Just as the scrutiny of kinds of truth is central to my argument, so is the scrutiny of sentences where the ‘essentially contested’ category of ‘religion’ plays the role of a ‘subject’ to which some inherent characteristic x and some likely consequence y is attributed. In ordinary discourse, including debate over religion and violence, we take such sentences for granted, whereas they are highly problematic. That matters for two closely connected reasons. The first relates to the way we conventionally label ‘religion’ as a definable and delimited entity when it is nothing of the kind. The second relates to the way the illusory ‘entity’ denominated religion is saddled for polemical purposes with specific characteristics and consequences which are in reality shared by all the varied discourses of power. For example, campaigns and rituals of purification are the common currency of religion, political ideology and nationalism.
As in the case of purification rituals, the saddling of religion with specific characteristics shared by all the discourses of power is a prime example of that kind of rhetorical falsehood. When we articulate a sentence claiming that an entity we identify as ‘religion’ is this or does that, we are not so much making an empirical statement covering a set of interrelated characteristics, as offering a stipulative definition of what we understand religion to be for the purposes of a particular argument based on a rhetorical wrestling match fixed in advance to deliver a foregone conclusion. Polemicists not only take the part for the whole, but assume what is to be proved, cite examples out of relevant context, manipulate criteria to serve their purposes, forget that statements are provisional, and deploy odium theologicum. By definition scientists do not do this. When it comes to issues of religion and war Richard Dawkins is a polemicist, and one who does not care how much he contradicts himself provided he can get away quickly with the sudden thrust. One moment he claims that he (helped on by the revelatory impact of the religious violence of 9/11) has put to flight the dwindling powers of superstition, while the next moment he expresses alarm at their menacing recrudescence.
Take, for example, the constantly reproduced sentence from Chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene: ‘The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational enquiry.’1 This is an elegant and seemingly simple sentence that appears to nestle innocently within a scintillating wider argument. For the average incurious atheist it provides the pleasurable assurance of very special exemption from the deadly virus infecting the intellectual operations of those routinely dismissed as ‘believers’, including presumably people like Leszek Kołakowski and Alasdair MacIntyre. But put logical and empirical pressure on the sentence and it oozes problems. You need to know first whether specifically ‘blind faith’ is a subcategory of faith, or alternatively inheres in the very idea of faith. The context strongly implies the latter – that faith is by definition inherently blind; but if that is so, the postulated consequence of a ‘meme’ for blind faith in terms of resistance to rational enquiry is likewise true merely by definition. The meme inserted in the sentence in order ‘unconsciously’ to reproduce this unhappy condition as an entity, equipped with quasi-agency, is effectively a deus ex machina, doing no empirical work. The context also implies that blind faith is an inherent property of religion when blind faith is either a dubious and abusive metaphor for a condition affecting an extraordinary variety of types of commitment, or else it functions to define all these types of commitment as ‘religious’. Clarity about these complicated matters is not helped when Richard Dawkins routinely claims that Christians do not believe what they are signed up to (a useful tactic for initially disconcerting Christian debating partners), and that faith is culturally acquired (rather than biologically through memes) by the ‘child abuse’ of early religious socialisation. The only way to get at the truth of these matters is by recourse to evidence. Historically we know, as Alec Ryrie has reminded us, that Christianity has been rather too inclined to offer reasons for faith.2 But there is a vast amount of contemporary evidence that religious or spiritual attachments come in many modes, most of them subject to some more or less thoughtful consideration, and that the distribution of such attachments – high, for example, in Poland, vanishingly small in the former East Germany – depends on historical conditions for religious attachment or identification that vary massively depending on whether you are east or west of the Oder–Neisse line. In short, the deus ex machina, aka the meme, is as good as dead.
In the framing of rhetorical sentences we may in an entirely arbitrary way define religion as that which in essence causes wars, or we may arbitrarily define religion as that which in essence binds society in solidarity. Then we can combine the two and marginally increase the exiguous empirical component by defining religion as that which binds society together and, therefore, causes wars. The word ‘therefore’ adds to the empirical content and at least tells you that social solidarity among Us generates the seeds of conflict with social solidarity among Them, though this observation is far too generalised to be of much empirical use. It is too generalised precisely because religion is very far from the only entity that binds society together and therefore causes wars. The link between the solidarity of Us and conflict with Them is genuine but it takes numerous forms, not all of them religious, and there are many forms of religion to which it is irrelevant. That is what I mean when I say that what we conventionally call ‘religion’ is polemically singled out as moral scapegoat for characteristics that inhere in all the discourses of power and solidarity.
No wonder social scientists are so wary of loose statements about hypostasised ‘entities’ like ‘religion’ and insist on attaching a massive qualifying rubric. None of the verbal concepts of sociology can be treated unproblematically as a bounded ‘entity’ constructed on a crude version of the natural science model. The semantic depth and historically inflected nature of concepts in the social sciences drives a deep ditch between them and the natural sciences. Some natural scientists maraud across the ditch without having the faintest suspicion they are trespassing on ground they systematically misunderstand. The settled modes of operation native to the natural science side of the divide, such as metrics, have a strictly limited purchase across it. In social science metrics are pointers and circumscriptions to be deployed with a proper caution about the seemingly solid and historically stable entities they purport to measure.
I am interested in sentences, arguments and styles of public rhetoric concerning religion, war and violence. Unless we recognise how these operate we lack a baseline to move the argument forward. We have to become properly conscious of how locutions and discourses about religion, war and violence veil their tautological, moral and polemical character behind statements with only the most exiguous empirical purchase. Acquiring that consciousness depends on the scrutiny of concrete examples, some of which are here provided by Richard Dawkins, though mostly not itemised since they are easily accessible on the Internet. I have also looked at the arguments of other ‘New Atheists’ like the late Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, A.C. Grayling and Michael Martin.
I now examine the smallest possible unit of polemical assertion ‘religion causes wars’ understood as a core statement of position by Richard Dawkins. A relatively early instance of this kind of blanket assertion encapsulated in embryonic linguistic form can be found in an interview with Dawkins conducted on 22 January 1995 by Sue Lawley for the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs. I refer to it here because it provides a perfect illustration of what I shall identify as the hit-and-run technique, where a huge assertion is made without any fear it will be taken up and subjected to analysis. However, the core assertion made in Desert Island Discs is not simply an off-the-cuff locution made in a moment of gross intellectual carelessness. In essence ‘religion causes wars’ has been repeated by Dawkins in many other contexts. His reported speeches and obiter dicta as found on the internet under the auspices of the Richard Dawkins Foundation show little of the provisionality he believes intrinsic to science.
The locution ‘religion causes wars’ exemplifies a technique constantly used when time is too short for a considered comeback. It represents a standard hit-and-run raid on the vast storehouse of history where the assailant utilises an extremely loose trope embedded in the ideological narratives I examine later. A glove has been thrown down with no real danger that the challenge will be taken up in extended combat. If the partner in this game were seriously to take up the challenge he or she would break the unspoken rules of the game. The verbal assailant achieves a cheap victory and is away before anyone can mobilise.
One has to ask just how Dawkins gets away with it, and the answer lies in the deployment of irrelevant authority to disseminate a particular ideological narrative. The technique works because Richard Dawkins carries around the authority ascribed to the natural scientist. Of course, ‘religion causes wars’ is not a natural scientific statement but a quasi-social scientific bluff which anyone with the slightest knowledge of social science knows to be empty of empirical content. A socially constructed accreditation as a natural scientist, constantly trumpeted by its beneficiaries to secure uncritical reception of assorted opinions of all kinds, allows a loose ideological trope to masquerade as a social scientific statement. Yet hardly anyone registers shock because this particular ideological trope is so much taken for granted through sheer iteration that it has been ‘naturalised’ as possessing empirical purchase. Statements can be taken ‘at face value’ as obviously true through iteration and reiteration. Yet this technique for establishing falsehoods is identified as intrinsic to religion. The scientist pontificates without reproof on the basis of a generalised authority, whereas the ex cathedra statements of real popes are quite properly liable to exposure as ridiculous. The self-styled scientist breaks the first rule of scientific procedure by taking for granted what is to be proved, and engages in statements about the source of violence which are themselves violent speech acts, as in An Atheist’s Call to Arms to ‘wage war’ on religion.
We find violence everywhere, not just in violent struggles for supremacy between tribes and nations but also at the domestic level. Violence is endemic in each and every type of context. No wonder Christianity takes its global logo from a paradigmatic act of unjust violence committed against an innocent man. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet we have an example of apparently senseless violence between nations. The Prince sees an army about to go into battle over a strip of barren land ‘that hath no profit in it but the name’. Some social scientists might understand this as a struggle over territory with high symbolic value but no material benefit. ‘Face’ is a sufficient motive in itself, and ‘face’ is normally expressed in words. Words are potentially lethal, so that even a comma out of place can generate extreme violence and potential annihilation.3 For others, the symbolic value has been ‘referred’ from its real point of origin in the territorial imperative and/or in material benefits and interests. This is a false distinction because symbol, socio-biological imperative and material gain are mutually reinforcing. Nevertheless, the casus belli is focussed in the symbol, whatever material forces lie behind it.
Domestic relations are like international relations. Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is the human equivalent of symbolically occupied territory, kept vacant of all intrinsic character by the dominating imperatives of infantilised ‘womanliness’ imposed by her husband, Torvald. Her final bid for autonomy forces her to leave Torvald’s ‘doll’s house’ because she can ‘no longer live in the house of a stranger who does not know her’. The symbolic idea of womanliness fuses with the assertion of material control over the ‘territory’ of her person. This turns sexual mutuality into quasi-rape carried out by an occupying force, and Torvald invokes ‘religion’ to provide symbolic cover for the patriarchal and territorial imperative.
Violence in domestic relations is committed inter alia through speech acts as well as territorial enclosure, and speech acts are as a class replete with violence. To quote again from Hamlet, we ‘speak daggers’ though we ‘use none’. The same verbal pugilism is evident in debates over religion and violence by ‘New Atheists’ like A.C. Grayling and Christopher Hitchens. The general dynamics of power represented by control of the field apply to debate, to the usurpation, domination and liberation of territory in the domestic sphere, and to acts of war to secure strips of real territory. Miniaturised verbal violence has been normalised beyond comment, and it enjoys a special licence in debates about religion and violence.
I now examine how the authority of ‘the natural scientist’ is deployed in debate on public issues that lie outside its remit specifically to bring out the special character of social science. The natural scientist claims to exercise authority on the basis of a philosophy restricting ‘truth’ to statements generated according to a positivist modus operandi and a delimited natural scientific intentionality. It seems not to matter that this philosophy is excluded by its own criterion of truth. Yet it can be protected by a blank refusal to recognise the boundaries of science or by declaring that science has made philosophy redundant. Not so. What is to count as truth is highly problematic and extends far beyond the restricted area governed by positivist protocols.
Any contention that these protocols can be straightforwardly extended to the social sciences is implausible. Yet some social scientists apparently adopt the positivist position, even though their practice is bound to be inconsistent outside an artificially restricted range of subject matter. Those who restrict the accolade of objective analysis to the operation of material forces and those who restrict it to what can be measured drastically reduce the range of issues that can be discussed ‘scientifically’. The ideological sources of these restrictions in Marxism and positivism are in fact incompatible, but that does not prevent some social scientists combining them in practice. Charles Taylor has subjected these restrictive protocols to comprehensive criticism, for example in his work on Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer.4
Social scientific truth is saturated in language and in semantic auras embedded in historical and cultural usages. Moreover, I have already indicated there are many kinds of truth relevant to scientific discourse about religion, war and violence. The problem canvassed here only appears intractable because some social scientists are themselves tempted to engage in loose tropes embedded in standard ideological narratives, and because the public sphere is to a high degree saturated in such narratives. Indeed the public sphere lives off them and lives by their seeming naturalisation. Given they are constructed on the basis of ideological organisations of history constantly contradicted by the sheer contingency of history, they are versions of the Indian rope trick held aloft in the public sphere because they represent its constitutive fictions. If one wanted to be paradoxical one might even label them ‘religious’. After all, they conform to the definition of religion as that which binds society together. This is precisely the situation that has led some thinkers to declare there is nothing beyond the Indian rope trick and that consequently there is no such thing as truth when it comes to our standard ideological narratives. On the contrary, there are many truths of different kinds.
I am deconstructing the miniaturised power relations of public debate to show what they share with power relations in general, up to the level of figures of authority accorded limited licence to pronounce and aggressively to denounce, whether they are popes or ‘scientists’ or other persons sheltered by ‘a little brief authority’. These malpractices are inaudible to the naked ear, and therefore uniquely effective. Yet sometimes the inaudible can be detected loud and clear. When Christopher Hitchens added the subtitle How Religion Poisons Everything to his book God Is Not Great he made explicit what is elsewhere implicit.5 The subtitle is eye-catching nonsense. Yet hardly anybody says so, and Hitchens is granted the licence and even the adulation of a hero of free thinking and free speech. Instead of the barely registered thrust of the hit-and-run raid, Hitchens confronts us with verbal strutting where the alpha male protagonist beats his breast to secure attention. He deploys speech acts to convey the maximum aggression and defy anyone to risk intellectual annihilation. This is how a serious and extremely complicated issue is degraded into a populist punch-up to ‘catch the ears of the groundlings’. The alpha male exhibits contempt in the aggressive style exhibited in prize fights and exchanges between combatants in tournaments conducted under the feudal code of honour.
Both Christopher Hitchens and A.C. Grayling are prone to acts of gross verbal aggression that use expressions of contempt to intimidate the Other and decry their intellectual status. Hitchens backs up exaggerated expressions of contempt with quick and elegant thrusts to the solar plexus. The style of A.C. Grayling drips contempt, as when he dismisses Christians as ‘away with the fairies’, meaning that they are retarded at the level of deluded children. Grayling is ever ready to expound a truncated and extremely simplified historical narrative based on the key transition from religious ignorance to true scientific knowledge. It is a typical from/to construct illustrated by his contemptuous dismissal of biblical writers as ‘ignorant goat herds’.
The moment debate includes an interlocutor who understands the contours of the issue in question the rhetorical approach has to change. The protagonist can neither carry out a quick underhand thrust before disappearing down an alleyway nor brazenly strut his stuff across the boards. When Richard Dawkins debated with Archbishop Rowan Williams on 23 February 2012, he set out his case in cautious depth and exhibited sweet reasonableness. His self-presentation as an apostle of reason required him to exemplify his self-assigned role. A contemptuous approach could only damage the cause of sweet reason. No killer punch can be delivered under the conventions and courtesies governing this kind of exchange and within so extended a time frame. This is partly because the protagonist is not exploiting a monopoly or an intellectual inequality, and partly because there are cruces in the argument where participants articulate assumptions beyond which it is impossible to go. On the one side these assumptions might include a positivist articulation of the limits on what are to count as meaningful statements and on the other side some exposition of the nature of historicity and associated semantic complexities. In this debate a crux occurred where the archbishop, following the classic affirmations of Christian theology, said that God is ‘not an extra to be shoehorned into the universe’. Dawkins failed to see what that implied for his contention that God understood as a variable – a God particle, say, operating within the ensemble of variables – does no discernible work. A transcendent God is not an immanent factor alongside other factors to be assigned a causal role with a designated range of essentially ‘mysterious’ effects.
I now return to the statement ‘religion causes wars’ to bring out the logic of social science and the rhetoric of public debate, and the extent to which logic and rhetoric interweave. I need to establish in more detail what I understand by social science and the integrity of its procedures, not least because the findings of social science circulate as part of the accepted currency of public debate without being understood as a distinctive scientific practice. Social science requires careful conceptual clarification, historical contextualisation and a tentative and provisional approach. Social scientists eschew statements about a supposed ‘entity’ known as ‘religion’ in favour of initial hypotheses about what might be more or less likely to follow on the basis of a given set of beliefs – say, the Quakers or the Assassins – in given historical and social contexts. In those contexts they would try to elicit what Karl Popper called ‘the logic of the situation’. This approach is entirely alien to the way people swap views in ordinary conversation and to the conventions of public debate over the role of religion as such in relation to conflict in general, or the specific role of religion in particular contemporary conflicts. A social scientist veers between intellectual shock over the display of sheer ignorance about the relevant social scientific approaches and moral shock over culpable indifference to them.
‘Religion causes wars’ is a banal statement of ‘the obvious’ which can only become empirically productive when related both to historical and cultural context and to a general enquiry into the sources and dynamics of human conflict as such from the emergence of the species to the present day. In itself the statement is inert and uninformative. It is banal precisely because it is isolated from the almost infinitely complicated context of human conflict. That is the only arena in which it might eventually acquire a modicum of empirical force, by which time it would be qualified almost out of recognition. The claim is both an obvious truth of casual small talk and utterly ridiculous in the way so many ‘obvious’ truths of everyday conversation are ridiculous. No one who has even begun to think about what religion is, and enquired with some degree of systematic seriousness into the multitudinous sources of human conflict, can fail to see that taken in isolation this standard banality, articulated in a casual speech-act, conveys no information whatever. It is the question posing as an answer.
By purporting to convey information when it does next to no empirical work it conforms to what we mean by a falsehood, not as a conscious intention to deceive but by being misleading. Of course, once a speaker understands just how misleading such ‘obvious’ statements are when taken in isolation, and acquires some knowledge of the broader contextualisation required by any genuinely scientific procedure, what had been merely misleading becomes deliberate falsehood. Since we must absolve Dawkins from any intention to deceive, we conclude he simply does not know what can and cannot be said from a social scientific viewpoint. He is immunised from susceptibility to moral discomfort about making morally saturated statements under ‘scientific’ auspices.
I next draw attention to another version of ‘the obvious’ that sharpens the question raised by ‘religion causes wars’ by pointing to almost equally obvious facts that render it dubious. I say almost equally obvious because we have already noticed that ‘religion causes wars’ is so much part of a hegemonic narrative that it usually secures acceptance without conscious scrutiny. I take this second version of the obvious from Marilynne Robinson, and I observe that her contribution is animated by proto-scientific curiosity and can only be generated once the taken for granted has been subjected to conscious scrutiny. What she has to say represents stage two in the formulation of a question because it puts the obvious in question, whereas the first stage took for granted precisely what needed to be questioned.
I take my example from the Introduction to Robinson’s Absence of Mind, a book which presents a wide-ranging critique of the positivist and consciously modernist thought represented by Dawkins and the other ‘New Atheists’.6 I am here interested only in the way she deals with a variant on the core component just discussed, which slightly enlarges the empirical range of the question by dealing with the contention that ‘conflict arises out of religion, more especially out of religious difference’. Her next move is formally rhetorical but also proto-scientific. She says that people who hold the view that conflict arises out of religion ‘would do well to consult Herodotus, or to read up the career of Napoleon’.7 She deploys ‘the obvious’ strategically by widening the range of reference. She points out that highly generalised statements about what religion ‘causes’ are based on far too narrow and indiscriminate a basis of cultural and historical reference and comparison.
But then she adds that ‘this thesis about the origins of conflict is novel in the long history of the debate over human origins which has typically argued that conflict is natural to us, as it is to animals and is, if not good in an ordinary sense, at least necessary to our biological enhancement’.8 This is precisely the point I made in Chapter 1 where I underlined the oddity of claiming that conflict is endemic to humans and uniquely the fault of religion, and to be morally deplored. Having stirred up doubt by extending the range of comparison Marilynne Robinson points up just this potential contradiction. If Darwinian and Freudian explanations treat conflict as natural and built-in it seems odd to maintain that conflict has something specially to do with religion, or, indeed, to complain about it morally any more than one complains morally about tsunamis. She then points up another contradiction, which is that those who load the onus of conflict onto religion often deplore it both as fomenter of oppression and violence and as promoting dysgenic compassion. The latter is, of course, Nietzsche’s criticism. This parallels the contradiction between those who accuse Christianity of political aggression and those who accuse it of political quietism. ‘Religion’ does incompatible things. Marilynne Robinson has not engaged in a fully fledged social scientific approach to conflict, but she has drawn attention to awkward facts and curious contradictions.
1 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 198).
2 Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
3 Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
4 Charles Taylor, ‘Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes’, and ‘Language Not Mysterious?’, in Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2011, pp. 24–38 and 39–55, especially p. 40).
5 Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007).
6 Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of Self (Terry Lectures) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010).
7 Robinson, Absence of Mind, pp. xi–xii.
8 Robinson, Absence of Mind, p. xii.