its disease and death, violence and pain. The true God had nothing to do with the physical universe but lived in heaven in a realm beyond time, death and change. For the Nag Hammadi sectarians the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament Gospels are, in significant ways, completely false. The real hero of the Garden of Eden was the serpent. It was he who opened Adam’s and Eve’s eyes to the truth. As for the New Testament, the Gospel of Thomas offers the startling revelation that the only disciple who truly understood Jesus was Judas, seen in the canonical Gospels as the traitor who betrayed him.
Where did these strange ideas come from? They are clearly not indigenous to Judaism or Christianity, because dualism is not monotheism. Jews first encountered them during the period of Persian rule in the form of Zoroastrianism. This ancient faith divided the supernatural powers into two, Ahura Mazda, the god of light, and Ahriman, the god of darkness, ‘the accursed destructive Spirit who is all wickedness and full of death’.2 Aided by an army of demons and seven archfien
ds, Ahriman wages war against the light, changing his form into anything he chooses, from lion to lizard to handsome youth. As time proceeds and Ahriman senses his inevitable defeat, he gathers his strength for a final confrontation, during which the sun and moon will pale in the heavens and the stars will be shaken from the sky. Eventually, exhausted, he is vanquished, never to return.
The other source of dualism, more evident in Nag Hammadi than Qumran, is ancient Greece, especially Orphism. Here the division is not between good and evil but between the soul and the body, the spiritual and the physical. Orphic myth tells the story of the Titans’ clash with Dionysus, son of Zeus, whom they murder and eat. Zeus burns them in his anger, and from the ash, humans are born, containing elements of both: Dionysus in the form of the soul, the Titans in the form of the body. The soul is imprisoned within the body but lives on after it and is reincarnated. Elements of this doctrine persist in the philosophy of Plato, who distinguished between the world as we encounter it through the physical senses and as we truly know it through the soul.
The sects that produced the manuscripts at Qumran and Nag Hammadi disappeared, but dualism lived on. In Persia it became known as Manichaeism (after the Iranian thinker Mani, c. 216–76 CE). In Greece it was called Gnosticism. The Nag Hammadi texts are known as the Gnostic Gospels.
It might seem strange to turn to two ancient and marginal sects to understand the connection between religion and violence, but they contain a clue that is an essential piece of the puzzle. The last chapter argued that violence is born of the need for identity and the formation of groups. These lead to conflict and war. But war is normal. Altruistic evil is not normal. Suicide bombings, the targeting of civilians and the murder of schoolchildren are not normal. Violence may be possible wherever there is an Us and a Them. But radical violence emerges only when we see the Us as all-good and the Them as all-evil, heralding a war between the children of light and the forces of darkness. That is when altruistic evil is born.
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