The legitimacy of rebellion

This is going to be one of those blogposts where the primary aim is for me to summarise some incomplete thoughts/research rather than to attempt a complete solution. (If I've misrepresented anyone else's views at any stage, my apologies, and do correct me in the combox. I find Twitter particularly frustrating for bringing out detail and nuances and I've quite likely misunderstood a lot of these.)

As a result of Ttony's post on the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Government (here for the text of the proclamation) I got into a discussion with Cathy Barry (on @IrishPhilosophy -follow!!) on the understanding of rebellion in the proclamation and, more widely, in just war/Thomist theory. To start at the end, I suggested the following eirenical formula:

Need longer treatment to deal with all this! But might we agree that mediaeval political theory at least reluctant to concede right of rebellion/revolution to groups/individuals without legitimate authority? And that brings us back to 1916 and rhetorical/real search for such authority

Now Cathy wasn't prepared to concede this -on the grounds that 'they didn't say that' (I'll return to this) - coupled with a reasonableness test from the following scenario:

 Imagine North Koreans with plan to revolt likely to succeed. How could they get authority?

Just to dispose of the latter point quickly, North Koreans (admittedly with a mediaeval Christian outlook on these things!) might seek authority from the papacy (as a universal authority) or from the bodies with authority within the land (eg barons). This is very much the scenario of the Declaration of Arbroath where, having emphasised the independent rights of the Scottish King (as against the English claim of his holding this kingship from the English monarchy) it then goes on to emphasise the rights of the Barones et Liberetenenetes ac tota Communitas Regni Scocie [barons and freemen and the whole commuity of the kingdom of Scotland] to depose a king who acts against their  leges et Consuetudines [laws and customs]. This is a communitas with internal sources of authority from within the state appealing to a source of authority above the state. Unsurprisingly, the Declaration is very mediaeval in this way: it does not simply appeal to the better condition of the Scottish people if they are ruled from Scotland, but to questions of legitimate authority to wage war and govern. It envisages not the modern emphasis on just the state and the invididual, but envisages other corporate sources of power and authority. [If I were developing this point, I'd say something here about a general point of mediaeval hermeneutics: both on grounds of commonsense ideas of (feudal) hierarchy in the mediaeval world and on the grounds of the neo-Platonic influence in (eg) Aquinas, I'd expect such a concern with establishing authority from above -not with the idea that the individual has a right to act himself, but with the idea that authority is bestowed from above and only in certain circumstances where that (state) authority has broken down is it legitimate to look elsewhere.]

Now of course fast forwarding to 1916, we are no longer operating in an entirely mediaeval picture (even for Catholics). But modern Catholic teaching, however far it has moved from the mediaeval world, still maintains a concern for the natural authority of bodies other than the state. Moreover, it maintains a concern for civic peace and preservation of th established order that goes beyond the simple question of effectiveness (would (eg) people be happier under a new regime?) [I leave this paragraph as an assertion, but it is one that I think is easily evidenced from (eg) the Compendium of Social Doctrine.] So I would expect, however changed from the Declaration of Arbroath, a concern in a heavily Catholic influenced document with the legitimate authority for their actions. And I would argue that this is pretty self evident from the text:

In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.

...

We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades in arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations.

Now, of course, to assert legtimacy is one thing, to prove it is another. But going back to my eirenic claim above, I would expect Catholics at least to be worried about establishing legitimate authority for rebellion and, mutatis mutandis, I think that concern is evident both in the Declaration of Arbroath and the Proclamation. [There is also the rather interesting attempt (successful?) to achieve support from the papacy for the Easter Rising (Plunkett and Benedict XV here).]

I turn now to consider Cathy's point about texts: 'they didn't say that'. In the context of our discussion, I take that to be a reference to Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, particularly STh IIa IIae qq40 & 42 (on war and on sedition) q40 here q42 here . More specifically, we discussed the legitimacy of applying 'Just War' theory to rebellion. (I think this cropped up as a result of Ttony's focus on this question in his blog and this may have cropped up from the book he was reviewing. In any case, the applicability of Just War theory here is not an unreasonable thought.)

Now I concede immediately that Just War theory, certainly as sketched in q40 is not directly applicable to rebellion. But then neither is the theory of sedition in q42: indeed Aquinas clearly excludes 'perturbatio' of tyranny (and presumably rebellion is a subset of perturbationes of this kind) from sedition.

Consequently there is no sedition in disturbing a government of this kind, unless indeed the tyrant's rule be disturbed so inordinately, that his subjects suffer greater harm from the consequent disturbance than from the tyrant's government.


That just perturbatio is subject to a test of proportionality does not mean that this is the only test: it is a necessary condition of just pertubatio not a sufficient one. (Or at least, there is no indication in the text that this is the only test: Aquinas doesn't say that.) Moreover, although he does say that war is about external strife rather than internal strife ( 'quia bellum proprie est contra extraneos et hostes' (SThIIa IIae q42 a1 resp) note the 'proprie'. Given the usual Aristotelian ideas of focal meaning or paradigms, that somethng may not be said proprie of a case does not mean that this case cannot be illuminated by the case proprie described. Here, I'd expect the case of Just War to illuminate the issue of rebellion, particularly if it is (as was claimed in 1916) a case of perturbatio 'contra extraneos' ('The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people...') Aquinas certainly does seem to say this.

Moreover, there is a danger of reading Aquinas' Summa as a legal code. For example, let's accept for the sake of argument that q40 does not deal with rebellion. And let's also accept that rebellion is covered in q42 where it is subject only to the test of effectiveness. If this were a legal code, one might point to the clear text and exclude any other considerations. (That's debatable, but it is at least arguable.) But the Summa is a theological primer for students: it is no intended to cover every eventuality and nor does it. Now it is pretty obvious that Aquinas has nothing like a developed theory of rebellion: he is not trying for one and he certainly hasn't achieved it here. It is therefore reasonable to look to Aquinas' general approach in related areas to see how they might flesh out ad mentem divi Thomae the little he does say about rebellion. And it is reasonable in such circumstances to look to q40 on Just War.

To summarise. I conclude that a concern for the establishment of a legitimate authority to rebel is present in the 1916 Proclamation. Primarily, that is a matter of the text itself, but the general trend of Catholic teaching on this seems to make this a reasonable interpretation.

Secondly, I conclude that mediaeval political theory [is] at least reluctant to concede right of rebellion/revolution to groups/individuals without legitimate authority. In the comparative luxury of a blogpost over the 140 characters of Twitter, I'd concede that 'mediaeval political theory' is too wide, and would have to include (if taken literally) everything from Ango-Saxon theories of kingship to Marsilus of Padua and more. But in the context of the present discussion, if it means 'what formed the germ of Catholic political theory particularly in Aquinas', then I'd stand by the claim. This is for two reasons. First (and this is unevidenced but I take it to be intuitively plausible) there is that general hermeneutical point from above that a concern for levels of authority above the individual is what you'd expect (mostly) to find in the Middle Ages. Secondly, so far as the texts of the Declaration of Arbroath and the Proclamation are themselves evidence of what is thrown up by this tradition, both do in fact display such a concern. Thirdly, insofar as the texts of q40 and q42 in tbe Summa are concerned, nothing is said to contradict such an interpretation and much is said to support it.

[And now to acknowledge the lacunae that I'd like to pursue but don't have the time just now!

1) There a highly relevant paper http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0191-6599(93)90181-O I don't have immediate access to it (I think it's pre-digital access but in any case none of the archives I can access seem to allow me to see it. Off for a hard copy at some stage!)

2) I haven't taken detailed account of other texts where Aquinas deals with this issue. (They're listed on the first page preview  of the above. I've had a quick look at them insofar as they're available online (all are apparently available at least in Latin) but won't claim to have done much with them. The above paper seems to suggest a development in his views.]

3) Suarez would be an obvious next step (esp Defensio catholicae fidei contra anglicanae sectae errores ). There are some English translations of at least part of this online but again I haven't pursued in any detail.]

Wars, politics and alienation

Although there's been quite a lot I've been tempted to write on recently, it's been very difficult for me to focus on anything else without first talking about Syria and bombing. And since I have had little sense of what I should say about that, I have been left in silence. Not a bad thing maybe...

I've been reading (amongst many other things) Robert Nisbet's 1953 The Quest for Community. And this morning I came across this passage:

The clear tendency of modern wars is to become ever more closely identified with broad, popular, moral aspirations: freedom, self-determination of peoples, democracy, rights, and justice. Because war, in the twentieth century, has become rooted to such an extent in the aspirations of peoples and in broad moral convictions, its intensity and range have vastly increased. When the goals and values of a war are popular, both in the sense of mass participation and spiritual devotion, the historic, institutional limits of war tend to recede further and further into the void. The enemy becomes not only a ready scapegoat for all ordinary dislikes and frustrations; he becomes the symbol of total evil against the forces of good may mobilize themselves into a militant community.

Now this isn't quite applicable to the present case in the UK: certainly, bombing Syria or even more generally the 'war' against ISIS is not popular in the sense of mass participation or even mass support. But one of the things that has paralysed me in expressing any views about the present situation is the 'spiritual devotion' of many public commentators on both sides: whether you are one of those calling Cameron a c*** or one of those sonorously advising the bombing of civilians, there is clearly more spiritual weight being placed on the issue than a difficult practical decision about how best to exercise force.

There's an awful lot that might be said about this, including a recognition that decisions of life and death ought to be taken with a good deal of fear and trembling (although of all the current reactions to the seriousness of the issue, that of fear and trembling in the face of God's Judgment seems least in evidence). But I want to focus on two which I take to be central to that issue of alienation and the desperation to escape from it which Nisbet identifies, among other modern ills, with an obsession with war.

First, there is the modern tendency to concentrate on act based ethics rather than agent based ones: in essence, a focus on the right action rather than being (or becoming) the right person. Catholic ethics (like most ancient ethics) is at its foundation agent based: it is focused on becoming a good person and the attainment of beatitudo (the Beatific Vision of God) rather than simply doing the right action. That's key because for the modern, particularly the progressive, there is a desperate search for and conviction that there is one right answer, and, moreover, that it is essential for each individual to get that answer right. (Part of the problem here is that, in replacing God with the individual's consciousness, the duty of Jove to see everything correctly devolves upon every participant in social media.) For the ancient (and Catholics are very ancient) I am neither God nor (unless I am David Cameron etc) under a particular duty to express a view on a decision I have little understanding of and little influence on. Democracy of course complicates that by turning us all into little legislators, but practical wisdom should remind us how marginal such a decision is to most of our lives and quite how foolish it is to pretend otherwise.

Secondly, there is the tendency to identify politics with salvation. The fundamental problem in regard to Syria is not so much whether the RAF should drop a few bombs on Syria, but how the Mediterranean world -particularly North Africa- can be once more a place where ordinary people can get on with the pursuit of beatitudo. Defeating ISIS (well, denying them territory) might help, but the recent history of Iraq shows how clearly destroying one tyranny doesn't solve the problem of what happens next. The overemphasis on politics amongst moderns shows itself in two ways. There is the tendency to look to politics and the expression of political views (on war and other matters) as the cure for personal dissatisfactions and the meaninglessness of modern life. (Evidence of this among Islamists, MPs and progressives.) Furthermore, there are the unrealistic expectations of what might be achieved in the foreseeable future in the Middle East. One might not go quite as far as Hobbes in suggesting that any stable government would be better than none, but one might take the Augustinian view that the main business of government is essentially to facilitate or at least to allow the really important business of salvation by establishing civic peace. Instead we have the sort of mentality that leads to seeing anything other than the establishment of Hampstead on the Nile as a failure.

There's much more that could be said but I'll leave it there with the critique of overemphasizing the right view of actions we have little part in making at the expense of cultivating our character, and the critique of overemphasizing what politics can achieve rather aiming primarily at the sort of stability that allows the really important permanent things of life to be achieved. A coda. While mulling over what to say here (and now mulling over whether such mulling over is itself a sign of lack of virtue), I receive news of a friend's having been attacked. Not by a terrorist, but a thug screaming at 'Pakis'. (The friend is horrifyingly white but the friend whom he was with I suppose might look like a 'Paki' to someone not too fussy about a victim.) Not unusual I suppose in cities late at night and, in this case, only some relatively minor physical damage done. Possibly nothing to do with current events although somehow I doubt they helped. I can't do much directly about the Middle East, but I can do a great deal about how I react to them. It would be good to grab back, for a start, the word 'dignity' from those who identify it with a hysterical desire to establish their autonomy by getting the state to kill them.

Something must be done: Adam Curtis and Bitter Lake

                                             
                                       Another Mass? Perhaps not such a bad idea after all...


I finally caught Adam Curtis' 2 hour + long documentary Bitter Lake on the BBC i-player yesterday. (Wikipedia article here. Iplayer here.) It's primarily a reflection on the US and UK involvement particularly in Afghanistan, with the message that Western governments began spinning a simplistic story of good versus evil to support their policies since Reagan, a strategy which has failed and led to foreign policy disasters and a remaining sense of confusion and hopelessness in politics.

It's well worth watching. Death, in particular, can rarely have been made more beautiful. My simple reaction (one that unfortunately others have got to before me: see the Wikepedia article) is that the attack on simplistic narratives is ironically in tension with the simplistic narrative of the film. It also teases. Practising argument by juxtaposition, it suggests that the banking crisis and ISIS are also areas in which this urge for simplistic solutions based on simplistic narratives have failed without doing much to back up these claims, however plausible they may be quite apart from the film.

Whatever else the film is, it is certainly an exercise is the politics of aesthetics. (One of the creepier moments is some well bred art historian lecturing a bunch of Afghans on the importance of conceptual art in nation building.) A well constructed piece can leave you with a sense that 'you've got it': that a convincing vision has been given you which has revealed the truth about a complex situation. Added to this is the vanity of the modern artist contra the bourgeoisie: I have seen through what others have not. Both are abiding sins of popularism and its political child, democracy. In two hours, I have seen what my preceding complete ignorance of Afghanistan might have been expected to be a poor preparation for; in two hours, I have seen through their knavish tricks. To the barricades!

Applying this to current British politics (and particularly 'progressive' Scotland) one might note the attractiveness of (simple) visions: it is like this, and those who disagree are simply fools or giant alien lizards. (That, by the way applies to many in both unionist and nationalist camps in Scotland. For every foam flecked cybernat, I could name a unionist commentator writing off the SNP as a cargo cult.) It also explains, I think, much of the gut reaction to attempts by various people such as Gerry Hassan and the National Collective to insist that creative dance and its ilk should play a key role in our political culture: aesthetics is an unreliable element in politics and perhaps the best thing is for politicans, as in Plato's Republic, to escort the artist to the borders of the State.

But in a wider way, it also a reminder that natural religion is part of rationality. As I've noted before, belief in God is something accessible to reason. To put it more strongly, if you don't believe in God, you're not (fully) rational. Now this is something that is profoundly unfashionable to claim, both within the Church and outwith it. (Note how both sides seem to chummily accept the label of 'faith' for religion.) This, of course, is not something touched on (well, except perhaps unwittingly through Curtis' use of Tarkovsky's Solaris) in Bitter Lake. But rational people in times past squared the circle between something must be done and not actually knowing what to do (or even knowing that there was nothing they could do) by praying. In the absence of a belief in prayer as action, the temptation to rush in and do something is increased. Prayer is however doing something, perhaps the most important something. That secularists are too irrational to see this and have to be left floundering around in a mad frenzy is of course unfortunate but there's little to be done when people close themselves off to a key aspect of reality...

Traitors and sympathy

                                                 'This is how we punish traitors.'


One of the things I've rabbited on about fairly continually over the lifetime of this blog is the need for a layer of politics that takes a longer, less ad hoc approach to how we live in the polis. Instead of politics being simply the hurly burly knockabout of Ed's failure to eat bacon sandwiches properly, or Nigel's discovery that another one of his candidates is a former member of a Waffen SS re-enactment group, there needs to be a continual effort to create institutions and to act individually in ways that promote longer term, more rational reflection as well as the inevitable day to day scraps. (I'm not a naive purist about politics: they've always had more of a touch of the dirty and irrational and always will. And that's not totally a bad thing. But the current balance is wrong. Which I'm happy to admit often includes my current balance as well.)

As I mentioned a while back, I prepared for the Scottish referendum by reading my way through Sir Walter Scott. I am still reading my way through Sir Walter Scott (67% through per Kindle). Anyway, apart from the growing horror that modern Scotland simply isn't recognizing the genius of the man with anything like sufficient fervour (perhaps regular feasting on oxen, celebratory riots in the Grassmarket, the occasional sack of a minor English Border town?), Scott's work is a continual reminder of just how much British society (and even conservative British society) has changed. I was brought up short by the following passage from Tales of a Grandfather (Scott's history of Scotland for children) on the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion:

Treason upon political accounts, though one of the highest crimes that can be committed against a state, does not necessarily infer anything like the detestation which attends offences of much less general guilt and danger. He who engages in conspiracy or rebellion is very often, as an individual, not only free from reproach, but highly estimable in his private character...The sense of such men's purity of principles and intention, though not to be admitted in defence, ought, both morally and politically, to have limited the proceedings against them within the narrowest bounds consistent with the ends of public justice, and the purpose of intimidating others from such desperate courses.

There is a typically Scott move here: a practical determination uninfluenced by anything other than realism (the need to punish to intimidate others) coupled with an understanding of and even sympathy with the individuals and their motivations. (I won't pursue this just now, but it's in part a linguistic richness we seem to have lost. Instead of morally 'thick' concepts such as 'treason' (or as I read in Burke recently, a lack of 'chivalry' as a criticism of the failure of the French to defend the woman Marie Antoinette), we're simply reduced to the yah! boo! of the modern tabloid or commentator.) The contrast struck me during the referendum campaign. It's currently striking me in the way that much of the media is treating ISIS and Muslims. Any attempt to understand let alone sympathize with the motivations of those who might support ISIS or commit acts of terror is branded as defending them. To suggest the need for understanding and explanation is, it's claimed, to introduce a 'but' into the condemnation and thus to forsake any moral standing.

And so, when CAGE tried to claim that 'Jihadi John' has been, at least in part, driven into the hands of ISIS by British security services, those of us who remember the effects of the sus laws or the effects of internment in Northern Ireland might suspect there probably is an issue here. (The issue might simply be that any effective security measures have occasional unfortunate consequences, but if so, that needs to be acknowledged.) In Scott's terms, understanding is 'not to be admitted in defence', but is still necessary, if for no other reason than to produce an effective counter-terrorism strategy. Moreover, to understand why young men and women might be attracted to a clear apocalyptic vision of the world, to fighting, to the creation of a utopia based on violence is surely not that difficult for anyone who has studied twentieth century history, let alone earlier centuries.

I'm not sure why public discourse has generally become so dumb. Perhaps it's simply that the moronic, through the availability and influence of social media, has simply become more visible. I suspect, however, it's more than that. I'd suggest three things in particular. First, there is the absence of historical understanding. In a world where a scientific paradigm has become increasingly the sole measure of knowledge, the breadth of human sympathy that arises simply from an acquaintance with a range of humanity over different times and different cultures is replaced by a shrill certainty that what passes for truth in twenty-first century Western European elites is blindingly obviously true. Secondly, there is emotivism in morality. If you think that there are no objective standards of right and wrong, then the temptation is to replace calm, patient reflection by agonistic displays of emotion, which work, not just to win the contest, but also to provide a surrogate for personal integrity: the more strongly I feel, the better a person I am. Thirdly, there is the decline in religion. Scott viewed people as souls on a journey towards God, not just lumps of flesh to be steered by whips and carrots onto the right path. That there are times for such physical means, for the hangman and the soldier (or the blackmail to turn an enemy) is a matter of cold realism. But it is also a matter of regret that, instead of always seeing and treating all people as images of God, the needs of public safety and good government do occasionally require force alongside understanding and even sympathy.

#Jesuislaloi

I held back from commenting immediately on the murder of the journalists in Paris in part because I knew I'd get the tone wrong if I said anything immediately and in part from a feeling of nausea at how many commentators were hitching this or that bandwagon to the event. Fundamentally, it's about human beings having their lives violently snuffed out and perhaps the only totally satisfactory immediate response is sorrow and prayer.

With a bit of distance, perhaps it's possible to start drawing necessary distinctions. #Jesuis Charlie is fine as fighting talk, a quick and necessary way of showing solidarity with the victims. But as reflective political commentary, it's inadequate. 'I am not Charlie': I don't like its brand of satire; I don't like its crudities. I don't think it adds to democracy to shriek at your opponents. 'Free speech is the foundation stone of democracy': well, some (large) amount of free speech is a foundation stone of democracy, but that isn't the same as having the right to say anything that pops into your head. Civility is also a foundation stone of democracy. So is restraint. So is the exercise of rationality. So is not alienating large  numbers of your fellow citizens who happen to be of a different Weltanschauung. (Yes, I do primarily mean Muslims.)

'Islam is...' A lot of things apparently. '...the problem.' We shouldn't have to worry about placating them or worrying about Islamophobia or backlashes. We need to arm up and fight them. (And what? Bomb Southall?) Do something about the fifth column. (Send them back to Birmingham?) If you must say that Islam is the problem, then I suppose you must so long as we can also say that secularism and legal positivism are the problem. But I don't see how it helps either analysis or solution, certainly in the short term.

The murders in Paris changed nothing: that's part of the tragedy. Terrorism has been a feature of twentieth century Western democracies whenever we've paused fighting continental wars. 'The Troubles' (as one of my children remarked recently, is that supposed to be an example of British understatement?) killed over 3,500 people in roughly thirty years in a population of roughly two millions. And you can add to that the Red Brigades, Baader Meinhof, ETA etc etc. Undoubtedly, the current situation in the Middle East with IS looking to establish some sort of regional Caliphate is new. But we've only just emerged from a generation who, often with good reason, daily expected to be incinerated by a global nuclear war between the Warsaw Pact and NATO.

Nothing has changed from the Tuesday before the murders. On Tuesday, we knew that there were Muslim terrorists who wanted to conduct terrorist campaigns. We knew that they had had some success in the past and that, in all probability, they would succeed again. On Tuesday, we knew that freedom of speech is an important area in a democracy, but that there are difficult philosophical issues regarding its extent and justification. (If anyone is going to contest this, would you read Mill's On Liberty and Fitzjames Stephen's Liberty, Equality, Fraternity before doing so? Or at least this?) On Tuesday, we knew that there are cultural and racial tensions in French and other Western European societies which are difficult to deal with. On Tuesday we knew that the Middle East is a rapidly escalating source of instability.

One of the cornerstones of democracy (not sufficiently mentioned in recent days) is the rule of law and the use of force by government through a disciplined army and police force. It is fortunate that, whatever else has been dismantled since the 1960s, both France and Britain possess professionally trained men and women in these institutions with an ethos of public service that will, in extremis, allow them to lay down their lives for others. The main achievement of civilization is the restraint of stasis, the restraint of civil unrest which allows people to pursue the good life. The main question since Wednesday is what needs to be done and what can be done to prevent terrorism from undermining civic stability without wrecking the possibility of living well, particularly in the areas of privacy and liberty. That is, for the most part, a question of policing and intelligence methods, but also needs deeper (and continued) reflection on the nature of politics. It's there that I worry that the fetishization of one element at the expense of all the others -liberty or freedom of speech or the preeminence of satire- distorts the complexity of democratic culture. As I have said before, there is politics as campaigning, fighting talk, where such slogans or fetishization serve an immediate rhetorical purpose. But that needs to be supplemented by reflective thinking that aims at the truth in politics rather than momentary effectiveness or the mobilization of the public.

If I have to have a hashtag at the moment then #jesuislaloi would be my best bet. That's law which both controls stasis, but which also reflects ethics (ie natural law). Frankly, I wouldn't defend to the death the right of satirists gratuitously to insult people or beliefs, particularly if that right is bought at the cost of cheapening public discourse and coarsening society. But I would defend to the death their right not to be murdered. And the solution to that is primarily a question of policing.

Originally considered this as picture, but felt it didn't quite convey the sense of impersonal, rational justice required...

Zizek and Rotherham

I try to avoid talking about Zizek, in part because I have an insufficient grasp of him and his influences such as Lacan to do him justice, but mostly because I can't work out how to get the correct diacritics onto his name. But needs must...

Zizek recently wrote an article for the Guardian on Rotherham in which (roughly) he took the opposite view to mine and argued that we needed to ask difficult questions about patriarchal attitudes to women in Islam rather than (my favoured position) just doing the police and legal work properly in dealing with crime and not worrying too much about the big sociological issues behind the abuse.

The problem according to Zizek:

The crucial feature in all these cases is that the violent act is not a spontaneous outburst of brutal energy that breaks the chains of civilised customs, but something learned, externally imposed, ritualised, part of collective symbolic substance of a community.

To put it simply, this sort of abuse goes to the heart of a culture rather than being an aberration. The solution?


So how are we to deal with all this in our societies? In the debate about Leitkultur (the dominant culture) from a decade ago, conservatives insisted that every state was based on a predominant cultural space, which the members of other cultures who live in the same space should respect. Instead of bemoaning the emergence of a new European racism heralded by such statements, we should turn a critical eye upon ourselves, asking to what extent our own abstract multiculturalism has contributed to this sad state of affairs. If all sides do not share or respect the same civility, then multiculturalism turns into a form of legally regulated mutual ignorance or hatred.

...

This is why a crucial task of those fighting for emancipation today is to move beyond mere respect for others towards a positive emancipatory Leitkultur that alone can sustain an authentic coexistence and immixing of different cultures.

Again, to put it simply, we need to work towards vision of fully emancipated culture within which we can all live. This will, inevitably, involve criticism and correction of unemancipated cultures such as Islam.

Now, I know that many readers have read some of my previous posts on Islam and written me off as an apologist for the religion. And to the extent that I think Islam and Muslims within the UK are being unjustifiably criticized in the media, I suppose I am an apologist. But perhaps my 'apologiae' will become clearer if we take up what Zizek says about Catholicism:


The same perverted social-ritual logic is at work in the cases of paedophilia that continuously shatter the Catholic church: when church representatives insist that these cases, deplorable as they are, are the church’s internal problem, and display great reluctance to collaborate with police in their investigation, they are, in a way, right – the paedophilia of Catholic priests is not something that concerns merely the people who happened to choose the profession of a priest; it is a phenomenon that concerns the Catholic church as such, that is inscribed into its very functioning as a socio-symbolic institution. It does not concern the “private” unconscious of individuals, but the “unconscious” of the institution itself: it is not something that happens because the institution has to accommodate itself to the pathological realities of libidinal life in order to survive, but something that the institution itself needs in order to reproduce itself.

In other words, it is not simply that, for conformist reasons, the church tries to hush up embarrassing paedophilic scandals. In defending itself, the church defends its innermost obscene secret. What this means is that identifying oneself with this secret is a key constituent of the very identity of a Christian priest: if a priest seriously (not just rhetorically) denounces these scandals, he thereby excludes himself from the ecclesiastic community, he is no longer “one of us”.

And we should approach the Rotherham events in exactly the same way...

In other words, just as Catholicism is essentially abusive, so are Pakistani Muslims.

Now I guess at this point, there might be two different reactions.. First, some Catholics may tend to regard Zizek on Catholicism as nonsense, but think he's right about Islam. Or, secondly, secularists and (some) non-Catholic theists will think he's right about both. Well, for me, neither.

When Zizek talks of paedophilia as being a phenomenon 'that is inscribed into its very functioning as a socio-symbolic institution' I struggle to make sense of this. I suspect a) that it is in fact a nonsensical claim (what is the 'unconscious' of an institution?); or at least b) it is a claim that requires long and critical debate before it could be thought plausible let alone true. (Come back and ask me in thirty years when we've all got the requisite work done on Lacan, Hegel and Aquinas.) But very many people are willing to countenance similarly dogmatic claims about Islam after thirty seconds thought: we know that Islam is a violent, patriarchal religion. (I'm afraid that I don't really know what a patriarchal religion is, let alone whether Islam is one of them.)

I conclude from all this what I've been regularly arguing in the past. At best, the sort of theological and sociological arguments about what Islam is or isn't, will take an awfully long time to complete (and frankly, I don't think they are the sort of arguments that ever can be completed: to borrow Bryce Gallie's term, the concepts involved are 'essentially contested'). In short, they are not the sort of arguments that can feed directly into political or legal action. In the meantime, there are all sorts of short term, immediate responses that will help: listen to victims; do evidence gathering properly; don't get complacent about your failings. At worst, the sort of knee jerk reactions to Islam and Muslims in the UK that are being seen at the moment will lead to 'a  positive universal project' that will sweep up everyone in its Black Maria of progress who doesn't buy into every jot and tittle of modish secularism.

Vatican II was groovy and Islam, Judaism and Christianity are cool.

                                     
                            Your blogger has been drinking too much chamomile tea

One of the most interesting aspects of blogging is the way the personal and the public interact. An aspect of this is the way events in one's personal life interact with leading news stories to prompt a blogpost.

Publicly? Well, wars and the rumours of wars -but also (and it feels extremely intense here) the impending Referendum. So lots of prompts towards thinking about the military, violence, particularity and national identities. And personally, in terms of reading at least, an odd and serendipitous mixture of Weigel's biography of St John Paul II, Maritain's The Peasant of the Garonne (slightly icky review by Michael Novak here but which does give a flavour of some of the complexities of the book) and a raft of stuff by Pierre Manent. So my thoughts, gentle reader, turn to Vatican II and modernity...

If you're an orthodox Catholic (ie one of those strange beasts who actually believes that the Church has a divinely given teaching authority which you'd better listen to) you can find yourself in that odd situation of starting to make excuses for an Ecumenical Council of the Church. Because so much rubbish entered Catholicism after Vatican II, and because so many Catholics you agree with locate the seed of those troubles in the Council, you can find yourself very easily on the defensive: explaining that this or that document isn't that bad, or that it is perfectly easy to interpret it as not changing this or that traditional teaching (provided you read the original Latin rather than the translation, or by a charitable interpretation of this parenthetical phrase...). To put this another way, it becomes easier to read the identity between the tradition of the Church and Vatican II always from left to right: it becomes second nature to try to explain away Vatican II as simply restating tradition. Nothing to see here. Move on.

The problem -particularly in revisiting St John Paul II- is you have this saint walking around and clearly under the impression that something big and wonderful had happened: not that anything had essentially changed, but that the identity had to be read from right to left: Vatican II interprets the tradition and illuminates it in perhaps unforeseen ways.

Of course, the identity is more dynamic than reading just one way or t'other: the idea of a hermeneutic of continuity brings out this mutual illumination. But unless there are some moments where Vatican II is genuinely helpful in illuminating previously hidden or obscure aspects of the Church, I can't help thinking that we are doing less than justice to the Council.

So what aspects might they be? Here are two suggestions:

1) Fraternity between Jews, Muslims and Christians (in Nostra Aetate). It is hard to read this document as forbidding anything other than fraternal respect from Christians towards these other religions. Whatever the essence of previous tradition, this truth can hardly be said to be always uppermost in the lives of earlier Catholics. It is extremely helpful (to put it at the mildest) to remember that, surrounded by heightened emotions at genuine atrocities in the Middle East, hatred of Judaism and Jews, or of Islam and Muslims, just isn't an option. (Of course, that leaves open an awful lot of detail, but it's surely helpful that this truth be taught with the full authority of an Ecumenical Council. At the least, it should steady some nerves.)

2) Religious freedom. (Primarily in Dignitatis humanae.) One thing that comes over particularly strongly in St John Paul II's writings is his emphasis on political and spiritual freedom, reflecting the teachings of Dignitatis Humanae. (This is of course one of the key areas in which those who worry about/reject Vatican II identify a difference from previous authoritative teachings.) For simple folk like myself, seeing one of the supreme sources of authority in the Church teaching this is enough. Whether or not I can articulate how this teaching is in accordance with previous teachings (Thomas Pink's attempt is widely considered as one of the most successful), or whether I simply have to say with St Robert Bellarmine  'rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false', as Le Paysan de l'Ecosse, I can be sure that I am right to acknowledge the importance of the free pursuit of our common spiritual end, that liberty that is the essence of the 'flight of the alone to the alone'. And thus, when I see the imposition of secularizing authority opposed to both this supernatural end and the teachings of natural law, I know where I should stand.

We are living in bloody. dangerous times. (Our forefathers lived in worse, but they were stronger.) In the end, the only weapons that will work will be truth, goodness and beauty -and a trust in Christ and the Church. That may not save us from suffering and death, but a martyrdom for the Prince of Peace is not the worst fate that may befall us:




Sancte Michael Archangele,
defende nos in proelio;
contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium.
Imperet illi Deus, supplices deprecamur:
tuque, Princeps militiae Caelestis,
satanam aliosque spiritus malignos,
qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo,
divina virtute in infernum detrude.
Amen.




[Saint Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle.
Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray;
and do Thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host -
by the Divine Power of God -
cast into hell, satan and all the evil spirits,
who roam throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls.
Amen.]

Politics isn't therapy

 
                                                         Do not be afreud!

I'm not sure if Gerry Hassan's piece on admitting and overcoming doubt is responsible for this (the rejection of Project Fear has been a noticeable trope of pro-Independence rhetoric for most of the campaign), but there have been a number of pieces recently which treat the highly political choice on 18 September as a therapeutic choice, where the aim is less a rational assessment of the Common Good, but rather an overcoming of the Scotch (or a more individual) Cringe.

A prime example of this is Val McDermid in the Guardian:

What I don’t respect are the “fearties” – the ones whose reason for voting no is that they’re afraid we’ll turn out to be incapable of managing our own country. I don’t want us to stay in the union because we’re scared of what the future holds if we strike out on our own.

Now, frankly, this is nonsense. The idea that we need to cleanse ourselves internally of unpleasant emotions is (admittedly a rather jejune version of) psychoanalysis: we are neurotic; by therapy, we cleanse our neuroses. We are cured. But appropriate fear can be a perfectly rational response to a danger: the virtue of courage, as Aristotle would put it, is the mean between cowardice and rashness -the feeling of the correct amount of fear at the correct objects of fear. If we are not to be 'feart' at the prospect of Independence, it is only because the objective dangers of such Independence are not appropriate objects of fear. If, to take the Domesday scenario, there was a realistic prospect of every large corporation making a dash for Berwick upon Tweed on 19 September, together with an abandonment of post NATO Scotland to some sort of alliance with, at best, Samoa, I'd be quite afraid -and rightly so. It is only because the future is unlikely to be quite so clear cutly awful, that Independence is a possibility. For those who, on the best assessment, think that Independence will wreak economic and social havoc, fear is the appropriate response. For those who do not, there will certainly (ought certainly) to be some fear, but such as will be met by the virtuous agent with courage. A certain amount of self assessment is required for virtue: am I more or less likely to feel fear than the practically wise person ought? But the point of such assessment is to have 'figured plain/As though upon a lighted screen': when one has purified oneself, one sees dangers correctly and fears them correctly. Therapy is to allow oneself to fear rationally, not not to fear at all.

Politics is, essentially, the projection of ethics beyond one's own life and those of one's immediate circle. The virtuous person can be trusted to have the correct affections to react properly to everyday circumstances, but in planning and assessing the life of the City, hard rational thought is required. Both campaigns rely on rhetoric: the manipulation of emotions to serve their campaign aims. To resist that requires rational reflection and character: to recognize the correct place of fear in the good life rather than the childish desire not be be shamed in front of one's peers. Moreover it requires the analysis of language. When McDermid talks of our being 'scared of what the future holds if we strike out on our own' (my emphasis) again I must ask: Which we? If she means me, I'd be terrified: any country which put me in charge would be a country I'd like to leave. If she means 'progressive Nationalists' then again, I see every reason for being terrified. I presume she means something like 'the sort of people who'll be thrown up in any realistic scenario in a medium sized country' -a much more plausible perspective. But even here, it would not be unreasonable to fear that there will be a process of formation of governing expertise which undoubtedly would be a transition cost of Independence.

I'd originally intended blogging today to a similar purpose on the political response to IS and Islam in general. Perhaps soon. But in short, politics is too important to trust your emotions. (And I say that holding in my mind the shock and outrage that I felt seeing, albeit only for a split second, the decapitated corpse of James Foley when I clicked on a twitter link. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord.) The sifting of pride, fear, confidence etc etc are, roughly, a matter of therapy: that spiritual therapy which all of us who aspire to virtue should be undertaking every moment of our life (and where, let us remember, the theological virtues of faith, hope and love are a matter of being open to grace more than effort). Thereafter, think. Hard. And that applies whether it is  the Yes Campaign telling you not to fear, or the No Campaign telling you that no right thinking person could ever envisage splitting the Union.

Marlbrough s'en va-t-en guerre: Jihadists and Social Cohesion

Marlborough has left for the war / Nobody knows when he will come back.

He will come back at Easter / Or on Trinity Sunday.

Trinity Sunday goes by. / Marlborough does not return.

My lady climbs up her tower / As high as she can climb.

She sees her page coming / All clothed in black.

"Good page, my good page / What news do you bring?"

"At the news that I bring / Your pretty eyes will start crying!

"Take off your pink clothing / and your embroidered satins!

"My lord Marlborough is dead; / he is dead and buried.

"I have seen him borne to the grave / by four officers.

"One of them carried his breastplate / another his shield.

"Another carried his great sabre / and the last carried nothing.

"On his tomb was planted / a beautiful flowering rosebush.

"When the ceremony was over / Everyone went to bed. [From Wikipedia.]

As I've mentioned previously, I'm currently buried ('mongst other square, papery (but digitalized) things) in the works of Sir Walter Scott (42% through according to my Kindle).

One of the things that immersing yourself in a different sensibility can bring is a bringing to the foreground of consciousness facts that we in our age tend to overlook and that other ages faced up to squarely. I'm pretty much convinced that one (if not the) central theme of Scott is social cohesion: how groups (especially the Jacobites and the Hanoverians) can live together in social peace whilst loathing each other and whilst having each other's blood on their hands. I'll probably come back to this in the future, but the answer certainly isn't the imposition of a common loyalty: instead, and briefly, it's much more to do with a recognition of common humanity, deliberate avoidance of certain issues, having a 'flexible' attitude to law and authority, and the aestheticization of violence. Not a very modern mix, of course, but probably all the better for that and possibly one from which we can still learn.

But a subsidiary theme is that of the violence of young males. Duels are fought. Most of the old have spent their youth on some battlefield or other. The solution to life's problems of going abroad as a soldier exists as a constant possibility. Even if we haven't been reading Scott, we ought to be familiar with such a vista. The male members of the two previous generations of my family fought in the army. (I pass over my own exalted -if brief- service in a school CCF troop.) I've worked with several former soldiers and we're all familiar with the young men who went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. (And rather closer in time and space, there is the  'Armed Struggle' in Northern Ireland.) Idealism and a tendency to violence are characteristics of young men. If channelled correctly, they form part of the social mix, the activity of the young balancing the resignation of the old etc.

So I'm not really sure why 'we' are surprised at young men going off to fight for ISIS. It seems perfectly reasonable to worry about what effects this will have on UK society: whilst I've no doubt that most will probably not come back to take up an armed struggle here, it seems implausible that none will. And certainly an attitude of mind forged in an armed struggle is unlikely to accept an easy cultural integration into modern British ways. So it's certainly reasonable to worry about (eg) security implications and to act accordingly. But constantly using the language of indoctrination and manipulation of these men is silly:


Using the hash tag #AllEyesOnIsis, extremist fighters flooded the social media site with propaganda, luring vulnerable people to join them in Iraq. [Here.]

The media attitude to ISIS, quite apart from a core, commonsense worry about national and international security, demonstrates many modern failings. It decorporealizes minds: instead of acknowledging that the young and the old, male and female, have a different biology and different characteristics, it regards all as disembodied reasoners with only one rational path. It undervalues religion: the intensity of religion's pursuit of justice surprises those whose lives lack commitment or transcendent values. It invents rational expertise: last week's pundit who knew everything about Putin's Russia now knows everything about the Middle East. It is orientalist in creating a landscape of the Other populated neatly with homogeneous and docile 'communities' (ie tribes) led by community leaders. And so on.

There probably isn't an answer. Some of us will probably die in the long run as a result of terrorist actions. The Middle East sounds like it's on its way to becoming a Hell for a time, especially for Christians. What can be done in terms of security precautions should be done, but without destroying the normal business of society. But on the specific problem of angry young men, and particularly angry young Muslim men, the only answer (and it's a partial one) is to do what societies have always done: find a way of channelling their energies into the wider society through the institutions of the family, civil society and the State. At the moment, the family is being deliberately undermined, the economic crisis of the West is destroying business and employment, and politics is closed to those who cannot mouth the secularized platitudes of consumerist liberalism.

 In the video, he says: "Are you willing to sacrifice the fat job you've got, the big car you've got, the family you have?

"Are you willing to sacrifice this for the sake of Allah? Definitely! If you sacrifice something for Allah, Allah will give you 700 times more than this."

Later in the video, he says: "All my brothers living in the west, I know how you feel.

"When I used to live there, in the heart you feel depressed. The cure for the depression is Jihad." [Here.]


Perhaps, in the end, it's about death: the Jihadists have retained a sense of the inevitability of death and killing that the modern West has lost. In that case, perhaps the true resistance is to face our own death well, even matter of factly. If so, please note that I will not be dying for 'British values' but for Catholic ones.

Islam in the UK

                                              Birmingham PTA meeting

 So the media full of a menagerie of Trojan Horses and Muslim extremists...

Listening to David Blunkett on Radio 4 this morning made it clear just quite how out of their depth politicians are on this issue.

In essence, this is a tale of two liberalisms. On the one hand, you have a civic liberalism which promotes freedom from the state and the encouragement of (as Mill put it) experiments in living. Following this aspect through, you have the drive for subsidiarity in school leadership and the encouragement of community involvement. On the other hand, you have a substantive liberalism which holds certain beliefs about human flourishing, including the promotion of sexual freedoms, the eradication of differences between the sexes and a conceptualization of religion as harmful unless confined to eating interesting foods and dressing up in glad rags.

On the basis of civic liberalism, you end up with schools that are heavily influenced by local communities and parents. If those local parents are orthodox Muslims (rather than the sort of pet 'cultural' Muslims who have actually abandoned the religion if not the samosas) that will lead to a consensus on certain views and a tendency to assume these as the norm in your school. These views (to repeat the analysis given by a Muslim blogger and which, in my own limited personal observation are correct) include:

Halal slaughter provisions, a general aversion to licentiousness coupled with the desire to protect their children from it, Shariah finance, opposition to government foreign policy vis-à-vis Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel – just some of the issues on which there is broad agreement in the Muslim community. Other examples one might cite are: revulsion towards blasphemous cartoons of the prophets, rejection of homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle and the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab (and somewhat more contentiously the niqab).

On the basis of substantive liberalism, many of these views will be abhorrent and it will be the job of the education system to eradicate them.

Now, I'm a Catholic. That means that I neither accept the orthodox Muslim views set out above nor the views of substantive liberalism. For example, whilst I agree that the substantive liberal understanding of sexual mores is licentious and foul, I do not accept Sharia punishments or an understanding of modesty that requires segregation of the sexes or veiling. But I do, faute de mieux, accept civic liberalism: I want the state out of my life and, eg, the education of children left primarily to the parents and their wishes.

From what is emerging in Birmingham, we are seeing the inevitable problems of trying to reconcile civic liberalism and substantive liberalism in the presence of large body of citizens who do not accept substantive liberalism and have moved beyond an initial generation of immigrants who did not feel 'at home' enough in British society to stand up against 'British values'. (The other complication here is that 'British values' have largely declined since the 1950s and 1960s from social conservatism, leaving orthodox Muslim values even more in conflict with the majority community. But I put that aside for now.)

Putting aside BNP fantasies about repatriation -and let me make it clear, I regard such as genuinely fantasies and genuinely poisonous- we are left with a number of possibilities. One -the hope of most of the media and apparently the politicians- is that by cracking down on schools etc, we can impose substantive liberalism. The problems with this are a) it won't work (Muslims won't abandon their religion and will simply be further alienated and radicalized) and b) it entails the abandonment of civic liberalism (which will have a knock on effect on Catholics etc). Another is to simply abandon substantive liberalism and let civic liberalism run its course. Now that's fine up to a point. But that point -and it may already be in sight- is where you have communities that have developed a culture which poses a genuine threat to the stability of society, both in that it no longer engages with the wider society, and that it advocates the destruction of democratic politics and civic liberalism. (Whilst I am an Islamophile, there are clearly such dangers in the religion -putting aside for the moment whether those dangers are essential to it or merely aspects of some current forms.) 

My solution? Well, ultimately, I'd hope that 'British values' return to something like the natural law understanding backed up by a benign State established Protestantism. If that happened, many of these social tensions would become less acute. In the meantime, we should hold fast to civic liberalism, abandon the attempt to enforce substantive liberalism (because that won't work) and concentrate on a) ensuring that threats to civic peace are removed (so clamping down on advocacy of terrorism) and b) ensuring that orthodox (ie genuinely representative Muslim voices rather than 'humanist' ex-Muslims) engage in the political process and cultural sphere rather than being isolated as 'extremists'. There are some signs of the latter happening: my worry is that, due to the Trojan Horse case, we'll go back to a hysterical substantive liberalism shouting down any form of social conservatism as completely 'unacceptable'.

Trojan Horse schools: State ideology coming to you?

                                     
                                      Birmingham schools CCF on manoeuvres

From a Catholic perspective, the whole row over alleged extremist infiltration of Birmingham schools is distinctly unsettling.

Putting aside the difficulties in being certain of the facts -and when politics and religion are involved, getting clear here is going to be particularly difficult- from what facts seem to be clear, we have at least in part a clash between the general social conservatism of orthodox Islam and the official secularized Liberalism of the UK state. Additionally, we just have elements of real stupidity in dealing with a minority religion. Beyond that, we have a genuine worry that some aspects of Islam represent a threat to the security of the country.

Specific claims (according to the Guardian):

1) The academy is not doing enough to keep students safe, including raising students' awareness of the risks of extremism.

Muslims are always going to have split loyalties, much like most serious religious groups. Our first loyalty is to God, mediated through the structures of our religion. It is inevitable that Muslim understandings of the world and politics will be different from those of non-Muslims. All that can be done here is to establish a respect for civic peace: that disagreements are resolved politically rather than by force.


2) External speakers, such as those who speak to students as part of a programme of Islamic-themed assemblies, are not vetted and pupils not taught how to use the internet safely.

Nobody can use the internet safely if you mean avoiding unpleasant views. (It's quite another thing if you mean keeping your anti-virus software up to date. I presume this isn't what's meant.) 'Vetting'? Fine. What is the substantive test for being vetted? I presume that at least one person already thinks any given speaker is a good egg and not wearing a suicide vest. If it means not having views that secular Liberals don't like, see 1).

3) Students are not prepared properly for life in a diverse and multicultural society.

Good if this means rejecting the usual liberal claptrap. I've always encouraged Muslims I've come across not to kowtow to the rather thin secularism they'll come across in much British education, and to be confident in the basic soundness of their tradition. (Ditto my own children.) I doubt if this is what Ofsted means by 'being prepared'. I wish it were.

4) Staff feel intimidated and fearful of speaking out, while some believe the governors involve themselves inappropriately in the running of the school.

Well, not an infrequent occurrence in education. More details please.

5) Sex and relationship education is ineffective, with students not well supported in understanding how to protect themselves from bullying.


I presume this means the usual 'sex ed' agenda. It's always ineffective. (I assume what this really means is that Muslim teachers are unwilling to teach the 'shag everything that moves' official philosophy. Again, good.)

The absurdities here are reflected in the Daily Mail's dubbing of a representative of the Humanist and Cultural Muslim Association as a 'centrist'. A 'humanist' Muslim is as much a Muslim as an atheist Catholic is a Catholic. If you are going to engage with serious Muslims, there is absolutely no point in expecting them to end up agreeing with atheists.

There may well be genuine issues in the schools of public safety. But so far as I can see, the main issues at the moment are those inevitably resulting when minority belief systems confront majority systems, but have become canny enough to organize themselves effectively to resist the majority pressure. Muslims aren't going to disappear into secularized atheism (which I suspect was the basic assumption of many multiculturalists). That means the State is going to have to engage seriously with people who will, inevitably, have different conceptions of human flourishing. As a Muslim blogger puts it:

The reality is that certain political stances, values, social mores, moral precepts etc. do have widespread, indeed majority, acceptance amongst the 2.6 million strong Muslim community. Halal slaughter provisions, a general aversion to licentiousness coupled with the desire to protect their children from it, Shariah finance, opposition to government foreign policy vis-à-vis Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel – just some of the issues on which there is broad agreement in the Muslim community. Other examples one might cite are: revulsion towards blasphemous cartoons of the prophets, rejection of homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle and the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab (and somewhat more contentiously the niqab). I believe that it is an incontestable truth that all of the above examples I have cited are normative positions in the Muslim community. I challenge anyone to canvass the major Muslim population concentrations in Britain and come back with findings that show otherwise. On these issues and others most Muslim groups concur and speak in unison. They can be said in all honesty to represent “the Muslim view”.

Engaging with those different conceptions of flourishing is never going to be an easy process, but it's essentially one of messy negotiation and compromise. It's not helped by branding mainstream Muslim views 'extremist' and giving the impression that, if we just get the bureaucracy right, they'll stop believing all that rot.

As ruling elites become more and more secularized, the ability to deal with religious belief also diminishes. We're seeing it with Islam now. We've seen it in the past with Catholicism and will doubtless see it again. But neither serious Islam nor serious Catholicism is going away, whatever the fantasists of secularization might believe.

Islam, Gerry Hassan, the Enlightenment and MacDiarmid

In which your blogger throws various ingredients into a pot, and stirs to no good purpose....

There was a letter from Gary McLelland (omnipresent Scottish secularist) in The Scotsman on Wednesday suggesting that we need a debate about Islam:


For once, I agree with Richard Lucas (Letters, 27 May) – whether the brutal murder of Lee Rigby was the result of a few radicalised fanatics, or, as a result of the 7th century barbarism promoted in the Koran is debatable. One thing is sure, however, the British people are overdue a serious debate about how to treat this ideology.

Islam has been allowed to develop an air of unquestioning respect. Many commentators have suggested that the UK government is trying to ramp up “them and us” rhetoric. There genuinely is a “them” and “us”, though I would not define it in racial or religious terms; we are now engaged in a war of ideas.(Full letter.)

The letter Gary refers to from Richard Lucas contains the following description of such a debate:


Those claiming that the Koran, Hadith and biographies of the Prophet Muhammad justify atrocities such as the Woolwich murder should be able to put their case publicly to more moderate Muslims who can, in turn, explain how they interpret the relevant passages and events differently.

Also, non-Muslims should feel free to challenge both sides of the debate by citing sections from the foundational documents of Islam.

Equally importantly, the veracity of Muhammad’s prophethood should be the subject of vigorous debate. (Full letter.)

I love this idea of a debate about Islam. I'm not sure whether it should take place in one big hall (probably Edinburgh as it's the capital) or would it be better to have lots of little meetings round the country and then 'snowball' the results until we get to a final national level decision.  It might be a little tricky to assess the result -although clearly as a democracy we're talking about a majority decision- and it might be even trickier to get Muslims to accept it (although of course we might hope that just being talked about would cow them sufficiently to encourage them to accept whatever result the majority came up with). Oh yes, and what precisely was the question....?

In fairness to the letter writers, I suspect that what they're really asking for is the ability to freely criticize Islam in the media without censorship. Certainly, in recent days, it's been quite evident that a number of websites for example have been carefully moderating comments to remove inflammatory anti-Islamic remarks. Personally, I think that's a good thing. I've spoken to a few Muslim colleagues recently who are terrified of a backlash against them, with some of them (in England) having experienced family members having to pick their way through streets full of English Defence League members. I'm not sure that now is the time for anything other than calming words: deeper public critiques, if needed, can wait for a while until emotions have calmed.

But let's assume that this calm has arrived. What sort of 'debate' should follow? Should it be the sort of ill-tempered mutual baiting that I frequently indulge in with Dawkinsians in the Catholic Herald comboxes? Or should it be the sort of TV programme where a secularized presenter explains where Islam went wrong? Given the vastly greater numbers of non-Muslims than Muslims, should the non-Muslim community be handicapped in some way to ensure fairness? And should it be a requirement that anyone entering the debate has even the slightest clue what they're talking about?

Calls for a 'debate' on Islam suffer from a similar problem to Gerry Hassan's call for a 'culture of self-determination' in Scottish politics: both sound like a good idea (thought? reflection? who can object?) but both model that debate on essentially party political practices: clear sides to an argument; clear processes of decision; clear questions; clear process of implementation; clear time limit. There is of course a 'debate' about Islam. It started in 632 AD (if not before) with the death of Muhammad, and has been going ever since. Such a 'debate' doesn't fit into the party political model (nor does it really fit into the 'war' metaphor that Gary uses either) although both set piece debates (and indeed real wars) do form parts, albeit relatively minor ones, of that continuing encounter.

There are a number of different ways of putting this point. A slightly simplistic one is to talk about the limits of an Enlightenment model of rationality. (Personally, I'm not sure that this 'Enlightenment' model of rationality is anything like as clearcut as might be supposed, but still...) Another way is to talk about how Aristotle locates politics and the exercise of practical wisdom against a background of sophia, the virtue of contemplating divine things. In short, not all problems of how to act and live can be solved or reflected on in practices modelled on (essentially) the court room or Parliament. In particular, the central mysteries of life dealt with in religion and the deepest philosophies are especially resistant to this sort of treatment. One of the crassnesses of modern life is that we have forgotten the existence of deeper questions and issues, and instead reduce them to the state of 'bairnly things' to be settled in businesslike ways:

Oh it's nonsense, nonsense, nonsense,
Nonsense at this time o' day
That breid-and-butter problems
S'ud be in ony man's way.

They s'ud be like the tails we tint
On leavin' the monkey stage;
A' maist folk fash aboot's alike
Primaeval to oor age.

We're grown-up folk that haena yet
Put bairnly things aside
-A' that's material and moral-
And oor new state descried.


(Hugh MacDiarmid, from Second Hymn to Lenin.)

Islam and Woolwich

                                               Not really the ideal solution....

I felt a twinge of conscience when, in my last post on Lee Rigby, the only tag I could find that was immediately relevant from my available stock was 'Islam'. Clearly, when a young soldier is murdered by two men one of whom then proceeds to talk about Islam, then 'Islam' might well be one of the appropriate tags for the post. But I should have liked to add 'terrorism' or 'male violence' or almost anything beyond the bald, 'Islam'. Why? Because I don't think that label sums up the killing, and I don't think the killing sums up Islam. (I've now sprouted a 'terrorism' label to put this right.)

The press and internet are full of opinions and conclusions and nostrums. Some of the more belligerent are going on about the essentially violent nature of Islam and the need to do something about the threat within now. Immediately.

That's fine, but apart from anything else it lacks a certain realism. According to Wikipedia, 4.8% of the UK population are Muslim. (It's worth noting that, in 2001 -the breakdown in the article- compared to the (then) 3% living in England and Wales, only 0.84% were living in Scotland: whatever the issues are with Islam in the UK, Scotland and England are not in the same position.) If there were an essential threat from Muslims, what are you going to do with these Britons? They're not going to go away. They're not -except in the fantasies of the National Secular Society- going to stop being Muslims. If there were a sure fire recipe for changing people's religious views, I'd quite like the Catholic Church to start producing and using it now: in any case, it's clear that it's not as simple as government deciding to pump a few more pounds into community 'education'.

Given these facts, it's not a great idea to start telling Muslims that they are irredeemably outside the civilization of the West (because their religion and culture are rubbish or whatever). National identities are to a large extent matters of imagination and myth put to the service of a real social good: a cohesive and peaceful society. If we can't imagine a society where Muslims and others live together peacefully, then we will almost certainly get what we imagine.

My own solution? I don't have one. I don't think there is one solution but a constant series of struggles, all carried on against the background of love for the image of God that is in fellow human beings whilst respecting the truth that (eg) Islam and Catholicism are not the same religion.  For Catholics, it's good to remember the Vatican II document, Nostra Aetate:

The Church, therefore, exhorts her sons, that through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life, they recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these men.

The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth,(5) who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.

Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.

Or as the Blessed John Paul II said:

As we make our way through life towards our heavenly destiny, Christians feel the company of Mary, the Mother of Jesus; and Islam too pays tribute to Mary and hails her as "chosen above the women of the world" (Quran, III:42). The Virgin of Nazareth, the Lady of Saydnâya, has taught us that God protects the humble and "scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts" (Lk 1:51). May the hearts of Christians and Muslims turn to one another with feelings of brotherhood and friendship, so that the Almighty may bless us with the peace which heaven alone can give. To the One, Merciful God be praise and glory for ever. Amen.

In general, I see nothing that prevents Muslims and others living together peacefully in the UK. That doesn't mean that there aren't some Muslims who are going to behave as terrorists, and then the solution is simply that of police and military measures for self-defence: if there is anything that needs to be done at this level, then I agree with Dan Hannan that the last thing we should be doing is rushing into hasty decisions and bad lawmaking.

Those of us who lived through IRA terrorism -particularly those in Northern Ireland- will remember that Irish Catholics were often regarded with suspicion at the time. Even after the end of that period, I was told (upon my conversion to Catholicism) by a Protestant that they (ie me) had a 'different attitude to the law'. (And of course he was right: Catholic loyalty to the positive law is dependent on that law's fidelity to divine law. To that extent, we are indeed profoundly unreliable as citizens.) One of the problems with the integration of Muslims into UK society is a growing hostility to any religious expression in the public sphere. The Anglican blogger Archbishop Cranmer seems to suggest the re-imposition of some sort of  'act of conformity':

And that 'neutrality' has brought us to where we are. We are so obsessed with not offending minorities that we not only tolerate but advocate their alien cultural beliefs and practices. And if we do not, we are 'racist' and 'bigoted'. Mindful of minority ethnic voting communities, politicians have trodden very carefully along the via media between religious liberty and cultural prohibition. There has been no demand for assimilation. That is what must now change.

Sounds fine, but it's worth remembering that such an 'act of conformity' would not be that of Tudor Christianity, but of a modern secularism especially hostile to traditional morality. If the solution is going to be the test of a sort of normal  'Britishness' (a test so described will doubtless go down particularly well in Scotland), I expect serious Catholics as much as serious Muslims (or indeed Protestants) to fail it: none of us will find our 'alien cultural beliefs' easy to accommodate in a society whose main cultural expressions might appear to be falling down drunk on Friday nights and trying to think up ways of stimulating jaded sexual appetites amongst ten year olds.

On a final anecdotal level, have a look at this video from CBN (December 2011) on the co-operation between Muslims and Catholics on the opposition to same sex 'marriage'. It features Bashir Maan who, after a long and distinguished career in public service in Scotland, was forced to resign  as President of the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations in 2006 after deploring the teaching of gay sex education in schools. Given the behaviour of the senior Catholic member of the campaign, Muslims might be forgiven for finding an irony on being lectured on the need to preserve 'our' values.