PIETY AND TERRORISM
15th October 2001
The next issue, Number 65, will appear on 15 November 2001.
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction" (Attributed to Pascal - Skeptical Inquirer Vol 25 No 5)
A short while before the Gulf War was launched in response to the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait ..... a letter appeared in The SCOTSMAN newspaper in which the writer said that he knew that war would soon break out because there had been so many prayers for peace recently.
On reflection it seems clear, as a matter of historical experience, that there is, in the words of David Hume, "a constant conjunction" between the offering of such prayers and the outbreak of war. Generally, the one precedes the other.
Hume argued that causation could best be seen as associated with constant conjunction - if an event of type P is usually followed by an event of type W then the two can be considered causally related. Whether Hume (1711-1776) would be saying today that Prayers for peace cause War ........ is impossible to say with certainty. But it is a matter of history that on Friday October 5th 2001 the Archbishop of Canterbury (and others) held a National Day of Prayer for Peace, Justice and Reconciliation ........ and two days later the Americans and the British attacked targets in Afghanistan.
The notion that the Prayers have caused the War is one that few people would accept. On atheist assumptions, there is nobody to pray to so the question does not arise. On an eccentric, but logically possible, view of God - that He does, or permits, the opposite of what believers pray for - we have to postulate a perverse god. Theists don't accept that idea; they claim that God is good and that He acts for good but often in ways that, admittedly, we do not always understand. That lack of understanding poses the classic problem for theists; their answers are encompassed by the term 'theodicy' - or to put it plainly - making their excuses for the god they have invented.
Rather than follow a possible interpretation of Hume and rather than inventing implausible theories about a god, it might be useful to consider the Prayers and the War as joint effects of a single cause - namely the potential for immediate war. The metaphor of pregnancy might be illuminating. When a pregnancy, carrying non-identical twins, comes to term, the first born may be a perfectly normal baby but the second one may be a dysfunctional monster. This would be a metaphorical view of the Prayers coming first followed very soon by the War coming second - both coming from the war-soon scenario.
Returning to the Archbishop, a BBC radio interviewer asked him, on Friday October 5th, whether there is a Christian view on the subject of Just War. He replied that there is such a view. The interviewer's next question - a foreseeable one - was to ask whether the war (that people expected to happen) would be Just or Unjust. The Archbishop - the accredited leader of the Church that purports to offer clear moral guidance to our perplexed nation - said that it would be up to our political leaders to decide.
Big deal! I wonder whether they will have consulted the Church and would have abided by its guidance before taking the final, irrevocable, decision to bomb Afghanistan ? We may doubt this; we may suppose that the Church has licence to talk but no practical right to be heard at the highest political level. That it is not to say that our political masters have got it wrong; it is say that at least one of our moral mentors has got it nowhere. Those of us drifting in the MMM (Moderately Moral Mainstream) don't like the war but we are at a loss to know what else to do. Negotiating with the Taliban, or with Mr OB Laden, is what many Muslim Members of MMM suggest - but then they would, wouldn't they?
The classic requisites of Just War are essentially four in number: first - exhaust the possibilities of peaceful resolution of the questions at issue: second - don't fight a war you cannot win: third - use only the minimum of force to achieve victory: fourth - treat your defeated adversaries with magnanimity.
Perhaps the present war complies with the first and, no doubt, the questions raised by the third and fourth will be borne vigilantly in mind by the MMM as history unfolds. The second is the big one. Terrorism is endemic in the modern world ..... a world of gross inequality of wealth and power and, consequently, of the alienation and disempowerment of millions of people. The 'war against terrorism' is unwinnable because the seeds of terrorism are all over the place. At most, terrorism can be contained at some times more easily than at others. It is arguable that terrorism, on the world wide scale, is the underside of 'globalisation'. Globalisation of finance and economy is the globalisation of manipulating the vulnerable by the poweful - the globalisation of greed. Terrorism, as now being experienced, is the concomitant globalistion of envy and hate.
Getting rid of the Taliban and allowing it to be replaced by another gang of cut throats - pious or otherwise - is not properly to be identified as the central question. It is the extreme bent piety of the Taliban and its supporters that is so menacing at the present time but the Taliban has no monopoly in bent piety. The seeds of future 'talibans' are being sown by a self-righteous war against the current Taliban.
Speaking of bent piety, I am reminded of a caustic remark of one of our great orchestral conductors, Sir Thomas Beecham. At the end of a public speech he said "We don't need second rate foreign musicians .... applause ..... we have plenty of second-rate musicians of our own." US spokespersons would do well to beware of the bent piety at home as well as the need to be saved from bent piety abroad.
To quote a recently published opinion ........"The US is now consumed by shallow religious fanaticism of the sort that demands little more of its adherents than to take noisy ignorant attitudes to such things as abortion, homosexuality, biblical authority. evolution and what not. The shallowness of this illiberal religious stance lies in its cosy folksy avoidance of any notion of self sacrifice for the sake of one's faith. US opinion knows very little of the real religious fanaticism that rates one's life on earth as instantly expendable for the greater glory of God. All the technical expertise there is can be no substitute for seeing the reality of pious self sacrifice and the appalling threat it poses. It is humanists, and humanists alone, among all the strands of modern opinion, that have a sufficient idea of just how lethal religion can be. People of that lethal mindset do not fight us on battlefields of our choosing - if they can help it; they fight by practising what they are best at - increasingly hi-tech terrorism". (Quoted from a column in HUMANISM SCOTLAND, Summer 2001).
"The cosy folksy avoidance of any notion of self sacrifice for the sake of one's faith" has been shattered - at least the cosy folksy bit took a cruel knock on September 11th 2001. It remains to be seen whether the avoidance bit is still tenable.
Secular humanism - including liberal atheism is pretty clear ....... "Humanism claims to be distinctively the lay view of the world. It is the ordinary way of taking hold of the world - straightforwardly - by contrast with the mysteries, the far-fetched, the ancestral and the immemorial". It is on this basis (The Plain View, as HJ Blackham calls it) that humanists were well aware of the dire threat posed by the Taliban when the US (and the ever-obedient UK) were supporting precisely those perverse fanatics as part of the State Department's attempt to wreck the relatively liberal regime then current in Afghanistan.
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