Wilkins explains some obvious things about religion that need explaining to an awful lot of people. And I mostly agree.
He first points out the ugliness of historical Catholicism, and make no mistake, it’s a wretched, awful history and Catholicism has much to be ashamed of. But it’s gotten better.
Ask yourself, gentle reader: do you fear the coming Catholic takeover of your democratic society? Sure, the various popes and archbishops (and one cardinal in particular) say fundamentally indecent things about how the rights and welfare of women and children are to be subordinated to the interests and dogmas of the Church, and if they had half a chance they’d block abortion even in life or death situations for mothers, but secular societies have forced the rank and file to accept that they are not in charge, and that they must live by the laws and mores of a modern society. Most Catholics in western societies even think contraception is acceptable, and more than half agree divorce and abortion are okay as well.
I’d love to say that no, I have no fear of such a thing, except that I live in the USA. Have you looked at our Supreme Court lately? Packed with Catholics, and most of them aren’t the gentle progressive kind.
But I would agree entirely that the influence of the kind of rigid Catholicism that expects every word of the Pope (who is also a regressive asshole) should be obediently followed. The power of their dogma has waned.
The same thing will happen with Islam. Indeed, Muslims have been enthusiastic adopters of secularism in many countries (pre-revolution Iran, pre-Erdogan Turkey, Indonesia) already. Most of the extremists are from the countryside, and rural peasants always are more conservative than urbanites, no matter what the nation, ethnicity or religion.
Likewise, I agree that we can expect Islamic fanaticism to fade, and in many places it was fading…although we can also fuel the fire. There’s a backlash effect, though, and we get sporadic resurgences of extremism — note that he mentions pre-revolution Iran and pre-Erdogan Turkey. Secularism seems to be a fragile trend, so far.
I’d also quibble with the “rural” characterization. Rural populations seem to be ripe for exploitation, as he explains further, but I don’t think it’s so simple. The 9/11 hijackers were engineering students, for instance; in the US it takes at least the kind of sophistication to set up a TV station and charm large urban crowds to become influential. The megachurches are more a staple of the suburbs than the countryside. Don’t underestimate the fanatics! They aren’t necessarily a bunch of dumb hicks.
But this, I think, is the real meat of the article:
But there’s another concern here: the sacrificial lamb, to use a religious metaphor.
Jews know this. They were used to justify every grab for power and money from Richard II to Hitler, and to denigrate every nation from Spain to America. They were a nice distraction from the real issues facing a political elite. Problems with the economy? The Jews. Problems with employment? The Jews. Terrorist acts by (in recent years) Muslims? The Jews set it up.
Muslims have a large number of extremists, to be sure, among their ranks. I suspect, however, this has more to do with dislocation, dispossession and marginalisation than it does with the admittedly awful doctrines of Islam, just as it did with Catholics before them. Dislocate, dispossess and marginalise any group at all, and they will become extremists.
That’s what I see, too. You don’t make terrorists by converting them to Islam; you make terrorists by killing people’s families, depriving them of hope, reducing them to desperation…and then using a seductive idea like religion to give them an identity and a focus, and aiming them towards doing violence.
It needs that extra kick of a large group of people to generate the necessary mob mentality, and to offer social awards for extremism. I’d have to mention that gay and trans people experience far more marginalization than Muslims, but there isn’t much in the way of gay terror squads. Desperation may be necessary but not sufficient — it also takes the support of an institution that encourages violent responses.
But also religion is not sufficient, and if the recipe for terrorism is religion+fear, and if we’re not going to eradicate religion overnight (a few centuries of gentle education, at least), then we ought to recognize that the immediate solution is to reduce fear. Give the populations who are most likely to turn to violence those incentives of hope, opportunity, and justice — all three perfectly good secular causes — and the problem begins to go away.
It’s rather unfortunate that the US and Israel have somehow decided that ramping up the bombs and the walls and the abuse are the solutions, rather than agents of exacerbation.
It’s election year here in Canada and our Republican Prime Minister is running on a platform of ‘Look, a bogeyman!!’
As a Canadian I am ashamed and embarrassed to admit that it seems to be working.
Regarding Islam and any tendency toward moderation: the following recent article by Graeme Wood in the Atlantic is a must-read:
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants
If he is correct, the core of ISIS is an astonishingly retrogressive, fundamentalist, rigid interpretation of Islamic doctrine, far to the right of, and quite distinct from, the driving philosophy of Al Qeada. Striking quote: it is “like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.”
This is both its strength — because it is drawing a to-me astonishing number of enthusiastic recruits eater to fight and die for an apocalyptic vision — and its weakness, because it makes it impossible for ISIS ever to negotiate or form alliances.
But if some parts of the Islamic world are moderating, there are is this strong reverse current toward a truly insane fundamentalism.
Yes I do fear the Catholic take over. I am in Washington state where more and more hospitals are joining forces with Catholic organizations and following their rules with regard to women’s health.
Thinking about how this applies to fundamentalist Christianity in the US, the fundies cannot show the (necessary?) ingredients of “killing people’s families, depriving them of hope, reducing them to desperation..”, so they have to manufacture them. Teh Gay Agenda, no prayer in public schools, not allowed to rewrite the history books, etc. have been sold to the pews as the equivalent of rampant death and destruction. Social awards for extremism includes being elected to public office, where your supporters treat you as being worthy of the office, and you have some influence. At what point does rampant terrorism begin, not just the bombing of abortion clinics and waving guns around in public spaces, but killing people that actively disagree with you?
On a past episode of the “Reasobale Doubts” podcast, the hosts talked about a study that found that, when people become isolated and associate prdominently with people who think the same as they do, they become less tolerant of new or different ideas and see different and new ideas as threats to their identities as individuals and as a group. The results are extreme reactions to anything they see as a potential threat. Whereas, the study found that people who associate with a variety of different social groups are much more accepting and tolerant of new and different ideas. The study seems to support exactly what Wilkins and PZ are talking about. I apologize that I can’t remember the episode number, but all of their podcasts are usually pretty good.
I don’t think this really addresses the situation of the kind of homegrown European terrorists and teenage jihadists we’ve seen of late. Actually, the more I look into them the more they seem to be the ‘victims’ of precisely the mixture of relative social deprivation, actual privilege (on a global scale), personal moral ambivalence and sheer immaturity which also produces those unfortunate blots on existence known as white nationalists. And you make them in the same way: by feeding them hate speech and delusions of supremacy.
Uh, of course. Most of the Islamic world is, I’d say, about where some average of Christianity was in the early 20th century; that’s a far cry from the Islamic State, which tries very hard to be in the 7th century but is actually a lot more brutal than even that.
hope, opportunity, and justice are I think the key to stability. They have to be more than an illusion how ever they have to be concrete to persist over time. I would go so far as to say that at the root of all revolutions is the realization that the hope, opportunity, and justice available to them is at best an illusion if it is offered at all and that they owe no allegiance to the current order of authority. People will be drawn to whatever ideology whether religious or political that will convincingly offer those to them. In the Islamic world religion still has some measure of respect hence it is the focal point and the message is delivered in the language of religion. When the people realize that what religion and the extremists are offering is an illusion they will turn on them as well.
The good thing about now is the awareness of what constitute , hope, opportunity, and justice is harder to bullshit it is too easy to compare with others for illusion alone to supply stability there will need to applied increasing levels of force.
uncle frogy
I have a quibble about the “pre-revolution Iran” and “pre-Erdogan Turkey.” In both of these cases, secularization proceeded very top-down, in the case of Iran, it was the Shah who wanted to westernize his country (over objections of religious figures), in case of Turkey, it was Kemal Ataturk. The phrase “Muslims have been enthusiastic adopters of secularism” suggests that the process of secularization was based on a popular movement, which it was not.
Culturally speaking, the suburbs are a lot more ‘rural’ than they are ‘urban’. Substitute ‘insular’ for ‘rural’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ for ‘urbanite’ and you’ll get a better sense of what the author was getting at, I think. See Congaboy’s comment @5 for more on how that works.
hope, opportunity, and justice have nothing to do with secularism per se if secularism delivers or is seen to deliver those things it will succeed. In the Iran of the Shaw what was seen was increasing repression by a government set up by a foreign power with little hope, justice or opportunity for the mass of ordinary people.
people trusted the religion more than any other political idea from the west like democracy or communism or secularism. The thing is still that those things have to be seen as deliverable to the people or they have no reason to give their allegiance to it.
uncle frogy
rinn @ 9
Kemal Ataturk: “My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go.
Agreed. There are two ways to make terrorists: Religion+fear, and Religion+privilege+social immaturity+racism
“I’d have to mention that gay and trans people experience far more marginalization than Muslims, but there isn’t much in the way of gay terror squads. Desperation may be necessary but not sufficient — it also takes the support of an institution that encourages violent responses.”
Marginalized population need to have sufficient mass, before those members of the population who feel the strong need to hit out/back actualize their desires. Where such mass is not available, often this particular activist portion of the population will get the requisite mass by embedding themselves in a larger group – in a sense transcending their smaller social group. The participation of the Jews in Europe in the early twentieth century in the communist movements, and the Italians in the US at the same time in the anarchist movement seems to be a result of this dynamic. I am probably stretching this but I see the same pattern in the participation of some gay activists in the Islamophobic “movement ,” from the ill fated Pim Fortuyn, to Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan. Perhaps those with more knowledge could address this.
You’re exaggerating in the other direction, though. Iran didn’t, AFAIK, become any less secular under Mossadegh; and while full-on Kemalism isn’t the only or the biggest political force in Turkey, it is a large and well rooted one.
(…And now I wonder if Erdoğan is going to be caliph instead of the caliph at some point. But I digress.)
(He’s totally Sultan Pullmankar right now, though.)
Homegrown extremists in the USA gets lots of encouragement from rightwing religious politicians And this includes breakdowns in the wall of separation between church and state, between secular government and religious groups.
Cross posted from the Lounge:
http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/davidbadash/gop_lawmaker_wants_almighty_god_our_savior_credited_as_creator_of_liberty_in_constitution
On the news last night I saw a young man being interviewed about ISIS. He said “the whole universe will obey Sharia law …”
Not sure how black holes will obey Sharia law. Seems wildly off kilter as far as expectations go.
A. R wrote:
Religion isn’t strictly necessary there. Any totalitarian ideology will do, regardless of if it’s secular or religious.
Discussion of radicalization of, well, anyone without discussing racism and colonialism seems like a lot of effort spent to not be smart on purpose.
I feel the following is applicable to many local, regional, national, global problems in the world. We have too many humans with too few jobs using up too many resources too quickly. To paraphrase some Heinlein book out of my distant past: Most of the worlds population is reduced to beggars fighting over a crust of bread.
eventually the beggars may realize they have nothing else to lose
uncle frogy
Excellent point about marginalizing groups tend to make them into terrorists. I recall Nelson Mandela being acutely aware of the exact same thing. When peaceful resistance to the apartheid regime was not getting the oppressed non-whites anywhere, and people were getting desparate, this was the reason he reluctantly agreed to a start of a campaign of sabotage. He knew the leadership needed to channel the increasing aggravation somehow, otherwise it could explode into a bloody civil war and acts of terrorism. Despite his wisdom in this matter, this is now used by right-wing loons to brand him as a full-blown terrorist.