January 17, 2010

• A response to Ashis Nandy’s “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Toleranc

  Basically Nandy is
  a religious man trying to excuse inexcusable acts by religious men on
  the grounds that they wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for other,
  secularist men. Keep this absurd undercurrent in mind as you read my
  response; whatever else there is to say about this essay, keep in
  mind just how crazy it is to
  blame sectarian violence on secularism, how obviously backward the
  reasoning must be necessarily.
  

  I’m
  being required to read this essay for a class, a seminar on “politics
  of religion and secularism” run by a professor who is the worst
  kind of faitheist. He actually tried to claim that people can and
  should believe in faith as trust in God without believing in faith as
  belief in God. Stop for a moment and think about what this would
  mean: I trust my mother to tell me the right things, but of course my
  mother doesn’t actually exist. I believe that unicorns will make the
  world a better place, but of course there are no such things as
  unicorns. (He admitted that my logic is undeniable, yet didn’t seem
  to care; this was all the more frustrating, since it implies that he
  has forsaken rational thought.) Yes, this is the state-of-the-art in
  faitheist discourse.

  It
  was this paragraph that inspired me to blog a response: “Secularism
  has little to say about cultures—it is definitionally ethnophobic
  and frequently ethnocidal, unless of course cultures and those living
  by cultures are willing to show total subservience to the modern
  nation-state and become ornaments or adjuncts to modern living—and
  the orthodox secularists have no clue to the way a religion can link
  up different faiths or ways of life according to its own
  configurative principles.”

  Whatever this is, it isn’t secularism.
  Secularism as I understand it—as I advocate it—is explicitly
  pluralistic; it destroys “cultures” only in the sense that it
  integrates culture—gives
  access to cultural arts and experiences from all societies for all
  human beings. It destroys us-them thinking,
  not cultural complexity. My secularism is reading the Bhagavad-Gita
  while standing in the Sistine Chapel and wearing a kilt and a
  Bluetooth headset. In the future I imagine, there would be no
  Muslims, no Catholics, no Buddhists, only humans, humans
  who are social and cultural animals. I’ve no love of the
  nation-state; I think it is at present a necessary evil, and I would
  very much like to see it die in favor of a species-state or indeed an
  ecosystem-state. Government is clearly effective at securing
  stability and preventing violence; but nationalism is fundamentally
  evil.

  Nandy
  makes a distinction early in the essay that he hardly ever uses
  later, between “religion-as-faith” and “religion-as-ideology”
  (I would use instead the words “religion-as-culture” and
  “religion-as-belief”, but the taxonomy is similar); insofar as
  this distinction works, I agree with it wholeheartedly, as would any
  of the New Atheists. Richard Dawkins says grace and celebrates
  Christmas. Sam Harris often writes of the wisdom in Buddhist
  literature. Salman Rushdie frequently speaks about the Muslim
  cultural values he believes in. The people who have made a false
  association between these two categories are not the atheists, they
  are the religionists; they are the people who think that you can’t
  respect the Bible as literature without believing that Jesus rose
  from the dead. A pluralistic, metaphorical, cultural experience of
  religion is precisely what we New Atheists are trying to
  achieve. If that’s really what
  you want, you agree with us.

  Nandy
  also goes on about “theories of self” without any actual
  evidence; all the psychological evidence I’ve studied shows that
  people around the world, regardless of cultural identification, are
  capable of both a fixed and a fluid concept of self.

  Nandy’s
  conception of “two definitions of secularism” is more useful; he
  is right that “be religious at home, but secular in public” is a
  highly problematic notion. This is why we New Atheists argue for “be
  secular everywhere”;
  we think religious belief and religious ideology are fundamentally
  evil things, and would like to see them eradicated. Separation of
  Church and State only makes sense if we agree that there must be such
  a thing as Church; New Atheists precisely deny this. On the other
  hand, Nandy’s second definition is even worse: respect for all
  religions is precisely the opposite of what makes rational sense.
  Respect for ideas and practices must be earned by
  the validity of those ideas and practices.

  “His
  contemporary, Joseph Bradlaugh, on the other hand, believed in a
  secularism which rejected religion and made science its deity.”
  Well, except for the idiocy of saying “science its deity”—clearly
  you know nothing of science and little of theology, for science is a
  methodology, not an ideology, and it is nothing even remotely like a
  being—this is in fact the secularism I agree with. Science is true,
  religion is false; we need no further reason to believe science and
  reject religion.

  He
  then speaks of a hierarchy of belief; the only change I would make is
  to say that people who are religious in public but not in private are
  the worst kind of
  people, worse even than true believers. The first two I entirely
  agree with: Rationalists are better than secular theists who are
  better than everyone else.

  Nandy
  is a fan of ridiculous proclamations about secularism; I doubt anyone
  seriously thinks that Britain dominated India because Britain was
  secular and India wasn’t. I certainly don’t think that—gunpowder
  and industrialization are far more obvious reasons. Moreover, it’s
  clear that the violence in “secular” Ireland is motivated as much
  by cultural and religious identity as the violence in “religious”
  India.

  I
  feel no obligation to defend the way India was run by the British;
  while secular, it was also evil in plenty of other ways.

  And
  yet another ridiculous proclamation: “To
  many Indians today, secularism comes as a part of a larger package
  consisting of a set of standardized ideological products and social
  processes—development, mega-science, and national security being
  some of the most prominent among them.” So
  far this is true, except I’m not sure what “mega-science” is as
  distinct from plain old science.
  “This package often plays the same role vis-a-vis”
  (anytime someone says “vis-a-vis”, expect nonsense to follow;
  it’s an effective heuristic) “the
  people of society—sanctioning or justifying violence against the
  weak and the dissenting—that the church, the ulema,
  the sangha,
  or the Brahmans played in
  earlier times.” And now
  he’s gone off the deep end. I challenge you to name one—just
  one—New Atheist who
  has once—just
  once—advocated
  violence against religious people. You can’t do it, can you? And yet,
  I can find thousands of
  examples of religious people advocating violence against people who
  disagree with their religion. Maybe millions. The
  closest example I can find in secularism comes from Communist
  tyrants; yet, none of them were actually rational, none of them
  believed in Enlightenment values, and all of them were insane
  megalomaniacs. That isn’t secularism, it’s madness. Such people are
  beyond the pale of moral behavior, and I do not consider them my
  allies.

  Nandy
  also likes making assertions without evidence, or even in the face of
  obvious counter-evidence: “Finally,
  the belief that values derived from the secular ideology of the
  state” (like
  freedom, equality, justice, the
  dignity of humanity?) “would
  be a better guide to political action and a more tolerant and richer
  political life” (like
  that actually enjoyed in secular countries?) “(as
  compared to the values derived from the religious faiths)”
  (like racism, sexism, bigotry, genocide, sectarian violence,
  irrationality? Oh, and “don’t kill people”, because that’s not a
  value secularists believe in?) “has
  become even more untenable to large parts of Indian society than it
  was a decade ago.”

  Only
  when he actually makes substantive historical claims does Nandy begin
  to sound reasonable: “It
  is not modern India which has tolerated Judaism in India for nearly
  2000 years, Christianity from before the time it went to Europe, and
  Zoroastrianism for more than 1200 years; it is traditional India
  which has shown such tolerance.” This
  could indeed be correct; I somewhat doubt it, given the history of
  sectarian violence in the rest of the world, but perhaps its true. If
  so, all that shows is that the forced
  transition to
  modernity causes violence—something I do not doubt. It does nothing
  to show that modernity
  itself
  is harmful—to do that, Nandy would need to show that Sweden is a
  more violent and horrifying place than India or indeed Congo or Saudi
  Arabia. I’m fairly certain he can’t do this. And even so, Nandy
  trusts ancient records to be accurate and comprehensive, which is an
  absurd trust to have. Even if no one wrote
  about violence,
  that doesn’t mean violence wasn’t happening. Maybe it wasn’t—but we
  simply don’t know. What few written records we have from the time
  period (ahem, The
  Bible? The Qur’an?)
  are simply chock-full of genocidal violence, depicted as if it is
  completely normal and acceptable.

  In
  general, Nandy hates modernity because it challenges his own
  religious beliefs, and he is trying to convince us that modern times
  are more violent than the past, when the evidence shows precisely the
  opposite. Even the most horrible acts of modern times—Hitler,
  Stalin, Pol Pot—were the sort of act that was commonplace in
  ancient times. The Bible, the Qur’an, the Odyssey, the Aeneid… all
  the ancient texts we have verify that life was brutally violent for
  everyone. Genocide used to be a way of life for religious humanity.
  We feel more violent now paradoxically because we are less violent;
  we are more aware
  of
  the violence and how terrible it is, so when we do still see it on
  occasion we are more horrified by it.

  Overall,
  I am convinced that Nandy has nothing useful to say, because he
  systematically distorts secular ideology in order to defend some
  weird form of “religion” that no one actually believes—except
  perhaps we New Atheists.

  • 2:16 pm
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