The Fires of Moloch - Introduction

Warning: long post - see here.

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!

              Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! 

              Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! 

Alan Ginsberg - Howl

Introduction

On 25^th March 1586 Margaret Clitherow was crushed to death. She was stripped of her clothes, and her face was covered with cloth. After she had been laid down on a sharp rock, the door from her own house was placed on her front, and was slowly piled with rocks and stones. This grotesque penalty was commanded by the York assize as retribution for Clitherow's refusal to enter a plea with respect to the charge of harbouring Catholic priests; doing so would have resulted in the arrest and torture of her three childrenⁱ.

Some centuries later, on September 11^th 2012, Salma Yaqoob, one of the most prominent Muslim women in British politics, resigned from the left-of-centre RESPECT coalition. Yaqoob, who has described her own politics as 'old Labour', had fallen out with RESPECT figurehead George Galloway, who had recently described the alleged rape of two Swedish women by Julian Assange as 'a failure of sexual etiquette'. In an interview she explained “to have to make a choice between [George Galloway's anti-imperialism] and standing up for the rights of women was a false choice.”ⁱⁱ

These stories of two women, both tied up intimately with the intersection of politics and religion in Britain, call into question the dominant narrative about that intersection, not only in Britain but throughout the world. Clitherow's murder was part of the birth-pangs of the Church of England, an institution now widely regarded as the paradigm case of religious breadth and theological moderation, whilst also being thoroughly integrated into the British state and key sectors of civil societyⁱⁱⁱ. Yaqoob, on the other hand, is a Muslim, who takes her faith to be integrally linked to her left-wing politics, a politics which amongst other things is manifest in a passionate concern for women's liberation. The view that “Islam should guide social and political as well as personal life” - if the spectrum of doctrines thus described is sufficiently unified to be called a view - is known as Islamism, and haunts the Western imagination^iv. If Marx and Engels were correct in 1848 to name the spectre then lurking in the interstices of society as communism, a modern rewrite would have to speak of Islamism.

I take no pleasure in the fact that socialism has receded from the horizon of political possibility^v. In fact, as may become clear, I take this to be part of the problem for how our contemporaries tend to think about politics and religion. This is hardly a popular view, and I urge the reader who doesn't entirely share my political sympathies to persist, since the main task of this short book is negative – I want to call into question, by a series of provocations and reflections, a hegemonic account of the current state of theopolitical play. That account, far from being a bulwark of human decency against the barbarism of religious fanaticism, serves to provide ideological support to both state violence and the exploitation of human labour which this violence permits to flourish.

Liberal thought, representing as it does the key modern support for the state in the realm of ideas, has always been terrified of people with problematic beliefs about the religious. In his Epistle on Toleration, Locke explicitly excludes both atheists and Catholics from the remit of the proposed toleration^vi. The former cannot be bound by “promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society”, whereas the latter “deliver themselves up to the protection of another prince”, namely the Pope. These days many states find the courts, the police, and the fear of starvation satisfactory defences of the bonds of oaths, and can therefore dispense with the Almighty's services. Meanwhile, at least in Europe and America, a good deal of the heat has been taken off Catholics, since Muslims too are now regarded with suspicion because of dual allegiance, as evidenced by the repeated demands on 'the Muslim community' to distance itself from ISIS^vii.

Locke's present-day successors are more likely to be found in television studios or the opinion pages of liberal newspapers than in society coffee houses. We have deferred long enough an encounter with the story they have to tell about religion. This is, with minor variations depending on who is doing the telling, as follows:

Religion can have a place in modern society. It is, after all, none of the state's business what people do in private. If you want to miss your Sunday lie-in and go to church, or go to the mosque, or the synagogue, or whatever – that's fine – as long as you pay your taxes and obey the laws of the land. The problem with religion is when it exists in extreme or radical forms – then it becomes a problem. Such religion is incompatible with being a good citizen: how can one be both British and a radical Islamist? There is a particular problem with Islam at the moment. The solution is for young Muslims to be encouraged – by a series of civil society initiatives (ranging from the Prevent strategy in the UK, to bans on distinctive Islamic clothing in the cause of French laicité) – away from extremism. Islam itself stands in need of a Reformation, of the sort that produced the possibility for religious tolerance at the beginnings of Western modernity.

It deserves comment that this narrative, at home as it is in Guardian columns, finds disturbing echoes on the far right. Groups like the, increasingly explicitly fascist, English Defence League, the pan-European Pegida movement, and the Dutch PVV present themselves as defenders of cherished freedoms^viii. And the implicit association between reformed religion and civic peace has been trumpeted for years by the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, not widely regarded as an organ of the liberal left.

Suggestive though these unsettling affinities are, the focus of this book is on undermining more mainstream proponents of the account of religion and politics outlined above. Implicit in this is the claim that modern society as it presently exists, that is (more or less) liberal capitalist society, is conducive to human flourishing. Outside of the rarefied climes of liberal political philosophy this is rarely supported with argument, and is usually assumed to need no such support^ix. Against this liberal acquiescence, I will afford existing reality no presumption of ethical legitimacy. Explicit in the account are the following claims:

1. That religion is separable from society, both in the sense that religion can be understood apart from wider society, and in the sense that a religious believer can, with integrity, exist as a citizen in the public sphere in such a way that her deep religious commitments do not affect her citizenship.
2. That extreme, or radical, manifestations of religion are damaging in a way that more moderate ones are not.
3. That there is a particular problem, appropriately described in terms of unreformedness, with Islam, and that supporters of human freedom should call on more moderate Muslims to encourage a process of reformation.

Against these I believe that:

1. Religion is a social phenomenon, and cannot be understood adequately apart from the social totality in which it occurs, and into which it feeds. The separation of person-as-citizen from person-as-religious is a product of alienation inherent in the separation of state from civil society, and should be overcome in both thought and practice^x.
2. That some (but not all) forms of religious practice that are extreme and radical, on any reasonable understanding of those terms, should be applauded, whilst some very moderate forms of religion are complicit in horrific violence, not least the violence of states and capital.
3. Islam is in no different position in these respects than other religions; it has merely been thrust into the limelight by geopolitical attention, motivated in large part by the concerns of the oil industry, on the arab world, and the unresolved conflict in Palestine. Islamophobia is a genuine phenomenon, a form of racism, and in its liberal variant should be understood in terms of orientalism and the recurrent liberal trope of the defence of civilisation against barbarism.

It should by now be apparent how the stories of Clitherow and Yaqoob fit my view better than the dominant one. On the one hand we have a particularly brutal instance of religiously-motivated state violence against a woman, perpetrated in the cause of the very reformed religious order that is supposed to provide the conditions for religious pluralism. On the other, a woman in whose entire political outlook sticks two fingers up to the separation of religion and politics, ends up supporting exactly the kind of cause (women's rights; justice for victims of rape) that the pedlars of that outlook tend to regard as best served by liberalism. Reality is more complicated than the dominant view allows. Such is often the way with ideology.

Having laid my theoretical commitments on the table, I will proceed in a much less systematic way. What follows is less an ordered argument than a loosely connected series of interventions, aimed at tempting readers in thrall to liberal approaches to religion and politics away from these. The temptation is intended to be particularly strong to those sympathetic to left-wing critiques of capitalism and state violence; in fact, I hope to expose the holding of these positions in combination as untenable.

The first chapter argues for a view that religion is a practice, and that an understanding of religious phenomena cannot be separated adequately from a theory of society as a whole. The next subjects the current public discourse around radicalisation and extremism to critique, and argues for a liberative form of extremism, that opposes the violence of both states and fundamentalists. The following essay explores the idea of the state as a jealous god as a means of gaining insight into liberalism's difficulties with religious allegiance, and of suggesting that liberals are not themselves free of the kind of absolute loyalties and binding imperatives they find so troubling in others. I next use Said's concept of orientalism to discuss Islamophobia, and ask questions about the reasons contemporary capitalist society produces this form of racism. Finally, I look at ways of reading religious narratives that, whilst no doubt extreme and radical, provide resources for struggle against the nightmare of the present. Ernst Bloch will provide the background here.

Be in no doubt that the present is a nightmare. Whilst you have been reading this, people have died of hunger – hunger that is preventable in that that humanity has the technological resources to prevent it, but also not preventable in that the way society is currently organised prevents the harnessing of these resources from being an immanent possibility. It is striking, given that this is the case, that a good number of intellectuals, as well as Richard Dawkins, seem to think that the most urgent problem in today's world is the persistence of religion. It is, however, baffling that a good number of professed leftists give the impression of agreeing with them. It is best therefore in ending this introduction to minute this widespread hostility on the left to any discussion of religion that goes beyond denunciation. Terry Eagleton has described the phenomenon well,

...what they usually write off is a worthless caricature of the real thing, rooted in a degree of ignorance and prejudice to match religion's own. It is as though one were to dismiss feminism on the basis of Clint Eastwood's opinions of it^xi.

My pet genealogy of this state of affairs notes the enduring influence of two vulgarisations of Marxism, the scientistic determinism of the Second International and the shallow dialectical materialism of Stalinism. Whether or not this is correct, the problem is not simply a theoretical one. That many leftists have a crude and undiscriminating approach to religion should be a real source of political concern. Increasingly, capitalist states are legitimising themselves predominantly in terms of their capacity to protect their citizens from religious extremists without and within. It is not the job of the left to justify existing society, yet in singing from the anti-extremist hymn sheet on the basis of a visceral hostility to all things religious far too many are doing precisely that.

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