God-botherers and Other True-believers: Gandhi, Hitler, and the Religious Right [1 ed.] 1845455126, 9781845455125

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Faith and Politics
1 Faith, Reason, and Consequences
2 Religion and Persuasion in Politics
Part II: Antagonistic Religions
3 Desert, Marketplace, and Forum
4 The Need for Enemies
Part III: A Religion of Love
5 Gandhi: The Freedom Fight
6 Gandhi’s Charisma
7 Gandhi’s Religion and Political Reality
8 The First Cause and the Last Word
References
Index

Citation preview

God-Botherers and Other True-Believers

ALSO BY F.G. BAILEY Caste and the Economic Frontier, 1957 Tribe, Caste and Nation, 1960 Politics and Social Change, 1963 Stratagems and Spoils, 1969, New Edition, 2001 Gifts and Poison (ed.), 1971 Debate and Compromise (ed.), 1973 Morality and Expediency, 1977 The Tactical Uses of Passion, 1983 Humbuggery and Manipulation, 1988 The Prevalence of Deceit, 1991 The Kingdom of Individuals, 1993 The Witch-Hunt, 1994 The Civility of Indifference, 1996 The Need for Enemies, 1998 Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils, 2001 The Saving Lie, 2003

GOD-BOTHERERS AND OTHER TRUE-BELIEVERS Gandhi, Hitler, and the Religious Right

b F.G. Bailey

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Published in 2008 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

©2008 F.G. Bailey

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bailey, F. G. (Frederick George). God-botherers and other true believers : Gandhi, Hitler, and the religious right / F. G. Bailey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-84545-512-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Religion and politics.

2. Religious fundamentalism.

4. Christian conservatism—United States. 1889–1945.

7. National socialism.

3. Religious right—United States.

5. Gandhi, Mahatma, 1869–1948.

6. Hitler, Adolf,

I. Title.

BL65.P7B35 2008 201'.72—dc22

2008007616 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-1-84545-512-5 hardback

For Paula Levin, Amica Nostra Verissima

. . . remembering above all to walk gently in a world where the lights are dim and the very stars wander. —Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion

The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organized religion, in India and elsewhere has filled me with horror, and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seems to stand, when it comes to practice, for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition and exploitation, and the preservation of vested interests. And yet I knew well that there was something else in it, something which supplied a deep inner craving of human beings. How else could it have been the tremendous power it has been and brought peace and comfort to innumerable tortured souls? —Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography

And malt does more than Milton can To justify God’s ways to man. Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink For fellows whom it hurts to think: Look into the pewter pot To see the world as the world’s not. —A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

C ONTENTS

b Acknowledgments Introduction

vii 1

PART I | FAITH AND POLITICS

13

1

15

Faith, Reason, and Consequences Three Kinds of Faith Only Believe! Humanism Oneness A Point of View

2

Religion and Persuasion In Politics Religion and Political Involvement The Problem of Order What Should Go On and What Does Go On Defining Situations Information Costs: Political Clairvoyance Creating Trust Persuading Reality Testing

15 20 23 26 28 39 39 40 43 46 51 56 60 65

PART II | ANTAGONISTIC RELIGIONS

69

3

71

Desert, Marketplace, and Forum The Religious Right (and Left)

71

x

•

c on t e n t s

Hypocrisy Render Therefore Unto Caesar Modes of Clerical Involvement in Politics Antagonism Paraclerics: Repenting Religion as a Weapon: Mrs. Schiavo The Religious Mode of Political Persuasion 4

The Need for Enemies Pol Pot and Secular Religion “Ardent and Even Hysterical Passions” Manufacturing Enemies Group Sentiment and Violence Hitler’s Faith Fascism and Christian Fascism

PART III | A RELIGION OF LOVE 5

6

Gandhi: The Freedom Fight

116 118 122 126 129 137

147 149 149 154 158

Gandhi’s Charisma

160

Gandhi’s Religion and Political Reality Gandhi and Hitler Faith and Responsibility Secular Disciplines in the Freedom Fight Gandhian Morality and “Sectarian” Religions Gandhi’s Universalism and Political Action

8

116

The Freedom Fight Peacemaking Failures

Calculation Charisma: the Mass Audience Charisma: Elite and Entourage Single-Mindedness 7

74 81 89 95 100 106 111

The First Cause and the Last Word Propagating the Faith Walk Gently Morality and Evolution

160 163 166 173 178 178 181 187 191 194 199 199 201 204

conte nts

Oneness and Its Consequences: Diseducation Oneness and Its Consequences: Strife Diseducation and Authority Only Think!

•

xi

207 209 211 215

References

217

Index

221

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

b For their comments and their criticisms of this book’s several recensions, I thank Stan Barrett, David Jordan, Dan Linger, Eloise Meneses, Ted Schwartz, Gil Williamson, and my wife. I am especially grateful to the one among them whose teeth must have been set on edge by the assumptions on which this book is founded, and who yet provided civil, reasoned, and constructive criticism.

I NTRODUCTION

b At this time (Fall 2006) in the USA and elsewhere, faith-based malignancies appear to be contaminating civic affairs—cancers, so to speak, on the “body politic.” Such outbreaks are not, of course, unprecedented: evil things have always and everywhere been done in the name of religion. The present malignancies vary in the form they take. The milder kind can even be comical: the offender is “hoist on the petard” of his/her own sanctimoniousness. A self-proclaimed God-fearing Christian, cleric or politician, who lives the pure life “fellowshipping with Jesus,” is caught fellowshipping with whores in a brothel. Radio-pastors and televangelists are discovered using Church funds to support a style of life that is wantonly self-indulgent—gold-plated bathroom fittings seem to be in vogue. Such people, of course, are a blot on the civic and clerical landscape, but they are more to be satirized than dreaded. They have always been a feature of civilized—or “over-civilized”—societies. More to be feared are those who are driven by their faith to inflict harm—all too frequently, death—on others whose faith is different. That, too, has been done throughout the ages. What now is remarkable, however, is the hugely increased efficiency in the means of delivering death and destruction: it now is possible for one self-sacrificing terrorist to end the lives of even a thousand innocent people. Faith, not surprisingly, has been getting a bad name. Faith, it may be said, is intrinsically flawed and human life would be better if it were not contaminated by religious or any other kind of bigotry. This book is part of that tradition, but not, I hope, in a simple-minded way. Rationality alone cannot be a guide because it has to do with method; faith is needed to provide the substance and the goal. Faith—of the appropriate kind—is not a social carcinoma; indeed, without faith civilized life would be impossible. I will begin with two quotations in which religion is, by implication, set against rationality. Here, first, is E.E. Evans-Pritchard (“Religion and the Anthropologists,” The Aquinas Lecture, 1959):

2

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

[I]f social scientists were to inquire unemotionally into the social function of a phenomenon so universal and persistent they would discover that the vitality of societies, even their existence, is bound up with religion, and that it is precisely through religious systems that social evolution, or progress, has been brought about, for it is the most significant of evolutionary forces, the chief agent in natural selection.

Gilbert Murray, in Five Stages of Greek Religion, wrote: I believe that at times we actually gain practical guidance in some questions where experience and argument fail. That is the great work left for religion, but we must always remember two things about it: first, that the liability to error is enormous, indeed almost infinite; and, second, that the results of confident error are very terrible. Probably throughout history the worst things ever done in the world on a large scale by decent people have been done in the name of religion, and I do not think that has entirely ceased to be true at the present day.

These two citations signal a contrast not only of substance but also of manners and of intellectual style: one writer (more so in other parts of his lecture, cited later, than here) is bellicose, patronizing, bigoted, dogmatic, sure of his rightness, displaying the spiteful animosity that so often disfigures declarations of religious conviction; the other writer is more judicious, more tolerant, less polemical, believing that both sides deserve a hearing—a model, in a word, of civility. Both writers held professorial chairs at Oxford: of classics in Murray’s case; of social anthropology in Evans-Pritchard’s. Both were talking about beliefs and values that, since they are given to us by God, are to be taken on trust; that is, they are talking about revealed religion. They belonged to different generations. (Gilbert Murray 1866–1957; EvansPritchard 1902–1973. I heard both of them lecture, Gilbert Murray in 1942 and Evans-Pritchard in about 1948.) If I had to make a judgment solely from what is written in the two epigraphs, I would—mistakenly—have made Evans-Pritchard the earlier of the two. Gilbert Murray’s sentiments seemed to me (before I wrote this book) more in tune with modern thinking, whereas the Aquinas Lecture, which was delivered to a Roman Catholic audience, gives off—for example, in the Creationist interpretation of Darwinism—an aroma of the medieval: God is in charge, always and everywhere. I would have been mistaken about both timing and content. The first edition of Gilbert Murray’s book (then Four Stages of Greek Religion) appeared in 1912; Evans-Pritchard delivered his Aquinas lecture in 1959. As for content, it is simply not the case that revealed religion has yielded to modernity and has no significance in the present day world. It does; and this book is intended to find out what, at least in politics, that significance is. My foundation is this definition of religion: Any belief (along with its associated attitudes, rituals, disciplines, and institutions) is religious to the extent that it is asserted with dogmatic finality, held on faith, without evidence, without doubt, immune from

introduction

•

3

criticism, immutable, and eternal. A religious person is anyone who feels driven to hold beliefs—any beliefs—in that manner. (Not infrequently an “immutable” belief is unseated and replaced by its contrary—the eagerly left-wing-dogmatic young agnostic becomes in middle age a similarly dogmatic True-believing, Godfearing reactionary. Less often a True-Believer becomes a doubter. It happened to C.S. Lewis when his wife died of cancer. It happens also to secular True-believers: see The God that Failed, Richard Crossman’s collection of essays by six apostate Communist intellectuals.) Clearly, in that definition, not all beliefs are religious. Some are presuppositions, from the outset considered provisional and contingent on their usefulness; they are open to doubt, criticism, and to rejection when they do not deliver what was expected of them. I will call this kind of methodological faith “presuppositional.” Defined in that all-inclusive way, religion does not specify any particular content. It may be about spiritual beings—the everyday definition of religion; or, it may be about other metaphysical constructs that concern the soul and what happens to it after death. Politico-economic creeds like Communism, Fascism, or Free Market Capitalism also qualify; so also do disciplines, such as “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matthew 7: 12), along with various other basic codes of conduct—sportsmanship, fair play, moderation in all things, and the manner of conducting oneself that is implied in Murray’s “Walk gently!” In short, any factual belief is religious if it is firmly maintained, despite the absence of supporting evidence or even in the presence of contradictory evidence, and despite the pseudo-rational mode in which the purported supporting evidence may be presented. (The argument that “intelligent design” is proof of God’s existence is of that kind: it is dogmatically stated and not held open to possible disconfirmation.) Disciplines (codes of conduct) likewise are religious if they are valued not for their consequences, but in themselves. Given this definition, there need be no Creator, no presiding God, and therefore no “science of things divine,” as that phrase is generally understood. There can, of course, be a science that investigates the mindset and the actions of those people who do believe in “things divine.” That mindset and its consequences is one part of this inquiry. I am in Nehru’s camp: the existence of religious beliefs is indisputable and is not the issue. People hold such beliefs: therefore the beliefs exist. Even if they are untrue—if they are myths—they still have social consequences, which, as Nehru asserts, are often deplorable, notwithstanding whatever psychological comforts they may provide. The citation from Nehru’s autobiography makes a distinction between organized religions (Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and the rest), which nurture “dogma and bigotry, superstition and exploitation, and the preservation of vested interests,” and, on the other hand, religion construed as spirituality, as

4

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

belief, as what goes on in the individual’s mind, in the psyche. Gandhi referred to the spiritual aspect of religion as “things of the soul;” Nehru said that it answers to “a deep inner craving of human beings.” I will use the word in both senses and trust that the context will make clear which is meant.1 The major part of this book is an investigation into what takes place when True-belief, whether in its spiritual or in its organized form, has a hand in politics, when political leaders and their followers are True-believers, or, as sometimes is the case, when leaders, who are not themselves True-believers, make opportunistic use of other people’s True-belief.2 The harvest of material is indeed bountiful and various, including such disparate personalities as Gandhi, Hitler, and, in present day American politics, right-wing Fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Randall Terry, and many others. I began with a different title in mind: God help us! But the irony is too sharp, too aggressive. God help us! would have been (for me) derisive, a sarcasm, because I do not believe that He exists in the form of a spiritual being, as “the Creator.” Certainly, He exists as an idea held by those who believe in Him. It also is said that we are in God’s presence when the ineffable beauty of a landscape or of a musical composition comes upon us as an epiphany, or when we are enchanted by the words of a skilled orator. Even—Such a paradox!—the “Free Market,” which is said to promote everyone’s well-being, is presented by neoclassical economists as immanent and unquestionable, as an eternal and inescapable verity, something that has God’s attributes (although they do not use that label). Third—a similar but more subtle interpretation (Gandhi’s)—God manifests himself as the moral order (dharma) that sorts out right from wrong conduct. None of these interpretations belong in the domain of reasoning; they do not offer themselves for critical examination, they call on faith. That is the crux. They are first principles. They can neither be confirmed by evidence, nor disconfirmed. Their existence is dogmatically—without evidence—asserted. (Without evidence they can, of course, be no less dogmatically rejected.) God in any of these forms—an idea, an emotion, a “natural system,” or a discipline—may help us cope with life’s travails, but that is not what “God help us!” means. Its referent is the divine person. But since He, in that form, does not exist, the only help that we can get to direct our conduct and

1. On occasion I will make a general statement about a particular organized religion—Fundamentalist Christianity, National Socialism, and so forth—without an identifier. Again, the context should make it clear that the statement does not apply to all organized religions. 2. The difference between the Truth of a True-believer, and the empirical—testable—truth that is sought in natural-system analyses will be signaled by the use of upper- and lower-case letters. A True-belief is God’s Truth, accepted without evidence. The ins and outs of the distinction will be considered along the way in the text.

introduction

•

5

shape our lives is what we provide for ourselves and what we receive from those around us. Beyond that, we are in the hands of what Gilbert Murray called “the Unknown,” a mindless agency, an all-compelling Fate, blind Chance, “heartless, witless” Nature.3 That assertion (and consequently this book) will not appeal to True-believers. Indeed, they may find its message offensive. That is not my intention; rather, I want them to reconsider the consequences of their beliefs and the values that go with those beliefs. True-believers will say that I am, in a quite fundamental way, missing their point (that God is all, a transcendent reality, omnipresent, omnipotent, and the custodian of our morality). I think that they are missing my point (that what they do and believe, even if sometimes beneficial, is also the cause of much suffering—of evil). In that respect, they are irresponsible. The Christian response is that suffering is not an evil, but a privilege that God bestows: it is the way to salvation. I am nowhere near that wavelength: for me, that idea is nothing more than an unsubtle theodicy intended to “justify God’s ways to man,” which all too often is in fact Man’s ways to Man. True-believers (in Christianity and in other religions) will object that religions are not to be defined by the manner in which they are held (that is, dogmatically), but by their content, because it is content that decides whether a religion is good or evil. But that claim can only be sustained if one has an independent criterion for separating good from evil. I do not think it enough to say that Christian morality is good simply because God validates it. Assertions like that beg the question and reduce the discussion to the level of a Boo!/Hurrah! exchange, and comparison is then perfectly unproductive: a shouting match, a dead end. The issue in this book, in fact, is not the truth of one religion and the falsity of another, but the consequences of dogmatism, of refusing to admit that one could ever be wrong, and of terminating inquiry into the natural and social world by asserting that God is the final cause of everything and that is all one needs to know. This jack o’ lantern—the theory that will explain everything—appears in several different ways in what is to come; it will be considered again in the concluding chapter. Nor is this book addressed to scholars (True-believers or not) who immerse themselves in the study of religious doctrines; they will find it banal, suitable not for them but perhaps for ordinary people. That, indeed, is exactly the audience that I want to reach: those who are given to reflecting on the world around them, who are not much interested in theories of religion, but are sometimes puzzled, or even troubled, by what True-believers say and do.

3. “For nature, heartless, witless nature/ Will neither care nor know . . .” A.E. Housman, Last Poems, #40.

6

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

It follows that the book’s language is not the language of academic abstrusity. I have endeavored to write in the clear and simple English prose that was taught to me seventy years ago, when I was first required to compose essays. Clarity, unfortunately, comes with a cost. The style in which a book is written can affect the way it is received. I have in mind those who think that what can be readily understand cannot be profound, or even worth saying. Ideas can only be insightful when their meaning is obscure, and wisdom is discovered only in prose that is as dense and impenetrable as a thicket of brambles. One looks back on the unsurpassable limpidity of Voltaire’s writings, and wonders, regretfully, whatever happened to the French to make them produce, in its place, the Foucault style. Nothing like this ever gets written without the spur of emotion, which here takes two forms. One, which is non-moralistic, concerns the intellect and our capacity to discover how Nature (including human nature) works—puzzle-solving. The other is moralistic, ready to pass judgment, to distinguish right from wrong conduct, sometimes to praise, and sometimes to hold one’s nose when recounting what is done by clerics who engage in politics and politicians who make scoundrelly use of religion. The intellectual variety emerges from the irritation and sometimes apprehension we feel when faced with something—a person, an event, a pattern of some kind—that is a mystery: “What is this? Why does it take that form? What are its consequences?” We feel anxious; it is not under our control; it is untamed, undomesticated, and therefore possibly dangerous. This feeling goes along with the idea that we should be able to understand it; somewhere, if we could find it, there is a reckoning that will explain the inexplicable, position it on the map we have of the world around us, and so let us respond to it rationally. But we do not know where to find the map. When we do comprehend it, when we “grasp” it (that is, have a firm hold on it), we are back in control, at least to the extent that we know what we are dealing with, even when we also know that we can do nothing about it. This kind of emotion, the itch to understand, which is the fuel that powers our reasoning, is directed inward at our own intellectual inadequacy, not at whatever it is that is beyond our intellectual reach. There are no enemies, except (metaphorically) the unknown itself. The moralizing emotions are different. What hitherto was unknown, once it has been identified, is open to moral judgment: we can adore it, approve of it, admire it, or else disapprove of it, despise it, hate it; or be indifferent, deciding that this is not an occasion to make a moral judgment. Entailed in these postures are notions of solidarity, conflict, and neutrality, which together are the essence of politics. Recognition opens the way for moralizing, which logically should come second; first, the understanding, then the judgment. Very often, however, we are not logical; we are too impetuous: the hating, the adoring, or the indifference goes

introduction

•

7

ahead without there ever having been a rational, evidence seeking inquiry into just what it is that is being hated or adored or dismissed. I came to this inquiry for two reasons. First, I have long wanted to empathize with True-believers. I still cannot do so. I still cannot fathom the colleague, a linguist, who (now many years ago), in what seemed to be a quite relaxed conversation about some small scandal that was lending a touch of the bizarre to our institution, suddenly took it on himself to tell me that this was an occasion for prayer, that God (or was it Jesus?) had an all-seeing eye for such matters and would surely, when invited, see to it that the right and the good would prevail. He spoke as if God (or Jesus) was a presence no less real to him than that of the Director of our institution, who was, in the meantime, required to deal with what, in fact, was no more than a trifling affair. I did not know how to respond; I might have said that surely God had more important things to do. But I did not; if I had, he might have corrected me with Luke 12: 6: “Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God?” God, in other words, is omnipresent and omniscient. Nowadays, in this country, I suppose my colleague would be called a “born again” Christian (or, on the other side of the street, a “Jesus freak”). At that time and in that place (England), the derisory term in use among those who did not subscribe to revealed Truth was “God-botherer.” I was at a loss, taken aback; I had, naïvely, supposed that anyone with a trained intellect could only be agnostic, if not an atheist. Now I know differently. I do not recall experiencing any sense of disapproval at the time; nor did I think (and still do not) that his religious beliefs in any way clouded his linguistic insights. I was simply puzzled. I did, however, become a little less relaxed in my dealings with him and I am still wary in the presence of the many others like him that I have come across in the half-century that has gone by since that encounter. Such people still reside in the domain of my “unfathomable;” there is something feral about them, they are not fully domesticated. My second reason for making this inquiry is substantially one of disapproval: I am appalled by the sanctimonious humbuggery of certain politicians, including some who wear the clerical uniform. If I think they are sincere, truly believing in the morality that they claim to be their guide, then, as in the case of my colleague in London many years ago, I would like to figure out (but cannot) what goes on in their minds. If they are not sincere, but opportunistic, I think I can better understand them (and I would condemn them because they are not simply doing evil things, they are guilty of doing them—they know that what they are doing is dishonest). The problem then shifts into the field of rhetoric and politics: to find out how they persuade others to forego the use of reason and join them in “blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition and exploitation, and the preservation of vested interests.” The book is anchored in case material about individuals: sometimes about a life, sometimes about a significant incident in a life, sometimes about both.

8

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

I had two criteria for selecting my subjects, the first being the material available. Of this there is no shortage; the corpus, in fact, is huge. Most of those who appear in this book have written extensively about themselves and about their ideas on religion, on politics, and on connected matters. Gandhi must hold the record: there are more than a hundred volumes of his writings. He also wrote an autobiography; so did Hitler; so did some of the televangelists who make their appearance in Chapter 3—Charles Colson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, along with others whom I have passed over because their life stories add nothing more to the analysis. (The style of these autobiographical writings is somewhat uniform, not only because they all are Fundamentalist Christians, but also because several of them used the same ghostwriter. See Harding 2000, 295, n.16). When there is no autobiography, there usually is a collection of confessional writings, transcripts of sermons, and the like. Gandhi and Hitler inspired formidably extensive biographical writing, both the “definitive study” type and what their friends or enemies from time to time wrote about them. The better known televangelists also have biographers, some critical, others sycophantic. I have consulted several of these publications, but, since I am looking for a pattern, not writing life stories, I thought it enough to select material that furthered my inquiry. I have also used ephemeral stuff, written either by the persons themselves or by journalists, much of it trawled from the Web, and much of the catch, somewhat reluctantly, thrown back (it’s an entertaining read, but it does stale with repetition). The reports, put together by scandal-hungry “investigative” journalists, are focused (with ironic intent, I assume) on the instrumental use of religion by political entrepreneurs and, with even more relish, on entrepreneurial pastors doing the same thing. The company that brought TV viewers racy and irreverent programs such as “Nip/Tuck,” “Temptation Island,” and “The Simpsons” has found religion. In the biggest commitment of this sort by a Hollywood studio, News Corp. Fox Film Entertainment is expected to unveil plans today, to capture the gargantuan Christian audience that made “The Passion of the Christ” a global phenomenon.

And, Over the past four years, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment has quietly built a network to mobilize Evangelical Christian moviegoers in an era of diminishing box-office returns. The network includes 90,000 congregations and a database of more than 14 million mainly evangelical households. (Los Angeles Times, 19 September 2006)

This parading of numbers is, as you will see, a characteristic of Fundamentalist Christian organizations. They also lean heavily to the right in politics. Fox News

introduction

•

9

has that bias: it comes across as a strong supporter of, and a flack for, the Republican party. Faith also may earn a discount: a Christian insurance company waives the deductible for those who have an accident when engaged in Christian work. Trinity Marketing Group, a Christian-owned company, advertises its cell phone service: “Many plans include free cell phones and some even give you money back! If you sign up through Trinity, you are supporting Christian causes.” ()

Journalists also delight in reporting clerical practices that are good for business, but seem bizarre to anyone who thinks that worshipping God is not a business but a devotional exercise. The Los Angeles Times of 28 September 2006 reports that, although Pastor Marty Baker in Florida still passes round the collection plate, he relies mainly on an Automatic Teller Machine placed in a kiosk in the church lobby. The ATM brings in up to $240,000 each year. The devout use a bankcard to make their contribution. Furthermore, Pastor Baker has gone directly into business and sells custom-built kiosks and ATMs to other churches and charges them a monthly subscription and maintenance fee. Finally, as I mentioned at the outset, journalists especially relish uncovering what seems to be barefaced hypocrisy. They write about the sexual escapades of clerics and their breathtakingly hypocritical justifications for using church funds to live high off the hog (the “Cadillac principle”—see Pastor Crouch’s message in Chapter 3). It is entertaining material, but, as I said, the pleasure soon stales. The second criterion is not available material, but the patterns that are discovered in it. An important (and annoyingly elusive) feature of the politicians and clerics caught in my net shapes the book as a progress from (probable) hypocrisy to (probable) sincerity—“probable” because no one can know for sure what is in another person’s mind. (That problem, occurring throughout the book, is squarely confronted in Chapter 3.) This progress—hypocrisy at first and then upward toward sincerity—happens in this case to match a parallel increase in the complexity of the person emerging from the writings. Far and away the most complex figure is Gandhi. He is discussed last and he commands the largest section in the book. The material shows him to be many-layered, and it is sometimes difficult to find consistency between his different personae. In comparison, the figure that precedes him in the book—Hitler—seems relatively transparent, much less complicated and invariably (and, as it turned out, disastrously) consistent in his religious philosophy, which was not Christianity but a secular religion, National Socialism. In that creed, as his words and actions clearly demonstrate, he was the Truest of True-believers.

10

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

These, of course, are lives that have been completed. Others, who appear in Chapter 3—the politically active, media-adept clerics and the present day American politicians who make use of religion—are in mid-career and have not had (and are unlikely ever to have) an effect on the world that would put them in the same bracket as Gandhi or Hitler. From the perspective of history, then, this book is an ascent from pipsqueaks in the first part to Titans in the two remaining parts. Compared with Gandhi, or even with Hitler, the lives of televangelists and of religion obsessed American politicians—what they do and what kind of person they are—seem relatively transparent, often banal, and not infrequently preposterous. The pipsqueaks come first. Most of them are Fundamentalist Evangelical Christians: they proclaim the inerrancy of the Bible, which they regard as God’s message; they require everyone to accept its discipline and to live by its rules; they are fanatical about the Decalogue and fight to have it displayed in public places. Truth, as they see it, was given once and for all: As it was in the beginning, so shall it always be. They are the strictest of biblical strict-constructionists, conservative to the bone. They are knee-jerk supporters of the Republican party; so much so that they have come to be called the “religious right” and, because they have the apparatus to mobilize voters, they have considerable clout. This move beyond the Scripture into the political here-and-now goes along with a high level of bellicosity and a propensity to hate unbelievers. The Evangelical commandment (Gandhi’s too) is to loathe what unbelievers stand for, but not to hate the unbelievers themselves—Hate the sin, love the sinners! But this, as I will have occasion to notice several times, is, so far as Fundamentalist Christians are concerned, an adage that may be preached on Sundays, but is seldom put into practice on weekdays. To hate the sin and love the sinners is, after all, a feat that only saint-like people can accomplish, and the leaders of the religious right are not saints. Neither are ordinary Joe and Jill. Indeed, there are rewards, both psychological and sometimes material, for making out that one’s enemies are sinners, professing to hate them, and punishing them. The bellicosity shown by clerics who enter politics and by politicians who resort to religion as a persuasive or disciplinary device is the third way in which the book is patterned: antagonism first, and then its contrast, a religion of love. I should make clear, after that condemnation, that not all Evangelical Christians are cast in the same rigid mould as the Fundamentalists. There is a “religious left,” about which I will have more to say later. It exists at the price of some inconsistency—scripture is infallible, but sometimes it is in error: Although I believe that scripture is divinely inspired and infallible, I have a hard time going along with the belief that the whole creation process occurred in six twenty-four hour days. My skepticism is due, in part, to the fact that the Bible says that the sun wasn’t created until the fourth day of creation (Genesis 1:16–19). I

introduction

•

11

have a hard time figuring how twenty-four hour days could have been measured before that. ()

There is a believer’s answer. Here is a passage from the Scopes trial (“the Great Monkey Trial”): Clarence Darrow: Do you think the sun was made on the fourth day? William Jennings Bryan: Yes. Clarence Darrow: And they had evening and morning without the sun? William Jennings Bryan: I believe in the creation as there told, and I am not able to explain it. I will accept it. Then you can explain it to suit yourself. (Wilcox, 1986, 33. Also ).

Religions that are organized, having evolved beyond the pure and simple stage of the reclusive individual escaping from the world and communing only with the Divinity—the hermit, the dweller in the desert—inevitably are caught up in mundane things. Many of them are evangelical in the broadest sense of that word: they preach the gospel and would like everyone to share the faith they have. The difference between mainline evangelists, including some who favor right-wing politicians, and the Fundamentalists is that the latter are more intemperately political, willing to cleanse the world by destroying other faiths (sometimes along with those who believe in other faiths), while the former operate, as Gandhi did, by persuasion and a hoped for moral conversion. That, roughly speaking, is what separates Billy Graham or Robert Schuler (hate the sin) from the Fundamentalist Christian Fascists (make life impossible for the sinners and the sin will take care of itself). That is also what separated Gandhi from India’s orthodox religions (Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism), which were his undoing. The same feature marks a difference in strategy between Gandhi and such communist reformers as Pol Pot, and, at the same time, picks up the theme of religions of love in contest with antagonistic religions. Fundamentalists use sanctions that appeal to expediency: “Do what I say or God will make you regret it!” A month or two before I wrote this, Pat Robertson, in a television address, said that the people of a Pennsylvanian town had laid themselves open to a God-sent cataclysm when they voted off the School Board all eight Fundamentalist Christians who proposed making Intelligent Design a mandatory part of the science curriculum. “I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city.” Evidently he did not think it enough to say, as Gandhi would have said, “Do what is right only because it is right.” Morality, in the Robertson reckoning, needs the aid of expediency; that is certainly a political, practical, and essentially rational point of view, if the goal is domination, but it is hardly the morality of the New Testament. The same thinking underlies the idea that sin is best combated by making life-here-and-now hell

12

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

for the sinners, a policy that has occasioned in the United States not just violence (blockading or fire bombing clinics), but even murder. Only in the third part of the book, in reviewing the ideas of Gandhi, does the goal of a free-from-hatred morality appear. Its feasibility, as you will see, is, at best, dubious. The book’s full course, then, runs from those who are fuelled by antipathy in Part One (many, but not all, of the televangelists) and in all of Part Two (Hitler and the National Socialists), to sympathy—caritas or agape, a religion of love— in Part Three (Gandhi). Before I come to these three bodies of case material, in the first two chapters I will define key terms and build a conceptual framework into which they fit. I will also, in fairness to the reader, fill out, in more detail than I have done in this preface, my own attitudes and presuppositions about the way in which politics and religion interact, and (sometimes) about the way I think they should interact. There is one final thing to be said—not once and for all, but for the first of many times—it is impossible to write about people in politics without also, on occasion, writing about their motives in a way that seems to indicate that I have insight into their minds. I do not have such insight, at least not in any direct way. Since some of my actors are dead and all of them are outside the circle of my acquaintance, I cannot even use the hit-and-miss method of reading motives from body language—shifty eyes and the like. But I can read about what they do and what they say, and I can use presuppositions that connect actions with motives to make deductions: if they say “I am serving the Lord” or “I am serving my country,” and then do something that in my understanding has nothing to do with the Divinity or the nation’s well-being, but instead has everything to do with money-in-the-bank and power, or if they say “I am striving to rescue people from their sinful, sex-ridden way of life,” and then are caught patronizing a brothel (not once but twice, as one prominent live-the-pure-life televangelist was), then I will conclude that either they are not smart enough to perceive what they are doing, or else they are liars and hypocrites who think that they can get away with it because their followers are too stupid or too mesmerized to draw the obvious conclusions. More to the point, since my interest is in politics, what matters is not what is in the minds (and souls) of politicians, but the reaction of other people to what they say and what they do. Power goes with the ability to persuade others to see their world as you want them to see it, and to make them act accordingly. If those “others” smell stupidity or hypocrisy, then, other things being equal, power over them is diminished.

Part I

Faith and Politics

b

1

F AITH , R EASON ,

AND

C ONSEQUENCES

b Expedit esse deos: et, ut expedit, esse putemus. It’s convenient to have Gods; so, since it’s convenient, let us believe in them. —Ovid, Ars Amatoria

Three Kinds of Faith To believe in Gods is one way to have a religion, but what Ovid says is not in line with everyday religiosity—no devotion, no adoration, only a noting of religion’s pay-off. Expedit—our “expediency”—indicates that Gods are valued not because they are Gods, intrinsically and for themselves, but instrumentally, because they are handy. This no-nonsense attitude toward religion would not endear Ovid to the devout Christians of our day (even if he was talking about pagan gods); still less would they appreciate the particular usefulness that he had in mind. Gods are convenient for would-be seducers of other men’s wives, because the seduction is more effectively done if the seducer promises utter fidelity and everlasting devotion, and reinforces his promise by invoking a god to witness it. That is why gods are convenient. They are the guardians of truth, but they are perfectly indulgent about lies used for seduction; after all, they do it themselves. Jove looks down from on high and laughs.1

1. Even less would a devout feminist approve of what Ovid wrote: If you are smart, you’ll play this game only on women. You’ll get away with it. It’s good to be honest, but this kind of cheating is no big thing. Deceive the deceivers! For the most part women are outside the pale. Let them fall into their own traps!

16

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

To believe in Gods because it is convenient is one thing, but you can go further and argue, as I will, that having faith (of a certain kind, and for sure not faith in a spiritual being) is more than convenient; it is a necessity. Without it, human life would be impossible. To have faith, in the word’s broadest sense, is to accept as true and indisputable an idea, even when there is no evidence that will demonstrate its truth. “Faith” appears in at least three forms: presuppositional, Godly, and secular. The first—in which faith is a necessary part of our thinking—refers to beliefs and values that are accepted as presuppositions, premises, axioms, or principles, which are for the time being exempted from doubt and questioning. Without such presuppositions, it would be impossible to reason, and reason is a definitional element in human life. Like Archimedes, everyone needs a place to stand—“Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth.” In theory, but not always in the practice of scholarship and science, we have no emotional investment in presuppositions of this kind. They are judged, discarded, modified or retained according to their usefulness; they are not intrinsically valued. The second sense of “faith” is represented by Ovid’s gods. This is also our everyday definition of the word religion—a belief in supernatural beings. Faith of this kind, unlike presuppositional faith which has only a contingent validity, is proofed against doubt. Godly Truth is exempted in perpetuity from questioning; it is eternal. Devotees are not encouraged to use their critical faculties; only to commit themselves emotionally to what they believe is Truth. Godly religions confer infallibility on selected first principles, which are privileged, because they “explain” events and experiences that are otherwise inexplicable. Godly religion (here I am following Gilbert Murray 1951, 4–5) “deals with the uncharted region of human experience” and makes sense of it by invoking supernatural forces or spiritual beings to fill the gaps in understanding that cannot be closed by rational forms of inquiry. Religion has, as Nehru said, adverting to the emotions rather than the intellect, “brought peace and comfort to innumerable tortured souls.” In a similar vein, Freud writes that religious beliefs and practices provide the “common man” with a “system of doctrines . . . which . . . explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable completeness.” They do more than that, he adds; they also promise him that, “a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him in a future existence for any frustrations he suffers here” (Murray 1961, 21). Such ideas do not invite reasoned (and therefore possibly skeptical) inquiry into Providence and how it works; they are

Ludite, si sapitis, solas impune puellas: Hac minus est una fraude tuenda fides. Fallite fallentes: ex magna parte profanum Sunt genus: in laqueos quos posuere, cadant.

fa it h , r ea s on, and cons e que nce s

•

17

all to do with feeling—they minister to the emotions. Their accuracy is not at issue; their Truth is assumed and it is “validated” by their capacity to convince the faithful that whatever they experience is part of an ultimate order—a transcendental unity that encompasses both the natural and the moral universe. Such ideas lodge in the heart, not in the head. “It is the old difference between Philosophy and Religion, between the search of the intellect for truth and the cry of the heart for salvation” (Murray 1951, 112). Sentences about the divine may be written in the indicative (or sometimes in the imperative, when they are presented as emanating from a divinity), but the writer’s mood is frequently optative, a wish (or else an expression of gratitude for a wish granted, a prayer answered, and the consequent stilling of anxiety). They are not about what is the case here in the terrestrial—or, indeed, the celestial—world, about the kind of truth that can be empirically questioned: “Saturn has more than eighteen moons,” or “It’s raining,” or “The sun is shining,”” or “Cigarettes cause cancer.” Instead, they “answer” unanswerable angst-questions such as “What is the Purpose of Things? What is the Meaning of Life?” and, in doing so, they respond not to a desire for information, but directly to human needs that are anything but cerebral; they respond to feelings of bewilderment, perplexity, anxiety, helplessness, inferiority, utter dependence, loneliness, a realization of one’s own cosmic insignificance; they are a cry for help when confronted with dark thoughts of a formless void, where Truth has no existence and our existence has no meaning. Then, for those to whom the Truth has been revealed, religion releases an effusion of the joy that comes with entering into the divine presence, the divine fellowship, the divine “oneness.” True-believers know with absolute certainty (and without any need for evidence) that all is for the best in this best of possible worlds—not, of course, this everyday world in which both they and the non-believers live out their miserable lives, but a higher world where God enfolds them in his embrace. The third kind of faith comprises beliefs and values that have the same foundational quality as the first two; they provide a place to stand. Like the Godly religions, they are presented as directly and intuitively known, and they demand emotional involvement and are therefore not easily amended, but they do not posit Gods or supernatural events. The word “ideology” fits this kind of faith; so also does the slightly derisive label “secular religion.” Or we could talk of secular and religious ideologies. An ideology is a coherent set of ideas that includes both ontological declarations, which explain what things are and why they are as they are, and codes of behavior (or “disciplines”) that distinguish right from wrong conduct. Both the disciplines and the declarations are held unshakably as first principles. Both can include items that have nothing necessarily to do with spiritual matters: honesty, good sportsmanship, kindness, decency, self-restraint, going the extra mile, hiding emotions (or letting them hang out—being “genuine”); or, in the realm of

18

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

ideas, the unassailable superiority of market capitalism; the inherent rightness of a command economy; America’s “Manifest Destiny” and its noble aspirations; the evils of American imperialism; the saintliness of Gandhi; the non-saintliness of Richard Nixon; the essential wickedness of Communism; the iniquities of free market capitalism; that forgiveness is good; that forgiveness only makes evildoers more impudently evil; that patriarchy is an infamy; that misandry is a symptom of neurosis; that homosexuality goes against Nature; that the sun goes round the earth; that the “common man’s” notion of religion is “patently infantile” and “foreign to reality” (Freud 1951, 21)—and a zillion other contestable notions, both moral injunctions and statements of fact, that are observed or presented as if they were categorical imperatives and categorical truths, absolutely incontestable, absolutely without ambiguity. When such matters of faith are systematically developed into creeds (as is Marxism, which has its own dictionaries and a quasi-Biblical volume of exegesis and commentary), they are secular religions. Secular religions can be distinguished from the spiritual variety by the absence of other-worldly beings; devoted Freudians or Manifest-Destiny fanatics or those who believe faithfully in tax cuts and supply side economics have no God to hear their prayers. Truth alone, impersonal, is the object of their faith. This secular truth is not like the Truth of Godly religions because it is seen only as an idea; it is not a Redeemer or a Creator or a person who sits in judgment. It is a tool that provides understanding and in principle, if it fails to do so, it will be abandoned. In practice, however, that is not true of most secular religions: such first principles as market freedom or, on the other hand, centrally controlled economies are likely to be maintained in defiance of clear evidence that they are at least inadequate, if not wholly mistaken. In that way they become “religions”: their claims are resistant to scientific testing. My general argument, throughout the book, will be that the first kind of faith is an intellectual thing, a logical entailment of using one’s intelligence, of having a mind. Neither Godly religion nor secular religion are logically required for human existence, but some kind of non-intellectual faith, anchored in the emotions, seems to be a practical necessity. Many of these faiths exact a price: those that categorically reject critical examination of their own foundational beliefs are likely to be harmful in their effects. Faith-motivated people and the faith-based institutions they create, and the projects they engage in are responsible for much of the world’s misery. (Not all the misery, of course; Nature, which is not “God’s servant,” but an emotionless agency, a power on its own, contributes its share.) To have any kind of faith is to acknowledge that we are surrounded, as Gilbert Murray puts it, by the “Uncharted”; that is, by happenings that we do not yet understand enough to demonstrate that what we assume about them is, in fact, the case, and so we fill in the void by making assumptions or guesses. Gilbert

fa it h , r ea s on, and cons e que nce s

•

19

Murray’s term for this kind of “knowledge” is “high truth” and he sets it in opposition to knowledge that is derived from and validated by experience and reason. In this view our—mankind’s—everlasting quest is to diminish the Uncharted, extending the realm of the intellect and reason by questioning, when the occasion arises, what hitherto has been taken on faith, but all the time knowing that as the mapped region expands, so does the area still to be mapped. The Uncharted constantly recreates itself; there will never be a time when the chart is completed and we all become afflicted with Weberian disenchantment.2 This book presents a cost/benefit reckoning of what powerful and would-be powerful people—that is, politicians—do under the spur of, or sometimes only in the name of, one or another ideology, whether religious or secular. Insofar as it concerns Godly ideologies, it is written from the standpoint of atheism, which is the doctrine (itself, in my definition, a religion) that it makes no sense to base one’s attitudes, decisions, and actions on the premise that there is an all-knowing and all-powerful Creator, when knowledge of Him (or, nowadays, also Her) is entirely outside the realm of fact, and perfectly resistant to empirical demonstration. Rejecting the idea of a Creator or Redeemer identifies an atheist and I write as one, not as an agnostic. If I believed that He (or She) existed, I would be a misotheist: the actions that believers say are His responsibility so often seem capricious and cruel. Of course, I may be wrong; He may exist, and in that case I am a misotheist. The focus of my argument, however, concerns not His existence or non-existence, but the fact that many people believe in Him and the consequences of that belief can be disastrous. A similar skepticism colors my view of most, but not all, secular religions. Skepticism does not mean that I think there are no valid or worthy beliefs; it means only that it is right—even necessary—to question all beliefs and values in order to see what their consequences are. Socrates was right: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” It is also ill advised, even dangerous. But I do have a faith. Part of it is about method: some things that are beyond demonstration—the place to stand—must be taken on trust; but nothing is sacrosanct. There are no eternal verities other than the truth that no religious or secular ideology is forever beyond the reach of doubt and questioning, including, of course, my own atheism and the morality implicit in the commandment to walk gently. “Walk gently” means that nothing deliberately and maliciously done in order to hurt other people can be right. Those whose faith is in a Creator call that philosophy “secular Humanism” and condemn it. Pat Buchanan, then a presidential candidate, addressing an antigay rally in Des Moines, said, “We’re going to bring back God and the Bible and drive the gods of secular humanism right out of the public schools of America.”

2. This unforgettable concept is to be found, among other places in his writings, in Weber 1948, 155.

20

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

Secular Humanism has no gods; evidently he could not imagine a religion without supernatural beings (). Alternatively, it is possible (but not likely) that he intended “gods” to mean a discipline, as Gandhi did when he said that atheism is the God of the atheists. If so, he was proposing to train schoolchildren not to “walk gently,” but, when faced with unbelievers, to put the boot in. I think Buchanan would like that interpretation.

Only Believe! This invitation—or is it, so insistently repeated, a command?—appears in a hymn: Only believe, only believe; All things are possible, only believe, Only believe, only believe; All things are possible, only believe.

The verse is conditional in form (if you believe, then all things are possible), but its import is surely imperative. It is a command simply to believe, to take on trust, never to doubt, never to ask questions, to abstain from the use of critical reason, to embrace misology, to ‘not think.’ The hymn was inspired by several passages in the New Testament, of which the following is a proverb-providing example: “If ye have faith and doubt not . . . if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea: it shall be done” (Matthew 21: 20). The injunction to have faith provokes various responses. I will describe two, each different from the other, both coming from men who were contemporaries, and who were involved in public affairs, one marginally, the other very much at the center. The first is Gilbert Murray, already encountered, a distinguished classical scholar and somewhat engaged in politics; he stood for Parliament as a Liberal six times, but never was elected; he was also the first president of the United Nations Association’s General Council. The other is the Indian statesman, Gandhi, whose political accomplishments and ideas about religion and religions will be examined at length in the third part of this book. Almost one hundred years ago, in his Five Stages of Greek Religion, Gilbert Murray, in the effortlessly pellucid English prose that seems to have come naturally to those trained in the classical languages, wrote this: I confess it seems strange to me as I write here, to reflect that at this moment many of my friends and most of my fellow creatures are, as far as one can judge, quite confident that they possess supernatural knowledge. As a rule, each individual belongs to some body which has received in writing the results of a divine revelation. I cannot share in any such feeling. The Uncharted surrounds us on every side and we must needs have

fa it h , r ea s on, and cons e que nce s

•

21

some relation towards it, a relation which will depend on the general discipline of a man’s mind and the bias of his whole character. As far as knowledge and conscious reason will go, we should follow resolutely their austere guidance. When they cease, as cease they must, we must use as best we can those fainter powers of apprehension and surmise and sensitiveness by which, after all, most high truth has been reached as well as most high art and poetry: careful always to seek for truth and not for our own emotional satisfaction, careful not to neglect the real needs of men and women through basing our life on dreams; and remembering above all to walk gently in a world where the lights are dim and the very stars wander. (1951, 163–64)

The prose is plain and simple—even if its classical cadences are not in tune with modern usage—but the ideas require a brief commentary to connect them with the subject of this book. The paragraph’s central theme is the contrast between the “austere guidance” that “knowledge and conscious reason” provide, and, on the other side, the “emotional satisfaction” derived from ideas that are not based on reason and answer only to our need for a feeling of certainty in a world where “the lights are dim and the very stars wander.” Reason has priority; only when its resources are exhausted (“as cease they must”) is it right to search for “high truth” by resorting to another kind of “knowledge” that is derived not from evidence and reasoning, but from intuition, hunches, “surmise,” and “sensitiveness.” Since “high truth” is the product of “surmise,” and not of the “austere guidance” of “knowledge and conscious reason,” granting it the status of “truth” must be, in some measure, an act of faith, a religious act. “High truth,” however, although taken on faith, is still a product of human intellect, not of divine revelation; it is not supernatural knowledge; it is not an eternal verity that is sacrosanct and beyond questioning. On the contrary, it is our responsibility to search constantly for evidence that would validate it, and all the time to be aware that both intuition and “austere reason” may disconfirm it. The same cannot be said about the religious Truth that is provided by revelation. Revealed Truth (God’s Truth) is asserted without evidence, and to that extent, it is unauthentic; it has nothing to do with knowledge, it evades criticism, and it answers only to the emotional discomfort that accompanies feelings of uncertainty. It is found in unexpected places. Gilbert Murray’s paragraph opens with a mild, gently ironic, almost apologetic comment about how “strange” he finds it to discover that among his friends, who are presumably scholars like himself—historians, philosophers, and other savants who combined formidable powers of reasoning, exacting standards of scholarship, a profound respect for evidence, and no little mental ingenuity—there were many who, trained intellects notwithstanding, believed that they had “supernatural knowledge” attained without the “austere guidance” of reason. In other words—to use a term that he did not—supernatural knowledge is superstition and is made up of beliefs that are the product of fear and ignorance and consequently, are proofed against austere reasoning. Elsewhere the tone is less gentle and his disdain more obvious:

22

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

[Paganism] appeals to the philosopher and the thoughtful man as a fairly complete and rational system of thought, which speculative and enlightened minds in any age might believe without disgrace. I do not mean that it is probably true; to me all these over-powering optimisms which, by means of a few untested apriori postulates, affect triumphantly to disprove the most obvious facts of life, seem very soon to become meaningless. (Murray 1951, 184)

He was writing about the “final reaction” of pagan Greek religions to Christianity, but the sting in that last sentence is directed not at those philosophies—Epicurean and Stoic—but at colleagues who believe they have supernatural knowledge and who do not realize—or refuse to admit—that this “knowledge” is nothing more than speculation, the product of “overpowering optimism” and the need for “emotional satisfaction.” “High truth” can be accepted “without disgrace” by “speculative and enlightened minds,” so long as they acknowledge that their high truth still is speculative and presuppositional—that is the significance of “I do not mean that it is probably true.” The same admission of fallibility is not made by those who have “supernatural knowledge” that rests on “a few untested apriori postulates” and contradicts “the obvious facts of life.” Gilbert Murray’s voice is the voice of the Enlightenment, the voice of reason and science, of testable truth, the voice that denounces the dogmatism of revealed religions. (The command to look for “testable truth” is, itself, a form of religion, albeit ungodly.) Gandhi’s voice was different: faith came first, reason second. In his periodical Harijan (18 June 1938), he wrote: “It is impossible that a thing essentially of the soul can ever be imparted through the intellect. . . . The intellect, if anything, acts as a barrier in matters of faith.” It is not difficult to work out what he might mean. The first part of his declaration implies that deism, the idea of a natural religion, one that reasons its way to the existence of a God, is a contradiction in terms; all True religion is revealed religion. There is one kind of truth: it is reached by the methods of science, by constructing hypotheses and testing them empirically, that is, by using one’s intellect: above and beyond it there is another Truth, a “thing essentially of the soul,” which is the Truth of God, revealed Truth. It is the Truth that Jesus claimed for himself when he provoked Pilate into asking, “What is truth?” Pilate did not wait for an answer, and I feel for him because I know what the answer would have been, having too often been told in arguments with True-believers who quote Isaiah at me: if you lack faith, you are not qualified to know Truth (nisi credideritis, non intellegitis).3 That declaration usually ends the conversation and I am left thinking how much better it would

3. Isaiah 7, 9. This comes from a Latin translation of the Greek Septuagint. The King James version, following the Latin Vulgate, is not the same: “If ye will not believe, surely ye will not be established. The Latin verb is permanere, for which the modern idiom would be “endure” or “survive,” presumably within the faith and eventually in Heaven.

fa it h , r ea s on, and cons e que nce s

•

23

be if we reserved the word “truth” for what can be tested, and called the other kind “Gospel” or wrote it as “Truth.” But, in fact, “truth” in both senses is in current use, and the two meanings flow easily into one another. Unraveling the ambiguities and discovering the tactical and rhetorical tricks in play is one of several skills needed to understand what politicians say (and do), why they say it, and what the consequences are. The second part of Gandhi’s claim—that the intellect is a barrier to faith— is at first sight nothing more than a statement of the obvious: the intellect threatens faith because its function is to inquire and to demand evidence, which is ipso facto to put faith in question. But seen from another angle, the claim conceals a judgment that is hugely significant for political arenas: revealed Truth is assumed to be in some unexplained way superior to—and to have a legitimate veto over—scientific truth. Of course, the superiority has to be taken on faith: God’s Truth is by definition the commanding truth. But why not make the reverse claim? Faith gets in the way of the intellect; things “essentially of the soul” inhibit the use of reason and curtail knowledge that might help us better manage the way we deal with one another. Dogmatic faith, fortunately, is not always held across the board. True-believers can be good scientists to the extent that they suspend the belief that “God’s hand” is in itself a sufficient and complete answer to questions about natural systems. It should be enough that he is only the final cause. When this is not the case, true belief (“Truth”) constitutes a barrier to knowledge. In intellectual matters the other kind of truth—Gilbert Murray’s “austere” reason—should be in command. So we reach the inevitable impasse that faith (whether in God or in reason) produces. More on this later.

Humanism “God’s mercy is infinite,” wrote Anatole France, in a story about Nicolas Nerli, a Florentine banker in search of salvation, “it will save even a rich man.” God has compassion even for those who have no claim to it. We do not; our compassion is selective and rationed, nor are we all-forgiving. We listen to the advice in Exodus 21: 24–25: “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” We find it harder to obey Matthew’s correction (5: 39): “whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also,” and we are inclined to write off those who do turn the other cheek as at least unusual, if not foolish (unless it is a successful bid for the higher moral ground that embarrasses the attacker and wins the support of the bystanders—or, in rare cases, even awakens the attacker’s conscience). That, as you will see, was an important element in Gandhi’s nonviolence.

24

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

God’s watchfulness likewise is infinite: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matthew 10: 29–30). Our vision, however, and our concerns are quite systematically limited. Not only sparrows are forgotten; people too may remain outside the circle of those for whom we care; they may even be considered enemies. This is not a pattern of binary discrimination, not in/out, not friend/enemy: rather it is a gradation, close/less close/not close at all. Our social world is like a set of concentric circles: nearest the center are those for whom we have concern; then those whose fate is not our business (the sparrows, so to speak); and, at the outer boundary, our enemies. These expanding circles represent moral communities. Morality is a willingness to (I am quoting Hitler) “subordinate [one’s] own ego to the common weal.” This sentiment—concern for other people—diminishes with each movement outwards. At the center, there are no circles of relationships, but only the “ego,” standing alone, and the question of morality does not arise: “ego” worries about no one but himself/herself. Ego is “economic man,” that unattractive representation of the person who concentrates entirely on his/her own material pay off (power or money), and not at all on moral obligations and the common weal. That is a description of things as they are. We match it against an ideal of things as they should be. One such ideal is the vision of the universal and undiscriminating morality that is signaled in the description of God’s infinite mercy: there are no circles, there are no enemies, all are one, and Ego becomes not selfish, but selfless. This, I think, was Gilbert Murray’s ideal; Gandhi’s too. In addition to Gilbert Murray’s mild disdain for revealed knowledge, there are, in the passages quoted earlier, signs of that other Enlightenment concern (besides the use of reason): morality or the good and just society. Fundamental moral values are in the domain of religion and are beyond the reach of the “austere guidance of reason.” Religion inevitably has an influence on social and political processes. Recall what Gilbert Murray said: I believe that at times we actually gain practical guidance in some questions where experience and argument fail. That is the great work left for religion, but we must always remember two things about it: first that the liability to error is enormous, indeed almost infinite; and, second, that the results of confident error are very terrible. Probably throughout history the worst things ever done in the world on a large scale by decent people have been done in the name of religion, and I do not think that has entirely ceased to be true at the present day. (1951, 7–8)4

4. Gilbert Murray’s summary statement is given chapter and verse in the eloquent, immensely detailed—even ferocious—account of faith-based inhumanity, both enjoined by the scriptures and perpetrated by believers, which Sam Harris provides in his two books.

fa it h , r ea s on, and cons e que nce s

•

25

The problem with the “austere guidance of reason”—it will surface throughout this book—is that reason alone is an insufficient guide: it is a tool. It can have categorical status as a methodology, but it is not itself a truth. The command to reject “untested apriori postulates” that contradict “the most obvious facts of life,” leaves unstated the morality toward which the procedure is directed. Murray’s answer is clear enough—“the worst things ever done in the world on a large scale by decent people have been done in the name of religion.” (It is hard to see how, at least after the event, such people can still be considered “decent,” unless they are also naïve enough not to realize what they are doing.) He has in mind the inadequacies of particular religions (those that have “received in writing the results of a divine revelation”). But their failings do not remove the need for some kind of moral guidance. There has to be a place to stand, a morality, a goal that antecedes reason. Gilbert Murray’s solution is conveyed in two phrases; “the real needs of men and women” and “walk gently.” They signal a religion, Humanism: whatever the conduct required, it should never be at the cost of deliberately inflicted or deliberately permitted human suffering. (I recall my incredulity—I hoped he was not being serious—when I was told by a missionary doctor that winning his patients’ souls for Christ far outweighed curing their sick bodies; if he could not make converts, he would go elsewhere. He did.) Humanism, which is itself unambiguously a faith—it precedes “austere” reason—is condemned by True-believing Fundamentalist Christians as weak-kneed, contemptible, an insult to God, even a threat to their own revealed religion. Of course it is a threat, but a mild one: notice how gently Gilbert Murray disengages himself from those “strange” people who think they have revealed knowledge. A Humanist is neither a fanatic nor a crusader. Followers of other creeds are included within the fold of humanity, and when Humanists confront those who claim to have supernatural knowledge, they endeavor to win them over by means of austere reason. They do not menace; their mode is hopeful persuasion. Certainly they would like to have others share their beliefs and values, but they believe in reasoned argument, not force, because the use of force would contradict their primary directive, which is that nothing (including both Divine and secular ideologies) is of value if it allows, or causes, or directly inflicts harm. True-believing Christians or Communists or Fascists are different: they threaten; they offer those outside the fold nothing between conversion and annihilation. Humanism is a secular religion; it posits neither a Godhead nor supernatural knowledge, but it still calls for faith and for unquestioning commitment. It differs from most other secular religions, which are, like the revealed religions, brutally unforgiving. They too have surely been responsible for “some of the worst things ever done in the world”—what was done in the name of National Socialism and other types of Fascism, of Soviet and other Communist regimes, of America’s “manifest destiny,” of European and other colonialisms, of racism, and of nationalism (the demise of Yugoslavia was the occasion for exceptional brutality).

26

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

I would also place in this category of “worst things” the supposedly necessary bracketing out the human suffering caused alike by command economies and by free market capitalism. These and other fanaticisms require mindless adherence to a cause and utter indifference to the miseries that go along with making that cause prevail. Most secular religions, like their revealed equivalents, are not given to “walking gently.”

Oneness Mindless adherence to a cause usually means contemplating rival causes with hostility. Nor is it possible to resolve differences rationally by following the precepts of scientific knowledge and discovering, through the use of evidence and experiment, what is the truth. What faith-motivated people, both religious and secular, mean by “Truth” is not within the range of discursive reasoning; their Truth is revealed and revealed Truth, by definition, is proofed against doubt and criticism. Truth in secular ideologies is in effect the same: once stated, it is “so obvious” that it cannot be doubted. That kind of truth is like beauty, “in the eye of the beholder.” It cannot be explained, it can only be intuited. Beauty in a painting does not translate into pigment densities; in a similar way, religious Truth is a primal thing, irreducible, and accessible only to those who are privileged to see it. Truth of this kind—direct knowledge that is experienced without being conceptualized—cannot be systematically uncovered by a rational inquiry into facts that account for it, nor can facts destroy it. It flourishes in the domain of the “Unknown.” When truth can be attained by the intellect, there should be no call for Truth. The Truth of religion is instant and immediate; it comes not from a process of reasoning (which it antecedes), but from intuition or, as Truebelievers affirm, from divine revelation. It is a world away from scientific truths that can be empirically tested.5 This belief goes along with an attitude and a program (found in some religions, but not in all) which, depending where you stand, seem to be both remarkably unselfish and insufferably arrogant. The peace of mind religion brings comes at the price of obedience. Godly religions contain codes of conduct based on principles that, once stated, are immediately and inevitably known to be right and good. These codes identify proper behavior toward the Divinity, toward fellow believers, and toward those who are not of the faith.

5. Intuition and presuppositional faith, since both concern a truth that cannot be demonstrated, are clearly out of the same stable. But they are not identical. Presuppositional faith is the foundation (albeit contingent on the outcome) for a process of reasoning: intuition bypasses reasoning altogether and is the enabler of unreasoned action.

fa it h , r ea s on, and cons e que nce s

•

27

At their center is the teleological construct of oneness, which is a state of perfection that demands from believers a constant effort to bring it about, to find Truth and make it prevail. “Oneness” is a pedestrian word that pins down (with as much precision as is ever likely to be possible) a diverse array of moral and mystical notions. It is variously symbolized in place words like Heaven or Paradise, or in conditions of being such as nirvana, moksha, or the Christian Grace, which is the salvation that a forgiving God bestows alike on the deserving and the undeserving when they join in oneness with Him and with each other. The Christian idea comes not only with a credenda (a list of things to be believed), but also with an agenda (things to be done): it is the duty of those to whom the Truth has been revealed to bring others, as yet unsaved, into the divine companionship, persuading them to follow the discipline and so become united with and in God. From one point of view, this is commendable selflessness: salvation shared is salvation augmented and everyone who repents is welcomed into the fold. From a different point of view, it is the outrageously arrogant claim that outside the fold there is no salvation and therefore no Truth. “Salus extra ecclesiam non est,” said St Augustine. “There is no salvation outside the Church.” In this notion of oneness, power is negated. To have been admitted to the Truth and to have become one with those who are saved is to be everyone’s equal, because salvation is the only condition that has meaning: everyone is equal in the sight of God. Nor can there be strife between those who are saved; there is nothing to be striven for; the only worthwhile prize has already been won and everyone within the fold is a winner; there are no further goals; there are no debts to be redeemed, no scores to be paid off, no politics. In that sense, religion is a conceptual denial of politics: it does not countenance a struggle for power. This is the imagined state of affairs after oneness has been achieved. But oneness is a telos, a goal; outside of Heaven, it is never achieved; it is an ideal, never a mundane actuality. Both extra and intra ecclesias, there is a world where equality and moral equivalence are not the rule. In the real world, the very notion of proselytizing (or even evangelizing—bringing the good news—which is a gentler way of imposing oneness on diverse others) presupposes the exercise of power, at least through persuasion, if not by force. More than that: once attention shifts from individual souls and their salvation to religion’s institutional forms, it is confronted everywhere intra ecclesias (most of them) with hierarchies of command. Equivalence recedes and power comes to the front; oneness is no longer only personal redemption (oneness with God), but is also manifested in political mobilization and political unity in the face of enemies. “Oneness” is the imagined future; the way to it in practice is the way of strife. I do not mean that religious endeavors to impose oneness must always be violent. Very often they have been, and still are, but physical violence is only the crudest of persuasion’s many forms. Kenneth Burke, in The Rhetoric of Religion,

28

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

says that we are “goaded by the spirit of hierarchy” (1970, 40), we look upward for perfection; we see what is more abstract—what is nearer to oneness—as higher and therefore as superior and rightfully dominant. Religion is “a unifying principle, the vision of an original Edenic one-ness” and the messages that come from religions “are designed, in the last analysis, as exceptionally thoroughgoing modes of persuasion.” Burke, I think, is here using the word “persuasion” to encompass not only debate, but also force. (There is a Runyonesque idiom in which a handgun is a “persuader.”) Persuasion in either mode—persuasion or force—is the essence of most of the religions that appear in this book, and it is also the essence of politics. In politics, to be persuaded is, by definition, to succumb to another’s power. In short, while a religion as a set of ideas (Godly or secular) may speak to the goal of oneness and harmony, as a practice it is inevitably, to some degree, involved with power and the competition for power—with politics.

A Point of View “Naïve scientism” is a derogatory label attached to the claim that the methodology of the natural sciences works no less well for understanding social systems than it does for natural systems. It is an idea, as you will shortly see, that offends those for whom revealed religion is Truth. They will be sufficiently offended by this book anyway, but I have no wish to be placed by them in the ranks of the naïve scientists. I too find “scientism” at least lacking, if not offensive, when it is applied to moral systems. Those systems are about not only what is, but also about what should be, and in that mode they are not true/false propositions, not indicative statements, but directives, imperatives, hortatory, sermon-like. I write from the perspective of moral systems, not natural systems, and my own beliefs and values shape what I have to say about politics and religion. That is one reason why I have allowed my personal point of view to feature prominently in the text, particularly in this chapter, which will serve as an apologia.6 A naïvely scientific point of view would present the world as objective, existing independently of anyone’s ideas about it. We discover that such a world does exist when our experiences contradict our ideas. But to assume that our knowledge of this natural (and social) world is not mediated by the presuppositions that enable the inquiry would imply that there could be theories that are not based on presuppositions. Presuppositions are concepts about reality, not reality itself. They

6. The autobiographical first person singular “I” is out of place in scientific writing. In the days when books were still set up in lead type, Evans-Pritchard, who had a nicely malicious sense of humor, said, when one of his colleagues (Max Gluckman) produced a new book, “The compositors, they tell me, ran out of capital ‘I.’ They had to order up more.”

fa it h , r ea s on, and cons e que nce s

•

29

are the telescope, not the view. There is, as I said, a reality that we discover when our experience is not in accord with what our presuppositions led us to expect. We then may blame the telescope, saying, perhaps, that the lens is at fault. The presuppositions, in other words, are mistaken. If one is to understand and evaluate a theory, it is important to know what are the presuppositions, both moral and existential, that it rests upon. That, clearly, is true also of my own theories. In arguments about social systems, other people’s presuppositions are likely to be renamed “prejudices.” The word connotes distortion, a faulty lens in your telescope that causes you not to see features that are clear in my telescope and that I consider relevant. “Prejudice” takes the place of “presupposition” because arguments about politics and religion are, as I said, not only about what goes on, but also about what should go on. In other words, there is no escaping morality: the moral prejudices of those engaged in the argument must be known in order to assess the significance of their arguments. That applies no less to my arguments. I, like everyone else, have selective vision. I write about understanding the mutual effects of religion and politics. How could that be done without making explicit the presuppositions that I bring to the debate? In short, this is an advocacy book. I have prejudices, which inevitably shape my theories, just as their prejudices shape the thoughts and actions of the politicians and clerics who appear in the book. That said, let me talk again, briefly, about my own prejudices and about the experience that gave rise to them. I share Gilbert Murray’s values and some of his experiences. Like him, I have had colleagues who were True-believers. The urge to understand such people—what moves them, what their culture is, and what effect they have—is one motive for writing this book. I feel no disdain—certainly no anger—toward them; only puzzlement. I would like to empathize with those to whom the Truth has been revealed, but so far I cannot. Nor can I connect, on that level, with most secular religions. I also share Gilbert Murray’s belief that some of “the worst things ever done in the world” were, and are, done in the name of religion. They need not be dramatic, immediate, brutal, and obvious like the dreadful killing that went on when India was partitioned; they can also be slow and insidious. I would include in that category the unthinking elevation of faith and the exclusion of reason, which characterizes much of the present day political discourse in the United States. Those who do this are intent on creating—I do not mean only locating, but actively schooling into existence—a particular kind of electorate: one that is deplorably prone to accept the tendentious opinions and factual distortions fed to it by propagandists, and is distressingly incapable of asking questions. In that scenario, the ideal voters live unexamined lives: they do not have doubts, they could not express them if they had, they are incapable of demanding a reasoned justification, and they are all too ready to emulate the Light Brigade (Tennyson)—“Theirs not to make reply,/ Theirs not to reason why,/ Theirs but to do and die.” (That, given what is going on in the Middle

30

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

East while I write this, can sometimes be all too literally the case.) How politicians attempt to put faith into the place of reason, when they succeed and when they fail, and what are the consequences, will be recurrent themes throughout the book. I cannot empathize with those who are “quite confident that they possess supernatural knowledge” (or with most of those whose faith is of a secular kind), but I can observe what they do and I can work out the consequences of their attitudes and their actions, both for themselves and for other people. What they and others have to say about the values and beliefs that prompt their actions constitutes hard data about politics (even when what they say is inaccurate or deliberately misleading), and these facts are accessible without resorting to empathy. Empathy, as an investigative tool, is only one step short of plain, shot-in-the-dark guesswork. Like Gilbert Murray’s “high truth,” it depends heavily on intuition, not much on observed facts, and not at all on the “austere guidance of reason.” An inquiry of this kind rests on presuppositions both about what is and about what should be, and mine are already obvious in my construal of Gilbert Murray’s ideas. I too am appalled when I see what people, “decent” or not, have done and do in the name of religion. I too experience that same sense of bewilderment when I encounter True-believing colleagues. For the most part, they are “decent people,” but I can empathize neither with the “general discipline” of their minds nor with “the bias of [their] characters.” I feel the same way about those who have been born again into one or other of the secular religions and are politico-economic True-believers in free market capitalism, command economies, Fascism, Communism, and the like. I think I can understand them better than I can understand a devout Christian or a Hindu mystic or a Muslim cleric, because secular faiths are usually presented as if they were not faiths at all, but as the kind of truth that fits the evidence and is arrived at by austere (that is, secular) reasoning. That is epistemological skullduggery and far from convincing. (I can understand them when it is clear that they knowingly have a piece of the action—in other words, when they are hypocrites. More on that later.) The “discipline of my mind and the bias of my character” have produced the presuppositions—outlined earlier and here given more substance—that underlie what I have to say about the presence of both religious and secular ideologies in politics. I intend to make these presuppositions—you may already see them as prejudices—explicit and at the same time, to provide a context that will make them intelligible even to those who find them unacceptable. These presuppositions are the religion that, for me, separates right from the wrong procedures, not only for making sense of what happens in the world, but also for deciding what is rightly or wrongly done. The intellectual regime that I favor is sometimes misconstrued by critics, not only by True-believers, but also by romantics who fear a disenchanted world—that phrase again—as “naïve scientism.” This kind of “naïve scientism,” properly defined, I can accept. If scientism is insistence that Truth, which it is not open to em-

fa it h , r ea s on, and cons e que nce s

•

31

pirical testing (as truth is), must constantly be scrutinized for its consequences, then I am content with the label. For a large and unenlightened American public—menacingly large—questioning the factuality of spiritual beings (or, mutatis mutandis, the merits of free market capitalism) is worse than naïve; it is blasphemous. Even agnostics, who admit merely to an open mind about Godly Truth, let alone the Humanists who are atheists and talk, as Gilbert Murray or Nehru did, about the harm done by True-belief, are heard only with disrespect (unless of course, some alien True-belief is being disparaged).7 An equivalent disdain, no less vehement and no less unexamined, awaits those in the United States whose creed is Socialism and a planned economy. It is not my intention, however, only to disparage True-belief (of either kind), although I am often appalled by what True-believers do; I want to find out what effects, whether harmful or beneficial, their doctrines have on the conduct of public affairs. My principal and immediate aim, directed at revealed religion, is modest: no more than to make sure that a secularist—that is, rationalist or positivist—framework, in which political actions are modeled as a natural system (to the extent that is possible), is neither forgotten nor placed on some Index of Prohibited Ideas because it generally goes along with a skepticism about the doctrines of Godly religions, in particular, literalistic notions of God as a person who guides politicians or sits in judgment on what they do. (Secular religions and their spurious claim to be “scientific” will be dealt with along the way.) Godly Truth requires me to have an open line to Him (or Her), which I do not. It also requires me to pretend that the world, both natural and social, is a much simpler construction than I know it to be. It requires me to have faith in Him, which also I do not have. That does not vitiate my inquiry—the reverse, if anything. Non-believers—agnostic, atheist, or even misotheist—are better equipped to ask and answer questions about the political consequences of religions and religious ideas than are True-believers, if only because non-believers have no vested interest in promoting or disparaging one or another brand of revealed Truth. Nor do they feel obliged to respect the noli-me-tangere fence—William James calls it the “unwholesome privacy” (1960, 451)—that True-believers construct to keep their beliefs beyond the reach of critical examination. This does not mean that those who are deaf to the music of revealed religion, as I am, must instantly doubt others who claim to have had the Truth revealed to them and who know for sure that life has a meaning, even when they cannot explain, in words that make sense to a non-believer, what that meaning is. Even when I believe that what they experience corresponds to nothing at all outside their own minds (and the minds of other believers), and even when I can

7. “U.S. parents would rather their child marry a Muslim than settle down with an atheist, according to a recent survey by the University of Minnesota” Los Angeles Times, 6 May 2006.

32

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

clearly see the harmful consequences of their beliefs, consequences which they explain as God’s way to teach us not to be sinners (but never as a manifestation of His malevolence)—Was it Jerry Falwell who said that the Twin Towers catastrophe was a sign that He was not pleased with America?—I can still believe in the psychological reality of their experience (unless, of course, they give me reason to think they are faking, which, especially in the domain of radio-pastors, televangelists, and some right-wing, self-styled Christian politicians, they often do). My present purpose, however, is to find out what the political consequences of religious ideas are; questions about the objective truth of “Truth” can generally be left moot. I can still watch what people say and do in the name of religion, and then ask what effect they have on politics and on “the real needs of men and women.” “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7: 20). The reader should by now be clear about my guiding prejudice, which is close enough to Gilbert Murray’s: knowledge gained through intellectual procedures is different from, independent of, and has priority over, revealed knowledge, simply because its truth—or, more to the point, its mistakes—can be demonstrated, whereas “revealed” knowledge, which is derived directly from God, can only be asserted or denied. Revealed knowledge is not knowledge at all, but faith. I share with Gilbert Murray his (currently unfashionable) respect for the general goals of the Enlightenment, in particular its social ideals and its readiness to question religious doctrine. (I write general goals in order to acknowledge the Enlightenment’s wonderfully complex internal diversity, which is comprehensively portrayed in Peter Gay’s monumental work.) My dictionary (OED) tells me that the Enlightenment has been defined by derisive commentators as, “shallow and pretentious intellectualism” and “unreasonable contempt for tradition and authority.” I had thought of it, on the contrary, as a movement that promoted the kind of knowledge that is accessible through the techniques of science; and if critical examination undermines “tradition and authority,” which base themselves on revealed knowledge or on some secular dogma, then that is all to the good. Those who have an open line to God see matters differently. For them, it is the Enlightenment that is evil. In 1960, Evans-Pritchard, delivering the Aquinas lecture at Hawkesyard Priory to a Roman Catholic audience, deplored the “animosity to revealed religion” harbored by his fellow anthropologists and their eighteenth and nineteenth century predecessors (1962, 29–45). He was himself not without animosity toward some of the leading spokesmen for the Enlightenment. Condorcet is “unfortunate.” Saint-Simon’s followers were “heralds of the Fascist, Nazi and Communist forms of society.” Saint-Simon was a “more or less lunatic genius.” Jeremy Bentham is “the morbid Bentham.” Herbert Spencer is a “dour, rationalist hypochondriac.” Even the genial Rector Marett, head of the Oxford college that opened its doors to Evans-Pritchard, is tarred as “having been at one time some sort of Comtist.”

fa it h , r ea s on, and cons e que nce s

•

33

The source of his animosity was this: “Condorcet held that social phenomena are just as natural as those of the inorganic and organic sciences, and therefore could be, and should be, studied by the same methods and with the same ends in view as such sciences as physics and biology.” But the presuppositions of the natural sciences take no account of revealed knowledge, of what Gandhi called “Truth,” and of its source, which is God. “Saint-Simon wished to reduce Christianity to a system of ethics.” But “if social scientists were to inquire unemotionally into the social function of a phenomenon so universal and persistent, they would discover that the vitality of societies, even their existence, is bound up with religion, and that it is precisely through religious systems that social evolution, or progress, has been brought about, for it is the most significant of evolutionary forces, the chief agent in natural selection.” Even the sages of the Enlightenment in the end could not do without religion: “But later Comte, like Saint-Simon before him, realized that there has to be a religion of some sort and set about founding a new one, a secularist church with himself as high priest, ‘an incongruous mixture of bad science and eviscerated papistry’ as Huxley acidly called it.” Those sentences display some spectacular question begging. First, like Pat Buchanan, Evans-Pritchard evidently could not imagine a morality—“reduce Christianity to a system of ethics”—that was not enforced by the Creator, which would mean that there can be no code of right conduct that is not “God-given.” It also implies that secular humanists have no way to distinguish good from evil, which is patently false. Second, Evans-Pritchard claims that “there cannot be a stronger assertion of natural law than belief in miracles,” which is simply to equate apparent irregularities in nature with the will of God. Others might say that a miracle is not evidence of natural law, but a prima facie demonstration of its incompleteness along with a decision to abandon the inquiry; but there are still questions to be asked, and God is not the answer. That seeming incompleteness, as Gilbert Murray and others point out, is one reason why gap-filling religions of one sort or another are found in every society. But in this context ubiquity is not the point, consequences are; and it is hard to swallow Evans-Pritchard’s version of those consequences: “it is precisely through religious systems that social evolution, or progress, has been brought about, for it is the most significant of evolutionary forces, the chief agent in natural selection.” If he is talking strictly about the evolutionary process, he must mean that God is the chief agent; as I understand evolution, a more likely agent is “chance,” which, unlike the Christian God, does not give a fig for humanity.8 More likely Evans-Pritchard was deftly

8. If chance is in control, there is need neither for contorted theodicies that “justify the ways of God to Men” nor, worse, for the self-inflicted agonies and the witch-hunting that are their result. The import of “chance” is nothing divine: only a tacit admission that the intellect has not yet penetrated into that part of the “uncharted region.”

34

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

equating (commonly done at that time) “evolution” with “progress,” which is to confuse the natural with the moral; this confusion makes it possible for him to claim that revealed religions are the “chief agent” of “the vitality of societies, even their existence.” Certainly a “natural science of society” would leave many questions unanswered. Those that concern good and evil are inherently unanswerable by an inquiry that deals with what actually is the case and not with what from one or another ethical point of view should be the case. Natural science is a methodology; it uses hypothetical thinking to expand our knowledge by asking questions, and it can ask them about the causes and consequences, not only of events, but also of beliefs, including religious beliefs. To that extent, Gandhi was wrong: the intellect can illuminate religion. Revealed religion, on the other hand, does not illuminate anything because it does not promote inquiry; it is not a methodology, but a creed; it offers only answers in the form of authoritative statements about the way things are and about the way they should be; it inhibits the search for new knowledge. That, of course, is itself a moral judgment; my animosity is on view and I should explain the kind of intellectual procedures that excite it. I summarize them as the “totality-trap” or “totality-itch,” which is a religious, curiosity inhibiting, intellect stifling urge to make everything simple, to bundle up all the world’s actual complexities into a single package that conceals the complexity by transforming it into oneness. It is the incautious pursuit of general truths and the unwarranted neglect of those particular facts that contradict the generalization that is supposed to encompass them: in other words, Truth is asserted without evidence, or even in defiance of evidence, because there is an emotional need (or sometimes because it is expedient) to perceive (or proclaim) a unity: questions can be settled once and for all, and in reaching the Truth, one attains emotional tranquility, an intellectual nirvana. Bertrand Russell (1931) saw things differently: “Academic philosophers, ever since the time of Parmenides, have believed that the world is a unity. This view has been taken over from them by clergymen and journalists, and its acceptance has been considered the touchstone of wisdom. The most fundamental of my beliefs is that this is rubbish.” This unity is formed by hierarchy; it is not the rule of equivalence, as in the Christian notion of redemption; the social order that it serves is domination. The idea accords with the philosophy of Plato and with the Hindu notion of dharma, the moral order that exists in a caste society. Peter Gay (1966, 242) talks of “the master metaphor of the Middle Ages—hierarchy.” He writes: Reasoning from analogy, Christian philosophers and theologians established it as a universal principle that the higher governs the lower everywhere: thus the brute fact of social inequality was at once expressed and rationalized; thus the overwhelming need for peace, both political and psychological, was translated into the

fa it h , r ea s on, and cons e que nce s

•

35

grand image of cosmic concord. The old Platonic principle that tranquility results when each part of the soul occupies its appropriate place and performs its appropriate function became the vital centre of spatial mysticism. (Gay 1966, 242)

There is a whimsical passage about the making of intellectual unity to be found in the autobiography of that same R.R. Marett, sometime Rector of Exeter College in Oxford, a classical scholar and an armchair anthropologist in the manner of Frazer and Tylor (both of whom, like Marett, were on the EvansPritchard hit list). In it, Marett offers a formula for undergraduates writing their weekly essay in philosophy: There was a standing recipe for an essay as follows: at the outset you posed the question, with perhaps an epigram or two to awaken expectations; there followed a brace of paragraphs in which you defended in turn two diametrically opposed solutions, to all appearances mutually destructive; then on your last page you explained that these were but “complementary aspects” of a higher truth, and the thing was done. When Randolph Churchill called himself a Tory-Democrat, someone in Balliol remarked that he must have done so “to catch the Hegelian vote.” (1941, 87)

Marett is referring to sublation, which is making a unity out of opposites by confecting an encompassing “higher truth.” The notion of a “higher truth” pervades the kind of religious thinking that spills over into the rhetoric of political arenas. The spatial metaphor of above and below, higher and lower, superior and inferior, the higher being a unity and the lower chaotic, pervades religious discourse. As Burke said, we are “goaded by the spirit of hierarchy”; and we are in search of “a unifying principle, the vision of an original Edenic oneness.” There is an itch for religion and its comforts in all of us; but those comforts are dearly bought if they come by finding Truth in defiance of the evidence and heedless of the consequences. Non-questioning followers go along with leaders who, lacking critical feedback, are not encouraged to pay close attention to reality. There are costs to having followers contaminated by mindless devotion: a dictator is likely to get in trouble if, when he is on the wrong track, no one in his entourage is detached enough to perceive the mistake and brave enough to challenge him— Hitler’s misfortune. Nor is constructive criticism to be expected from the masses, because states and other large organizations are generally so structured that feedback does not easily filter up from below, at least not in good time. Even a well functioning democracy only goes systematically into the feedback mode when elections are held (or unsystematically when there is a coup d’état). In the extreme case, such leaders come to live in a fantasy world of their own making, and the fiction they create to bamboozle their followers becomes their own reality. What makes for uninformed and unthinking followers also makes for uninformed leaders, whose decisions are reached more by intuition and less

36

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

by “austere reason,” which requires a rational consideration of feasibility and of likely consequences. In practical matters, credo quia absurdum—forget the evidence if it challenges the faith—is generally not a sound procedure. Nevertheless, in political arenas there are occasions—Gandhi’s story will bring me to them later—when having faith and believing in what others think is absurd seems to pay off. Before I come to that story, however, I need to confront my scientistic creed with its indisputable antithesis, which is Gilbert Murray’s “the Uncharted.” Reason, which distils knowledge out of experience, has its limits. One of a leader’s functions is exactly to make decisions by intuition, because many situations are so complicated that a rational computation of likely outcomes is impossible. If that were not the case, our social structure could be a flawless bureaucracy, run by managers in accordance with policy and procedure manuals; there would be no place for leaders. The limits of rationality, moreover, become obvious in the case of first principles or of ultimate moral values (Gandhi’s “things of the soul”): they cannot, by definition, be the product of reason. Rational decisions are about means, not ends; they are about the most effective way to use scarce means to attain given ends. Those ends, if ultimate, can only be matters of faith. In positing reason and faith as thesis and antithesis, I am not on the way to a synthesis. To suggest that there is a higher truth that sublates faith and reason would be to turn one’s back on the real world: reason and faith are in the same arena and the tension between them will remain an ever present, if shifting, feature of political life. Nor can one grant exclusive domain to one or the other principle. Simply to deplore the situation and insist that leaders should always be rational in making their decisions would be no less naïve than insisting that faith in God alone sufficiently qualifies a leader. It does make sense, however, to keep the question open and simply ask what it does for leaders to have faith in one or another form of divine intervention in the world’s affairs. How do they differ from leaders who have no such beliefs? That decision—to keep both models in play because that is how people in fact behave—is easily made and maintained because it concerns methodology and the pay off can be measured by the level of understanding and knowledge attained; and knowledge is positively valued, as an end in itself. For me, that is a fundamental value, my equivalent of Truth. It was nicely put by Evans-Pritchard in a different lecture: “Knowledge of man and of society is an end in itself . . .” (1962, 13–28).9 I have an antipathy toward revealed religion because it stands in the way of that end. Nor is my antipathy lessened by the spin that EvansPritchard puts on revealed religion, in the name of which so many dreadful things are done.

9. At the time, there was a small vogue for “applied anthropology.” Evans-Pritchard was not an enthusiast.

fa it h , r ea s on, and cons e que nce s

•

37

I found the methodological decision—about how to make sense of conduct—easy. Sometimes it seems no more difficult to make a moral judgment about the conduct itself: what is good and what is evil seem self-evident. At Aulis, a harbor in Boeotia, the Greek fleet on its way to attack Troy was becalmed by the goddess Artemis. She withheld the wind to punish Agamemnon, the Greek leader, for killing a deer in a grove sacred to her. Hoping to appease her, Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigenia, his own daughter. (Artemis saved Iphigenia, putting a doe in her place and spiriting her away to be her priestess in the land of the Tauri.) Lucretius, commenting on the incident, wrote this hexameter: “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum” (“Such vileness could religion recommend”). I set out, irritated by the aggressive and selfassured defenders of revealed religion, to write in the spirit of Lucretius. Now, as I get further into the matter, I see that things are in fact more complicated because it is impossible to rationally justify a claim about where vileness lies. Such a claim is “a thing essentially of the soul,” never to “be imparted through the intellect.” That phrase, “things are more complicated,” will serve as a commentary, intoning a moral, chorus-like, throughout the book. In the meantime, I introduce here, almost without comment, “a thing essentially of [my] soul.” It shows itself in my reaction to an anecdote told by Nirmal Kumar Bose, an anthropologist who served Gandhi as his secretary, translator, and confidant in Bengal during the faith-based mutual slaughtering of Hindus and Muslims that went on there and elsewhere in India between 1946 and 1948, at the time of India’s partition. On the evening of the 17th of February [1947], a Muslim divine named Khalipur Rahman paid a visit to Gandhi at a village called Devipur. It was reported that this divine had been responsible for the conversion of a large number of Hindus during the disturbances. When Gandhi asked him if this was true, the divine said that the conversion should not be taken seriously, it was a dodge adopted to save the life of the Hindus. Gandhi asked him if it was any good saving one’s life (jan) by sacrificing one’s faith (imam). It would have been much better if, as a religious preceptor, he had taught the Hindus to lay down their lives for their faith, rather than give it up through fear. The divine continued to argue that such false conversion for saving one’s life had the sanction of religion, when Gandhi grew impatient and, in an almost angry tone, said, if ever he met God, he would ask Him why a man with such views had ever been made a religious preceptor. The divine became silent, and after an exchange of courtesies, left. (MDG, 149–50)

If your sympathies are with Khalipur Rahman and his practical Humanism, you will better understand this book.10

10. Notice that to die in this way—to sacrifice one’s life for one’s faith—has the same motivational foundation as (but is the mirror image of) that which causes terrorists to attach a bomb to their bodies and detonate it in a crowded marketplace.

38

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

Those are my presuppositional foundations. The chapter following this one is closer to the ground. It describes the limits of rationality, and therefore the inevitable presence of presuppositional faith in practical politics. That is beyond dispute. Whether or not the other kinds of faith play a necessary part in politics—and, if so, with what consequences—will remain to be considered.

2

R ELIGION P ERSUASION

IN

AND

P OLITICS

b I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet with all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means. —Gandhi, Autobiography

Religion and Political Involvement Religions take many forms and therefore shape politics in different ways. In one form, it may nullify civic concerns and therefore also politics. This effect is magnificently described in Gilbert Murray’s Five Stages of Greek Religion. The fourth stage, which emerged in the early Roman Empire, he calls “failure of nerve.” It is the rise of asceticism, of mysticism, in a sense, of pessimism; a loss of self-confidence, a loss of hope in this life and faith in normal human effort; a despair of patient inquiry, a cry for infallible revelation; an indifference to the welfare of the state, a conversion of the soul to God. It is an atmosphere in which the aim of the good man is not so much to live justly, to help the society to which he belongs and enjoy the esteem of his fellow creatures; but rather, by means of a burning faith, by contempt for the world and its standards, by ecstasy, suffering, and martyrdom, to be granted pardon for his unspeakable unworthiness, his immeasurable sins. There is an intensifying of certain spiritual emotions, an increasing sensitiveness, a failure of nerve. (Murray 1951, 119)

40

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

Other forms of religion generate not a failure of nerve and a shying away from political responsibility, but the opposite—political activism. This suggests three lines of inquiry. First, as Gandhi insisted, religion may provide moral directives that allow politicians to separate right from wrong conduct. What kind of politics emerge when people follow their consciences and use their religion to regulate their own conduct in public affairs? Second, religion may have tactical uses: religious values serve to mobilize a following or to discredit an opponent. How do politicians (whether hypocritical or sincere) use religion as an instrument to compete for power? Third (thinking ahead to Gandhi’s encounter with sectarian religions), Gilbert Murray’s description of civically disengaged religions prompts this question: How are either of these uses—ethical or instrumental—influenced by the different conduct that different religions promote? I am again thinking of the contrast between religions that enjoin love and those that are fuelled by hatred. In theory, a religion of love civilizes what is done in political arenas. But that is a wish more often than it is a reality; and the reality is strife. But strife is often—even usually—at least in part contained before it reduces the political process to chaos. How is this done?

The Problem of Order Politicians who make rhetorical use of religions—and often misuse them—are familiar figures in media-reported politics in the United States. Some of them come across as shamelessly opportunistic and evidently dishonest; others, who seem to be sincere, display a single-mindedness that is disturbing both for its intensity and for its obtuseness: they are unable or unwilling to recognize a proven reality that makes nonsense of their doctrines. Less familiar and sometimes tragic in its outcome—I am thinking of Gandhi—is the transparently well-intentioned and entirely sincere politician, upheld but ultimately done down by the forces of unrelenting religiosity (including, in Gandhi’s case, his own). Gandhi’s message, delivered “with all humility”—without religion, politics, and evil may go hand-in-hand—is not, in its form, without ambiguity. “Humility” should indicate a willingness to entertain the possibility of being wrong, which is conveyed neither by the content of his pronouncement nor by its slightly bellicose tone. It will become clear later that Gandhi’s humility, while loudly proclaimed, was selectively deployed. It also is hard to resist the conclusion that Gandhi not only took pleasure in, but was also proud of, his humility—which is to live an oxymoron. Gandhi was saying that religion in the conduct of public affairs is both necessary and beneficial: politicians need its guidance. That, surely, is indisputable, so long as religion is defined by the simple idea of morality, of making politicians—

r e l ig io n a n d p e rs uas ion in p ol itics

•

41

or anyone else—think about the difference between right and wrong conduct. But religions have more to them than that. Gandhi’s religion, like many others, brings with it some mythopœic baggage: to know good from evil is to know God and His Truth.1 The idea is commonplace, caught, for example, in the words of Sidney Herbert, a Cabinet Minister, writing during the Crimean War to Florence Nightingale: “I am more and more convinced every day that in politics, as in everything else, nothing can be right which is not in accordance with the spirit of the gospel” (Strachey n.d., 171). That advice, presumably written from an Anglican point of view, does not at all take into account that there are different “gospels,” that their advice can differ radically, and that their followers are all too often antagonists. The quotation comes from Lytton Strachey’s mordant essays on four “eminent Victorians,” all of whom were stiffened by an unswerving faith in God’s guidance. All four are intimidating in their single-mindedness; not one of them, not even Florence Nightingale, is portrayed as likeable, let alone lovable; at best, if they are styled as tragic, they may arouse a somewhat distant feeling of compassion. Gandhi had a vision: “religion . . . means a belief in ordered moral government of the universe” (AMB, 77). The concept was not his invention; it is the Hindu dharma, which is not a personalized God or Creator or Redeemer, but Truth, the eternal verity and the eternal moral law. Morality, which rules when everyone has a good and clear conscience (“devoted to none but Truth,” AMB, 94), should— and could—become the principal agent of social order; everyone must “owe no discipline to anybody but Truth”(AMB, 94). Without a discipline and without order there can be no life; disorder leads to violence, and violence, unrestrained, ends in mutual destruction. The problem of how we escape that final catastrophe is both timeless and universal. It has given rise to three—among others—theoretical solutions, which all make presuppositions about human nature, and all start on the bad side of the fence that separates Nature, which is “red in tooth and claw,” from love, “Creation’s final law”—Tennyson again. His “Love” is not eros, sexual love, but agape or caritas, what in the New Testament (First Corinthians: 13) is called “charity,” the self-sacrificing love that Christians have for God, Christ, and their fellow Christians. I will have more to say about caritas later. In the first theory, Nature itself, since it is a senseless agency and not a person, is by definition amoral and therefore neither benign nor malevolent; it is indifferent alike to human comfort and to human suffering. The system, nevertheless, through the agency of competition for scarce resources produces a natural order1. Notice that Gandhi was not thinking in institutional terms—of State and Church—but rather in terms of individuals and the morality that should guide their conduct. It will become clear later that Gandhi’s ideas about Truth and God are too complex—too abstruse—to be adequately represented by the straightforward image of God as a person, although the words he used often give that impression.

42

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

ing, which not only saves us from mutual destruction, but does so in the most efficient way possible. Seen from the outside, there is no place for conscience in this scheme: people are selfish, essentially amoral, but when they compete with one another, as in an economic market or to exploit an environment, their interactions exhibit an orderliness that is spontaneous. This scheme can lend itself to a theocratic interpretation: the “invisible hand” that guides interactions toward the best possible outcome is the hand of a benevolent God. Generally, however, since the idea has become the property of neoclassical economists, God is left out of the equation and the process is considered “natural,” that is, nothing other than a pattern observed, analyzed, and the conditions for its existence identified. Those conditions need not include a Creator and His purposes. Notice that in this solution, while the Old Adam, selfish and amoral, is recognized as a reality and an inevitability, it is assumed that nothing need be done to reform him because the system itself compensates for those disorder producing motivations that others call moral deficiencies. (The “Old Adam’” is taken from an invocation in the book of Common Prayer, at the baptism of a child: “O merciful God, grant that the old Adam in this Child may be so buried, that the new man may be raised up in him.” The biblical context is Romans: 6.) The second way of escape is described by Hobbes in the allegory of a body politic: a “well-governed Commonwealth . . . that great Leviathan, or rather, to speak more reverently, that mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and defence” (1946, 112). People are rational; they are aware that, if unrestrained, they will destroy one another; the Old Adam, unregenerate and full of sin, is inevitably present but he can be tamed. Therefore, people surrender themselves to the control of a Commonwealth, which restrains their selfish impulses in the interest of them all. Leviathan, unlike the market, is not spontaneous; it is the outcome of rational calculation and purposeful design. Nevertheless, religion has at least a presence in the scheme: Leviathan may not be the “immortal God,” but obedience to it is categorical and it is godlike in its decisions—above the fray and attentive always to the needs of the whole. The third solution is Gandhi’s. Old Adam is still there, active and unregenerate in everyone who has not yet learned to recognize and accept the Truth that is God and is God’s design for the world. Gandhi’s religion is universalistic: to recognize God’s Truth is to be saved and salvation is open to everyone. But Truth cannot be imposed; it cannot be the product of power and political action; its provenance can only be an inner sense of morality; Everyman must be his own Leviathan, his own controller—literally so, in the concept swaraj (“self-rule” or “self-discipline”). When Everyman, whatever be his “sectarian” religion (to use Gandhi’s term)—Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Parsi, Christian, Jew, or whatever else—comes freely to know and accept Truth, the problem of violence and disorder has been solved; that is why religion has everything to do with politics. In the other schemes, God is either superfluous (the “invisible hand” need be no more

r e l ig io n a n d p e rs uas ion in p ol itics

•

43

than a poetic way of pointing to pattern and regularity), or else He is remote (the “immortal God” of Thomas Hobbes has a distant supervisory capacity, and the real work of bringing order is done by the mortal god, the Commonwealth). But in Gandhi’s creation God’s Truth is the keystone; without it the arch collapses. That is enough, for the time being, about religion. Now I will say what I think are the elements of politics.

What Should Go On and What Does Go On It is in the nature of politics, and often also of politicians, to be nasty. Politicians do not, of course, admit to their own vindictiveness, underhandedness, and general readiness to transgress the moral rules that (they claim) govern their behavior; the wrongdoers, always, are their opponents. Politics often (but not always) involve the exercise, not of virtue, but of power, which is the capacity to make other people do things whether they want to or not, whether or not they are aware of what is being done to them, whether or not it is good for them. To understand politics is to know how power is distributed—to know who defines situations and to understand how they prevent others from doing so. In the last resort all politics are adversary politics. But that is not the whole story. Understanding politics calls for two kinds of inquiry. One is into the institutions of political morality, which are sets of rules laying down who is eligible for power and what they may and may not do when they compete for it or exercise it. These rules describe what should be the case; they are not accounts of what is the case, because from time to time rules are not only broken, but also may be modified or transformed. Rule breaking and change call for the other type of inquiry, which looks for patterns in political events and explanations for them. These two inquiries are different. The first—a description and analysis of institutional rules—would only be a complete account of the political reality if people always obeyed the rules, if there was a single set of unambiguous rules, and if those rules were enough in accordance with situations to make observing them always feasible. That model is clearly less than realistic. The second kind of inquiry—into what actually happens—presupposes: (i) that people sometimes seek their own advantage (utility) even when it requires them to break institutional rules; (ii) that in any political situation (or indeed in situations of any kind) ambiguity may be present because there are alternative sets of rules; and, (iii) that institutional rules must sooner or later be adapted to fit an actuality that changes independently of them. Given these three premises, which assume both a lack of consensus and a need to make decisions that are beyond what the rules specify, competition is logically entailed. Politics, in short, will be modeled here as an actuality of competition, whether over raw interests (money

44

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

or power—a competition which Gandhi called “greed”) or over what form the moral consensus should take (Gandhi’s Truth)—and often both, as when private advantage lurks behind a façade of public good, or when those who would sincerely serve the public good discover that they cannot do so without first gaining power in ways that they find morally distasteful. The second and third premises allow for the ideal of an agreed upon public morality, a consensus about the goals and procedures of public policy. The first premise is different: it assumes that anyone who competes for power cares only about winning and is not influenced by rules of right conduct (except insofar as they may be used for tactical advantage). It assumes, to invoke Tennyson again, a human nature “red in tooth and claw,” and if it stands alone, then politics has no place for morality, political arenas are like markets—as economists define markets—and the rational politician is a version of “economic man,” the skeletal construct that in neoclassical economic theory represents a human being. Economic man has no social conscience and would, in another kind of discourse, be labeled “sociopath.” If political man is built to the same design, then to make him the essence of politics is to agree with Benjamin Disraeli: “In politics nothing is contemptible.” (I take this to mean “Anything goes!” Other interpretations are possible.) There are no upright politicians; there are no wise elder statesmen; and, despite what politicians say about themselves, they do not serve the public interest, they serve only themselves. That model is no less unrealistic than the simple morality model; it clearly misrepresents the facts both of history and of human nature. More precisely, it misrepresents some facts; it fits others quite well. A moment’s introspection reveals that at times we harm others to help ourselves, and at other times we do the opposite: help others at a cost to ourselves. Nor need we look far into history to find leaders who tried to serve their people and other leaders who exploited them (and many who did both). Furthermore, while institutionalized moralities are by definition an ideal, to proclaim them in order to justify or condemn a course of action, whether it is done with sincerity or not, is to act politically in the real world. In short, moralities must have a place in a model of the political actuality, not only in the Gandhian form of guidance, but also as weapons deployed to enlist a mass following or to darken an opponent’s image. It follows that neither the power seeking model of political conduct (the utility or advantage model) nor its contrary (the morality model) should be written off. They complement each other; both are needed to make sense of politics and politicians. To elevate one model and dismiss the other as wholly unreal and irrelevant—or sometimes as so distasteful as to be unfit for serious consideration— is to be lured by a predilection for oneness into the “totality-trap” that awaits those who imagine that our social world, formidably complex as it is, can be usefully framed within a single model, which, by either subsuming its contraries or else rejecting one of them as a falsehood, becomes the one and only gateway

r e l ig io n a n d p e rs uas ion in p ol itics

•

45

to Truth. It is also to misunderstand the nature of model making, because it confuses methodology with ontology. Models are instruments that let us understand reality; they are not reality itself any more than eyes are what is seen; models are not “truth.” The power seeking model, properly used, does not assert that people always seek their own advantage; it is a tool for making sense of what happens when they do. The same, mutatis mutandis, is true for the morality model. Every model has competences and limitations. Both models are devices for discovering order—a pattern, a regularity—in events and actions. The two kinds of order are different. The utility model depicts a natural order—the kind that we perceive and react to but which we did not produce: the movement of planets, tides, seasons, the life cycle of organisms, evolution, markets, and so on. Order in these systems is spontaneous, natural, God-given; no one else gets the credit; no one gets the blame; no one (except God) intended them or could have created them. Second, a natural system is modeled as something that is a reality: there is a planetary system; there are booms and slumps; there is an ageing process. Moral orders, by contrast, do not have the same kind of actuality. They are aspirations—for law and order, justice, honest government, peace on earth, doing to others as you would be done by, and so forth—things to be striven for. Moral orders portray an ideal social world—how it would be if people always followed their consciences. Third, it follows that natural systems and moral orders differ with respect to truth. Statements about a natural system are not absolute truths; they are always open to the test of fact; the reasoning that constructs them uses hypotheses, which are derived from presuppositions, not from categorical truths. Statements in a moral order, on the other hand, are presented as categorical Truths. Certainly the goals of a moral order, since they direct action, have an effect on the reality of political life and this effect can be empirically tested; but their own Truth is not of the kind that is open to empirical testing; it is foundational. There is no experiment that will prove murder or blasphemy or fornication morally wrong, because moral statements, whatever their grammatical form, are imperatives or optatives, not existential propositions. Moral orders have no place for hypotheses, only for ultimate, unconditional, eternal truths (that is, not secular truths which are specific to a particular age). Fourth, contradictions between moral Truths cannot be resolved discursively, but only by fiat. Different versions of a natural system, on the other hand, can be resolved by reasoning because science, which is the discoverer (or creator) of natural systems, deals in propositions, not in categorical Truths, and scientists have explicit procedures for proving or disproving a proposition. Moral systems, in other words, belong in the domain of religion, not in the domain of natural science. That being so, the question of their objective truth cannot arise: moral statements are imperatives or optatives and neither of these can have a truth

46

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

value. Take Hamlet at his word: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Neither do our own intuited judgments about good and evil—where we choose to take a stand—contribute anything to understanding (as distinct from passing judgment on) political situations, other than, perhaps, to prompt the inquiry in the first place. The valid question has to do with psychological truth and the people involved: not “Is this good or evil?” but “Do those people think it good or evil?” In this reckoning, one’s own moral opinion should not count; only that of the people involved. Their moral judgments and the manner in which they are delivered and received are suitable objects for inquiry. Moral standards, so defined, then become an objective element in politics framed as a natural system. What the people involved think (or say they think) about good and evil is the variable that makes morality central to the understanding of political systems; our own intuited distinctions between right and wrong conduct should contribute nothing to our reasoning. Politics modeled as morality driven, and politics modeled as a natural system—what people think should go on and what they think does go on—are analytically distinct. In any political actuality, however, both models guide conduct and the impact of each is modified by the presence of the other. To understand a political actuality is, in part, to understand how the tension between the two prescriptions—people doing what they believe is right versus what they actually do (sometimes doing what they hope will pay off, even if not right)—shapes the strategies that politicians use.

Defining Situations Given my negative attitude to revealed religion and to those who, like EvansPritchard, boost it by disparaging the Enlightenment, the argument that follows will at first seem paradoxical. I intend to demonstrate that Gandhi was right when he insisted that ideas and values held on faith are inevitably part of politics; so also was Evans-Pritchard, but they both were right for the wrong reasons. No purposive social action could be undertaken—no society could exist— without the benefit of faith. This faith, however, has nothing to do with either Revelation or with a Creator: it arises out of our computational incapacity and our moral uncertainties. “Intuition” is a perfectly adequate label for it; so is the everyday word “hunch”—something that you assume to be the case without being able to demonstrate why it must be. Intuition is necessary, not only in politics, but also in every other intelligible (non-random) form of social life. All this has been said several times in the form of general propositions; this chapter will provide some particulars in the shape of quasi-experimental procedures and the use of a desiccated logic.

r e l ig io n a n d p e rs uas ion in p ol itics

•

47

The person who exercises power makes other people do things, whether they want to or not. This can be accomplished in several ways, all of which are forms of persuasion designed to make the other person (the “subject”) first comprehend and then accept, willingly or not, the persuader’s definition of their situation and, as a consequence, of what should be done. There are two kinds of persuasion: one invites prudent calculation of the cost/benefit ratio of alternative definitions; the other is peremptory and immediate. I will begin at the peremptory, non-reasoned—one might say “religious”—end of the continuum. We comprehend a complicated situation by simplifying it—discarding some elements and retaining others—until we are left with a coherent pattern. Situations are defined by putting a boundary around (or, to vary the metaphor, applying a template to, or “connecting the dots” between) elements that we claim are systematically related, and in the process, we exclude other elements that we mark as not relevant. Situations are handled as if they can be reduced to hard and fast categories, their actual fuzziness necessarily eliminated. In other words, we simplify situations by using a totalizing procedure that reduces alternative versions of reality to the one desired. Then, we attach a label to it and present it as the definition of the situation, as the truth. In theory, this could be done with perfect rationality by following a systematic, step-by-step logical procedure, reasons being adduced for each exclusion and inclusion. In political encounters, however, when the definition has to be conveyed to another person, the process of systematic reasoning toward a conclusion is likely to be curtailed, if not eliminated, and the conclusion alone forefronted as something authentic, authoritative, as indisputably the appropriate thing to feel or to do. There is no detailed argument to show that the definition is either materially advantageous or morally correct; rhetoric is the medium, not logic; emotions are the target, not the intellect. The definition is affirmed as a fundamental instantly recognizable “truth,” which, being fundamental, does not need (and is not open to) reasoned justification. The trick is to find an image and a catch phrase that goes straight to the heart, and convey it in a manner that disinvites qualifications, stipulations, provisos, or amendments. • “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat!”—Churchill. • “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a day which will live on in infamy”— Roosevelt. • “Weapons of mass destruction . . .”—George W. Bush. • “We are at war!”—Bush again. • “The Sky is falling!”—Chicken Little. • “It says so in the Bible!”—Pat Robertson, William Bennett, Jerry Falwell, or any other Christian Fundamentalist.

48

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

• “Mission accomplished!”—the banner that Bush’s propaganda agents arranged to have displayed when he flew out to an aircraft carrier and welcomed soldiers returning from Iraq. • “Cut and run.”—Republicans on how the Democrats would end the war on Iraq. • “Tax and spend.”—Republicans on the fiscal policy of the Democrats. All these declarations call for a non-critical, non-questioning response, a whole-hearted acceptance of the definition, and a readiness to take whatever action is entailed. Similar pre-emptive slogan-like single-label strikes are made, not only about situations, but also about personalities. In political arenas, politicians and their congeners unhesitatingly define each other in a totalizing, here-is-all-you-needto-know manner that stipulates who is to be trusted and respected and who deserves ridicule, contempt, or fear. • “Nattering nabobs of negativism”—Vice-President Agnew in 1970, on intellectuals who criticized Government policies • “Axis of evil”—Bush again, on the leaders of Iran, Iraq and North Korea. • “A sophisticated rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity”—Disraeli on Gladstone. • “He is no saint! He is a rascal!”—Dr. Ambedkar on Gandhi. • “[Admiral] Jellicoe was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon!”—Churchill. • “ . . . a modest man who has much to be modest about”—Churchill on Attlee. • “ . . . a man suffering from petrified adolescence”—Aneurin Bevan on Churchill. No room is left in these assertions for points of view that might be different; none is anticipated. Complex situations that in their nature could be more open to argument can be reduced in the same way by attaching a particularly emotive word or phrase that conceals both their complexity and the fact that other interpretations are possible. • “Crisis!”—an event that requires an immediate response without further discussion. • “Only a blip!”—what governments say about statistical patterns that signal a failing economic policy. • “Freedom fighters!/Terrorists!”—Iraq, Ireland, India, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Israel, Spain, U.S.A, Chechnya, Cuba and many other places. “Terrorism” is an all-purpose rhetorical tool. When people protest the loss of civil liberties under the Patriot Act, “We are at war with terrorism!” translates

r e l ig io n a n d p e rs uas ion in p ol itics

•

49

as, “In wartime fussing about citizens’ rights is unpatriotic!” It also means, with the cavalier disregard for logic that marks this kind of discourse, “Being at war is no reason to give prisoner-of-war status to prisoners captured in the war against terrorism.” There is no political situation, however complex, that cannot be defined by an emotive marker, which, if it works, gives the audience an immediate, intuitive understanding of what is expected of them: the American people, freedom, democracy, faith-based, family values, our brave soldiers, taxpayer dollars, all intoned reverentially, as when talking of sacred things; or, to point the other way, phrases that suggest at least derision and more often loathing: military-industrial complex, socialized medicine, old Europe, neocolonial, liberal media, dictator, hawk, redneck, dove, thugs and assassins, trench-coat liberals, male chauvinist, poofter, dyke, nigger, fascist pig, capitalist swine, fellow-traveler. Character undermining epithets, no less illogical or truth stretching, are found also in academic discourse: recall Evans-Pritchard’s contemptuous labels for those who did not subscribe to revealed religion: “unfortunate,” “more or less lunatic,” “morbid,” “dour, rationalist hypochondriac,” “some sort of Comtist.” These terms of reference and countless other judgmental labels are intended to dragoon the listener into an appropriate attitude and, ultimately, appropriate action. Paradoxically, a similar inhibitory message (Questioning prohibited!) can be conveyed by an obscurantist verbosity that has the form of logic and therefore seems to invite reasoned consideration, but in fact functions to damp down the fires of critical analysis. The smiling, folksy, “speaks-like-a-reasonable-man” Rumsfeld won a “Foot in Mouth” award in 2003 for this masterly pseudo-algorithmic disquisition on the word “know” (in one of many statements about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq): Reports that say something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know . . . we also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. ()

A question-and-dialogue-blocker, for sure! So also were the po-faced Alan Greenspan’s mind-crunching declarations on the state of the economy. His metamessage, delivered in the quasi-priestly language of neoclassical economics and seeming more precise than Rumsfeld’s labored banalities, is: “These complicated matters are best left in the hands of the experts; they are the initiated; to them the Truth has been revealed.” From time to time, Greenspan hit the mark. “But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become

50

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?” The media relished “irrational exuberance,” perhaps because it indicates, without being too explicit, what is rarely openly said—that market-dealing is a form of gambling and gambling is generally not a rational activity (except for bookmakers, brokers, and race fixers). Or perhaps it caught on because rank-and-file media pandits are unfamiliar with, but impressed by, Græco-Latin polysyllabicity. Besides, the word “exuberance” has an agreeable ring to it, a Junoesque suggestion of abundance and fertility. Definitional claims coded in double-speak, along with those presented in the transparently emotive form of “blood, toil, sweat and tears” or the “day that will live on in infamy,” differ from certain other authoritative pronouncements that inform people in quite prosaic and direct ways about what the situation requires of them. The message is still pre-emptive, but it does invite a scintilla of reasoning. The Constitution of India (or any other country), Robert’s Rules of Order, bureaucratic policy and procedure manuals, the fencing around a corral, prison walls, a notice to keep off the grass, a locked door (whether the key is on the inside or the outside), the male and female icons on public conveniences, even a nameplate inside the cover of a book are all peremptory definitions that demand or enforce appropriate responses. They are peremptory insofar as they are presented as authoritative, without a preamble and unaccompanied by justificatory statements. But unlike the nakedly emotional “blood, toil, sweat, and tears” variety, they do carry a hint of being backed by regulations that will be enforced. Sometimes openly (as when penalties are listed), sometimes allusively, they seem to anticipate contrariness and to invite consideration of what will follow if they are defied. They prompt at least a minimal calculation; they do not call for intuitive and emotional acceptance, but rather for prudent and rational consideration (albeit generally habitual and quasi-instinctive) of the consequences of non-compliance. In short, situation-definitions take two different forms. In the first, there is a presumption that the recipients of the message will at once and intuitively perceive its intrinsic indisputability. The second assumes that there will be calculation. The two forms combine serially when the persuader has doubts about the message’s intrinsic indisputability. The religious appeal may then be (inconsistently) reinforced with talk of rewards and punishments in forms that are more tangible than just having a clear conscience. Sometimes persuaders straightaway invoke a bottom line, as in the following examples: “diplomacy” by means of aircraft carriers sent across the oceans; military maneuvers held on another country’s borders; bellicose speeches about patience being exhausted (Hitler on Czechoslovakia, George W. Bush on Iraq); subsidies used by dominant nations to keep client regimes in power or to buy compliance from troublesome subordinates; plain protection rackets in both the capitalist and the non-capitalist worlds; and the Ash Wednesday Commination service in the Anglican Church,

r e l ig io n a n d p e rs uas ion in p ol itics

•

51

which includes a recital of those in the way of God’s wrath—“fornicators and adulterers, covetous persons, idolaters, slanderers, drunkards, and extortioners” and various other undesirable characters—together with a reminder that Hell awaits the unrepentant and the unbelieving. In all these contexts, moral sensibilities are excluded from the calculation and persuasion functions through the promise of a negative pay off for those who reject the declared definition of the situation, and a positive pay off for those who accept it. (The promise of Heaven and the threat of Hell, despite their strongly religious aroma, seem to me, given the popular portrayal of both those places, to be as much material, as they are spiritual, inducements.) This form of persuasion derives from the utility model: it recommends whatever course will give the better pay off, whether or not it is ethically right. It invites calculation before acceptance, because the pay off is measurable (at least in principle). The purely religious mode does not. These, then, are the two basic forms of persuasion: the religious way, which is an invocation of morality—Accept the definition, because it is right and just!—and the worldly way, which is an appeal to utility—Accept it, just or unjust, because it will pay you to do so! (Since in most situations there is a choice between alternative moralities, it is frequently possible to find an ethical justification for whatever is advantageous.)

Information Costs: Political Clairvoyance Imagine a persuader (P) who thinks like an economist and asks the rational question: What are the respective pay offs (calculations of costs against benefits) for one or the other method of persuading subjects (S) to accept the targeted definition of their situation? There are two kinds of cost: (i) information costs, or what P spends to find out what is already in S’s mind; and (ii) operational costs, or what is spent to persuade S. Both costs would be measured against the service expected—reliability, flexibility, or whatever other qualities are desired in an ally, a follower, or a leader. Persuasion techniques vary according to whatever relationships of power and solidarity P and S believe they already have: superior/subordinate/equal, and friend/foe/indifferent. Those are crude categories; they iron out even simple gradations like more and less; even so they yield nine possible combinations. Furthermore, since a relationship is not objectively given, but is what the parties severally believe it to be, the range of combinatorial possibilities increases to eighty-one when the beliefs that P and S each have about the nature of their existing relationship do not coincide. They may also disagree about whether the relationship should be changed, and, if so, in what direction. Beyond that, tactical prudence requires that ego should compute not only his/her own beliefs about the relationship and its future, but also make a guess at alter’s beliefs, including

52

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

what alter believes ego’s beliefs are; and so on. Then (my mathematical consultant tells me), on the assumption of a systematic difference between S’s and P’s estimate of their present situation, and between their preferences, and between each one’s estimate of the other’s calculations and preferences, the possibilities are 8181 x 8181, which exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe. If that is not complex enough to make the model intractable, there is yet a further level—the diversity encountered when S is not one individual, but a multitude. In short, a systematic examination of any but the simplest set of logical alternatives would take the inquiry into the domain of mathematical logic and away from what political actors in reality do. I will begin with information costs. Their salient feature is that, despite the claims made by marketers of opinion surveys, focus groups and the like, and despite the desire of politicians to be guided by (or at least appear to be guided by) “hard science” and “the facts,” in practice, the S variables do not permit systematic computation; the reality is that P’s decisions on how to distribute resources between the moral and the utility modes of persuasion (and many other types of decision in political arenas) are taken intuitively, at the prerational level of hunches, “common sense,” or “common knowledge.” In other words, persuaders, especially when they are politicians and in the public eye, conduct themselves as if they have a special aptitude—clairvoyance—for seeing into matters that are beyond the range of normal perception; they call it “judgment,” “flair,” “inner voice,” “instinct,” “a gift for leadership,” or they may claim to be guided by God. I should be precise about the type of information that I have in mind. Competitors of all kinds—nation states, corporations, football teams, boxers, negotiators, hucksters and their customers, and so on—spend time and energy to discover what resources their opponents have and how they plan to deploy them. Exam candidates try to anticipate the questions they will be asked; nations want hard information about each other’s war-making capacities; management wants to know how deep the strikers’ reserve fund is; Boeing wants to know what Aerobus has on the drawing board; the widget manufacturer surveys the field to find out whether his clients can go somewhere else for their widgets if he jacks up the price; and so on. Equipped with intelligence of that kind (if it is accurate), a competitor is less likely to be taken by surprise and more likely to catch the other person unaware. But that kind of hard intelligence about objective resources is not my present concern, except insofar as it may provide indicators of S’s dispositions and inclinations. Beyond the hard objectivity of S’s material resources is a set of imponderables—ideas, intentions, dispositions, hopes and fears, prejudices and other such motivational vectors that, together, shape S’s likely decisions. P’s goal is persuasion, implanting an idea, and success is more likely if P can ascertain what is already in S’s mind. It is not a simple task. A mind is a complexity of beliefs, values, and dispositions and no P can ever know directly

r e l ig io n a n d p e rs uas ion in p ol itics

•

53

what S’s mind contains. There is also a formidable computational difficulty. P, if aiming to be rational, can only make inferences from what S does and says, and from what other people say about what kind of person S is, and then compute the data as an algorithm of alternative possibilities to find the strategy most likely to be persuasive: S is old/young, male/female, already on my side/ not yet on my side, gullible/smart, honest/devious, rich/poor, powerful/weak, afraid/unafraid, ambitious/happy-go-lucky . . . and a seeming infinity of other binary distinctions (not to speak of their combinatorial possibilities) that are needed to generate logically the if/then propositions on which plans to take action are based. The more realistic such models are (the more they take notice of human and situational complexity), the more they are intractable (resistant to logical manipulation). Such algorithmic procedures might be attempted as a theoretical exercise in hypothetically simplified situations, but it surely would be a vastly over-systematized portrayal of what Ps actually do, especially when S is a multitude of people. There is also a practical limiting factor: the real world of political encounters has costs to not making timely decisions. If time is short, as it usually is, P can only resort to reductive abstraction of the kind outlined earlier; an exercise in combinatory logic and deduction is replaced by selecting—in effect, betting on—one or two features that, with luck, will override the rest. “They may be a, b, c . . . n, but in the present situation k is the feature that will surely prevail.” To make that kind of decision, persuaders, even when dealing one-to-one with a single S, must resort to stereotypes and intuition. They shop around for one or another reach-me-down template that provides a definition of S’s mindset simple enough to make a selection feasible in the time available. This is a totalizing—homogenizing—procedure. It reaches toward a universal S by erasing features that set the particular S (the individual) apart from the generic S (the category): not real Joe and real Jane, each with their infinite particularities, but Ordinary Joe and Ordinary Jane, the G.I. models. There are, of course, unarguably generic human features, but they all are straightforwardly biological or psychobiological: we all breathe; we all have hearts; we all eat; we all die; we all have emotions. But as soon as attention is switched to the social part of human existence, variation and complexity reappear. In the list given above, eating and dying, since they have social significance, are complex processes that vary widely from one cultural setting to another. Likewise, the basic physiological mechanisms of emotion (heart-rate, sweating, trembling, muscle tensing, and so on) may broadly be the same for everyone, but the occasions that give rise to them and the behavioral response that is expected are strikingly different not only from one society to another, but also in a single society between old and young, male and female, and between individuals. We can only control that complexity—we have to control it if we are to understand anything at all—by simplifying and homogenizing.

54

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

With respect to investment in information gathering, these simplifying procedures are more drastic when the utility mode is employed. The utility template is a mass production instrument that defines situations on the basis of a single, diversity transcendent caricature of human nature: S, whoever S is, can be bought. The morality template, on the other hand, assumes that S cannot be bought and will act on principle; it is then necessary to find out what those principles are likely to be. (In practice this recognition of diversity will turn out to be a difference not of kind, but of degree; principles too, in the context of political action, have to be homogenized.) The utility computation is simple because it has only one dimension. Consider the economists; their economic man is a culturally unmarked, totally generic, a stick figure. They have an adage: “All you need know is that every man has his price.” I heard it said years ago in a seminar on economic development; I suspect it is still everywhere taken as an indispensable presupposition by all but a few maverick economists. Here is an elaboration of it, written by Sir Arthur Lewis, a 1979 Nobel laureate, in the Foreword to a book by an anthropologist: “Wherever we study the effect of economic change on institutions, the basic answer seems always to be the same, namely, that the love of money is a powerful institutional solvent” and, a few lines later, “Many countries have indeed attitudes and institutions which inhibit growth, but they will rid themselves of these attitudes and institutions as soon as their people discover that they stand in the way of economic opportunities” (Epstein 1962, ix). This cavalier dismissal of moral values introduces a monograph by a social anthropologist—perhaps Arthur Lewis was trailing his coat. It invites two comments. First, the “truth” of “every man has his price” is of the intuitive kind; it is not offered as a proposition open to questioning, but as a firm basis on which to reason. The assumptions that underlie it are “so much the stuff of our everyday experience that they have only to be stated to be recognized as obvious.” That assertion—again an edict, not a proposition—comes from another distinguished economist, Lord Robbins (1937, 79) and it can reasonably be called “religious” in the wider sense of a truth that must be kept beyond question. Second, sometimes Arthur Lewis will be right and at other times he will be wrong, but, for sure, if you try to find out what Everyman’s price actually is, you will discover that he/she is not the economists’ Everyman, but socio-cultural man. Moral scruples make prices vary from one institutional setting to another—eating a beefburger costs a Brahmin more in negative utility than it does a Baptist. In short, the assumptions that economists make about money and institutions can be less than the workable truth, because they have not taken into account the fact that, for some people on some occasions, utility has an opportunity cost, which is a clear conscience. Economists like the simple utility model, despite its weaknesses, because it deals in quantifiables, and they continue to like it even when facts demolish the theories and the theorist is reduced to inventing an imaginary world that would fit the theories, if only it

r e l ig io n a n d p e rs uas ion in p ol itics

•

55

existed. There is an old joke about how economists get themselves out of a hole: “Assume a ladder . . .” The utility paradigm does work some of the time: “the love of money” can turn out to be “a powerful institutional solvent.” Sometimes, however, it does not eliminate other motivations, and tailoring the definition of a situation to the assumed utility thinking of S, as if that were the whole truth, has to be hit and miss. But Ps continue to use the utility paradigm even when they suspect that S might have moral scruples, because, as I suggested, time and the complexity of variables make a realistic and systematic computation impossible. When P, the tactician, has a deadline and is dealing with a mass of people who differ in different ways, a generic utility model at least provides enough purchase to get on with the persuasion—Clinton’s “It’s the economy, stupid!” or the supposedly magic words in the 2004 US election “Jobs!” and “War!” and the hardy perennial “No new taxes!” Such rough and ready reckoning of what will sell (certainly the mot juste) permits a timely decision that is at least as likely to be on target as one made by tossing a coin or consulting an astrologer. No one succeeds in politics without taking chances, because to always wait for perfect information is to make no decisions at all. At first sight, using the morality model complicates P’s information collecting; S is no longer a simple one-dimensional stick figure. But in practice, collecting information about moral concerns does not cost much more than following a simple utility rule, because institutionally generated beliefs and values are, by definition, generically packaged. One size fits all, and if P, the tactician, can discover which institutional loyalties predominate in a situation, P will also know what, in that situation, is likely to motivate S to accept the target definition. There are many such presumed totalizing institutional categories: Catholic or Protestant in Ulster; black or white in the American South and elsewhere; Hindu or Muslim in India; ethnic differences (“the Jewish vote,” “the Hispanic vote”); generational differences; gender differences (“the women’s vote” that hovers like a storm cloud over male politicians in the USA); arts and science faculties in many universities (C.P. Snow’s “two cultures”); the rich and the poor (Disraeli’s “two nations”); and handy fictionalized categories, like the “moral majority,” “soccer moms” or the “average American” or “middle-class Americans” (at present this label homogenizes those who once were separated as blue-collar and white-collar workers and so does away with the socialism-tainted term “working class”), and there are many other conceptual homogenizers that are used to predict attitudes and so decide which definitions of a situation are likely to be persuasive. These institutional categorizations reduce diversity, but they do not attain the grandly generic inclusiveness of “economic man;” they all require a step toward particulars, because they all presuppose an alternative, which economic man models do not. “Protestant” entails “non-Protestants”; “Hindu” suggests “nonHindus”; and then relative size and strength in a total population becomes a

56

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

required calculation, along with estimates of how severely one side will be alienated if the other is gratified, and so on through a potentially endless list of derivative inquiries. Once again, thoughts about cultural and institutional differences, if pursued systematically and not halted by acknowledging a computational blockage and putting an end to algorithmic reckoning, soon generate a complexity of decision possibilities that is likely to prevent any decision at all. Then, the persuaders spin a coin or call in the augurs and astrologers or just follow their intuition and take the path of faith (in God or in themselves). None of these entanglements await those who use the utility rule, because they have decided from the outset that the non-category is empty: every man has his price. “One size fits all” is a low cost computational strategy, because the utility model deals with human nature, which is assumed not to vary. By definition, “utility” is homogenized and therefore more easily computed. Manipulating opinions is then relatively simple, providing one has the means; no one’s moral posture has to be changed; they just have to be paid enough or threatened enough. Morality models, however, deal with culture which (to borrow from Lowie who borrowed from Gilbert and Sullivan, who may have taken it from Shakespeare) is a “thing of shreds and patches”; it is a hotchpotch, a pasticcio, it lacks uniformity, and, by this reckoning, should be inconveniently diverse for those who use it as a basis for computation. The permutational possibilities of the different “shreds and patches” are potentially without end. In practice, however, computational difficulties cause P to override the complexity, and, in the end, there cannot be very much difference in cost between the utility model and the morality model, so far as it concerns collecting information. What sets them apart is the operational challenge. The utility model provides a relatively simple choice of tactical response: raise the pressure (whether a bribe or a threat or both) until you get what you want or until you run out of resources. That is not, of course, all there is to it; “raise the pressure” leaves unanswered the question of what kind of pressure to deploy, whether to appeal to greed or to intimidate, and it ignores variations within each of these categories—greed for what? fear of what?—all of which require calculation of opportunity costs. Let us, however, assume that P, for whatever reason, believes that neither bribery nor intimidation would be effective: S is rejecting the target definition because it violates ethical principles. Then P must either adjust the definition to suit S’s principles (or at least appear to do so) or else persuade S to modify those principles. In that case, P’s costs are no longer only to gathering information about S, but also to bending S’s mind.

Creating Trust Now imagine that P, having experimented with the econo-rational form of persuasion, discovers that S has scruples of conscience about the target definition.

r e l ig io n a n d p e rs uas ion in p ol itics

•

57

P concludes that piling on threats would be counterproductive or that further raising the offer would break the bank. The logical step would then be to modify S’s moral posture. What, other than bribery or intimidation, can be done to displace beliefs and values that are held as if they are beyond question? First, P must present him/herself as having a character—an ethical style—that identifies him/her with whatever moral principles S finds at least acceptable, if not imperative. The word character, used in this way, requires further specification. At the present time, it is generally believed that in the USA money wins elections (barring accidents or stupidities). Direct bribery is not the issue—not a straightforward matter of buying votes with $5 bills. (I am recalling a tale about Lyndon Johnson in a Texas primary. My source is Caro, 1982.) Rather, candidates hire propagandizers to present them as morally (and in other ways) acceptable and—perhaps more frequently—their opponents as contemptible. What does “morally acceptable” signify in this context? It mostly does not refer to universally applicable standards, such as honesty and integrity. For sure, to be a known criminal does not help, as Nixon acknowledged when, somewhat late in the game, he declared, “I am not a crook!” and the spectacle of Clinton harried by holier-than-thou Republicans indicates that there was still some hot air in the absolute morality balloon. But there is also ample evidence that political leaders can enjoy the fruits of private moral turpitude, whether financial or sexual, without forfeiting their reputations, providing the turpitude, even if widely known, does not spill into their public life. Clinton, although certainly damaged, survived because a sufficient number of Americans did not consider private lechery a betrayal of the public trust. John Profumo, Secretary of State for War in Britain, was axed in 1963 from Macmillan’s Conservative Government, not so much for cavorting with a whore, but because he was seen to be a security risk—his whore was at the same time servicing a naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London—and because he lied to the House of Commons about the affair. Nor does a positive moral reputation of the absolute kind necessarily certify political trustworthiness. “Decency” in my vernacular is an all-purpose fundamental value that encompasses reliability, honesty, and a proper concern for others. “They are fundamentally decent people,” means that they always behave considerately, no matter with whom, even strangers, even foreigners; their justice is absolute, the same for everyone. God is said to have those qualities. That kind of transcendent goodness does surface from time to time in politics, usually in funeral orations or in eulogies addressed to statesmen retiring from the political arena. But if P is to capture S’s loyalty, generalized proclamations about P’s honesty or sincerity, delivered by public relations flacks or by P in person, are likely to be just a prelude to a more specific recitation of P’s political virtues. Those specific virtues have less to do with P’s fine and noble character than with where P fits (that is, can be presented as fitting) into social structures and social networks. The morality that counts in persuasion is focused less on general

58

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

ethical principles and more on specific relationships: not “this person is good,” but “this person is good for us because his/her values are also our values.” This is not God’s morality, which applies to everyone, but the in-focused morality of a community: P is one of us, therefore P must be counted a good person, and this judgment may be sustained against clear evidence that P is corrupt and devious, so long as P continues to be “one of us” and not “one of them,” which in practice means that the costs of his wickedness do not fall on “us.” Unlike God, who belongs to everyone, and unlike God’s mercy, which is infinite, the political Ps are attached to some people and distanced or alienated from others, and their stock of blessings is finite; whatever commendable qualities they possess should be at the service of their own people, not the generalized other. “Decency” and the various other one-size-fits-all virtues only gain a persuasive edge in political arenas when the likely beneficiaries are identified. “Thou shalt not kill,” it is said in the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy, but by the seventh chapter, the Israelites, who are about to occupy the land of the “seven nations,” are told “thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them; thou shalt show [no] mercy unto them.” Morality, like piety, begins at home; in politics it ends there too. The morality that does not discriminate belongs only to saints and Panglossian dreamers, who generally do not fare well in the practice of politics. (This distressingly rough and ready generalization will be refined later, but not overturned, in what I have to say about Gandhi.) That people think in this way is apparent in the crude world of electioneering. Here is Lloyd George talking to the electors of Limehouse in a notorious 1919 speech: “Why should I put burdens on the people? I am one of the children of the people. I was brought up amongst them.” The “where I really belong” gambit played well in Limehouse and it was still playing eighty-five years later, as I heard Democratic candidates in the 2004 presidential primaries telling their audience that they grew up in mill towns, they grew up poor and disadvantaged, they worked their way to the top, they are one with the people, and the like. They belong to the same moral community. That same non-material, quasi-familial link with S was the objective of FDR’s “fireside chats.” There are similar instances to be found wherever and whenever P tries to manipulate the moral convictions of S. George W. Bush, with both eyes fixed on his conservative Christian vote-bank, leverages the theme of “compassionate conservatism” (which translates as legislation that helps the needy before it helps the rich). And if the faith-based initiative was teaching me anything, it was about the President’s capacity to care about perception more than reality. He wanted it to look good. He cared less about it being good. Christian leaders, Christian media, and Christian writers, however, didn’t dare question him or challenge him or the White House. He wasn’t a political leader to

r e l ig io n a n d p e rs uas ion in p ol itics

•

59

them, he was a brother in Christ—precisely what the White House wanted them to believe. A friend in a major pro-family organization said that in their regular polling they wouldn’t even ask other Christians if they were disappointed with the president. They didn’t want to know. (Kuo 2006, 129)

Kuo sums up (249): [Bush’s] passion was a passion for talking about compassion, not fighting for compassion.

Safe in that citadel of faith-based flimflammery, Bush was able to get away with promising funds for “compassionate conservatism” and never delivering them. Morally recognized and accepted, a leader is proofed against accountability. (More on hypocrisy, deception, and Christian Conservatism in the following chapter.) This kind of focused morality wooing is not a feature only of electoral politics; it goes on all the time and everywhere in social encounters between people, especially when they are not previously known to one another. If dress and manner do not make status and likely social affiliations obvious, people probe to find out what features the other person might have that could lead to mutual trust (or mistrust). Socio-moral reconnoitering continues until each person believes that he/she sufficiently knows what kind of person the other one is. If not, Plautus says, they are reduced to treating each other like wolves: Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit In elections, of course, and in many other kinds of negotiation, there is likely to be an element of “What’s in it for me?” Material benefits often come into the picture, but they do not always dominate it. Here, I am envisaging an attitude of mind that is quite distant from the straight contractual relationships deemed trustworthy because they are enforced by law; it is nearer to the kind of trust that exists when I am confident that you, if it comes to it, will sacrifice your own interests in order to preserve our relationship. “Trust” is sometimes used to describe the hard and brittle rationality based confidence that is found in business contracts, when the law is supposed to make it too costly for either party to go back on its promises; if they do, that puts an end to the relationship, because the trust never was in the person, but only in the law. “Trust,” as I use it here, is different because it inheres in a relationship that is valued for itself and not for whatever material benefits can be extracted from it. Trust of this kind is pliant; it bends before the adversarial winds even of seeming betrayal. Still more, it is proof against misfortunes that are not the partner’s fault; whereas in the case of contracts, those who cannot pay on time are penalized, whether or not they are to blame. In other words, perfect trust is proofed against rational evaluation; it belongs in the domain of religion and faith.

60

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

Such trust is a thing on its own; I can think of no adequate synonyms. “Friendship” comes close, but is not the same. Friendship suggests intimacy, but one can trust someone never even met, as in the case of charismatic political leaders and the common people’s devotion. FDR won the trust of his radio audience, but intimacy between them in those “fireside chats” could only have been a simulacrum—the radio voice but not the person, the sound without the substance. Conversely, it is possible to enjoy the intimacy of friendship while knowing full well that in certain situations, those friends would be entirely untrustworthy. Nor does trust rest on the feeling of equivalence and equality that exists between “mates” or “oppos” or “buddies.” Mates and oppos and buddies are, by definition, trustworthy, but trust can also exist between those who are not equivalent. If that were not the case, there could be no trusted leaders, only leaders in whom one had the contractual kind of rational confidence, or leaders who ruled by force alone. Perhaps the only word that stands square with this kind of trust is “love”—agape, brotherly love, not eros, the sexual kind. It has the same quality of something freely and unconditionally given; it is self-sacrificing; it is entirely beyond the reach of rational calculation; and, like religion, it has its being not in the intellect but in the emotions. Moreover, like trust, love can survive when the reciprocated love is only imaginary, as has to be the case with God (when He is conceived in the form of a spiritual being), or when the message is delivered from the stage or through a microphone. Think of Michael Jackson or the Beatles and their frenzied devotees; and see them as the zany version, perhaps not of God, but certainly of FDR and his fireside audience.

Persuading Now assume that P has successfully shown that he is worthy of S’s attention because they share some relevant moral value. P now has the credentials to make the case for his definition of the situation, which, I am positing, is not sufficiently in tune with one or more of S’s moral convictions. Suppose, for example, that an electorate is to a significant degree Roman Catholic and the Pontificate has decreed that the decisive issue in the election must be legislative support for banning abortion. P would prefer to fight the election on economic issues, whether for reasons of conscience (he is pro-choice), or because the pro-choice forces in the constituency are not insignificant, or because he believes that economic issues are truly what matters. How should P neutralize those parts of S’s moral convictions that stand in the way of P’s targeted definition of their situation? What are the tactical alternatives? Why are there alternatives? P has room to maneuver because S, the individual voter, is not a single self but a complexity of selves; so also is P. Individuals, happily, are more roundly complex than the stick figure images that the letters

r e l ig io n a n d p e rs uas ion in p ol itics

•

61

P and S suggest. If that were not the case, then a P, who is pro-choice, could never win the trust of Catholic voters. They, however, are not just Catholic and nothing else. Individuals are never single selves; when we talk as if they were, we simplify a complex reality by selecting a particular self that fits a particular situation; change the situation and the self changes. There is always a gaggle of alternative selves waiting in the wings, and potentially any one of them can be brought front stage. Indeed, P, in my hypothetical case, can only have made himself acceptable in the first place by an adroit selection of a self that downplayed his non-Catholic status. The process involved when P’s persuasion moves S away from the moral convictions that stand in the way of trust should not, despite the religious overtones of “moral conviction,” be called “conversion.” The process is better called an “adjustment” or a “rearrangement” of moral priorities. Those two words have a huge implication for the meaning of “moral conviction” because, without appearing to do so, they undermine the fundamental meaning of the phrase, which rules out rational appraisal and signifies a refusal to doubt and question. “Rearrangement” implies that what was taken to be an absolute and eternal truth has now become contingent on circumstances; to make a rational appraisal of a moral conviction is to do a deal with one’s conscience. To put it another way, “adjustment” is possible because the moralities that influence conduct are in-group moralities, and just as individuals belong to many groups and align themselves with one or another, depending on the circumstances, so also they can adjust their moralities to suit different situations. Assuming that the econo-rational mode of paying S to change his/her mind is impractical, there are three ways for P to shift ethical convictions that stand in the way of a targeted definition. Two are hazardous, the first because it uses the rhetoric of denunciation and slides easily into violence, the second because it is overly cerebral and risks awakening S’s rational and critical faculties. The first way, which is quite unsubtle, is to directly attack the obstructing creed and denounce it as false or immoral. In practice, such denunciations are generally designed to be solidarity boosters addressed to “us,” who are already the creed’s opponents. Shared hatred of an enemy (hopefully) makes for solidarity, as will become very clear in the case of Hitler (Chapter 4) or of the Christian and Hindu fundamentalist politicians who make their appearance in Chapter 3. Alternatively, if the denunciation is addressed to believers in the offending creed, it is likely to be a rhetoric that provides a moral screen behind which forced conversions (or worse) are taking place. (If that is the case, the persuasion is not moral, but econo-rational, and P forfeits whatever are the benefits of sincerely committed support.) For the most part, however, a religious doctrine is not likely to be abandoned just because someone says it is false, no matter how vehemently they say it, unless the denial goes along with some independent— and spectacular—demonstration of its falsity. In Ghana, Nkrumah’s godlike

62

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

pretensions collapsed, not because someone preached against his doctrines, but because the Ghanaian economy collapsed. In my imagined scenario, it would make no sense for P simply to rubbish pro-life doctrines in the hope that voters would see the pro-choice light; morality slates are not wiped clean in that simple way. The denunciation strategy, unless assisted by force or fate, is usually not going to work. The second, and more subtle way, is sublation, the encompassing strategy encountered earlier. To encompass something is to encircle it, to contain it in such a way that it is not demolished or damaged, but survives intact within a higher unity. Assuming it could be done, P would present himself not as an enemy of the pro-life cause, but as the champion of some higher truth in which the prolife doctrine is integrated. Incompatible moralities are supposedly reconciled by inclusion within a single higher morality. This stratagem draws on the perception that in religion, we are “goaded by the spirit of hierarchy” to look for values that are more abstract, more encompassing, and therefore superior (which, of course, begs a question by playing on the positional and evaluative ambiguity of the word “superior”). It is hard to see this as an effective mode of political persuasion, especially if people keep their wits about them. First, in practical politics it may not be easy to keep this quintessentially intellectualist procedure distinct from the everyday compromises in which some part of what is valued is forfeited in the hope of not losing everything; what is presented as the invocation of a higher morality might be seen as nothing better than a sell-out. Second, not everyone is given to totality thinking; not everyone believes that the whole should always take precedence over the part; indeed, a reverse philosophy has long had a good hearing in this country—the individual should not be routinely sacrificed for the good of the state. Finally, in our voters’ scenario, I cannot imagine what plausible encompassing value, short of a Papal Pro-Choice Encyclical, could remove the contradiction between the “right to life” and the “right to choose,” and even if one were issued, it would surely be received by both sides with suspicion. There is another weakness. The sublation-style of argument belongs more to an exchange between philosophers or to Rector Marett’s undergraduate essaywriters than to a political arena. The Hegelian sublation, the transfer of opposites into a higher unity, demands some intellectual sophistication. This may be possible when S is a single reflective individual, who has the time, the capacity, and the inclination to follow the logic of such an argument. A political S is generally not so inclined and in political arenas, time is usually short and the need to take action pressing. Moreover, in the course of following the steps in an argument, a reflective individual tests it and may find it wanting. Successful persuaders take care not to seed counter-arguments; S’s dormant critical faculties are like sleeping dogs, better left to lie. In short, the encompassing tactic is likely to be overly cerebral for use in a political arena, especially when S is not

r e l ig io n a n d p e rs uas ion in p ol itics

•

63

a reflective individual, but a mindless multitude. The political S en masse has a limited capacity to follow a discursive argument, a limited tolerance for being made to think at all, and a naïve readiness to believe whatever he/she is told by a trusted person. We have come back to a familiar theme: in political persuasion, emotions generally trump the intellect. Beyond denunciation and encompassment, there is a third way: divert attention. Control the conversation and steer it around obstructing values. Don’t talk about abortion; talk about jobs, health care, national security, your opponent’s conspicuous failings and alien connections, the admirable qualities of S, or anything else that might hitch a ride on S’s morality wagon. Those elements of S’s conscience that are standing in the way need neither be demolished nor even neutralized, but simply bypassed. Our scenario has already taken account of this: P, not a Catholic, can commend himself to his Catholic voters by presenting whatever versions of himself are acceptable and do not connect him with religion—local boy, war hero, labor stalwart, the people’s friend, renowned provider of political pork, or whatever else. This can be done because, as we have noticed, both S and P each have many selves and therefore many concerns. P’s task is then to find one that in the given circumstances moves S more vigorously than does the right-to-life issue. When P is appealing to a mass audience, there is another complication. Each S has a bundle of selves, but the bundles are not uniformly assembled and there is no assurance that the profile of one S will be the same as that of another. P’s best strategy, therefore, when S is multiple, is to find the values that both meet the occasion and are most widely shared, because emphasis on them is statistically likely to offend the fewest potential supporters. The maneuver is, in fact, a nondialectical practical equivalent to encompassment; it might be called the strategy of minimizing diversity. It pays P to homogenize, to take the diversity out of ideas and values and find higher ones that can be presented as encompassing discrepant lesser ones; at the present time in this country, the value of patriotism, which goes along with hating both non-patriots and the enemy, is being conspicuously used in that way to paper over a chasm that more and more separates the rich from the poor, and the powerful from the powerless. Stated more generally, there is a positive political pay off to covering up the distinctions that separate one individual S from another and to discovering (or creating by the use of astute propaganda, usually about enemies) a G.I. version of S that can be manipulated by mass production methods. Craftsman techniques that make use of the distinctive qualities of each individual are expensive in time and effort, and cannot be used except in the case of the relatively few people for whom P, whatever the reason, has a special affinity or a special need. (I will call them his “entourage” and consider what else is distinctive about them later.) Those individuals apart, it pays P to locate whatever features in S: (i) benefit P (but not his rivals), and (ii) can be standardized and simplified. The most tractable S—to cut to a telos that seldom

64

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

if ever becomes the unshiftable reality (fortunately)—is the S who thinks and feels like everyone else, who has lost all distinctiveness, and who therefore not only offers a machine-like reliability, but also makes economies of scale possible, because, although the operational costs of creating that kind of S may be large, the subsequent cost of deploying them in politics is relatively low when measured against the craftsman-politicking that a non-standardized S requires. What kind of political creature does that process create? A variety of words and phrases suggest themselves: uncomplicated, simple, unquestioning, uncritical, trusting, having few ideas, unaware of contradictions, but if made aware of them, happy to have them resolved (not by reason but by fiat) because contradictions beget uncertainty and are a small step into the Unknown. That kind of S is (approving) “a good citizen,” or (neutral) a “True-believer,” or (disparaging) “a person of diminished intellectual capacity”—in other words, brainwashed. I prefer a word that focuses on the trained unwillingness to examine and interrogate, because, like Socrates, I know that the unexamined life is no life at all: questioning orthodoxy is both a duty and a great privilege. The word is “diseducated.”2 Now, look more closely at what goes on in the process of being diseducated. Persuasion, as the words “defining the situation” imply, means telling people how to make sense of the world around them, and because making sense requires that some elements be kept off the screen, we use templates to blank out selected parts of reality. Seen in this way, an unavoidable part of instructing people on how to make sense of the world is diseducating them, telling them that it is not worthwhile, or is impossible, or is a mistake, or is dangerous, or—since we are not far away from religion—that it is a sin to lift the template and see what it has concealed. Hitler, discoursing on the idea of the People’s State, commended the Roman Catholic Church for its program of unrelenting diseducation: Here again the Catholic Church has a lesson to teach us. Though sometimes, and often quite unnecessarily, its dogmatic system is in conflict with the exact sciences and with scientific discoveries, it is not disposed to sacrifice a syllable of its teachings. It has rightly recognized that its powers of resistance would be weakened by introducing greater or lesser doctrinal adaptations to meet the temporary conclusions of science, which in reality are always vacillating. And thus it holds fast to its fixed and established dogmas which alone can give to the whole system the character of faith. And it is the reason why it stands firmer today than ever before. We may prophesy that, as a fixed pole amid fleeting phenomena, it will continue to attract increasing numbers of people who will be blindly attached to it the more rapid the rhythm of changing phenomena around it. (Mein Kampf, 1952, 257)

2. I first heard it used by a one-time Partisan leader in postwar Italy, Nuto Revelli; he was describing what sixteen years of Mussolini’s Fascism did to Italian political culture.

r e l ig io n a n d p e rs uas ion in p ol itics

•

65

To the extent that S questions Truth, it is said, S has not understood it and has mistaken mere “truth” for Truth and therefore is beyond the pale. True-believers, of course, see no diseducation when the Truth is their own; they have been educated, not diseducated; they know the Truth; there is nothing further to be known—mission accomplished! An exemplar of diseducation in the American electorate was the incorporated political action group (now disbanded) of conservative, fundamentalist Christians that its creator, Reverend Jerry Falwell, deceptively (or hopefully—and cleverly) christened “the moral majority.” “Majority” was a simple lie, if it implied that fundamentalist Christians constituted a majority in the United States. Alternatively, Falwell, like any True-believer, may have taken for granted that those who did not believe were not significant, or perhaps (surely unwittingly and a great irony), he was taking a leaf from the Roman Catholic canonical practice of weighting votes: the doctrine of maior et sanior pars rules that those in an electorate deemed to be of sound judgment (sanior) must prevail over (maior) a numerical majority.3

Reality Testing I have constructed two complementary images of S, the Subject: first, the diseducated non-questioning person of faith; second, the hireling who calculates what will be the likely pay off to accepting or refusing P’s definition of their situation. P and S are stick figures, logical constructs, although from time to time I fleshed them out with contrived examples. In reality, S is rarely one or the other, motivated only by faith or only by self-interest; and the ratio can vary from one occasion to another. Moreover, I have mostly presented what logically should be the case rather than what, in any historical reality, actually was the case. Historical examples reintroduce complexities that were bracketed out of the stick figure models and so test their applicability. Cases too, of course, are themselves abstractions from a more complex reality. The difference is the level of abstraction: case material comes nearer to reality. Reality itself, entirely unedited and unstructured, defies portrayal. Certainly, the template style of reasoning is indispensable; it simplifies in order to construct categories and then be able to say what, other things being equal, should be the case. But circumstances reveal the limitations of ceteris paribus reasoning; real life cases, which instantiate a proposition, uncover complexities that

3. Léo Moulin: “Sanior et maior pars: Etude sur l’évolution des techniques électorales et déliberatoires dans les Ordres religieux du VIeme au XIIIeme siècle,” published in Revue historique du droit français et étranger, 1958, Nr. 3–4, 368–397, 491–529.

66

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

are hidden in its generalized form. Certainly, questions like the one I asked about cost/benefit and religious forms of persuasion can in the end only be answered by general propositions about leaders and followers. The more general the proposition, the further it is from experience; and such constructs, when faced with an intrusive reality, risk collapsing into irrelevance. Reality testing by means of case material does have the final say, but it does not start the inquiry. I am not looking at historical material and drawing patterns from it, but rather deriving hypotheses from definitions of religiosity and rationality and putting them to the test of real cases (which invariably turn out to contain more complexity than the models can satisfactorily handle). The second part of this procedure constitutes a refusal to submit prematurely to the totalityitch—to Burke’s “spirit of hierarchy”—and so fudge experience as something less complicated than I know it in fact to be. The following chapter begins with a simple framework of what, logically, could happen when religion and politics come together. It then uses case material, mostly in the context of America’s religious right, to find out what does happen. There are two kinds of protagonist: clerics who are vigorous participants in the political arena (many of them proclaiming reluctance) and politicians who are not clergymen themselves but gladly use religious beliefs and religious enthusiasts for their own political purposes. Both the clerics and the laymen use diseducation—“What I tell you is Truth! Never question! Never doubt!”—or, more often, they choose to ignore diseducation, including their own: they pretend that it does not exist, or if it does, it is a price well worth paying in order to sustain the Faith. They also—not all, but many of them—thrive on, and work hard to sustain, antagonisms. This lends a bludgeon-like quality to their modes of persuasion. Quite consistently, reason plays a minimal role in the messages they transmit, although, obviously, reason has been put to use in deciding what form their message will take and how it will be most effectively delivered. Ironically, their technique of reasoning has some similarities to that used by Lord Robbins and the expectedutility economists: some things are “so much the stuff of our everyday experience that they have only to be stated to be recognized as obvious.” There is, of course a difference: Robbins was talking about facts, about a natural system; the clerics and their political congeners are concerned with moral values; they assume, wrongly, that these values “have only to be stated” to be recognized by everyone as Truth. These assumptions about how to persuade other people have several consequences. First, in both cases—economics and religion—there is often a large gap between reality and what the persuaders choose to believe is reality, and a consequent tendency to make policies that will suit the imaginary world they have invented, but not the real world in which they live; policies formed in that way are likely to be at least ineffective and sometimes disastrous. Along with this

r e l ig io n a n d p e rs uas ion in p ol itics

•

67

style of thinking goes obstinacy, a persistent refusal to see what non-believers recognize as obvious. This reality myopia persists because True-believers (both secular and Godly) attribute to their own values steamroller-like characteristics: anything that gets in the way will be crushed. When this turns out not to be the case, and those who should be persuaded by the Truth show signs of not being persuaded, then it is the duty of the True-believer to lend a helping hand to the “inevitable” by using instrumental forms of persuasion that will compel the doubters to see the light. “God’s Truth” is then legally enforced on those who are reluctant to accept its moral rightness. In other words, S must be made to realize that doubt and disbelief do not pay off. Truth is no longer an eternal verity, but, like Ovid’s Gods, whatever is expedient. The political significance of using religion in this covertly instrumental way will become apparent in the following chapter, which is a brief and selective account of America’s religious right. Its more subtle inverse, the (would-be) abjuration of force and instrumentality, will be considered in later chapters on Gandhi’s religion and Gandhi’s politics.

Part II

Antagonistic Religions

b

3

D ESERT , M ARKETPLACE ,

AND

F ORUM

b He that toucheth pitch, shall be defiled therewith: and he that hath fellowship with the proud, shall put on pride. —Vulgate, Ecclesiasticus 13.1

“I think we [Republicans] are going to keep the House and the Senate, “ [Falwell] said, “I think the Lord will take care of that.” —Los Angeles Times, 24 September 2006

But the greatest damage of all has come from the practice of debasing religion as a means that can be exploited to serve political interests, or rather commercial interests. The impudent and loudmouthed liars who do this make their profession of faith before the whole world in stentorian tones so that all poor mortals may hear—not that they are ready to die for it if necessary but rather that they may live all the better. —Hitler, Mein Kampf, 152

The Religious Right (and Left) Fundamentalist Christians, who now constitute the religious right in America, at first declared themselves to be non-political. They came front stage after the First World War and in their early days, they confined themselves to preaching, to saving souls by bringing God’s word to unbelievers, and persuading them to accept Jesus Christ as their Savior. Those goals, essentially “things of the soul,”

72

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

are still on the letterhead, but over the years, the strategy has changed. They still use prayer and one-to-one persuasion through personal testimony (“witnessing”), and they sermonize not only in their churches but also over the radio and on television to bring heathen souls into God’s domain, but they are no longer content to wait for the new morality to take hold. They (some of them) go directly into politics, expecting that enforced social reform—banning abortion, mandating the teaching of Creationism in schools, altering the Constitution to make homosexual “marriage” illegal—will not only clear public space for the discipline of Christ, but will also implant it, as a first principle, in the souls of individuals. These pious attempts to coerce faith—coerced faith can only be a contradiction in terms—are the reverse of a notion that we will encounter in Gandhi’s philosophy: Get the morality right and the social reconstruction will take care of itself! Politically active Fundamentalists of the coercive kind, however (as they will not be pleased to hear), are perfectly in line with Marxists (Pol Pot will be our example): first enforce the reforms, and the ideology, since it is by definition rooted in and therefore dependent on the material world, will adjust itself to the material reality. This means that, in the thinking of some present day Fundamentalists, “fellowshipping with Jesus”—the Christian way of life—is no longer only a matter of conscience but also of the law, to be sustained both by the promise of Heaven and the threat of Hell in the hereafter and, here and now by the State and its laws. Why (in passing) is it so infrequently the (Godly) religious left? One explanation is that leftist ideology stands in the way: the left, at least that part of it that is Marxist-inspired, formally rejects revealed religion. For that reason the Vatican, during World War II, fearing the Russians and Communism, leaned in the direction of the Fascists, despite what Hitler had to say about Roman Catholicism and the Vatican. There are Christians, however, who, depending on how the words are defined, constitute a religious non-Marxist left: they support policies generally advocated by Democrats and back-staged by Republicans. Here is Tony Campolo, a minister and a professor at Eastern University, which is a Baptist institution, Jesus transcends partisan politics. That’s what’s wrong with the religious right . . . they have made Jesus into a Republican, and he’s not! ()

and I think that Christianity has two emphases. One is a social emphasis to impart the values of the kingdom of God in society—to relieve the sufferings of the poor, to stand up for the oppressed, to be a voice for those who have no voice. The other emphasis is to bring people into a personal, transforming relationship with Christ, where they feel the joy and the love of God in their lives. That they manifest what

d e s e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

73

the fifth chapter of Galatians calls “the fruit of the Spirit.” Fundamentalism has emphasized the latter, mainline churches have emphasized the former. We cannot neglect one for the other.

Unfortunately, the voice of the “mainline churches”—the voice for those who have no voice—is less in the headlines and therefore less heard than is the strident propaganda of the “Christian fascists,” the right-wing fundamentalists. I can also think of three occasions when Catholics (the “Catholic Left”) openly defied a right-sympathizing American Government. The Berrigan brothers and their associates, Roman Catholics, made a vigorous and courageous protest against the Vietnam War. There were two acts of defiance (in the Reagan years) when Roman Catholics, from the episcopal level down to the parishes, set themselves against Reagan’s right-wing policies. The first concerned Nicaragua. The “Catholic left” came out to support the Sandinistas, despite the fact that the Sandinista regime was socialist: they condemned the covert and illegal sale of arms to the Contras, who were backed by the US government (recall Oliver North and the Iran-Contra scandal). The second act of defiance occurred when American Catholics again defied Reagan’s authority by organizing a “Sanctuary Movement,” which aided the hundreds of refugees (declared illegal aliens by the Reagan government), who had fled from the murderous regime in El Salvador, a regime which had Reagan’s blessing and his active support. That regime’s enforcers had murdered El Salvador’s Archbishop, Cesar Romero, while he was saying Mass, and, at his funeral, had opened fire on the mourners. On another occasion, three Catholic nuns and a Catholic lay worker were raped and then murdered. These brutalities were incentive enough for the Catholic Church in the US to defy Reagan’s authority and threaten, Gandhian fashion, civil disobedience. The ideology that underlay these acts of defiance, although dubbed by journalists “leftist,” is in fact not socialist but humanitarian, a protest against the reckless belligerence that gave rise to the hydrogen bomb and to intercontinental ballistic missiles, and later, under Reagan, a revulsion from the sheer brutality of the regimes that he supported in Latin America. The protests did not address questions of class relations, only the conduct that, from a Christian point of view, was utterly evil. To that extent, they were on the left, but they were not socialist. In the same category are the few Christian propaganda organizations that have appeared in response to the Religious Right: “Sojourners” and “Common Good Strategies” are examples. They style themselves “liberal” rather than “left” and certainly not “Socialist.” Their program anchors itself in compassionate Christianity, which they see as more a feature of the Democratic party than of the Republicans, despite claims about “compassionate Conservatism.” Black congregations and sometimes, on some issues, but not on all, Roman Catholics (as in the movements described above), and Jews, have been traditionally aligned with the Democrats.

74

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

There have also been a few religious movements elsewhere in recent years that did openly embrace a form of socialism. In France and Italy, Roman Catholic “Worker” priests, tried, without much success, to reconcile their Catholic faith with working class interests. In several Latin American countries, priests took an active part in peasant and working class movements that were defying right-wing governments. Both these movements were unambiguously of the Left (but, again, only if Left is defined simply as a movement that helps the poor, the property-less, and the oppressed). Left-inclined priests did not have the Vatican’s enthusiastic support. Even those elements in the Liberation Theology movement in Latin America who carefully dissociated themselves from Marxism, were unequivocally condemned by Cardinal Ratzinger, the present Pope Benedict XVI.

Hypocrisy There is a time-honored and deeply rooted idea in our society that using the things of God for one’s own material gain, whether economic or political, whether perpetrated by clerics or by laymen, is wrong because it contaminates religion’s purity, and it is contemptible because it is inherently hypocritical. At least, as in the following two examples, it is an occasion for satire. Somewhere in my mother’s ancestry, at least four generations back from her and in a collateral line, is Archie Cain, a less than admirable person. He lived in the Isle of Man, he owned a small farm, called Renshent, and he is memorialized (and his unamiable qualities probably enhanced) in a narrative poem (“Tommy Big-Eyes”) composed about 1880 in Manx-English by an Anglican clergyman, T.E. Brown, also a Manxman. In the parish of Malew, in the center of the island, there is a bare, windswept, and more or less treeless stretch of land—everywhere in the Isle of Man is windswept and much of it, except for the glens, treeless. On that land stands an unprepossessing stone-and-slate farmhouse, Renshent. Oh, I knew Renshent—and a beautiful garden— Bless me! Wasn’ Cain a warden! And a round of trees, if it’s trees you’d call them, For, the way the salt of the wind’ll scald them Over there, they’re rather like bushes— However, this Cain had a very nice spot of it— About a hundred acres’d be the lot of it.

Cain was a Methodist lay preacher: They said to preach he was only fair But you couldna’ touch him for a prayer— Soundin’ like a trumpet-blast—

d e s e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

75

Cain had married into Renshent. The woman who was heir to the property had been jilted and had fallen into a deep depression. The Archdeacon (Anglican) tried to rouse her, but soon gave up. So then the Methodists went to work And the lot of them hummin about her like midges; And got her to be sort of religious; Lek [like] stupid lek, and very meek And got her converted in a week.

She found peace of a sort, the narrator says, and then “comes Cain.” Yes, he come—he come from the South, And butter wouldn’ melt in his mouth— And the Methodists—bless ye! brought him over A purpose to see would he do for a lover— Renshent’s heiress! my gough [God]! they knew Which side their bread was butterin’ to. So nither [neither] way no love was meant: She got religion (!), and he got Renshent.

Those insistently rhythmical couplets—they are surely for the ear, written to be recited—tell the tale of a man of God who disgraced his religion by using it to get on in the world. The Reverend T.E. Brown, an Anglican, must have enjoyed telling such a sorry tale about the Methodists. (The exclamation mark in the last line is his, not mine.) The poem (it contains almost 4000 lines) ends dramatically when Mistress Cain, in despair, takes her own life. Archie, having concealed the suicide note, allows a young woman in his household, who had rebuffed his advances, to be tried for murder. He is caught out, the young woman is reprieved, and Archie flees, taking ship for Ireland and then—where else?—for America. The theme—using or bending one’s faith to make life in this world comfortable—has many variations. Like other boys in the 1930s (and I suppose, schoolboys back to the eighteenth century), I learned this mocking song about the Vicar of Bray, who trimmed his faith to the winds and currents of seventeenth and eighteenth century politics.1 In good King Charles’s golden days, When loyalty had no harm in’t, A zealous High Churchman I was, And so I gained preferment.

1. The tune is on .

76

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

To teach my flock I never missed: Kings were by God appointed; And they are damned who dare resist Or touch the Lord’s anointed. And this is law I will maintain Until my dying day, sir, That whatsoever King shall reign, I’ll be Vicar of Bray, sir. When Royal James obtained the Throne, And Popery grew in fashion, The Penal Law I hooted down, And read the Declaration; The Church of Rome I found would fit Full well my constitution; And I had been a Jesuit But for the Revolution. And this is law I will maintain Until my dying day, sir, That whatsoever King shall reign, I’ll be Vicar of Bray, sir.

And so on through the Glorious Revolution (William of Orange, Protestant and “our deliverer”), Queen Anne (High Church and Tory), and finally George I (Whig). The illustrious House of Hanover, And Protestant Succession, By these I lustily will swear While they can keep possession; For in my faith and loyalty I never once will falter, But George my King shall ever be, Except the times do alter.

On the face of it, both Archie Cain and the Vicar of Bray were hypocrites: they used their religion and other people’s religiosity for material ends—Archie to acquire a property, and the Vicar to hold on to an incumbency. But there is a scintilla of doubt, if not a cloud of confusion, about their hypocrisy. Perhaps Archie was quite sincere about his Methodism; the Vicar of Bray might have believed that he could best serve God by trimming his sails to the winds of political change. Are they still hypocrites?

d e s e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

77

I will give these ambiguities a hearing in the context of a dramatic event that occurred in a village in India when, about fifty years ago, I lived there. The village, Bisipara, at that time had about 700 inhabitants. They were Hindus and divided into castes, which are endogamous and ranked. Each caste has a traditional occupation, which, notionally, it alone has the right to perform: Priests, Warriors (landowners), Barbers, Distillers, Fishermen, Potters, and others. Ranking was expressed in terms of purity and pollution. The higher the caste, the nearer its members were to the Divinity. They were polluted by certain forms of contact with people in a caste lower than their own: marriage and sex, the acceptance of cooked food, and various other ritual indicators marked the line between superior and inferior. At the top were Brahmins, the priests and guardians of the spiritual; at the bottom were the Untouchables. Untouchables, as the English word suggests, polluted all those above them by even the slightest bodily contact; they also were forbidden entry into sacred places, including the kitchens of higher caste homes. This ritual scaling was paralleled, in a very approximate way, by the ownership of property, which, in the past, had always been in the form of land. The members of one caste, the Warriors, were the dominant landowners, but their dominance, certainly by the middle of the last century, had become somewhat shaky. About a century earlier, the British took control of the area and the region’s economy began a slow process of change: trade and markets—an expanding cash economy—made it possible to acquire wealth by other means than owning land. Members of some castes ritually below the Warriors in rank acquired wealth and, since wealthy people resent those poorer than themselves assuming higher ritual rank, they began to agitate, in a variety of ways, for improved ritual status. The story of these agitations—even the Untouchables were revolutionaries—is quite complicated and I have told it elsewhere.2 Here it is enough to know that the Warriors and most of the clean castes (that is, those above the line that marked off Untouchables) had a strong sense that the social order around them was falling apart. The unwashed no longer knew their place and were challenging a discipline and a structure that their superiors held to be sacred, to be accepted without question. Bisipara’s headman, the Sirdar, was a Warrior and a substantial landowner. He was involved with politics in several ways: first, he was the Sirdar, an hereditary office recognized by the Government; second, he was accepted by the people of Bisipara and of surrounding villages (the Sirdar being also in charge of a mutha, a territorial grouping of villages) as their legitimate ruler, the dispenser of justice, and the guardian of their social order; third, like most successful political leaders, he strengthened his official position by astute maneuverings, rewarding those

2. The story is told and analyzed at length in a monograph The Witch-Hunt (1994).

78

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

who were his allies and punishing those who challenged either him or the social order that he held in trust. There was in Bisipara a caste of Washermen, represented by a single family. Washermen (since their occupation brings them into contact with polluted garments) were low in ritual rank, not untouchable but close to the line. Accordingly, their socioeconomic standing should be modest. Bisipara’s Washerman was fortunate in having a large clientele (he served not only Bisipara, but also a neighboring village) and still more fortunate in having four grown sons whose strong arms made it possible for him to service his many clients. While not outstandingly wealthy, he had become a modest landowner, which was far out of line with what a Washerman should be. He was a moneylender too, and, it was rumored, he kept by him a substantial amount of cash. About the middle of March 1953, an adolescent girl in a Warrior household, whose name was Susila, died suddenly of cerebral malaria, which kills more or less overnight. Her death was abnormal in two ways: first, those who survive infancy usually have some immunity to that form of malaria; second, by March, the standing rainwater, in which mosquitoes breed (they are the carriers of malaria), has mostly dried up. Susila died, in other words, not only at the wrong age but also at the wrong time of the year. Religion—in this case a belief in supernatural forces—has a way of dealing with such anomalies. Bisipara decided that Susila’s death was caused by an evil spirit, one of the kind that people invite into their homes in the hope that it will make them wealthy. They held a ritual inquiry, a divination. The team of investigators going house-to-house—every house (they had to be fair)—discovered a plenitude of spirits, most of them benign. But they also uncovered half-a-dozen harmful spirits, including one kept by the Washerman, which, so the masters of the ritual said, was responsible for Susila’s untimely death. (The harmful spirits, it so happened, were discovered only in those houses where such spirits were already rumored to have been installed.) There followed a judicial inquiry in the village council (the panchayat), presided over by the Sirdar. It went on for several days; the atmosphere was extremely unpleasant—even I, an outsider, found it so—and the Washerman fled to camp with relatives in another village. After a short time he returned, was pronounced guilty, and ordered to pay to the village council a fine of what then, for a villager, was an enormous sum: sixty rupees. (Think of what you earn in a month; double it; then you have an idea of what his fellow-villagers mulcted out of him.) I do not believe in spirits, evil or beneficial, and I tried, cautiously, to find out what some of the people I knew best in Bisipara thought about the affair. I talked to younger men who worked for me and who, I trusted, would not hesitate to say what they really thought. All of them were non-committal, in the mode of “You never can tell” (in their language, Oriya, kie jane—Who knows?—a phrase regularly used when one is reluctant to show one’s hand). Later, standing in a

d e s e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

79

crowd watching the performance of one of the several ritual experts introduced from elsewhere to discover and exorcize whatever demons were still around in Bisipara, a man at my side, middle aged and of the Distiller caste, no friend of the Sirdar, asked if we had demons in England. He didn’t wait for my answer; he said that of course we didn’t; neither did they; it was all hocus-pocus, and, nodding in the direction of the Sirdar, he said that it was his doing. The Distiller evidently believed that the Washerman was the victim of the Sirdar’s opportunistic use of an unfortunate event and of the faith-based emotions that the event aroused; the Sirdar intended to get sixty rupees out of the Washerman’s hands and into the village council’s fund. (I had heard rumors that the Sirdar not only liked to stock up public funds, but also, from time to time, to raid them.) Why the Washerman? Half a dozen other demons were uncovered in the search. Only two of them (as I remember) were found in substantial households and the heads of both were the Sirdar’s allies in the faction fighting in which he was constantly engaged. The other householders were poor people, who would have had trouble raising six rupees, let alone sixty. For both these reasons—having money but also having neither clout nor connections with powerful people—the Washerman was a suitable target. All that, I think, was in the Distiller’s mind, although he did not spell it out. From that point of view it seems that the Sirdar was a hypocrite who used things of the spirit to enrich himself. But that, although certainly plausible, is too easy; there are other ways to construe the situation. I never dared to put the question to him, but I am fairly sure that the Sirdar, like most of his subjects, believed in demons and also believed that it really was the Washerman’s fault that Susila had died. In that respect, he was religiously motivated and acted sincerely in the best interests of his community by removing a spiritual cancer that was attacking it. If, in the process, money happened to come into the village treasury, that was coincidental. Seen that way, the Sirdar was not a hypocrite, but a leader shouldering his responsibilities and doing his duty. I have my own explanation, which also would go counter to the charge of plain money-grabbing hypocrisy. The Sirdar seized the chance to punish the Washerman, because the Washerman was doing things he had no moral right to do: he had acquired land; he had cash; he was not, as a Washerman, in his proper place. What he did and what he had become made him an example of what was threatening the traditional social order, a sacred order in which the members of each caste followed their dharma, their duty, in a divinely sanctioned arrangement of high and low. The Sirdar would never have used precisely these terms, but he could have seen himself as protecting the right and the good against the evil forces of revolutionary change. If so, once again the Sirdar was not a hypocrite. So there are three distinct judgments. One, essentially religious and the simplest, is that the Sirdar accepted the reality of evil spirits and acted to protect

80

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

his people and his community from them. He probably did. The second, also religious but in a near-secular Durkheimian sense of the word, is that the Sirdar did what he did because he had a duty, as Sirdar and his people’s leader, to protect and preserve their God-given social order. I think he did see things in that way. In neither of these scenarios is the Sirdar marked as a hypocrite. In the third version (that of the Distiller), he is a hypocrite: what he did, he did for the money. Again, I think he probably did. (Even then it might have been said, which the Distiller did not, that it was done out of a sense of responsibility and in the public interest of keeping the village solvent.) So was the Sirdar (he died about fifteen years ago) a hypocrite when he instigated an inquiry (which turned into a witch-hunt) to make sense of Susila’s death? The three judgments are logically distinct, but they are not, in practice, incompatible; they could, as I said, all be simultaneously applicable: it was his duty to protect his people from malevolent spirits; it was his duty to protect the dharma, the divinely given social order; and it remained his duty even if, by a coincidence, fulfilling it brought in money to pay for the ritual experts who were hired to conduct the inquiry. Even if he himself profited, he would still have been duty-bound to protect the social order. So why call him a hypocrite? What is the lesson from this? It is that if we define hypocrisy objectively as a quality of the person, no one other than the hypocrite himself/herself is in a position to know whether or not he/she is sincere and to know it conclusively; and if we follow Freud, even that is not the case, because the truth about ourselves is hidden from us in our unconscious minds. If, however, we take a sociological point of view, hypocrisy is not a quality of the person. Like charisma, it exists only in the eye of the beholders. I cannot peer into the souls of Godbothering politicians; I can never say with absolute certainty that a person has the soul of hypocrite, because what is in another’s soul is closed to me. But I can work out what mundane pay offs, other than spiritual, such people could rationally expect from what they are doing. Also—more to the point—I can listen to other people’s verdicts: from this perspective, a hypocrite is the person who earns a reputation for hypocrisy. Reputations are politically significant; actual sincerity is not only difficult to ascertain (even in the case of Gandhi), but also, for the most part, politically beside the point. In politics, to judge someone a hypocrite is a verdict not about his/her sincerity but about his/her reputation for sincerity. Placed in that frame, opportunism does not puzzle me; I understand how it operates in a political arena to provide opportunists with a politically effective image. To that extent, I can empathize—get into their minds—even when I am diametrically unsympathetic. (In some other ways, such situations do puzzle me; I will come to them later.) That said, I will use the terms “hypocrite” and “hypocrisy” without further qualification.

d e s e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

81

Render Therefore Unto Caesar That Archie Cain and the Vicar of Bray are mocked for their opportunism is the consequence of the widespread and strongly held notion, not only in Christianity but also in other faiths, that mixing politics with religion is neither in the public interest nor good for the soul; for some True-believers it is sinful. Things that belong in the desert—to take the purist view of religion—are different from, and should not be defiled by, contact with what goes on in the market place, where wealth is the incentive, or in the forum, where people contest for power. Defined in this way, the True-believer dedicates his life to no one but God and keeps the marketplace and the forum out of God’s affairs. Then went the Pharisees and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk. And they sent out unto him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man; for thou regardest not the person of men. Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar or not? But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny. And he saith to them, Whose is this image and superscription? They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s. (Matthew 22: 15-21)

In that deft way, Jesus fended off his provocateurs. What he said in the last sentence now has proverbial status, because it picks up the sentiment that is common in our own and in many other cultures: there should be a barrier that keeps Caesar’s things and God’s things apart. Power is not the same as religion; morality is not the same as power. They are separate domains and those who are engaged in matters of faith and in explaining the moral codes that are a part of faith, should not directly govern. Those who govern have no competence in issues of morality; they must rely on those who are competent to teach them how to separate right from wrong, good from bad. (This is true even when, as in the United Kingdom, there are Established Churches.) “Speak Truth to Power,” the Quaker said. But Truth cannot be imposed by force; it must be accepted voluntarily. I will come back to this issue later when considering Gandhi’s satyagraha—the “struggle to find truth.” That sentiment—power and morality are not to be confused (might does not define right)—is indeed widespread, albeit taking different forms in different places and at different times. According to the canons of Hinduism, Brahmin

82

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

priests take care of matters of the soul, and it is their duty to advise the Ksattriyas, who are the rulers, on how to govern in accordance with the scriptures, on how to be a virtuous king. Brahmins, moreover, have a status that is politically useful: their persons are inviolable—to kill a Brahmin is the gravest of sins and punished in the hereafter by being denied advancement toward nirvana, the blessed state of not being born again. Brahmins, therefore, are the peacemakers, the proper persons to negotiate a settlement between warring princes. Brahmins also, it is reported, in the days when dacoits (robber bands) made travel perilous in India, hired themselves out as bodyguards. If the travelers were attacked, the Brahmin committed suicide, and in that way the bandits had killed a Brahmin and would suffer the ultimate form of spiritual punishment. Another example is to be found in Fredrik Barth’s book about the warlike, feuding, honor-fixated people of Swat in Pakistan (1959). The Pakhtun caste were the warriors and landowners; the caste of Saints were peacemakers, and, like the Brahmin, inviolable in their persons. But both the Brahmins (Hindu) and the Saints (Muslim) exemplify an ideal, not the invariable practice, which generally is the case with moralities. At different times and in various places in India, Brahmins were rulers; and Barth’s book is enlivened by his description of how Saints were smart enough to work both sides of the street, using their religious status as a weapon to fight wholly mundane battles over power and property. There always seems to be a leakage: religion gets used as a weapon in struggles for power and consequently there is everywhere a dispute over whether, and if so how, religion should be involved in struggles for power. The ideal is indeed widespread. Church and state are constitutionally kept apart in the United States, although in practice—which is partly what this book is about—the insulating material is becoming less effective. There were times when clerics and their congregations tried hard to follow the constitutional rule of separation, perhaps moved less by the idea that the constitution protects them from the persecutions that disfigured the history of Europe than by a simple act of faith: it is wrong, sinful, for the faithful to engage in politics. Fundamentalist Christians in the United States, as I said, from the beginning of the movement in the 1920s until about the third quarter of that century, believed that religion must be kept separate from politics.3 The Church was charged with saving souls, with teaching people how to obey God’s laws; it had no business in politics, which were not God’s affair, but Caesar’s. Conversely, it was the duty of the State to leave religion alone, or at most to hold the ring, so to speak, while rival faiths competed to save the souls of sinners. Religious organizations risk losing their tax exempt status if

3. Wilcox (1986) provides an admirably clear outline of the history, composition, and scope of the Christian Right.

d e s e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

83

they endorse, from the pulpit, a candidate or give support to a party, for example by using church premises for political meetings. It is a law, however, that at the present time is “more honor’d in the breach than in the observance.” “There is no choice because the alternative is terrible,” said James C. Dobson, founder of the influential group Focus on the Family, referring to the potential for a Democratic takeover of the House and Senate in November. Dobson’s organization recently launched a major vote recruitment drive in eight battle-ground states that will include placing registration tables outside Sunday worship services at conservative churches.” Los Angeles Times, 24 September 2006.

I will come back later to the weakening, if not in some quarters the demise, of separatism. Before that, I have a general argument, which, I hope, will make sense of this progressive shift (or regressive, if you think that way) from separatism towards increasing engagement in the world and in politics, a movement in which those who are in charge of the things that are God’s attempt to take control over things that are Caesar’s. Most Godly people and all Godly institutions cross the line into mundane affairs and are then inescapably—but not all to the same degree— involved in one or another kind of politics. There are compelling reasons, logistical, and above all political, that make at least some minimal degree of clerical involvement in politics unavoidable. How deeply they become involved, and at what point involvement becomes a sell-out, depends on the circumstances and the motivations. I will come to that later, and to the corresponding situation of politicians involving themselves in matters that primarily concern religion. Think about the all but inevitable participation of a religious individual in everyday life. There are some—Gilbert Murray’s ascetics, moved by “burning faith . . . , ecstasy, suffering, and martyrdom”—who try to anticipate their domicile in the Great Beyond by spending their earthly lives in prayer and meditation, endeavoring to live entirely within the domain of whatever divinity they worship. But there are not many. Indeed, it is hard to imagine such a life—a spiritual Robinson Crusoe, a hermit who speaks only with God. But hermits, conventionally, do not live on tropical islands where the abundant gifts of Nature are at hand; they live in deserts. How long could such a life be? Forty days perhaps; by then Jesus, having eaten nothing, “hungered” (Luke 4: 2). Nor was he solitary; Satan was there, taunting him, playing politics, and, like any politician, trying to dominate the encounter, saying that if Jesus were the son of God, he should “command this stone that it be made bread,” thus eliciting what has become the proverbial response of the moral to the material: “ . . . man shall not live by bread alone” (Luke 4: 4). In the Hindu religion, a Brahmin in the fourth stage of his life has the option of becoming a sannyasi, spending his days in meditation and prayer, withdrawn from the mundane world. In fact, that fourth stage of life is not a withdrawal

84

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

from the world but only from worldly responsibilities. Sannyasis are mendicants: they depend on others to provide them with food. I knew one such person well. He was a senior civil servant, holding a doctorate in a social science from an American university. When he retired from service, he left his family and went to meditate in a cave in the Himalayas, where he lived off the charity of pious villagers. He was a True-believer, one of those with whom my reason will not let me empathize, least of all when they are, as he was, bona fide academics. Without a doubt, however, he was utterly sincere. Given the hardships of cave dwelling—he did not long survive—his sincerity speaks for itself. That is not the case with those sannyasis who advertise their spiritual powers and make a trade of their asceticism.4 Nor is it difficult to look with anything but skepticism on professional gurus, in India and elsewhere, who run spiritual empires and live comfortably off contributions from the faithful. Westerners, too, have learned how to traffic in the ascetic style. A spectacular example is the late Dr. Frederick Lenz, an American who held a doctorate in English literature. He operated about twenty years back on and around the campus where I taught. He styled himself Rama (God) and was, by his own account, a man of all the talents: author, educator, expert in computer science, producer, athlete, and philanthropist. The rank and file of his devotees paid him a tithe that was more than they would have paid to attend the university; I suppose that is as it should be, if a saved soul is more precious than a trained mind. He drowned in 1998, allegedly overdosed on drugs. Any religion, once it gets beyond the individual’s private relationship with God—the hermit in the desert—and becomes a church or some other kind of spiritual collectivity, inevitably takes on the features of a business. It owns property, it collects tithes, and it traffics in favors of all kinds that range from preferment within its hierarchy, to cures for sickness, to being saved from the perils of daily life, to passing examinations, to guaranteed immortality, and so on.5 The things prayed for—that is, the demands that are made—are frequently less spiritual than they are mundane and sometimes trivial. Stephanie Simon, reporting in the Los Angeles Times (16 May 2006) on the use that evangelists

4. There is some entertaining fiction about them. They appear here and there in R.K. Narayan’s gentle novels. Aubrey Menon’s Dead Man in the Silver Market is a brisk and enjoyable satire on religious mendicants. 5. I recall with pleasure a Church, standing alone on the col that leads from the Val Gesso in Piedmont to the valley next north. In it was a room dedicated by grateful individuals to Saints who had preserved them from peril. The occasions were memorialized in small paintings. One of them showed a pony and trap struck by a train on a level crossing. The trap and the headless man were in the bottom right corner of the picture; his severed head was at the top and on the left. Yet he was able to give thanks, in this votive offering, to the Saint who brought him alive out of this deadly situation.

d e s e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

85

make of electronic media, writes: “Log on to www.worldprayerteam.org and you can intercede for the parents in Singapore who want their son to practice violin; for Christine in South Africa, who needs to sell her house; for Bill in Nevada, who’d like the Lord to send him a sympathetic auditor from the Internal Revenue Service.” Not, for sure, things of the soul, even when the petitions are accompanied by expressions of adoration. Businesses and things of the soul are different: businesses run on the expectation of utility; things of the soul concern morality. When things of the soul are challenged, mundane values generally call the tune, and spiritual values, if not entirely lost, survive with difficultly—a religious version of Arthur Lewis’s claim: “the love of money is a powerful institutional solvent.” A business, by definition, is involved in competition, and Godly businesses are not exempt. Look at that short list in the previous paragraph: every case suggests competition. Who else is dispensing favors and do they give a better deal? I should have been appointed prebendary years ago! Their Sunday congregation is never more than five hundred, whereas we never have less than a thousand worshippers! Churches compete for believers everywhere, nowhere more blatantly than in present day America where charismatic preachers strive to make converts and raise money to invest in bigger “cathedrals.” Televangelists and radio-pastors struggle to outdo one another in saving souls and raising money. Religious groups are like any other corporate enterprise that has to survive in a market. We need not go so far as Hitler (Table Talk, 607): “The Church of today is nothing more than a hereditary joint stock company for the exploitation of human stupidity.” Churches are something more than plain businesses if only because what they sell is their own brand of morality. But neither should we imagine that an organized religion can afford to deal only with things of the soul; organized religions are in a market, and market values at least taint, when they do not trump, whatever are a religion’s spiritual values. Radio-pastors and televangelists are adept, tireless, and often, in my view, shamelessly money-minded fundraisers. Here is Bishop Clarence McClendon: God spoke to me that there are 1000 people that will give no less than $100. I got his word! Get up! Get up! Go to the phone . . . The spirit of God promised me that he would bless your seed! Go to the phone right now! (Los Angeles Times, 26 September 2004)

And here is Paul Crouch, not the most politically prominent in, but certainly at least a fellow-traveler of, the Christian Right. God spoke to me clearly and said, “Did I give son Jesus on the cross expecting nothing in return? God bankrupted heaven and gave the best gift he could give . . . You can bring God a gift expecting something in return. Get to the phone! (Los Angeles Times, 26 September 2004)

86

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

And again: Pastor Paul Crouch looked into the camera and told his flock that Trinity Broadcasting Network needed $8 million to spread the Gospel throughout India and save 1 billion souls from damnation. Crouch, head of the world’s largest Christian broadcasting network, said even viewers who couldn’t afford a $1000 pledge should take “a step of faith” and make one anyway. The Lord would repay them many times over, he said. “Do you think God would have any trouble getting $1000 extra to you somehow?” he asked, during a “Praise-a-thon” broadcast from Trinity’s studios in Costa Mesa. The Network’s “prayer partners” came through once again, phoning in enough pledges in one evening to put Christian programming on 8,700 television stations across India. (Los Angeles Times, 19 September 2004)

The writer adds that that TBN was wealthy already and “could have paid for the Indian expansion out of the interest on its investment portfolio.” The rest of the article contains what looks to me like actionable statements about Trinity Broadcasting Network’s wealth, and about the dubious ways in which its funds have been used, including “hush money” paid to a former employee to keep quiet about “an alleged homosexual tryst.”6 Nor is the soul and its fate—saving souls from damnation—always the primary incentive. Expected utility plays a part. God wants Christians to prosper and believers have the right to ask him for financial gifts . . .“If my heart really, honestly desires a nice Cadillac . . . would there be something terribly wrong with me saying ‘Lord, it is the desire of my heart to have a nice car . . . and I’ll use it for your glory,’” Crouch asked. (Los Angeles Times, 20 September 2004).

Fundraisers, as one would expect, are aware that they are in a competitive market. Competition is usually not measured openly in monetary terms but by the tally of souls saved; in other words by the size of the congregation. Jerry Falwell, founder and head of the now defunct Moral Majority, constructed a “league table” that ranked the “top twenty” Fundamentalist churches according to the number of people who attended Sunday School (1981, 18). The range is from 15,101 to 2,739. His point, to be fair, was not to identify the league champion, but to show how the Fundamentalist movement grew over a ten-year period. Nevertheless, the form that he chose to present the data separates, at each level,

6. For details see .

d e s e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

87

the successful from the less successful, and his entire argument assumes that Fundamentalist churches are in competition, not only with other religions, but also with mainstream Protestant denominations; and the Fundamentalists are winning. He describes the decline in membership experienced by the United Methodists, the United Presbyterians, the Episcopal Church, and “even the Southern Baptist Convention,” which “experienced some difficulty” and “netted only 121 new churches—a meager 0.4 percentage increase.” This language clearly suggests competition in a marketplace; it also reeks of unabashed triumphalism. The spiritual part of the Lord’s Work seems to have become an afterthought. A business, since it is in competition with others like itself, is by definition concerned with power—and therefore with politics—and ecclesiastical businesses are no different. Even those who would prefer to stay out of the race—or who insist that there need be no race but only one universal true religion (as Gandhi did)—must defend themselves against other religions who see universalism as nothing but a threat to their own existence. Moreover (moving out of the theology into practical politics), Godly persons who build up a following, especially when they also amass property, swim in shark-infested waters. They are at risk if they do not buy protection or themselves acquire the skills needed to fend off predators, especially those predators who are not of the Faith and are higher in the political food chain. “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” asked Joseph Stalin; nor did the Russian Orthodox Church fare well under the Communist regime; and Henry the Eighth made short work of Roman Catholic institutions that stood in his way (and were wealthy enough to be worth the picking). For most clerics, the fact that they run a business is not in their letterhead. Of course, this does not put a brake on triumphalist head-counting or on the active, enthusiastic, and often quite unscrupulous politicking. When challenged, they insist that are not in it for money or fame or power, but to do the Lord’s Work. The same reason justifies their involvement in politics: they are not driven by a simple lust for power; they engage in politics reluctantly and only in order to do the Lord’s Work. Here is Jerry Falwell: At ministers’ meetings I had preached against the clergy taking an active role in political causes. Again, I told my fellow pastors . . .“Our role as pastors and Christian leaders is to attend to the spiritual needs of our people.” (1986, 34)

He goes on to explain that campaigning against abortion was indisputably the Lord’s Work and that was what made him cross the line into politics. His work for the Lord evidently had the Lord’s blessing: I had begun the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1956 . . . We started our little church with thirty-five members . . . Over the years, our Christian education ministry had expanded to include an academy, a college,

88

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

and a program of continuing education for thousands of students. Our evangelism program has grown to include a worldwide television and radio ministry, along with the publication of books, pamphlets, and study guides. By the time of the Roe v. Wade decision, I was preacher, teacher, chief educator, and pastor to a congregation of over sixteen thousand members. (1986, 34–35)

The bigger the outfit, evidently, the holier it is, and the more it is proven to have God’s endorsement. The fact that size is partly a function of effective propaganda, which is by no means the same as Truth, of course goes unmentioned. Falwell again: At this moment there are more than 6.5 million active volunteers working under the banner of the Moral Majority. Our Moral Majority Report newspaper is mailed to more than one million homes a month, helping voters understand the issues without political rhetoric and gobbledy-gook. (1986, 181)

The label “political rhetoric and gobbledy-gook” clearly does not encourage critical examination; it is designed to diseducate. In this televangelic world, as in the world of pop stars, product merchandizing, and Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, numbers certify success, and in televangelism they also signify righteousness. Obsession with magnitude is not, of course, in itself sinful; nor is it evidence of insincerity. But it is evidence that the clerics who think that way, although they may believe that in the long run they are doing the Lord’s Work, in the short run are behaving like ordinary power-seeking politicians and businessmen. The means seem to have become tainted by the end, and the end is power. Falwell thinks like a politician: he takes an evident pride in his organizational and competitive skills, as that self-congratulatory account of his rise from small beginnings to the “worldwide” level suggests. By marking his entry into the pro-life campaign as his first venture into politics, Falwell indicates that for him (as for many people) the word political signifies only an overt attempt to influence public policy; in this case to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal. But “political” can also be applied to any activity that has to do with the distribution of, and competition for, power. Under that definition, it is hard to see how anyone who runs an academy, a college, a worldwide television and radio organization, and manages an organization of “6.5 million active volunteers” could have avoided competing for power, both within the organization and with rival enterprises, whether Godly or secular. The part he played (and still does) in the Roe v. Wade imbroglio is just one of his many power-seeking enterprises; there is more on his political agenda than the pro-life cause. Talking of other pressure groups that he recruited into the prolife campaign, he writes: We had other issues in common besides the pro-life issue. We were committed to the traditional family. We were opposed to illegal drug traffic and the proliferation

d e s e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

89

of pornography. We believed in free enterprise and a strong national defence. (Falwell 1986, 98)

Are free enterprise and a strong national defense “attending to the spiritual needs of our people?” It is hard to see how these values concern “things of the soul”; they have more than a whiff of ordinary right-wing American politics. Sharlet (2005, 47) quotes Pastor Ted Haggard, who, preaching “free market Christianity,” says of its disciples: “They’re pro-free markets, they’re pro-private property. . . . That’s what evangelical stands for.” Haggard’s Gospel for sure is not that of Christ and His Apostles. Quite the reverse: souls are not saved in free markets; they are lost. (But even Pastor Haggard, an enthusiastic believer in private gain, would still, I suppose, qualify for God’s infinite mercy—providing that Anatole France is correct.) It seems that in Haggard’s version of God’s Good Tidings, soul saving is not an end in itself; it is a competitive business that ostensibly traffics only in spiritual goods: morality, redemption, immortality, God’s love, and the like. In actuality, wealth, power, and fame are also incentives, prizes in a grab-game.

Modes of Clerical Involvement in Politics Not every cleric who has political ambitions has them for the same reason: motives differ, aspirations differ, and so therefore does the level of involvement. Some clerics make contact with politics and politicians infrequently and reluctantly. Others, like Jesse Jackson, Jerry Falwell, Al Sharpton, or Pat Robertson are so deeply involved that they sometimes come across as politicos who happen also to bear the title Reverend. The goal of involvement also varies. Clerics who need political protection may procure patrons or allies (or, when they are themselves powerful, they may recruit political hirelings). In countries where power is won through the ballot box, if the politicians are themselves of the Faith, it might be enough for the cleric to keep the channels of communication open by—a minimal example— being on first-name terms with a powerful politician, or, with more substance—I am thinking of Billy Graham—from time to time staging an ad hoc prayer-breakfast or some other well-publicized devotional performance that the politician attends, or, better, even preaches a sermon, thus reminding the faithful that he/she is one of the chosen. Clerics can also make sure that politicians are aware that the clerics control a vote bank of True-believers that will be available only to those who support clerical causes such as outlawing abortion, protecting the tax exempt status of faith-based institutions, a constitutional ban on marriage between homosexuals, or whatever else. The favors are mutual. Both the Fundamentalist Christians and the right wing politicians seem to know, to quote T.E. Brown again, “which side their bread

90

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

[is] butterin’ to.” Republican politicians are aware, sometimes confidently, sometimes uneasily, that to win elections they need the core support that is provided by Evangelical Christians. The Evangelical leaders, in their turn, know that they are less likely to get what they want out of a “Liberal” administration. So, despite their belief that the present Republican regime does not do enough to support their cause, they work to mobilize Evangelical Christians, including those who are not yet registered voters, confidently anticipating that they will support Republican candidates. Here is one such plan: The program, coordinated by the Colorado based group Focus on the Family and its influential founder, James C. Dobson, would use a variety of methods—including information inserted in church publications and booths placed outside worship services—to recruit millions of new voters in 2006 and beyond . . . County coordinators would be asked to work about five hours a week and would be responsible for “recruiting key Evangelical churches” . . . [Church coordinators], devoting one or two hours per week, would be in charge of “encouraging pastors to speak about Christian citizenship, conducting a voter-registration drive, distributing voter-guides and get-out-the-vote efforts.” . . . Registering voters in churches is not a new tactic for either party, but Republicans have proved far more effective in recent years at combining religion and politics for electoral gain. (Los Angeles Times, 15 August 2006)

The writer adds a comment from the Executive Director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State: “Dobson wants to be a major political boss, and this is his way to get there.” There are also shamelessly direct transactions, as when clerics solicit grants from public funds for “faith-based” enterprises, and in return offer their pulpits as a husting for the politician whose party dispenses the grants. At present, the Republicans have cornered that market. The White House Office of FaithBased and Community Initiatives, notwithstanding the constitutional separation of Church and State, serves as a Church-and-State mutual “bread-buttering” agency.7 Divines and religious organizations who use these persuasive devices and make a business out of charities—depending, I suppose, on what they give in return—are “milking the system.” (Politicians do it too. Clerics are not the only ones who know how to get their hands on tax money; big business has become adept everywhere, especially in the United States, at extracting profits from, and unloading their losses

7. David Kuo’s narrative, cited earlier, artfully combines naïveté, True-believing malevolence, and righteous indignation, in documenting the cynical misuse of religious faith and, in the process, stiffing the clerics and their supporters—the politicians (George W. Bush is Kuo’s villain) do not pay up.

d e s e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

91

onto, the public purse: privatize the gains, socialize the losses.) Other clerics are less interested in milking the system than in dominating it, in becoming the cow’s owner, so to speak, wholly or in part. This kind of involvement takes three forms: power is sought discreetly and covertly; or it is sought openly but with limited ambitions; or it is a bid for total domination. An intrusion is covert when its clerical operators intend to have an effect on the working of government but ostensibly have no other political ambitions for themselves. They present themselves as providing what, Gandhi said, all politicians need: a religion that gives them moral guidance and ensures that they do only what is right. In practice, spiritual advisers often turn out to be not only arbiters of the right and the good—umpires—but also active contestants on their own behalf. Religious organizations exercising informal political power flourish at both the national and local level. Without being formal contestants in the political arena, they influence the process of government. This can be done openly and in a manner that is best described as “seemingly innocent.” The once informal prayer meetings that had been organized by groups of believers in both houses of Congress, in 1952 came out of the closet: they were consolidated as the National Prayer Breakfast, which meets annually and is attended by thousands of prominent people. Politicians, government officials, lobbyists, and many others, even members of the diplomatic community, attend to hear an address from the President or Vice President or some other high official, and, of course, from one or more clerics. The institution is not formally a part of government, and its standing is not without ambiguity. “The breakfast isn’t explicitly Christian,” David Kuo (2006, 21) explains, “But it isn’t ecumenical either. Technically it is non-religious but pro-Jesus.” (One can love Jesus without being religious? I suppose he means non-denominational.) He adds that at first this description “didn’t make a lot of sense;” nor does he say how, later, he came to make sense of it. The institution, in fact, does have a touch of the pasticcio: one year the closing remarks were delivered by the King of Jordan, and there are prominent Jewish attendees: Senator Lieberman (until recently a Democrat) and Senator Coleman, a Republican.8 The Prayer Breakfast, Kuo reports, is a creation of “The Fellowship,” which is “the most powerful group in Washington that nobody knows” and is “part of a larger religious-political world that infuses God into government not for political ends, but for spiritual ones.”9 (Such organizations have a touch of the Mafia about them. See the remarks below on Opus Dei.)

8. See . 9. An essay on Senator Brownback outlines the structure of this organization, which, like Al Qaeda or the Communists or Opus Dei, is a collection of self-sustaining “cells” or “VATs” (Values Action Teams). See .

92

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

God also can be “infused into government” in ways that are less subtle. From time to time in the United States, a Roman Catholic cleric mildly embarrasses his Church (and gives an electoral boost to its enemies) by threatening to excommunicate candidates who happen to be Catholic, but refuse to commit themselves to the Vatican line on one or another socio-political issue. More often they exert behind-the-scenes influence as, at various times, the Catholic priesthood has done in Eire, and in Franco’s Spain. Islam does it in Pakistan and in Egypt, and increasingly in Turkey, Algeria, and in other Moslem countries. In Christian countries, the (rumored) dark machinations of Opus Dei serve the Vatican’s interests, and generally do so with the utmost discretion—that is, covertly—in a manner more sophisticated than, but ethically not far from, Nixon’s “plumbers.” In the United States, born again Christians exert a political influence in some public school boards and in other sectors of public life. The causes they push often are almost ludicrously symbolic: a vigorous condemnation of the sectarian-neutral “Season’s Greetings!” in place of the explicitly Christian “Merry Christmas;” the phrase “under God” in the oath of allegiance; the Decalogue exhibited in a courtroom; a cross, erected on city land in San Diego and, when objections are raised, hastily born again as a war memorial for those, presumably including Jews, who fell in the Korean War. (Should there not have been a Star of David put up beside it?) The list of such causes is not infinite, but it is very long. The devotees are looking for a fight, sometimes in legislatures, sometimes in the courts, and, not infrequently in the streets and through the extremes of violence, even murder. Religions of that kind (and their opponents, secularist or denominational) thrive on antagonism. The second form of True-believer intrusion is that practiced by faith-founded organizations that were set up explicitly for political reasons, but have limited political ambitions. The United States has an array of faith-based (both Godly and secular), reformist, sectarian, and intentionally political organizations that in most cases respond to the perception that people of their religion, their color, or their ethnic status are under threat: examples are the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims), the Jewish Defense League (JDL), and, I suppose, the Ku Klux Klan (Protestant racists in the American South). More recently, in response both to the JDL and to the heavily politicized Christian Fundamentalism that came more decidedly into the open in American politics after the 9/11 outrage (and is vigorously represented by the President, George W. Bush), various, as yet embryonic, Islamic-American organizations have emerged. All these organizations are the Vicar of Bray in reverse: not accommodating but fighting back. Their operators look to the needs of the institution they lead and are perfectly open about it, although they may from time to time claim, as Charlie Wilson, the chairman of General Motors, did in 1955, that what is good for their organization is also good for everyone else. (In a Senate hearing in 1955, Wilson said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the rest of America.” No doubt he was sincere, but his message was politically inept: its form is ambiguous and it suggests that the welfare of General Motors should call the tune.)

d e s e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

93

The Nation of Islam and the JDL have limited political aspirations: their aim is not to rule but to make sure that they are justly and respectfully—or at least warily—treated by those who do rule. Sometimes such organizations may change and become the kind of movement that does have ambitions to dominate but without theocratic intentions: political domination over rival believers is the goal, not their conversion. The Orange movement in Ulster is an example; so is Sinn Fein. Protestant and Catholic they are, recruiting their followers from one or the other religion and not from both, unquestionably aiming for political power, but they are not enthused by theocratic dreams. The third and ultimate form of involvement in politics is the theocratic dream, the fantasy of totalitarian rule by a religious discipline that aims at least to subordinate all other disciplines if not to eliminate them. Such theocracies demand complete subservience from individuals: Ask no questions! Here is Randall Terry, a fanatical upholder of the Pro-Life movement and the founder of Operation Rescue: Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want pluralism. We want theocracy. Theocracy means God rules. I’ve got a hot flash. God rules. ()

That is Terry’s version of God’s Kingdom on Earth: Oneness reigns; a single morality rules; and the morality is that of revealed religion, sustained and enforced by a religious organization.10 The aim is to take formal and open control over the apparatus of government. Success means that the constitution can be changed and all legitimate competition thereby eliminated, as seems to be partly the case at present in Shiite Iran and entirely the case in Afghanistan when it was under the Taliban.11 Sometimes such an organization wins power but cannot shift the constitution in a way that will make its domination permanent. This happened in India in the last decade when the Hindu Mahasabha, backed by the fundamentalist Hindu organization, the RSS, governed India for several years.12 Recently, it was voted out of office.

10. Gandhi also had a theocratic dream, but it was not like that. It was about The Kingdom of God on Earth; it was presented as a discipline that God had revealed; but acceptance of the discipline was voluntary. There were no enforcers; there was no political party to do the enforcing. In Gandhi’s view, enforced faith would be a contradiction in terms: God rules only over those who accept His rule. 11. There are, of course, secular equivalents: National Socialism; Communist states; and the “one-Party” democracies that flourished in the immediate postcolonial era in Africa, most of them becoming, in all but name, dictatorships. 12. The RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which translates as National Volunteer Service Organization) was founded in 1925. It presents itself as fundamentalist Hindu, perfectly intolerant of

94

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

In the United States, similar religious organizations operate in both national and local political arenas. At the national level, they are headed by charismatic individuals who present themselves as defenders of the Christian faith, and see that faith best realized in a form of right-wing hypernationalism (not entirely unlike Hitler’s). They are called, by those who disapprove, Christian Fascists or—a less opprobrious but still accurate title—Dominationists. Their long run goal, they would insist, is the advancement of Christian morality; they are doing the Lord’s Work; but the immediate goal is political power, because without it they could not do His Work. Since striving for power corrupts no less than does power itself, this strategy, whatever the original intention, is likely to convert means into ends: in the present actuality (which is where we live) the higher religious purpose survives only as propaganda that camouflages totalitarian intentions. Christian Fascism is a version of the theocratic dream.13 At the national level in United States, a theocratic dream certainly influences some politicians and therefore politics, but more as aspirations or as rallying cries than as an imminent reality; it is a dream that has not yet come true. In local politics, sometimes the dream does come close to being realized, particularly in the governing boards of public schools. From time to time these boards find themselves in the grip of True-believing, Fundamentalist Christians, who set about reforming the curriculum and modifying the school discipline to accord with their own version of Christianity. In biology classes, Creationism is to be taught alongside Darwinian evolution (none of them, not even in Kansas, seem yet to have mustered enough gall to say, openly, “in place of”); public prayers, which are constitutionally disallowed in public schools, are covertly encouraged; there is an eager search, sometimes ingenious, often brazen, to find loopholes in the definition of what is religious. As I write this, the lawyers of one such schoolboard are arguing that Intelligent Design is a scientific, not a religious doctrine, and therefore has a place in science curricula.14 Court cases, however, favoring religious influence in schools, even if won locally, so far are generally lost when decisions are appealed upward in the judicial system. The religious right has more success in local politics because: (i) in some localities militant True-believers are in a majority; (ii) even where they are

other religions, nationalist, militaristic in style—India’s version of Fascism. 13. Its activists rarely use the word “theocracy,” which, in the popular mind, is no longer associated with the Kingdom of God and with Jesus but with Ayatollahs and Mullahs and other “enemies of liberty.” 14. Intelligent Design accepts the evidence for evolution, but argues that the universe is too complexly and beautifully ordered to be the result of an accident and not of God’s creative hand. How one could test this “hypothesis” is not stated, thus making a presupposition, and so begging the question by assuming that there is no question.

d e s e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

95

not, they still win elections because no one bothers to mobilize the contravoters; and (iii) one suspects that behind the local born again Christians there are non-local organizations, equivalent to the Catholic Opus Dei, that offer covert help with funding and sometimes with campaign planning. The owners of these non-local, politically active, and generally not very visible organizations are usually not themselves dog-collar clerics, but laymen who are self-proclaimed True-believers and are rich enough to fund faith-based movements that engage in politics. They finance litigation that they see as politically useful; they subsidize (buy up) politicians; they pay for the legal or media harassment of any politician who has incurred their displeasure; they sponsor “Think Tanks” that function as propaganda machines; and, with an eye to the long run, they found educational institutions, for example Patrick Henry College or Bob Jones University, and publish textbooks that will indoctrinate the next generation with the appropriate politico-religious faith, which is, of course, faith in the Republican party. (There is an apposite essay by Hanna Rosin, “God and Country” in The New Yorker, 27 June 2005, which opens with this sentence: “In the last days before the 2004 Presidential election, Patrick Henry College, in Purcellville, Virginia, excused all its students from classes, because so many of them were working on campaigns or wanted to go to the swing states to get out the vote for George W. Bush.”) The result of these politico-religious investments is something that no one can admire: a politics of intransigence and a crop of power seekers who are determined to win, whatever the cost to others or to themselves. I am thinking of Islamic suicide bombers, and of those fanatics in Operation Rescue who, reluctant to make the final sacrifice themselves, consider the Lord’s Work sufficiently done if they blockade or fire bomb an abortion clinic, if they harass and terrorize obstetricians and gynecologists, and if, on occasion, they murder one to discourage the rest. An Operation Rescue disciple, James Kopp, no doubt obeying a higher calling and therefore unrepentant, shot and killed Dr. Slepian, an obstetrician who had performed abortions.15

Antagonism Most political organizations, secular as well as religious, use good works to recruit supporters. Tammany Hall did it at the local level and, going upscale and changing parties, Republican “supply-siders” do it by supporting tax breaks

15. A short account of Operation Rescue’s excesses is to be found at .

96

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

and any other policy, fiscal or regulatory, that preserves the well-being of big corporations and the ultra-rich. Religious groups that seek to dominate sometimes seek legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary people by getting into good works of the pastoral kind. The RSS, the fundamentalist Hindu organization from which Gandhi’s assassin came—Christianity is not alone in giving rise to Fascist-style political organizations—is and has been from its beginning heavily committed to welfare activities; so is Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Some of them— again the RSS—promote the kind of moral-emotional-bodily total conversion (“born-again,” so to speak) that goes with physical fitness and/or quasi-militaristic discipline. Other fascist organizations are eager sponsors of this method of political diseducation, especially for the young. Hitler had a Youth Movement; enrollment was compulsory. Mussolini started almost at the cradle: young Italian Fascists were age-graded—boys from 4–8 were Sons of the She Wolf, 8–14 were Balilla, those between 14 and 18 were Avanguardisti; then they were conscripted into the military.16 That same discipline—clean living, physical fitness, brass bands, uniforms, and good works but without the explicit militarism—is found in organizations that are overtly religious, but try to stay clear of politics (the Salvation Army). Others (the Boys’ Brigade, Baden-Powell’s Scouting) are incidentally religious: they have quasi-military disciplines that define virtuous conduct and they are often associated with formally religious institutions. They generally do not parade their political sympathies, but most of them lean toward the right, at least toward conservatism, and assume, without even thinking about it, that patriotism is the virtue that transcends all others. Politically, Scouting is like the Established Church in England—unhesitatingly patriotic, leery of Socialism, and, as are many quasi-religious organizations, somewhat given to homophobia. The other method of mobilizing supporters is to give them something—or, better, someone—to hate. Politicians, whether clerical or lay, cannot function without having the opportunity to harm—or at least to utter threats against—an enemy. They need enemies. Aggressive posturing is supposed to put courage into the troops, to fire up their emotions until they are ready to emulate the Light Brigade: “Theirs not to make reply/ Theirs not to reason why/ Theirs but to do and die.”

16. “Sons of the She-Wolf” refers, I suppose, to the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. Balilla was named for a boy who started a revolution in Genoa in the nineteenth century by throwing stones at the Austrian occupiers. Avanguardisti were the advance guard: those on the threshold of manhood. The three branches had a similar discipline: indoctrination with Fascist values, physical exercise, and barrack-square drills, all intended to awake a martial spirit that Mussolini thought to be lacking in the Italian people. For a comparisons with Hindu fascism, see .

d e s e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

97

Not surprisingly, Christian Fascism is redolent with aggression, which is openly and proudly expressed. Falwell boasts about the effectiveness of his political clout. We’ve helped elect Congressmen and senators who support our goals, and we’ve helped to unseat some of the most powerful men in the government who oppose those goals. (Falwell 1986, 182)

Sometimes the language is even more direct. The Reverend Hutcherson, a former professional football player and a pastor in the Antioch Bible Church, strongly disapproves of marriage between homosexuals. He said, in the manner of a perfect True-believer, There are absolutes and I’m absolutely right on this issue. God does not want marriage to be redefined.

And he added, Don’t mess with God’s people unless you want your office window view changed. ()

He does not mince words. Falwell, combining menace with self-congratulation, reminds his audience that his Moral Majority could unseat “powerful men in government”; Hutcherson uses the rhetorical device of gangster-like understatement and threatens to have “your office window view changed”; Robertson casually suggests that the Lord’s Work includes assassinating the President of Venezuela (“go ahead and take him out”), making his case, incongruously, in the mode of expected utility: assassination would cost less than going to war.17 Antagonism itself is sometimes lauded as a virtue and a necessity. The very nature of the ministry involves an aggressive confrontation of Christianity with nonChristian society. (Falwell 1981, 55–56)

17. If one takes this into account, along with his warning to “the good citizens of Dover,” and with the confident assertion in January 2006 that Ariel Sharon, having organized the Jewish evacuation of Gaza, had suffered a stroke because God was offended, it would be hard to doubt his sincerity. If he were opportunistic, calculating that his words would energize his True-believers and so give him more political clout, he would have learned that the pay off to such extreme pronouncements is very negative; specifically, from the ridicule he brought on himself, and especially the protests that came from the religious right as well as the popular reaction to his blaming of the Twin Towers catastrophe on the prevalence of homosexuality and abortion. Alternatively, of course, he could still be opportunistic: insincere, but also stupid. Alternatively again, his rhetoric might be effective and his audience stupid.

98

•

god- b ot h e r e r s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie v e rs

In fairness, he does immediately go on to say that the Gospel is not to be spread “by the sword.” Nevertheless, “aggressive confrontation” suggests intimidation more than it suggests persuasion. On another occasion, while talking to Pat Robertson, Falwell was less cautious: Banishing sinfulness and immorality from the United States is going to be no small task. But once we’re done, things are going to be a lot different around here. We’ll have a theocracy and all that entails: book burnings, compulsory religious services, forced conversions. Think Afghanistan under the Taliban regime, except without the ridiculous wardrobe. Plus, it will be based on the actual word of God, instead of some pseudo-religious cult. ()18

Randall Terry’s message is absolutely unambiguous: I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good . . . ()19

So is this: If we’re going to have true reformation in America . . . it is because men once again, if I may use a worn out expression, have righteous testosterone flowing through their veins. They are not afraid of contempt for their contemporaries. They are not even here to get along. They are here to take over. ()

“Righteous testosterone” is described by those less delicate than Randall Terry in their choice of words, as “cojones” or “balls.” He describes one way in which he, being man enough to put contempt into action, will do the Lord’s Work. Apostrophizing gynecologists and obstetricians who perform abortions, he promises, When I, or people like me, are running the country, you’d better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we will execute you. I mean every word of it. I will make it part of my mission to see to it that they are tried and executed. ()

18. I wonder whether any Taliban divine would be silly enough to comment in that way on the Christian dog-collar style. 19. This is Hitler again: “It was only in virtue of this passionate intolerance that an apodictic faith could grow up. And intolerance is an indispensable condition for the growth of such a faith.” (Mein Kampf, 254).

d e s e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

99

In this and the two preceding sections, I have been talking about the various ways in which clerics enter into politics and their motives for doing so: maneuvering to protect property, protecting political status by exerting a limited and focused influence over public affairs, and, finally, the mega-ambitions of Christian Fascism. There is a pattern in this clerics-into-politics process neatly caught in the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible: “He that toucheth pitch, shall be defiled therewith: and he that hath fellowship with the proud, shall put on pride” (Ecclesiasticus 13.1). The careers of clerics who have crossed the line into politics seem to follow that pattern: once in, there is no withdrawal (except, perhaps, to a cave in the Himalayas). They are caught, as if in a python’s teeth, and have only one direction in which to go. They are soiled by a lust for power, but, along with their fellow True-believers, they are nevertheless proudly sure of their own righteousness, claiming that power is only a means to do the Lord’s work. Power works that way: it inflates the egos of those who have it, and it is apt to be selfjustifying, and certainly not easily given up. Those who lose it generally have it wrested from them. Power—not necessarily its use, but certainly the struggle for it—comes at the expense of the New Testament (or Gandhian) variety of spiritual concerns. Again, I cannot talk with certainty about motives. What really goes on in the soul of a Falwell or of a Robertson is beyond my ken; in those locations, it may well be taken for granted that power and spiritual concerns do not compete with, but augment, one another: the more the political clout, the more the holiness. I can, however, ascertain what such people do, how much time and resources they expend on competing for power, what they see as success and how they measure it, and how frequently, in seeking power or using it, they depart from the paths of their own religion’s righteousness. In other words, their public lives are visible, even when their souls are not. I can observe how far removed they are from the spiritual full-timers—I called them hermits—who abandon worldly responsibilities and worldly ambitions and spend all their time and energy in meditation and in communion with the Divine. Televangelists would no doubt claim that their pastoral vocation—shepherding souls into the Lord’s fold, prohibiting abortion, or making life hell for selected sinners (homosexuals or those who do not believe that a free market economy is God-given or who cannot appreciate that it is America’s manifest destiny not only to “overspread the continent,” but also to recreate the world in its own image)—is no less the Lord’s Work than is praying or saving the souls of individuals. Perhaps they are sincere, perhaps not. But whatever is going on in their souls, they conduct themselves in the manner of power-seeking politicians in search of a following. To take this analysis further, we need to compare clerics who cross the line into politics with politicians who make use of religion, sometimes as a

100

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

guide (Gandhi will be the principle example) and sometimes as a weapon, and sometimes as both, which is probably the case with the present day American politicians, both clerical and secular, who make their appearance in the pages that follow. They are an assorted lot: some fortify success in politics (or aspire to it) by cultivating True-believing segments in an electorate; others make opportunistic use of morality and religion to destroy rivals—the harrying of President Clinton over a lapse into lechery is a recent example; and some, who have disgraced themselves in the political arena, confess to their sins, make a public (but incomplete) departure from politics, claim to have been “saved” by “finding God,” repent loudly, and are born again into political respectability, their political sins having been washed away—or at least whitewashed. Their reward is not only spiritual redemption, but also political and financial rehabilitation.

Paraclerics: Repenting Paraclerics do not style themselves as Reverend, but in other respects, especially in the way they raise funds and what they do with the money, not to mention their propensity to sermonize, they are to be counted in the religious right no less than are Reverend Falwell, Reverend Robertson or the egregious Reverend Hutcheson. Paraclerics are the religious equivalent of paralegals or paramedics: they function as religious leaders without having graduated from Divinity School, without having the right to wear clerical insignia, without, that is to say, the benefit of a dog-collar. There are many of them; some exercise considerable power. I will focus on one of them, Charles Colson. He was President Nixon’s “special adviser.” He was caught breaking the law, convicted, and sent to prison. He found Truth, in his case evangelical Christianity, and so expunged his public disgrace—or at least behaved as if it had been expunged. Having found God, he was “born again” into a life of public service. God’s forgiveness has been confirmed by Colson’s this-worldly success: he is a powerful man who makes a more than comfortable living out of his redemption. Colson, a lawyer, was a special adviser to President Nixon from 1969 to 1973. In 1971, during the war in Vietnam, the Committee to Re-elect the President (“CREEP”) commissioned Colson to organize a burglary by a White House Special Operations Unit (the “Plumbers”). Their task was to break into the office of a psychiatrist in order to find material that would discredit Daniel Ellsberg, a former defense analyst, who had seriously embarrassed the President by releasing to the New York Times the “Pentagon Papers,” a classified (and dismal) report on the war’s progress and prospects. A year later, the Plumbers attempted to bug the office of the Democratic National Committee,

d es e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

101

which was located in the Watergate office complex. They bungled that job too, were caught, and the subsequent investigation implicated not only the Plumbers themselves, but also those in the White House who had organized the break-in, contributing, eventually, to Nixon’s resignation in 1974. In that same year—justice may be unrelenting but it is seldom in a hurry—Colson was indicted, not for organizing the burglary, but for obstructing justice by attempting to cover up what had been done. He pleaded guilty and was given a one-to-three year jail sentence. He served seven months. Before the sentence was announced, Colson made it known that he had become a born-again Christian. Cynics said that he had done so in the hope of getting a lighter sentence.20 That may be the case, but what he did afterwards, by way of penitence, has achieved much more than a reduced sentence: it has made him a celebrity, given him control over large sums of money, and made him a powerful player in the political arena, albeit less strident than Falwell or Robertson. In 1976, out of jail but still carrying the stigma of a convicted felon (he could not vote), he founded the Prison Fellowship Ministries (PFM), an organization charged with helping convicts, while they are still in jail, to study the Bible, repent, and accept Jesus Christ as their savior. The PFM Website () describes the organization: Prison Fellowship reaches out to prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their families both as an act of service to Jesus Christ and as a contribution to restoring peace to our cities and communities endangered by crime. For the best way to transform our communities is to transform the people within those communities—and truly restorative change comes only through a relationship with Jesus Christ. Prison Fellowship’s logo is representative of Isaiah 42:3: “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. In faithfulness he will bring forth justice.” The symbol reminds us that while society may cast aside those people it deems useless and unworthy, God continues to pursue them with His steadfast love, offering forgiveness and restoration.

Along with this evangelical goal go, predictably, good works: The focus of our ministry includes fellowshipping with Jesus (including teaching others to live and look at life from a biblical perspective), visiting prisoners, and welcoming the children of prisoners.

20. In his autobiographical memoir, Born Again, a cautionary tale for those in high places who are tempted to sin, Colson insists that his conversion was not done to meet the occasion, but had long since been in the making. He anticipated, he claims, that his “fellowshipping with Jesus” would be lampooned, and endeavored to take the sting out of the mockery by defiantly reproducing in his book four satirical cartoons and an Art Buchwald derisory essay that had appeared in 1974.

102

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

There follows a longer list of programs. Under the heading “Fellowshipping with Jesus,” the Wilberforce Forum “equips Christians in all walks of life to develop and defend a clear Christian worldview.” The Justice Fellowship “works to integrate biblically based, restorative reforms into the criminal justice system.” There are programs for Visiting prisoners; for In-Prison Seminars and ongoing Bible Studies that “help draw prisoners into a vital relationship with Christ that can transform their lives and futures.” There is a program for collaborating with other ministries that “together seek to take the Gospel to every prisoner in every U.S. prison.” There is a Pen-Pal Program; a newspaper for prisoners that “gives hope and help through testimonies and teaching”; a Campus Ministry that “equips college students to bring clear biblical thinking into the classroom, to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with those in prison”; and, to end the list, The Angel Tree “reaches out to children of prisoners through its Christmas, Camping, and Mentoring programs, all designed to present Christ’s love, strengthen bonds between children and their parents in prison, and help the kids reach their highest potential in Christ.” In short, an evangelical mega-market! The website includes invitations to contribute by working in one or another program and by making donations. The PFM also receives substantial grants from foundations that support both evangelical Christianity and various rightwing political causes. The PFM, as an organization, is indisputably a worldly success: it claims to have branches or affiliates in sixty nations. Nor has Colson’s work gone unrecognized. In 1993, he was awarded the Templeton Prize, which is given for “Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities.” One might think of the Templeton as the Nobel Prize for religion. Those honored are mostly Christians; some of them are clerics; others are scientists who endeavor to reconcile their faith with what they do in their work. There have also been Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist recipients. The award includes a substantial sum of money, in Colson’s case, it was about $1 million. Colson has a radio program (a part of the Wilberforce Forum) and has published several books. What he earns in royalties and prizes goes to help the PFM and is therefore exempt from taxation. In 2000, the Governor of Florida, Jed Bush, restored Colson’s civil rights. I can imagine Colson saying, as Gandhi did, that politics “bereft of religion” is “absolute dirt.” This suggests the question that shapes this book: How, since founding the PFM, does Colson conduct himself in the territory that is common both to politics and to religion? He does it with considerably more finesse than his loud-mouthed clerical congeners, Robertson and Falwell. I cannot imagine him publicly advocating the assassination of the head of another state, as Robertson did. Nor would he have been as inept as Falwell, who took a trip to South Africa, announced his support for apartheid, and called Bishop Tutu a phony (World News, N.Y. Times, 21 August 1985—Falwell did apologize). Nor, I think, would Colson have ever

d es e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

103

committed such a poisonous floater as to say that the Twin Towers disaster was God’s punishment on Americans for tolerating homosexuality and abortion. Under Nixon’s regime, Colson learned how to play the game of politics effectively (until he came unstuck), not the politics of the hustings, but the mixture of chess and poker, flimflammery and plain dirty tricks, that goes with backroom deals and ethical indifference—precisely the world that Gandhi condemned as “absolute dirt.” So are we to say that this is genuine redemption? Did Colson come face-toface with God, repent for what he had done, and now make sure that his politics follow the path laid down by his religion? I think that is probably what Colson believes happened to him, but, to say it yet again, we can never know for sure what is in another’s mind. We can look at what he does, and we can work out what kind of religion guides him, and ask what effect he has on America’s political arenas. There are two kinds of inquiry: one is into the faith that Colson proclaims; the other is into what he chooses to do with it. The faith is that which made Sidney Herbert write, “I am more and more convinced every day that in politics, as in everything else, nothing can be right which is not in accordance with the spirit of the gospel.” But what is the “spirit” of the Colson’s gospel? It is not only knowing that “truly restorative change comes only through a relationship with Jesus Christ,” nor is it only “fellowshipping with Jesus,” nor is it foregoing all of those dirty tricks that seemed to have come so easily to Nixon’s entourage, nor is it only the manifestly good works of the PFM. The good Christian is required also to “defend a clear Christian worldview.” Then what is the Christian worldview? As I understand it, it is above all the “charity” of “faith, hope, and charity”—“Though I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and I have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” That is the opening of First Corinthians: 13, and the same sentiment is pursued through another twelve melodious verses. Charity, in the modern idiom, is what the rich give to the poor, which, I suppose is amply demonstrated in the PFM’s good works. But the charity of St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians has a wider and deeper meaning. It is taken from the Latin word caritas, which means, among other things, caring or love. Its Greek equivalent is agape, the love that God bestows on men and they on Him, and, not least, the love that they (should) bestow on each other. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matthew 19: 19). It is the Gandhian message: Hate the sin but love the sinner! There are no enemies, there is no one who deserves to be hated. All, the PFM propaganda says, can come together in “His steadfast love [that offers] forgiveness and restoration.” How well does Colson’s practical Christianity measure up to these standards? We should look not only at what is said, but also at what is done. Certainly, the PFM’s good works are the kind of charity that is the rich man’s gift to his

104

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

poor neighbor. They also come near to the conduct that is implied in caritas and agape—man’s love not only for God but also for other men—when the PFM works to make the lives of prisoners and of their families easier, and to return them to society as God-fearing Christians who love not only Jesus but also their neighbors, especially those that have criminal tendencies. So far the message is in perfect accord with the philosophy of Gandhi and with the New Testament caritas; it is a religion of love. But Colson is not only a religious person; he was—and is still—a political person, and politics do not thrive on love. Nor do politicians: they need designated enemies. Where does Colson stand? Does his conduct pass the test of charity, of Christian love? Does he “hate the sin, and love the sinner”? Yes; at least part of his conduct signifies that he does: criminals are, almost by definition, sinners, and the PFM loves them enough to want to bring them back into society: “ . . . while society may cast aside those people it deems useless and unworthy, God continues to pursue them with His steadfast love.” But what Colson does shows that his caritas is not bestowed on everyone. A critic writes: Secular admirers overlook the central fact about Colson’s work: He is a hard-core evangelist. Colson seeks to convert prisoners to Christianity, not necessarily to rehabilitate them. If they repair their lives, all the better, but souls matter most. This fact shadows Colson’s ambitious Inner Change project. Colson’s volunteers run the daily lives of about 200 Texas inmates. From dawn to dusk, the inmates attend prayer meetings, Bible study, and chapel. All activities are explicitly evangelical and Protestant. Though Inner Change is being widely praised and imitated, Muslims in the program complain of ostracism, and civil libertarians are alarmed at the project’s aggressive promotion of Christianity. (From an essay by David Plotz, )

If it is the case that Muslims make this complaint, and if it is justified, then it seems that not only the sin (not being a Christian), but also the sinners do not qualify for Christian love, for caritas. (We should not be surprised. Hating the sin without hating the sinner, when the sinner does things that you believe are hateful, is, for sure, a feat of emotional disconnection that is not easily achieved.) Others are disqualified not for having the wrong faith, but for conduct that, in the PFM’s definition, is beyond the pale, so sinful that the sinner cannot be loved, as an ordinary felon can. Colson is a member of the Arlington Group, a political alliance of 53 organizations of the religious right. Other prominent members are Bill Bright, one-time chairman of Campus Crusade for Christ, D. James Kennedy, president of Coral Ridge Ministries, Carl D. Herbster, president of the American Association of Christian Schools, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Gary Bauer of American Values, Bill Bennett of Empower America, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Sandy Rios of Concerned Women for America, and Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation. This group

d es e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

105

campaigned for a constitutional amendment that would make gay marriage illegal. Colson had a major hand in drafting the proposal, and when it did not get past Congress, he said, addressing a rally in Washington, that the campaign must continue: “I look at this as a 10-year fight. This is Day One. This is the mother of all culture war battles. This is the one that decides what kind of a country we’re going to be.” He told the crowd not to despair: “despair is a sin because it denies the Sovereignty of God.”21 Colson may be in the business of saving souls, and one might argue on the principle that punishment is a sign of love (as sometimes is said about disciplining children) and that, in a profound sense, Colson loves homosexuals. Otherwise, why should he take the trouble to castigate them? The same might be said of his campaign against those who do not want the Decalogue displayed in Government buildings. No punishment is involved there; the enterprise is purportedly done to promote the spiritual welfare of all. The propaganda against Darwinian evolutionary theory falls into the same category. Those who imagine that there is no Creator put their souls at risk and deprive themselves of reaching their “highest potential in Christ.” But, it should be noticed that these are also goals that right-wing politicians in the US find acceptable. Secular politics have more than a foot in the door of Colson’s evangelical crusades. Or perhaps that should be the other way round: Colson’s evangelism often concerns itself with issues that are hard to connect with converting unbelievers and saving their souls. For instance, he took a vigorous part in the condemnation of Clinton. Clinton’s soul, one might say, was so much endangered by his propensity to fornicate that only by punishing him could it be saved. Alternatively, one might suggest that Colson had been a servant of a Republican regime; Clinton was a Democrat; and Colson was moved as much by longstanding political allegiances and enmities as by a desire to save Clinton’s soul. Even more blatantly partisan and political, and on a level with Colson’s association with the Arlington Group’s campaign against homosexuals, is his signature in 2002 on the Land letter. This was written by Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, supporting the attack on Iraq. It was signed by Colson, James Kennedy (President of Coral Ridge Ministries), Carl Herbster (President of the American Association of Christian Schools), and Bill Bright (Chairman of Campus Crusade for Christ). The letter, sent in October 2002 to George Bush, set out the reasons why the preemptive invasion of Iraq was, in the judgment of these evangelical Christians, in conformity with the ethical standards required for a war to be a “just war,” a concept that has its origins in the writings of Aquinas. “Just war” standards refer both

21. That statement prompts theodicy: If God is sovereign why does He permit the despair? Perhaps He enjoys the spectacle.

106

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

to the circumstances that justify going to war and the way in which war is conducted. The criteria, as laid out in the Land letter, are that: (i) it is a defensive war; (ii) the intent is just; (iii) there is no alternative but to go to war, because Sadam Hussein is developing weapons of mass destruction and has links with Al Qaeda; (iv) the war has limited goals; (v) the US has the legitimate authority to declare war; (vi) it is likely to succeed (What has that to do with justice?); (vii) civilians will not be attacked; and (viii) the cost in human life, on both sides, is justified by the attacker’s intentions. Three years later, what is happening in Iraq gives some of these stipulations a hollow ring. “Politics bereft of religion are absolute dirt, ever to be shunned.” The Land Letter, religion’s intervention into the politics of war-making, did not remove the “dirt”; at best, it was swept under the rug. It could, I suppose, be said, as Gandhi implied, that it is the duty of religion to provide a morality for politicians. Religious people, lay or cleric, who intervene in politics would say they are doing exactly that. Perhaps they are. But it is not the morality of caritas—unfailing love for one another—that in this and most other cases is being imparted. It is a religion of hatred, intolerance, bigotry, the wish to conquer, crusading, ethnic cleansing, pogroms, holocausts, and the like: in short, the extreme form of that distinctive morality of power-politics, which is “might is right.” What is the moral of Colson’s career? Opportunist or not, he began his post-Watergate journey on the path that is marked by Gandhi’s satyagraha, the struggle to find Truth (more on satyagraha later). He found it in Evangelical Christianity; but now, thirty years later, the appearance is different. Gandhian Truth shuns power; so too, in its pure form, does New Testament Christianity. As the founder and chief executive of the Prison Fellowship Ministries, Colson has power; he commands resources; inevitably he finds himself projected into politics. In politics, nothing can be done without enemies. What may have begun as a religion of love became, at least in part, a religion of hatred. Antagonistic religions are at home in power politics; religions of love (as will become painfully clear in Gandhi’s case) are not.

Religion as a Weapon: Mrs. Schiavo Bisipara’s Sirdar was a politician in the constructive sense of the word; that is to say, he exercised power and could claim to have a duty to protect his community from dangers, including those that came from malevolent spirits. I do not think that he felt much need to justify himself: his office was hereditary, not elective; and popular support was with him when he instigated the witch-hunt. The Washerman had no allies and the voices of opposition, like that of the Distiller skeptic, were neither numerous nor loud. In the United States, there is a different kind of politics: popular support—the support of voters—is an important (but not the only) way to gain or to hold on to

d es e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

107

power. The use by politicians of faith-based congregations and faith-based sentiments to gain this kind of support is exemplified in the malicious and self-serving rhetoric of the first of the two quotations given below. The second quotation, also polemical, presents itself in the mode of “knowledge and reason,” (which, Gilbert Murray said, provides “austere guidance”) to demonstrate that the first speaker is nothing but a hypocrite. Both statements are lucid enough (they noticeably lack the muscular restraint of Gilbert Murray’s prose), but they do require some context to make their significance understandable. The occasion was a much publicized (and failed) attempt by Republican politicians in the House of Representatives, led by Tom DeLay, to prevent the husband of a brain-dead woman (Mrs. Schiavo) from having her feeding tube removed. The husband maintained that she would have wished it so; his detractors, who were principally the woman’s parents and the God-bothering politicians who thrust themselves into the affair (and who certainly did not “walk gently”) maintained that life always and everywhere is sacred: to terminate a life, whether in this fashion or by abortion or by euthanasia (but apparently not by judicial execution) is to defy God’s Will. Friday. March 18th. 2005, Washington. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) today delivered the following remarks at a press availability on the House of Representatives’ efforts to save the life of Terri Schiavo. “It is now one o’clock on the East Coast, the time preordained by a Florida state judge to allow for denial of food and water to Terri Schiavo. This act of barbarism can be, and must be, prevented. The Senate has before it the Protection of Incapacitated Persons Act of 2005. This bill is the right thing to do. Unfortunately, they have chosen to adjourn rather than pass it. Those senators responsible for blocking the bill yesterday afternoon, Senators Boxer, Wyden, and Levin, have put Mrs. Schiavo’s life at risk to prove a point—an unprecedented profile in cowardice. The American people are not interested in squabbles between Republicans and Democrats, or between the House and Senate. They care, and we care, about saving Terri Schiavo’s life. The House bill will do that. Terri Schiavo is alive. She is not ‘barely alive.’ She is not ‘being kept alive.’ She is as alive as you or I, and as such we have a moral obligation to protect and defend her from the fate premeditated by the Florida courts. This is not over. We are still working, so are Mrs. Schiavo’s lawyers, and so is the Florida state legislature. This is not over. To friends, family, and millions of people praying around the world this Palm Sunday weekend: do not be afraid. Terri Schiavo will not be forsaken.” ()

Compare this: “Deathbed Conversion: the lesson of Tom DeLay’s mortal hypocrisy.” William Saletan.

108

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

In 1988, Tom DeLay’s 65-year-old father, Charles DeLay, suffered catastrophic brain damage and went into a coma. He had no hope of recovery but evidently reacted when his son entered the room. Although Charles DeLay had no living will, his family concluded that he would be better off dead and wouldn’t want to go on living this way. Tom DeLay joined other family members in deciding to withhold dialysis. His father died. That story, pieced together from interviews and medical and court records by Walter F. Roche Jr. and Sam Howe Verhovek of the Los Angeles Times, defies Tom DeLay’s pronouncements 16 years later. In the Terri Schiavo case, DeLay condemns the reasoning he and his relatives followed when the tragedy was theirs. Which is more honorable: what DeLay says as a politician, or what he did as a son? And what does that tell us about the wisdom of families and politicians in matters of life and death? DeLay hasn’t confined his condemnation to the principles on which his family acted. He has condemned the character of people who now apply or defend those principles. On March 18, he charged, “Senators Boxer, Wyden, and Levin have put Mrs. Schiavo’s life at risk to prove a point—an unprecedented profile in cowardice.” A day later, he said of Schiavo’s husband, “I don’t have a whole lot of respect for a man that has treated this woman in this way . . . My question is: “What kind of man is he?” Why the difference between then and now? Maybe because DeLay saw his father as a human being. He speaks of Schiavo as something more—and less. “It’s more than just Terri Schiavo,” DeLay told the Family Research Council on March 18. “It is a critical issue for people in this position, and it is also a critical issue to fight the fight for life, whether it be euthanasia or abortion. And I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, one thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to elevate the visibility of what’s going on in America.”()

That last sentence is perhaps not exactly as DeLay intended: it implies that God is a politician and, like DeLay himself, ready not only to make opportunistic use of other people’s sufferings, but even to inflict suffering in order to advance an agenda.22 Later in his speech, he made it clear that he and God were working in tandem; his agenda was also God’s agenda. God was not pleased to see DeLay and the “conservative movement” attacked. Mr. DeLay made his personal stake clear at a conference last Friday organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. He said that God had brought Terri Schiavo’s struggle to the forefront “to help elevate the

22. DeLay does show some foot-in-the-mouth tendencies. Asserting that he and his audience were no more “alive” than a woman who had been brain-dead for several years was sailing near to the rhetorical wind.

d es e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

109

visibility of what’s going on in America.” He defined that as “attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others.” ()

Notice the belligerence, especially in the personal attacks that DeLay delivered in the press conference. Invoking God does seem to go along not only with malice, but also with an evidently felt need to identify enemies. Notice, also, the absence of “austere reason,” which in this case is inevitable: an ultimate value, something that is sacred—in this case human life—can only be advanced by unreasoned assertion, or by maligning those who think differently. To repeat, I cannot say with absolute confidence that in this matter DeLay was a hypocrite. If hypocrisy is having a reputation for being a hypocrite, Delay has it in most quarters, but not in all. His defenders maintained that the Schiavo case and that of DeLay’s father were quite different because the latter had brain damage that required special equipment to keep him alive; a feeding tube is not “special equipment” (In whose definition?) and therefore Mrs. Schiavo should have been kept alive, whereas DeLay was right to allow a “natural” death for his father. I am not convinced. Certainly I cannot be sure about DeLay’s motives. Perhaps in the intervening sixteen years he had been reborn into a faith and God had spoken to him about what it means to be brain dead (I cannot find any record of him making that claim). Perhaps he had forgotten about the manner of his father’s death; perhaps it did not occur to him that his opponents could make opportunistic use of what he had done so long ago; or perhaps—politicians have this failing (I am thinking also of Nixon and Clinton)—he imagined himself to be invulnerable. On the other hand, he may sincerely believe in the sacredness of life (or, of selected lives), no matter how minimal or miserable; I do not know. I do know, however, that his vigorous efforts to “save” Mrs. Schiavo, whatever his motive, were not politically irrelevant. At the time, he had been backed into a corner by accusations of sharp practice; the Schiavo affair, while it lasted, took the media spotlight off his own alleged political misbehavior. Besides, parading prolife values would do him no harm with his Christian right-wing voters. Of course, he could always find a refuge in the absolute, claiming that he stood with God in these matters, and that his stance had nothing whatsoever to do with voters or with diverting attention from the charges then being leveled against him.23 I do find some things puzzling in this and similar cases. I am taken aback by the infinite gall of politicians who use religion in this brazen fashion. Even Hitler had bad words for them: “impudent and loud-mouthed liars” (Mein Kampf, 152). Perhaps such people know that what they do will not be seen as effrontery: the

23. His chickens have since come home to roost and Delay is out of the Senate. To build on Romans 6: 12—“The wages of [political] sin is [political] death”—sometimes, but not very often.

110

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

ploy so often seems to be successful. That, too, I find puzzling. Why does not everyone see through the rhetoric and discover hypocrisy? Are the politicians such pastmasters in the art of political fabrication? Are we so unperceptive? Have we been so totally diseducated? Again, I cannot empathize with such minds—or such mindlessness. Or is it the case that politicians are held to a lower standard than the rest of us? Are we so completely disillusioned with public life that so long as politicians are smart enough to deliver the goods to their voters (and to the patrons who stake them), their integrity is of no public concern? I do not share that opinion; certainly I cannot empathize with such Pharisaic bullies, but I do understand how their own interests call the tune that many politicians dance to, as do all of us some of the time. It is an irony that religion, which is said to be the institution that injects morality into politics, should be used by smart politicians, both secular and clerical, in this wholly amoral, expected-utility fashion. It is also a tragedy that religion has rendered so gullible those who so readily believe what politicians and clerics tell them. But perhaps this cry of despair goes too far; it overlooks what sometimes actually happens. The malefactors may not be persuaded to contemplate their own inadequacies (Gandhian fashion) and with a free heart acknowledge that they have seen their errors and have now found Truth, but at least they sometimes get their comeuppances. The episode of Mrs. Schiavo probably did not much enhance DeLay’s reputation for being a smart operator, let alone an honorable man. The righteousness ploy is not without risk. There have been other self-appointed moralists who were more decidedly taken down than (so far) DeLay has been, when it became known that they themselves had been caught out doing exactly what they condemned in others. The 1994–99 hunt for Clinton damaged some of his Republican harriers. They set out to use his extramarital lusting to get him out of office; then several of his noisiest critics were themselves discovered in analogous morally dubious situations. Gingrich, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, had a more than rocky marital life. His wouldbe successor and acting Speaker when Gingrich resigned, Robert Livingston, confessed to an extramarital affair and had to withdraw his candidacy. The extramarital liaisons of two other pillars of the Republican establishment, Henry Hyde and Dan Burton, came to light. Livingston and Gingrich did nothing that federal law considers a crime, but they still were obliged by public opinion to quit. About twenty American states have laws making adultery an offence, but they are rarely enforced. Clinton was impeached not because he had committed a crime, but because his Republican detractors were gambling on a positive political pay off. A Republican Congresswoman from Idaho, Helen Chenoweth, bought advertising space to say this: “Our founding fathers knew that political leaders’ personal conduct must be held to the highest standards. President Clinton’s behavior has severely damaged his ability to lead our nation, and the free world.” Her

d es e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

111

Democratic opponent, Dan Williams, had confessed to an extramarital affair. In his absence, she addressed him in a sanctimonious apostrophe: “To restore honor in public office, and the trust of the American people, we must affirm that personal conduct does count, and integrity matters. Where do you stand, Dan?” Then it came to light that she (divorced) had an affair with a married man. She said: “I’ve asked for God’s forgiveness, and I’ve received it” (). How did she know? One could say, “Live by the shaft, die by the shaft!” The political careers of Livingston and Gingrich (and now DeLay) collapsed that way, but not Helen Chenoweth’s; she retired from Congress, undefeated, in 2000. That, a True-believer might say, is evidence enough of God’s forgiveness. Clinton, too, voiced his public repentance for what he had done, but in his case “God’s forgiveness” appears to have been withheld, at least in the opinion of the right-wing fundamentalists ().

The Religious Mode of Political Persuasion The political clerics and their lay congeners seem, as I suggested earlier, to have their own clear vision (the negative side of which—diseducation—they do not make explicit) of what is effective for mass persuasion and what is not: the masses can never be reached by “austere reason.” Only religion, in one or another form, can do the job. Hitler too, as you will see, believed exactly that. Faith, unquestioning and unreasoning, in our side’s virtue and in the other side’s wickedness, alone is effective; it does not need the support of reasoned argument, which, in any case, would be ineffective. For some clerics, however, faith needs to be backed up by a statement of what the pay off to morality will be, which, of course, is a brazen inconsistency: God’s message will always prevail because it is Truth, but if it happens not to prevail, then the prospect of punishment will do the trick. Hell, as the Reverend Hutcheson made clear, need not be in the hereafter but can be here and now: “Don’t mess with God’s people unless you want your office window view changed!” (Not all True-believers back up their morality with expediency: as you will see, Gandhi never played it safe in that way.) Homo religiosus, strictly construed, is a True-believer and a one-size-fits-all stick figure, the Godly equivalent of economic man. They are not, of course, identical: religious man is guided by Truth, economic man maximizes utility. But when it comes to political persuasion, their practices are not so different. In both cases S, the subject to be persuaded, is standardized and expected to succumb to the constraints of the situation, economic man to worldly costs and benefits, religious man to categorical Truth. In neither case is there a need for

112

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

fine-tuning, for working out differences between different kinds of subject and adjusting the techniques of persuasion to take them into account. One incentive, whether it be Truth or Utility, fits everyone, because everyone is of the same mind, profoundly diseducated. That is all the persuader knows. Of course one size does not fit all: people sometimes behave as if they cannot perceive or will not accept the Truth; and, on the other side, it is not unknown for hardheaded and unscrupulous “whatever works—ends count, means don’t” politicians to have a Colson-style attack of conscience.24 Religious-man theories and utility theories, as I said, deal with noncompliance in different ways. Utility theorists assume that the system itself will deal with those who are too stupid to see where their best interest lies: it will either bring them into line or put them out of business. Godly people have an equivalent to “the system,” which is God himself: sooner or later He will make sure that everyone sees the light and is recruited into the Divine Oneness. But, to put a twist on the saying “God helps those who help themselves,” it is the duty of True-believers to do the Lord’s work by persuading the faithless to come into the Faith, or, if they refuse, by eliminating them. When faith fails, try expediency. Or use them both. One consequence of this difference is that utility-believers do not produce the volume of hate literature that is characteristic of most revealed religions: those who think in terms of natural systems may deplore the system but, logically, they should not hate those who are caught up in it. I do not mean that economists always walk gently; they do not; and there is a good deal of vitriolic, quasi-religious, irrational animosity in, for instance, what free market people say about socialists, and vice versa. Expected-utility theorists fight among themselves about policy, for example about the proper role of governments in economic affairs, but they rarely dispute the basic micro-economic creed (expected-utility), and the few who do are judged not sinful but merely stupid or—the ultimate term of abuse—idealistic. This attitude is perfectly consistent with the presupposition that, since economic systems are natural systems, moral judgment on the conduct of individuals is pointless. Individuals are merely elements in a natural system: they cannot take credit or be blamed for what occurs and the system itself is, like Nature, “heartless” and “witless,” neither “caring nor knowing.”

24. Lee Atwater, a no-holds-barred Republican publicist, was best known for a very smart, and thoroughly dishonest television campaign in 1988 to demolish the reputation of George Dukakis, the Democratic candidate for the presidency. In 1991, he discovered that he had an inoperable brain tumor and repented for the vicious things that he had done, saying: “I’ve found Jesus Christ . . . I don’t hate anyone anymore. For the first time in my life I don’t hate somebody. I have nothing but good feelings toward people.” He died that same year ()

d es e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

113

Homo religiosus is the coin’s other face. Reverend Falwell and other Christian Fundamentalists assume that what non-believers call a natural system is in fact subsumed within the moral system that God created. From within that framework, natural disasters, like hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, or epidemic sicknesses, or man-made major disasters like the Twin Towers catastrophe are brought about by the actions of sinners, for example homosexuals or abortionists or secular humanists or even Tom DeLay’s political opponents, who, by their opposition, offend against the moral order God created and thus offend God himself. Then God, in His anger, punishes the entire society because it tolerates such people. Here is Tom Delay’s Christian-Right explanation for the Columbine massacre (April 1999), in which two adolescent students killed 12 fellow students and a teacher, wounded 24 other students, and then shot themselves: “Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.” ()

God, from that perspective, is not witless; He is all-knowing. Nor, despite all appearances, is He heartless: the seemingly random suffering that He inflicts upon us is for our own good. The causal connection between calamities and violation of the moral order is a feature of many, if not most, of the societies—primitive or not—that anthropologists study. A poor harvest was attributed by the Barotse (in Zambia) to the abdication of Edward VIII.25 In the same idiom, personal misfortunes (an accident or sickness or death or a failed harvest or a failed hunt) are given spiritual explanations, which lend themselves to a quite Machiavellian political interpretation. The spirits are those of the ancestors, who are offended by the conduct of their living descendents. The technique for finding out who did what to cause the trouble is divination: only those who are closest to the ancestors, the elders, have the right to conduct a divination; thereby they have power over younger men who are not qualified. Younger men have a different kind of power; they control the economy—they are the ones who work or trade or fight. In those domains, they are powerful; the elders are not. In that way power is, to some degree, balanced. As Mendonsa puts it, “The trump card of subordinates is an economic one; that of the elders is a ritual one” (1982, 7).26

25. Remembered from a conversation with Max Gluckman. 26. See also Middleton 1960.

114

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

Making sense of misfortune in this way is classically described in Evans-Prichard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic. Susila’s story, told earlier, is an instance: her untimely death was caused by the Washerman’s misconduct; he strayed outside the role that the dharma (of caste) had assigned to him, and so he became the quarry in Bisipara’s witch-hunt. The socio-moral view of the world that is encapsulated in witchcraft ideas decidedly influences the style that political clerics and God-bothering politicians use to bend minds. It centers on animosity: it can be used to directly intimidate opponents; it can serve to put mindless anger and unthinking hatred into the heads and hearts of followers and unite them against a common enemy. Objective reason and searching for evidence are inhibited from the outset. Followers are not invited to look for good in their opponents and so find a basis for compromise. Nor do the persuaders use the quasi-intellectualist strategies of sublation or encompassing. These strategies by implication concede that the opponents’ creed has in it something worth preserving, and, if that is true, they cannot be entirely evil. Witch-hunting Fundamentalists like Falwell or Robertson (or, for that matter, Evans-Pritchard lecturing to an audience of highly educated Truebelieving Roman Catholics) see themselves living in a stark Manichean world: there is good and there is evil and there is nothing in between. Not to be with us is, de facto, to be against us. Nor is it common to find a God-botherer finessing his/her way around contrary views in the way that I have suggested secular politicians sometimes do, bypassing values or organizations that stand in the way of their programs. A head-on attack is the preferred tactic. To demonstrate that opponents are irremediably evil—beyond redemption, forever barred from joining in the oneness that is “us”—is a way to justify the use of force against them. Nor, despite the idioms of love and forgiveness deployed by Christian Evangelizers, do they expect the opponent to have a change of heart. (Changing hearts, as you will see, was Gandhi’s basic strategy.) The presupposition underlying these strategies is not simply that reason would not work, but also a firm conviction in those who subscribe to Truth, that their own faith in God and the uncontestable justice of their cause will prevail; it is God’s will that it should prevail (and if it does not, that is because we have made Him angry by our failure to punish those who have offended him). This is a fail-safe style of reasoning. So ends this brief survey of the incursion by True-belief, both genuine and fake, into political arenas and the use that both lay and clerical politicians make of religious sentiments and institutions. Much of it is a sorry tale, perhaps because the case material directed attention more at the opportunistic use of religion than at its effect when used to guide statesmen to what is right and just, which is the vision contained in Sidney Herbert’s: “I am more and more convinced every day that in politics, as in everything else, nothing can be right which is not in accordance with the spirit of the Gospel.”

d es e r t , m a r ke tp l ace , and f orum

•

115

Religion as the statesman’s conscience-stiffener will be addressed in the third part of the book, in which the career of Gandhi demonstrates that revealed religion may lend fortitude, but it also tends to produce political myopia, an inability or an unwillingness to see things as they really are, and a failure to comprehend that the means deployed will not produce the ends desired—ultimately a reliance on God to work miracles. Unexamined faith of that kind blinds leaders to their responsibilities. The following chapter is about a secular equivalent of revealed religion, Hitler’s National Socialism. That National Socialism was a religion for Hitler (and, in the form of racialism or “white supremacy,” still is for many people) is shown in his unwavering faith in the doctrine and in the manifest destiny of the Aryan races. Steadfast religious convictions, in this as in other cases, went along with political myopia (an inability or an unwillingness to foresee the consequences of political actions), and with a propensity not simply to contend with opponents and think of them as rivals, but also, systematically and thoroughly, to hate them. There is no pretence in these creeds that sinners are to be loved and saved; they are to be destroyed. Hitler, a very self-aware and performance conscious rhetorician, also provides a systematic guide on how to propagandize the Faith, persuading others to perceive their social world in its light, to accept it, and to act upon it.

4

T HE N EED

FOR

E NEMIES

b Pol Pot and Secular Religion Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, was evil, not just in his philosophy, but also in what he did. The “reform-through-labor” that he carried out after coming to power in 1976 led to the death of at least a million Cambodians, of whom more than 200,000 were executed.1 Pol Pot was not without persuasive charm. “Throughout the 1980s, [Pol Pot] conducted seminars for Khmer Rouge military leaders. He often mesmerized them with his sincerity, his low, melodious voice, and his genteel charisma. To his disciples, there seemed to be no connection between this smooth-faced teacher and the violence of his past—except perhaps for his repeated emphasis on “enemies.” In fact, Pol Pot’s disconnection from reality seemed to many to be proof of his unworldliness, ardor and enlightenment.” (Time, 23–30 August 1999, vol. 154, no. 7–8) 2

His performance was certainly that of a religious fanatic, but the religion that drove him to the extremes of inhumanity was avowedly secular: he was a Truebelieving Marxist. No God told him what he should do; when he sent Cambodian bureaucrats, white collar workers, and intellectuals out to work beside the peasants, he was following the path that was consistent with the doctrine of historical

1. Massive slaughter—estimated at half a million—went on in India too at the time of partition (1947–48), but these deaths were the outcome of spontaneous religio-political faith-based enthusiasms, not of a centrally directed program. 2. Enlightenment? Religious (secular style), perhaps, but hardly intellectual.

the ne e d f or e ne m ie s

•

117

materialism; he was creating a mode of economic production that would bring about a classless society.3 Stalin’s Ukrainian famine of the 1920s is in the same category; so also are Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” (1958–60) and his cultural revolution (1966–69), with its systematic efforts to degrade the elite and the famine that followed. In all these cases, the anticipated end justified the means. Atrocities committed in the name of “good government” are still not rare. Nor, in any of those cases, was there any sustained attempt to change the system by first changing minds. The guiding Marxist philosophy, which held that ideas are determined by the mode of economic production, precluded this: ideologies do not shape the social reality, they merely reflect it. There is no need to preach; indeed, preaching by itself is ineffective; it is enough to impose a pattern of behavior and the appropriate values will emerge of their own accord. Morality adjusts itself to the politico-economic reality. Human nature, however, cannot be explained by such a simple version of materialism. Ideas do not instantly adjust themselves and bestow legitimacy on a new politico-economic order. Theoretically that might happen if all the individuals were wholly and completely diseducated, each one’s mind a tabula rasa waiting for the new message to imprint itself: but in fact, new ideas meet resistance from established old ideas. Certainly, if any of Pol Pot’s victims, after being press-ganged to work in the fields, had confessed to a moral conversion, it would surely have been a lifesaving lie, not a religious conversion but a prudent cost-benefit calculation: the cost of resisting the new definition of their situation is computed in 200,000 executions. As for those who died of starvation—and this is true also of the six million Ukrainians who perished in 1932 and 1933 as a result of forced collectivization and of the 30 million Chinese who died in the famine that followed on the Cultural Revolution—they had no chance to acquire a new morality from the new (for them) mode of production; they were dead. None of these three instances of a willingness to ride with an ethic of absolute ends—Stalin’s Ukraine, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Mao’s China—involve a Godly religion. So far as I know there is nothing to indicate that Pol Pot had that kind of belief. Nor is there any record of Stalin or Mao praying for divine guidance or for “intuition.” Their decisions were made in accordance with their interpretation of Marxist presuppositions about revolution and the classless society. Does this then suggest that secular religions are more likely than Godly religions to produce atrocities? Does raison d’état, more surely than divine guidance,

3. This deduction is made by matching Pol Pot’s deeds with the justification that his version of Communism makes available. Khmer culture must also be part of the mix; not to speak of a psychopathic personality.

118

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

encourage an ethic of absolute ends? The historical record contradicts that idea. The St. Bartholomew’s day massacre of 30,000 Protestants in 1572, the rampages of the millenarian Christian Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, that began in 1987 and still continue today, and the genocidal Muslim militias in Darfur—and there are many other examples—all demonstrate clearly that Godliness too is ready to dispense with humanism and the ethic of responsibility.4 The reality is complicated because in what leaders do there is often no clear separation between secular and Godly religions; some leaders work both sides of the street. Nationalists, for example, who are clearly motivated by raison d’état, can at the same time declare their allegiance to God, their need for His help and guidance, and—most frequently—the fact that He is on their side. They generally come across more as opportunists than as True-believers. But every judgment has to be hedged: behind even the opportunism that seems to be apparent in the American religious right, there may be at least a scintilla of Truebelief, certainly among the rank-and-file, and in some cases perhaps among the leaders too. What critics define as opportunistic and immoral striving for power may, in the minds of the doers, be carried on the back of their own morality. That is so in the case of Hitler and his secular religion, National Socialism.

“Ardent and Even Hysterical Passions” Hitler’s writings (a mere fragment compared with the volumes of material that Gandhi provided about himself and his beliefs) do give some insight into his ideas about how religion related to politics and demonstrate that he was, within the limits of his own morality, not opportunistic and not unmoved by things “essentially of the soul.” For sure National Socialism was a secular religion—and one purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that Hitler’s writings (although they do not use the word “secular” in this sense) show him to have been constantly aware that if National Socialism were not a religion, it would be nothing at all. But Hitler also had things to say about Godly religion—about Christianity— and its political significance. I begin with five quotations that are straightforward proclamations of religion’s importance. True-believing Christians, Catholic or Protestant, Fundamentalist or mildly Evangelical, all alike would not disagree with the underlying values that they suggest (but at the same time they would deny that Hitler was guided by those values).

4. A person is moved by an “ethic of responsibility” when he/she looks to the consequences of a decision. Its obverse is an “ethic of absolute ends,” which requires that an action should be taken because it is morally right, whatever be the consequences. See Weber 1948, 120.

the ne e d f or e ne m ie s

•

119

I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. (Mein Kampf, 46)5 To a political leader the religious teachings and practices of his people should be sacred and inviolable. Otherwise he should not be a statesman but a reformer, if he has the necessary qualities for such a mission. (Mein Kampf, 75)6 The Government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral purification of our public life, is creating and securing the conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life. (Speech, March 1933 ) This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief. The great masses of a nation are not composed of philosophers. For the masses of the people, especially, faith is absolutely the only basis of a moral outlook on life. (Mein Kampf, 152) The more an idea is correct in the abstract, and therefore, all the more powerful, the smaller is the possibility of putting it into practice, at least so far as the latter depends on human beings . . . If this were otherwise, the founders of religions could not be considered as the greatest men who have ever lived, because their moral aims will never be completely or even approximately carried out into practice. Even that religion which is called the Religion of Love is really no more than a faint reflex of the will of its sublime Founder. But its significance, however, lies in the orientation which it endeavored to give to human civilization, and human virtue and morals. (Mein Kampf, 123)

There are other statements that reveal more clearly both the nature of Hitler’s religion and why he thought it had political significance: faith, not reason, is the foundation of politics. [E]very attempt to combat a Weltanschaung by means of force will turn out to be futile in the end if the struggle fails to take the form of an offensive for the establishment of an entirely new spiritual order of things. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook. (Mein Kampf, 104) Therefore when force is employed success is dependent on the consistent manner in which it is used. This persistence, however, is nothing less than the product of

5. The next sentence, however, indicates a value, to which, at the present day, most Christians would not openly confess: “In standing guard against the Jew, I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.” 6. This echoes Weber: “He who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his own and of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics, for the quite different tasks of politics can only be solved by violence” (1948, 126). Hitler, if he ever read that sentence, would certainly have agreed that violence was a necessary part of politics.

120

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

spiritual conviction. Every form of force that is not supported by spiritual backing will be always indecisive and uncertain. (Mein Kampf, 104) Since our epoch not only lacks everything in the nature of exuberant energy, but even finds such a manifestation disagreeable, fate will never elect it for the accomplishment of great deeds. For the greatest changes that have taken place on this earth would have been inconceivable if they had not been inspired by ardent and even hysterical passions, but only by the bourgeois virtues of peacefulness and order. (Mein Kampf, 240)

Finally, here are four quotations that speak with absolute clarity to the need that this kind of religion has for enemies: The greatness of every powerful organization which embodies a creative idea lies in the spirit of religious devotion and intolerance with which it stands out against all others, because it has an ardent faith in its own right. (Mein Kampf, 199) The greatness of Christianity did not arise from attempts to make compromises with those philosophical opinions of the ancient world which had some resemblance to its own doctrine, but in the unrelenting and fanatical proclamation and defence of its own teaching. (Mein Kampf, 199) Christianity could not content itself with erecting an altar of its own. It had first to destroy the pagan altars. It was only in virtue of this passionate intolerance that an apodictic faith could grow up. And intolerance is an indispensable condition for the growth of such a faith. . . . The appearance of intolerance and fanaticism in the history of mankind may be deeply regrettable, and it may be looked upon as foreign to human nature, but the fact does not change conditions as they exist today. . . . A philosophy of life which is inspired by an infernal spirit of intolerance can only be displaced by a doctrine that is advanced in an equally ardent spirit and fought for with as determined a will and which itself is a new idea, pure and absolutely true. (Mein Kampf, 254)

He sometimes wrote about himself in the model of Christ, a cleanser and a reformer, but he was also pugnacious in a way that Christ was not. My feelings as a Christian point me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who—God’s truth!—was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself

the ne e d f or e ne m ie s

•

121

to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice . . . And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exposed. (Speech on 12 April 1922 )

The phrase “as a Christian,” and the sentence “I would be no Christian” are more a manner of speaking than an indication of his faith. He was a Truebeliever to the point of paranoia, but a believer in himself, his destiny, and the nation’s destiny, not in Christianity. As you will see, he despised Christianity in its institutional forms. To some extent, what I have written has to be guesswork; the contents of another person’s mind are not open to inspection. But at least it can be said that Hitler must have believed that his audience would understand his message and its idiom, would find it convincing, and would readily accept his definition of their situation; and so they did, until their Hitler-defined world imploded. The later quotations (not the first five) contain a theme that is the hallmark of the intolerant religions. This theme links together spirituality, fanaticism, enemies, and violence. Spirituality and fanaticism indicate that the critical faculties—the desire to understand for oneself, to have doubts, to comment, to question, to criticize, and in the end, perhaps to oppose—are in abeyance, if not defunct. The wrong ideas about culture, ethics, and morality may be the enemy, but these ideas are embodied in people, without whom the ideas would not exist: therefore, annihilate the people. There is no hint of conversion or redemption, no trace of “hate their sins but love all sinners.” Truth is already known and does not need to be uncovered in debate; non-believers cannot be converted, they can only be destroyed. The outcome in Hitler’s Germany is the long and oftentold story that began with the liquidation of Ernst Röhm and the Brownshirts in 1934 (the year after Hitler came to power), continued with the systematic extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and others deemed irremediably outside the faith, and ended only in 1945 when Hitler, defeated, killed himself. How much more robust and effective it is to hate the person, the embodiment of a hateful idea, than just to hate the idea! In faiths of this kind, both Godly and secular, True-belief is enshrined in malevolence. “It was only in virtue of this passionate intolerance that an apodictic faith could grow up. And intolerance is an indispensable condition for the growth of such a faith.” Once again: Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

122

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

Manufacturing Enemies Sometimes Hitler’s words make him sound like a straightforward True-believing Christian: Whoever would dare to raise a profane hand against the highest image of God among His creatures would sin against the bountiful Creator of this marvel and would collaborate in the expulsion from Paradise. (Mein Kampf, 216)

There is even, in one passage (quoted above), a glimmer of universalism: The appearance of intolerance and fanaticism in the history of mankind may be deeply regrettable, and it may be looked upon as foreign to human nature . . . (Mein Kampf, 254)

It is immediately followed, however, by realpolitik: “but the fact does not change conditions as they exist today. . . .” “Conditions today” might hint that perhaps there was once—or could be—a time when universalistic love was the statistical norm, but that would be to misread Hitler. He was writing not only about conditions in Germany in the 1920s, but also about human nature itself, as something given, as basically the same everywhere, and about how it can be put to use in politics. His remarks are elitist and at the same time profoundly contemptuous of intellectuals who imagine that reasoned argument can effectively influence the people whom Hitler called “the great majority” or “the broad masses.” Nor will it please those who believe that men and women are intellectually and emotionally no different. The great majority of the nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled rather by sentiment than by sober reasoning. The sentiment however is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood. (Mein Kampf, 110)

By “sentiment” he means “faith.” The emotional grounds of their attitude [the broad masses] furnish the reason for their extraordinary stability. It is always more difficult to fight successfully against Faith than against knowledge. Love is less subject to change than respect. Hatred is more lasting than mere aversion. And the driving force that has brought about the most tremendous revolutions on this earth has never been a body of scientific teaching which has gained power over the masses, but always a devotion which has inspired them, and often a kind of hysteria which has urged them to action. (Mein Kampf, 191)

the ne e d f or e ne m ie s

•

123

The import is that religion’s significance is less in itself than in its consequences, in the attitudes and the actions that it inspires. By helping to lift the human being beyond the mere level of animal existence, Faith really contributes to consolidate and safeguard its own existence. Taking humanity as it exists today and taking into consideration the fact that the religious beliefs which it generally holds and [which] have been consolidated through our education, so that they serve as moral standards in practical life, if we should now abolish religious teaching . . . the result would be the foundation of human existence would be seriously shaken. (Mein Kampf, 213)

Hitler’s “faith” is not simple, personal spirituality, a matter of the individual and his or her conscience. Faith has to have been “consolidated through our education.” It has to be organized and institutionalized. It has to be “a clearly defined doctrinal faith.” Of course, the word ‘religious’ implies some ideas that are fundamental. Among these we may reckon the belief in the immortality of the soul, its future existence in eternity, the belief in the existence of a Higher Being, and so on. But all these ideas, no matter how firmly the individual believes in them, may be critically analyzed by any person and accepted or rejected accordingly, until the emotional concept or yearning has been transformed into an active service that is governed by a clearly defined doctrinal faith. Such a faith furnishes the practical outlet for religious feeling to express itself and thus open the way through which it can be put into practice. (Mein Kampf, 214)

“Clearly defined doctrinal faith” means that it is clearly distinguishable from other faiths. Difference, of course, need not necessarily lead to intolerance or active hostility. At a somewhat remote level and in their doctrinal form (as distinct from what their adherents may do), neither Judaism nor Hinduism nor various other religions feel the need to actively interfere with other faiths. How is it, then, that Hitler’s religion, in its secular form—“the political and moral purification of our public life”—is so marked by intolerance? The answer is that he made it so. The first step in creating intolerance is to consolidate the True-belief by eliminating uncertainty and doubt: The purely spiritual idea is of itself a changeable thing that may be subject to endless interpretations. It is only through dogma that it is given a precise and concrete form without which it could not become a living faith. (Mein Kampf, 152)

The words “precise and concrete,” especially the latter, indicate that the faith and the dogma in which it is made concrete are seen not only as Truth—as ends in themselves—but also instrumentally, as a stimulus for action. Dogma, which is

124

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

unquestionable certainty, is embodied in a leader, who directs the action. For the masses, dogma is a psychological necessity. . . . the masses of the people prefer the ruler to the suppliant and are filled with a strong[er] sense of mental security by a teaching that brooks no rival than by a teaching which offers them a liberal choice. They have very little idea how to make such a choice and they are prone to feel that they have been abandoned. (Mein Kampf, 34)

“Brooks no rival” signifies both the existence of, and intolerance for, other creeds, as indeed does the word “dogma.” This was plainly stated in a passage cited earlier: Christianity could not content itself with erecting an altar of its own. It had first to destroy the pagan altars. It was only in virtue of this passionate intolerance that an apodictic faith could grow up. And intolerance is an indispensable condition for the growth of such a faith . . . (Mein Kampf, 254)

What did Hitler do to turn difference into intolerance? He was perfectly explicit both about the content of the message and about the techniques for delivering it. His writings, and the speeches that he made when ascending to power and when in power, resonate with ideas of conspiracy and betrayal. All that has gone wrong in the past, all that is now undesirable, all that is despicable, could not have been and could never be remedied by “bourgeois” intellect guided institutional reform. First and foremost must come conversion to a new morality—a new [secular] religion—and along with it, the destruction of those who stand in the way of a People’s State. Germany lost the First World War because the valiant soldiers at the front line—Hitler was one—were betrayed by a conspiracy on the home front, organized by Marxists and Jews. Conditions in Germany in the 1920s—“wretchedness and misery” caused by reparations demanded by the victorious nations—were ready material for propaganda about self-respect and the need for a new morality. This morality, moreover, could only come about by eliminating its rivals. And, above all things, the People’s State will never be created by the desire for compromise inherent in a patriotic coalition, but only by the iron will of a single movement which has successfully come through in the struggle with all the others.” (Mein Kampf, 286)

The least threatening “others,” in this case, are those who are patriotic, but have not discovered how to go about the task of restoring the Nation. They can be readily brought down by sarcasm in debate and by violence in the streets. They are bourgeois intellectuals who do not understand how to deal with “the broad masses.” He said this when ridiculing someone who criticized Lloyd George’s oratorical skills:

the ne e d f or e ne m ie s

•

125

This man criticized these speeches exclusively according to the impression they made on his own blasé mind, whereas the great British Demagogue had produced an immense effect on his audience through them, and in the wider sense on the whole of the British populace. Looked at from this point of view, the speeches were the most wonderful achievements, precisely because they showed an astounding knowledge of the soul of the broad masses of the people. (Mein Kampf, 266) For one must never judge the speeches of a statesman to his people by the impression which it leaves on the minds of a university professor, but by the effect it produces on the people. (Mein Kampf, 266)

In a different category are factions within the patriotic movement, whose actions threatened to destabilize it by providing an alternative focus. The Brownshirts, or S.A. (Sturmabteilungen—an armed detachment of the Nazi party, of whom more below) were an example. They, along with their leader, Ernst Röhm, were eliminated in 1934, one year after Hitler came to power, in what later was called “The Night of the Long Knives.” There is, perhaps, a small element of rationality, of pure calculation in that massacre; it was seen as a tactical necessity for Hitler and the German army to maintain their authority, rather than as a matter of difference over first principles or even over strategy. The identification and extermination of enemies outside the movement, primarily the Jews, had a different kind of rationality. Politically, it was a device to arouse the “broad masses,” and to provide them with a positive definition of themselves, their movement, and their new morality, by pointing at those who were defined as the negation of the “People’s State” and its values. This was to be done by propaganda, which is a “spiritual weapon” or “mental training” (Mein Kampf, 111). Its requirements are systematically set out in Volume 1, Chapter 6 of Mein Kampf. (a) To make propaganda effective you must first decide what end it is to serve—in this case the creation of a new morality that will serve the People’s State. This end justifies all means. “The most cruel weapons were the most humane, provided they helped toward a speedier [achievement of the goal]” (Mein Kampf, 107). (b) The propaganda should be addressed to the “broad masses of the people.” “For the intellectual classes . . . propaganda is not suited, but only scientific exposition” (Mein Kampf, 107). (c) What form should it take? “It must appeal to the feelings of the public rather than their reasoning powers.” “It is a mistake to organize the direct propaganda as if it were a manifold system of scientific instruction.” “Arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses” (Mein Kampf, 108). “[A]ll effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should

126

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

be persistently repeated . . .” (Mein Kampf, 108). What is needed is “a systematically one-sided attitude toward every problem that has to be dealt with” (Mein Kampf, 109). The victim of this propaganda was the Jew. Systematic diseducation was focused, not so much on the Jewish religion (Judaism), but on the Jewish “race.” The “stereotyped formulas,” “persistently repeated,” directed hatred less at ideas, which are elusive and intangible and even possibly arguable, than at the persons in whom the ideas are embodied. Jews are hateful not for their religion alone, which of course is evil, not even for the harm they do to the German people, but hateful in and of themselves. Their evil is bred in the bone; it is part of their nature. Persuasion or conversion—reforming their culture—is pointless; Jews are like an incurable disease; the only solution is to quarantine them and eradicate them. One might add that racism was no less bred in Hitler’s bones. It was already well established in Germany (and elsewhere). “Much less do I propose to convert the Jews, for that is impossible,” Martin Luther wrote in a sustained (100 page) tirade On the Jews and Their Lies. It was written in 1543.7 Did Hitler believe every word of what he said about the Jews? I cannot say. But the sheer venom of his remarks in his speeches (and in Table Talk) about Jews, along with various indications of paranoia both in his statements and in his lifestyle, suggest that he did believe what he said about Jews and was not just making cynical, opportunistic use of the Jewish religion and its linked ethnicity, because it was a convenient symbol around which to arouse “the broad masses.” Indeed, he claimed to despise the opportunistic use of religious beliefs by “impudent and loud-mouthed liars.”

Group Sentiment and Violence The sin of the “impudent and loud-mouthed liars” was their concern with their own well-being—they conducted themselves only “so that they may live all the better.” [The] mental attitude, which forces self-interest to recede into the background in favor of the common weal, is the first prerequisite for any kind of really human civilization. (Mein Kampf, 168)

There can be no disagreement with the general statement: to be civilized is to observe social norms. But that broad humanistic concern vanishes when Hitler specifies what he means by “common Weal.”

7.

the ne e d f or e ne m ie s

•

127

The greatness of the Aryan is not based on his intellectual powers, but rather on his willingness to devote all his faculties to the service of the community . . . the Aryan willingly subordinates his own ego to the common weal and when necessity calls he will even sacrifice his own life for the community. (Mein Kampf, 168)

In other words, those who are not Aryans are congenitally unable to “subordinate their egos to the common weal,” still less to die for it. Hitler’s community was not the universe of mankind but a segment of it, racially defined in opposition to other races, which lacked the Aryan virtues. Or, to put it another way, Hitler sought unity not by following the path of co-existence but through fusion, the kind that comes from disqualifying those who are different. The spirit of self-sacrifice, it seems, along with a sense that the group is real and the individual a mere cipher, are bred in the Aryan race. But that sense of the self needs also to be cultivated. For this, there are various methods: propaganda is one; another is the experience of “meetings” and “mass assemblies.” Mass assemblies are also necessary for the reason that, in attending them the individual who felt himself formerly only on the point of joining the new movement, now begins to feel isolated and in fear of being left alone, as he acquires for the first time the picture of a great community which has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people. . . . Mass demonstrations on the grand scale not only reinforce the will of the individual but they draw him still closer to the movement and help to create an esprit de corps. (Mein Kampf, 267)

Attending a “mass assembly” is equated here with those religious experiences that disinvite reasoning and inhibit not only a concern with individual interests, but even the very sense of individuality: they promote an entirely unintellectual sense of oneness, of belonging, an esprit de corps. Don’t waste time over “intellectual” meetings and groups drawn together by mutual interests. Anything you may achieve with such folk by means of reasonable explanation may be erased to-morrow by an opposite explanation. But what you tell the people in the mass, in a receptive state of fanatic devotion, will remain like words received under hypnotic influence, ineradicable, and impervious to every reasonable explanation. (Rauschning 1939, 210)8

8. Hermann Rauschning, the National Socialist President of the Danzig Senate in 1933–34, seems to have been a “constructive” writer. His book, which, among many other things, testifies both to Hitler’s insanity and to his liking for brutality, is rich with direct quotations—purportedly Hitler’s own words, stored in Rauschning’s memory and recalled after he had fled from Germany. This has led some apologists for National Socialism (for example in the Journal for Historical Review) to describe the book, which was published in December 1939, three months after the war broke out and before the Germans had overrun the French and British armies, as “phony,” a “brazen historical fraud,” and

128

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

This also is the kind of diseducation—an unwillingness or inability to ask questions and to criticize—that is involved in the process of redemption. It also is the making of a good soldier, one who is ready (in Tennyson’s famous words) to “do or die,” having been schooled “not to reason why.” Soldiers fight. Throughout Hitler’s writing, there is an evident fascination with soldiering, with warfare, and more generally with the idea of assertive force exercised through violence. “He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist” (Mein Kampf, 163). There are descriptive passages in Mein Kampf that reveal not only the considered belief that the new morality cannot be created without the use of force, but also a quite sensual relish for violence itself. “Our purpose [in holding meetings] was not to pour out a mixture of soft-soap bourgeois talk; what we had to say was meant to arouse our opponents at our meetings!” (Mein Kampf, 269). He goes on to describe the “ushers” who dealt with hecklers who tried to break up National Socialist meetings. These ushers grew eventually into the uniformed and armed Brownshirts, the S.A. (Sturmabteilungen), founded in 1920 and by 1932, the year before Hitler came to power, numbering 500,000. Like a swarm of hornets they tackled disturbers at our meetings, regardless of superiority of numbers, however great, indifferent to wounds and bloodshed, inspired with the great idea of blazing a trail for the sacred mission of our movement . . . In spite of all the interruptions, I was able to speak for an hour and a half and I felt as if I were master of the situation . . . A small psychological error which I committed in replying to an interruption and the mistake of which I was myself was conscious the moment the words had left my mouth gave the sign for the outbreak . . . There were a few furious outbursts and all in a moment a man jumped on a seat and shouted “Liberty.” At that signal the champions of liberty began their work . . . In a few moments the hall was filled with a yelling shrieking mob. Numerous beer mugs flew like howitzers above their heads. Amid this uproar one heard the crash of chairs, the crashing of mugs, groans and yells and screams . . . The dance had begun when my Storm Troops, as they were called from that day onwards, launched their attack . . . like wolves they threw themselves on the enemy again and again and began steadily to thrash them out of the hall. After five minutes

a “sordid hoax,” designed to influence public opinion on the United States. This may have been the intention, but that does not mean that the book is essentially a lie. The beliefs and values expressed in it (and sometimes also the words) accord very closely not only with those in Mein Kampf, to which of course Rauschning would have had access, but also with those in Table Talk, which did not appear until 1947. Even if the words attributed to Hitler may sometimes be fiction, the sentiments expressed in them surely are not; they ring true ().

the ne e d f or e ne m ie s

•

129

I could hardly see one of them that was not streaming with blood . . . Twenty minutes long the pandemonium continued . . . One’s heart almost rejoiced at this spectacle which recalled memories of the War. ( Mein Kampf, 273–74) About twenty-five minutes had passed since it all began. The hall looked as if a bomb had exploded there. Many of my comrades had to be bandaged and others taken away. But we remained masters of the situation. (Mein Kampf, 280–81)

Hitler took an evident and insane delight in violence; nowhere in that description of the meeting that ended in a fight, nor in his Table Talk (and certainly not in Rauschning’s book) is there a hint of guilt, of seeking to justify violence as an unfortunate necessity; there is only an entirely unreflective—a primitive— enjoyment of bloodshed. “One’s heart almost rejoiced at this spectacle which recalled memories of the War.” Violence, as Hitler saw the nature of things, is a necessity; he also found it gratifying. The enjoyment of violence, in and of itself (so long as it is inflicted on other people) is not uncommon. It is evident in movies, video games, cartoons, certain literary genres, photographs, paintings, and in some competitive sports, some of which are designed to be violent, such as boxing or all-in wrestling, and others that enhance their regular fare with impromptu fighting—ice hockey is an instance. But praising brutality is not common in the pronouncements of statesmen, most of whom feel that they must, in one way or another, justify the use of violence as a last resort—“my patience is exhausted” (George W. Bush, Hitler, and many others preparing for drastic and otherwise hard-to-justify action). But gleeful descriptions of bloodshed, broken heads, “groans and yells and screams,” and beer-mugs flying “like howitzers” are typical neither of political oratory nor even of political memoirs.

Hitler’s Faith Hitler’s relish for violence does, however, have a kind of logic: it is the final step in a series of beliefs and value-judgments that begin with the desire to create a new morality. As Gandhi said, “It is impossible that a thing essentially of the soul can ever be imparted through the intellect. . . . The intellect, if anything, acts as a barrier in matters of faith.” Hitler, predictably less abstract and more focused on action, made his point by deriding intellectuals as remote and ineffectual contenders in the political arena—“our pig-headed intellectuals, who live apart from the practical world” (Mein Kampf, 266). Hitler’s new morality was quite straightforward, easy to understand. It was not universalistic; he was not moved by a concern for individual souls and their relation to God. His interest was in collectivities and in techniques that

130

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

would mould individuals into a group that was conscious of itself as superior to (and also threatened by) other collectivities. A version of “oneness” prevailed: spiritual value inhered in the group, not in individuals. Nor did Hitler believe in an “ordered moral government of the universe,” but in its antithesis: the People’s State, a völkisch entity founded directly on racial purity, and therefore restricted to a chosen race, and maintained not by persuasion and consent, but by force. Other races are not only different, but also, ipso facto, inferior and dangerous because they are a threat to the purity of the Aryan race. Aryan purity and Aryan dominance was a religion: its ends justified whatever means would bring them about. Recall: “The greatness of every powerful organization which embodies a creative idea lies in the spirit of religious devotion and intolerance with which it stands out against all others, because it has an ardent faith in its own right.” National Socialism was the one true religion. When Hitler writes or speaks about Germany’s institutionalized Christian religions, it appears that the Christian idea and its associated emotions are either vacuous or, in accordance with the contempt that he expressed for “impudent and loud-mouthed liars,” fraudulent. Also, as you will see, Germany’s Protestant and Roman Catholic churches were considered to be potential (and sometimes were actual) opponents. Since the Godly religions were not a guide, but weapons in the political arena, their messages were adjusted to suit different audiences and different tactical situations and therefore were unbelievable. Hitler was born a Catholic and educated in Catholic schools, for which, as his Table Talk demonstrates, he had no respect whatsoever. I was the eternal asker of questions . . . I had a particular liking for the delicate subjects in the Bible and took a naughty pleasure in asking embarrassing questions . . . [The priest asked if he said his prayers.] “No, sir, I don’t say prayers. Besides, I don’t see how God could be interested in the prayers of a secondary schoolboy.” (Table Talk, 188–89) Since my fourteenth year, I have felt liberated from the superstition that the priests used to teach. Apart from a few Holy Joes, I can say that none of my comrades went on believing in the miracle of the Eucharist. (Table Talk, 325) [E]ven among those who claim to be good Catholics, very few believe in this humbug. Only old women, who have given up everything because life has already withdrawn from them, go regularly to church. All that’s dead wood and one shouldn’t waste one’s time in concerning oneself with such brains. (Table Talk, 342)

Nor did he have much respect for the Christian doctrines in which both Catholicism and Protestantism are embedded.

the ne e d f or e ne m ie s

•

131

The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity . . . The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. . . . Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its keynote is intolerance. (Table Talk, 7) If there is a God, at the same time as He gives man life He gives him intelligence . . . The concrete image of the Beyond that religion forces on me does not stand up to examination. (Table Talk, 144) But Christianity is the invention of sick brains. One could imagine nothing more senseless, not any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery. A negro with his tabus is crushingly superior to the human being who seriously believes in Transubstantiation. (Table Talk, 144) But that intelligent men should make themselves accomplices to such superstitions, [in the name of which] hundreds of thousands of human beings have been exterminated in the course of history—that is something I cannot admit. (Table Talk, 342) I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. . . . if I were to die today, it would shock me to know that there’s a single “sky-pilot” within a radius of ten kilometers . . . The idea that one of these fellows could bring me the slightest help would by itself make me despair of Providence. (Table Talk, 343) When all is said and done, we have no reason to wish that the Italians and the Spaniards should free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let’s be the only people who are immunized against the disease. (Table Talk, 145) Pure Christianity—the Christianity of the catacombs—. . . leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely whole-hearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics. (Table Talk, 146) The religion fabricated by Paul of Tarsus, which was later called Christianity, is nothing but the Communism of today. (Table Talk, 722) The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death . . . The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. (Table Talk, 58)

Despite these dismissals of Christianity’s “dogma,” Hitler’s own words seem to demonstrate that he was not without a sense of the spiritual. Trevor-Roper, however, in his introductory essay to Table Talk, “The Mind of Adolf Hitler,” scouts this idea. He was a complete and rigid materialist, without sympathy or even tolerance for those immaterial hopes or fears or imaginations or illusions which, however absurdly, cast a faint ennobling gleam on the actions of mankind. To Hitler all this immaterial world was simply Mumpitz [mummery, silly or hypocritical rituals,

132

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

humbug]. Moral values—the whole scale of better or worse—since they depend on immaterial criteria, simply did not exist for him. “I have not come into the world,” he would say, “to make men better, but to make use of their weaknesses.”9 He voiced an open preference for corrupt men, whose weaknesses he could use, over “ascetics with rings under their eyes.” (Table Talk, xxxvii)

Trevor-Roper’s comment about moral values is accurate enough (except, of course, from the standpoint of Hitler’s own racist non-universalistic morality). So also, at first sight and given Hitler’s own vehement dismissal of “the Christian lie,” is the remark about “rigid and complete” materialism. Hitler did, however, sometimes express himself in a straightforwardly Christian fashion. I am not ashamed to acknowledge today that I was carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment and that I sank down upon my knees and thanked Heaven out of the fullness of my heart for the favor of having been permitted to live in such a time. (Mein Kampf, 99)

He was thanking Heaven for the privilege of being alive when the First World War began, hardly an expression of Christian values, at least those of the New Testament. But perhaps this was only a manner of speaking, not evidence of faith. If, however, one grants that spirituality is not exclusively Christian, the evidence for Hitler’s acceptance of a divine mystery becomes stronger. Consider the following: An educated man retains the sense of the mysteries of nature and bows before the unknowable. An uneducated man, on the other hand, runs the risk of going over to atheism (which is a return to the state of the animal) as soon as he perceives that the State, in sheer opportunism, is making use of false ideas in the matter of religion, whilst in other fields it bases everything on pure science.10 (Table Talk, 59) One asks whether the disappearance of Christianity would entail the disappearance of belief in God. That’s not to be desired. The notion of divinity gives most men the opportunity to concretize the feeling they have of supernatural realities. (Table Talk, 61)

9. This sentence is close to what Rauschning wrote in his impassioned final chapter (1939, 274). He was “quoting” Hitler on the proper motive for a National Socialist, which was ambition for power unrestrained by ethical considerations. “Men who not only spout patriotism but make it the sole motive of their actions, are suspect. In any case, my task is not to make men better, but to make use of their weaknesses.” 10. A comment later makes clear what Hitler meant by “uneducated:” “It is deplorable that the Bible should have been translated into German, and that the whole of the German people should have thus become exposed to the whole of this Jewish mumbo-jumbo” (Table Talk, 513).

the ne e d f or e ne m ie s

•

133

For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys his work wages war against God’s Creation and God’s Will. (Mein Kampf, 310) The Russians were entitled to attack their priests, but they had no right to assail the idea of a supreme force. It’s a fact that we’re feeble creatures, and that a creative force exists. To seek to deny it is folly. In that case it’s better to believe something false than not to believe anything at all. (Table Talk, 87)

Anyone who invokes a “Creative force” and speaks of “Providence” and “Nature” and occasionally simply of “God” cannot be without a sense of spiritual things.11 Certainly, Hitler had much to say about science and about its inevitable triumph over “the Christian lie” and about nonsensical visions of “the Beyond,” but, as with everyone else, his capacity for the sustained doubt and the sustained critical thought and the steadfast attention to reality that a truly scientific outlook demands, was limited. Furthermore, he had his own religion. He was its prophet and prophets are not given to criticizing their own prophecies. “Hitler,” Rauschning writes, “ . . . has become the master-enchanter and the high priest of the religious mysteries of Nazidom” (1939, 219). In Hitler’s own words: Creation is not yet at an end . . . A new variety of man is beginning to separate out . . . The old type of man will have but a stunted existence . . . I might call the two varieties the god-man and the mass animal. (Rauschning 1939, 241)

And, Our revolution is not merely a political and social revolution; we are at the outset of a tremendous revolution in moral ideas and in men’s spiritual orientation. (Rauschning 1939, 220)

And,

11. In Britain, during and after the war, I heard it said that Hitler used astrologers. I have heard the same thing about Nixon, Reagan, and—of all people!—Henry Kissinger. Two categories of persons make these claims: astrologers themselves, for obvious reasons; and the politician’s opponents, again for an obvious reason—to cast doubt on his/her reliability. The one reference that I have found by Hitler himself is in his Table Talk, (583): “The horoscope . . . is another swindle whose significance must not be underestimated. Just think of the trouble given to the British General Staff by the publication by a well-known astrologer foretelling final victory in this war for Germany! All the newspapers in Britain had to dig out all the false prophecies previously published by this eminent quack and reprint them, before public anxiety could be pacified. . . . although an oracle’s prophesies may be wrong a hundred times (when they are promptly forgotten), it suffices for one prophecy to be fortuitously confirmed by subsequent events, for it to be believed, cherished and handed down from generation to generation.”

134

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

Those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it. It is more even than a religion: it is the will to create mankind anew. (Rauschning 1939, 242)12

He had an unwavering confidence in his “will” and its power to bend events in the real world, and along with that confidence went a lifelong incapacity ever to admit he was wrong. That practical weakness is a direct manifestation of spiritual strength—a confidence that a “Creative force” or “Providence” was always at his side and that his inner voice was an infallible guide. Unless I have the inner, incorruptible conviction . . . I do nothing. Not even if the whole party tries to drive me to action, I will not act; I will wait, no matter what happens. But if the voice speaks, then I know the time has come to act. (Rauschning 1939, 181)

His evident contempt for institutionalized Christianity, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, was not founded exclusively—or perhaps even primarily—on an intellectual rejection of “the Beyond,” the Eucharist, and the rest of Christianity’s mythopœic corpus. There were practical matters too. He fastened onto the Church’s worldliness, its manifest corruption, and its basic hypocrisy. The Church has succeeded in striking a very pretty balance between life on earth and the Hereafter. On earth, they say, the poor must remain poor and blessed, for in heaven the rich will get nothing; and the unfortunate poor on earth believe them! (Table Talk, 606) The Church of today is nothing more than a hereditary joint stock company for the exploitation of human stupidity. (Table Talk, 607)

Twice he made scornful reference to General Franco, who had bestowed a Field Marshal’s baton on the Virgin Mary. One thing is quite certain. People speak of an intervention from Heaven which decided the civil war in favour of Franco; perhaps so—but it was not an intervention on the part of the madam styled the Mother of God, who has recently been honoured with a Field Marshal’s baton, but the intervention of the German General von Richthofen and the bombs his squadrons rained from the heavens that decided the issue. (Table Talk, 569)

He was also uneasily aware that the institutionalized churches were contestants in the political arena and he seems to have persuaded himself that National

12. Recall Gandhi, quoted in the epigraph to Chapter 2: “ . . . those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”

the ne e d f or e ne m ie s

•

135

Socialism was in danger, if not of a takeover, at least of being contaminated by too much contact with the established religions and their doctrines and their schisms. . . . I have always kept the party aloof from religious questions. I’ve thus prevented my Catholic and Protestant supporters from forming groups against one another, and inadvertently knocking each other out with the Bible and the sprinkler. . . . (Table Talk, 58) A movement like ours mustn’t let itself be drawn into metaphysical digressions. It must stick to exact science. It’s not the party’s function to be a counterfeit for religion. (Table Talk, 61) I especially wouldn’t want our movement to acquire a religious character and institute a form of worship. It would be appalling to me . . . (Table Talk, 58)13

He could be called a “separatist,” but with a difference: religion was not in danger of being contaminated by politics; the Christian religion was itself a threat to the purity of National Socialism. He was particularly wary of the Roman Catholic establishment, even while admiring its methods and its organization. Catholic institutions were unwaveringly authoritative, not given to “soft-soap bourgeois talk.” They commanded from their adherents exactly that kind of unquestioning loyalty that he himself required from his followers; the Roman Catholic Church might therefore be a rival in political arenas. Worse than that, its transcending loyalty was not to Germany. From time to time, Hitler spoke about putting the established churches under the control of the State, which was the position of the Church of England, and he concluded that at least in the case of the Catholics, this might not be a good arrangement. “If one day the State’s policy ceased to suit Rome or the clergy, the priests would turn against the State, as they are doing now.” (Table Talk, 58). The Church should stay out of politics. The Church must be made to understand that her kingdom is not of this world. What an example Frederick the Great set when he reacted against the Church’s claim to be allowed to interfere in matters of State! The marginal notes in his handwriting, which one finds on the pleas addressed to him by the pastors, have the value of judgments of Solomon. They’re definitive. Our generals should make a practice of reading them daily. (Table Talk, 124)

In time, the problem would sort itself out. Science would prevail over “the Christian lie” and he could “let Christianity die a natural death.” In the meantime, 13. Of course, in its own secular idiom, the movement did just that.

136

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

however, there were some scores to settle with the priests who were ready “to turn against the State, as they are doing now.” . . . after the war I shall extract retribution to the last farthing. . . . The attitude of the Bishop von Galen affords just one more argument in favor of terminating the Concordat after the war, substituting for it regional regulations and immediately withholding from the Church the financial support at present guaranteed to it by that treaty. (Table Talk, 555–56)14

In short, the morality that guided Hitler’s politics was not derived from the God of Christianity, but from the People’s State. Whatever was in his soul, and whatever he had to say about “the bountiful Creator,” in his politics Godly religion was not a guide to conduct; it was not the authority that sorted good from evil. The Godly religions in their established institutional forms were his rivals, contestants in the same political arena; if allowed too much freedom, they might preempt the devotion that was properly owed to National Socialism, to the People’s State, and to Hitler himself. Here is his comment on Mussolini and his dealings with the Vatican. By nature the Duce is a free-thinker, but he decided to use the path of concessions. For my part, in his place, I’d have entered the Vatican and thrown everybody out—reserving the right to apologize later; “Excuse me, it was a mistake.” But the result would have been, they’d have been outside! (Table Talk, 145)

Nor did he make any attempt to use the doctrines and the beliefs that the Christian Churches promoted. Neither did he seek the support of their members and their institutions. What a happy inspiration to have kept the clergy out of the party! On March 21st, 1933, at Potsdam, the question was raised: with the Church or without the Church? I conquered the State despite the malediction pronounced on us by both creeds. On that day we went directly to the tomb of kings whilst the others were visiting religious services. (Table Talk, 145)15

14. A concordat is a treaty between the Papacy and a secular government concerning the respective rights and duties of the State and of the Catholic Church, covering such matters as the status of the clergy, of religious orders, of parochial schools, and state subsidies for the Church. 15. The building in which the Reichstag (parliament) met had been burnt down in February, allegedly an act of arson by a Dutch communist. Hitler declared a state of emergency and in March reconvened the Parliament in Potsdam. He persuaded President Hindenburg to suspend the basic rights guaranteed by the Weimar Republic, thus giving Hitler constitutional respectability and absolute authority. Whether or not the Nazis had themselves set the fire, or whether they were taking fortuitous advantage of the incident, is uncertain.

the ne e d f or e ne m ie s

•

137

With respect to Christianity Hitler was neither a hypocrite nor an opportunist. He did not follow “the practice of debasing religion as a means that can be exploited to serve political interests.” In fact, he had no chance to do so because the faith-building methods that he might have usurped were already being fully exploited by ecclesiastical politicians.

Fascism and Christian Fascism At the present time in the United States, there is a vogue among right-wing speech-writers for expressions of abuse that recall the enmities in the Second World War. Iraq, Iran, and North Korea constitute an “axis of evil.” “Fascist,” has, ironically, replaced “Communist” as the reach-me-down adjective for a regime or a philosophy that meets with the speaker’s strong disapproval. (Hitler used the same rhetorical device: “[Christianity] is merely whole-hearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics.”) The most recent addition to the vocabulary of political invective is “Islamo-Fascist.” “Christian Fascist,” a term of abuse, is a horse from the same stable. Received opinion (excepting a few leftover Nazi skinheads) has it that to find a likeness between anyone and Hitler, or between any movement, religious or secular, and National Socialism is extremely offensive—the worst of insults. Nevertheless, the comparison is worth the risk: it can be done with some degree of objectivity (certainly it is not done here with malice) and it may lead to clearer understanding. As I said, nothing should be praised or condemned until you know what it is that you are praising or condemning. I will try to walk gently. That said, I am going to find both similarities and differences between Hitler’s National Socialism and the Fundamentalist wing of American Televangelism that is represented in Terry Randall’s “We want theocracy. Theocracy means God rules.” The reader can decide whether or not the Fundamentalists deserve to be called Christian Fascists. Hitler’s creed had no place for God, not, at least, for the God of the televangelists. For them, God is a spiritual being whose Truth is enshrined in the Bible, and that Truth is, as they say, “inerrant.” God is a being, all-seeing, loving those who love Him, and sometimes moved to anger. Here and there in Hitler’s writing there are statements like the one cited earlier: “I sank down upon my knees and thanked Heaven out of the fullness of my heart,” but this, as I said, seems more to be a way of expressing oneself than a confession of faith. Certainly he was not in the habit of praying for guidance; he followed what others would call political instinct or intuition: “Unless I have the inner, incorruptible conviction, I do nothing. But if the voice speaks, then I know the time has come to act.” Unlike those who have revealed knowledge of His will, Hitler had no personal God at hand to buttress his decisions and to intimidate the skeptics. There

138

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

was, however, as I said earlier, a spiritual or mystical element in his philosophy that is equivalent to the God of other people; he calls it a “creative force,” the destiny that he and German people and the Aryan races were put on Earth to fulfill. That, the Aryan destiny, is the spiritual foundation of National Socialism, which, logically, has no place in it for a Christian God, who might veto the doctrine of Nordic superiority, and certainly none for Bishop von Galen and others who styled themselves His servants. In Hitler’s view of the world He is not—or should not be—politically relevant. Fundamentalist Christianity, seen from outside, has a mythology. True-believers do not themselves use that word, which, in common speech, has about it a ring of fiction. Certainly, the world created in seven days, Adam’s fall from Grace and our moral ruination, the great flood in the time of Noah, the Resurrection, and other such “events,” have a meaning for morality but they are more than just cautionary tales; for believers they are Truth, both in the Godly sense of that word and in the word’s scientific meaning. That is, they are facts; they are events in history. The Bible is the inerrant . . . word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc. (Falwell 1982, 26) 16

The death and the resurrection of Jesus is a part of history, no less real than the creation and dissolution of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, or Pat Robertson’s egregious gaffes, or the fact that the Southern Baptist Convention “experienced some difficulty” and “netted only 121 new churches—a meager 0.4 percentage increase.” The mythology of National Socialism is altogether different: it is vaporous, to be understood in the way that we now understand the gods of Classical mythology or the tale in the Bhagavadh-Gita of Krishna mentoring the brave and honest Arjuna: these are myths that portray and make immediate a morality; they are not presented as historical fact. The Nordic race, Valhalla, the Valkyries, Siegfried, and the Nibelungen are folktale fantasies that present a doctrine in the form of artistry; they are not a detailed and specific code of conduct of the kind that Fundamentalists and other Evangelical Christians find in the Bible. The Valkyrie are war maidens, but they are not, as is one half of the Christian God, avengers and punishers. They are ethereal; they belong to another world.

16. The doctrine of Biblical inerrancy is authoritatively stated in the report of a conference in Chicago in 1978. See . The tone of the document is indeed authoritative: each article of faith is first directly affirmed and then re-affirmed by denying its opposite. There are no justifications; there are only assertions. The document concludes: “We affirm that what Scripture says, God says. May he be glorified. Amen and Amen.”

the ne e d f or e ne m ie s

•

139

If anyone had suggested to Hitler, when the end was near, that the Valkyries were hovering over his bunker, waiting to take the spirits of himself and Eva Braun on their journey to Valhalla, he would surely have said that this was rubbish (Mumpitz). In short, to say it again, Hitler’s spirituality, when set against the grim “here-and-now” disciplines of Falwell or Robertson, is remote, insubstantial, and, for practical purposes, without immediate political consequence. At first sight, this pattern is reversed when one switches attention away from mythology to the contrasting values that National Socialists and the Fundamentalists place on scientific truth—that is, on fact. For a Fundamentalist, scientific truth takes second place behind God’s Truth. Hitler respected—or claimed to respect—facts. To that extent, the National Socialists had their feet on the ground; the Fundamentalists are up in the air. There are several passages, cited earlier, in which Hitler derides Christianity for its readiness to see the world as, in reality, it is not, and he predicted that science would prevail. “The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death . . . The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science.” Perhaps that discomforting prospect lurks also in the mind of Fundamentalists. If not, why should they so often attempt to negate or to sideline scientific inquiry? They assume, for example, that research into stem cells or into methods of contraception affront God’s will, as He has revealed it to the initiated: God’s truth is that a fertilized egg has the same moral status as a human being. They fear, it seems, that what natural science discovers might play havoc with the Godgiven morality or undermine God’s authority by suggesting that His is not the only way to define the situation. I do not mean that Hitler encouraged the dispassionate collection of evidence and the relentless use of scientific reasoning in every sphere of human knowledge. That is certainly not the case. I am thinking not only of the way in which he and his cohorts had recourse to astrologers in situations in which, for one or another reason, truly scientific investigation is impossible, but also of the quite remarkable confidence in himself and his judgment that caused him to put aside reality even when the facts were in the open and there to be seen. For example, from 1942 onward, most of his strategic decisions were in error to the point of being disastrous.17 Nor was his racism founded on scientific inquiry. Jews and Slavs are inherently inferior, just as the Aryan races, and especially their Nordic element, are inherently superior. That is Truth; it is unquestionable, part of the creed that marks National Socialism as a religion.

17. Trevor-Roper (1962, Chapters 4 and 5) recounts how, in his last days, in the bunker when the Russian armies were already in Berlin, he was making strategic decisions for armies that no longer existed. The book (293–98) also has a judicious summary of his self-confidence, his willpower, and his “strategical genius.”

140

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

No less religious is the way he handled setbacks and misfortune. In his philosophy there was no convenient God, on whose wrath disaster could be blamed, but there were people: the politicians who in the First World War had betrayed the soldiers at the front; and in the Second World War, his own generals who, he said, had been disloyal to him and to the National Socialist cause; and everywhere and always, whatever the misfortune, the Jews were to blame. Whatever might have been a rational explanation was left unconsidered; systems were not at fault, only people—never Hitler himself, but those around him. What could be more classically religious than this witch-hunt mentality? The two creeds—Hitler’s and the Fundamentalists’—appear to differ radically in their theory of how society and the individual relate to one another, and, consequently, to have different ideas about what redemption means. (The difference is one of theory. The techniques used for diseducating the faithful are quite similar.) Fundamentalists are intent on saving souls for God; Hitler saw himself saving not individuals, but the German nation and the Aryan race. For Falwell, Colson, and everyone else engaged in the Lord’s work, the fundamental task is to redeem sinners by teaching them how “to fellowship” with Jesus, how to repent their sins, and so spare their souls the torment of Hell. Hitler, in that candid statement quoted earlier, had different intentions: “I have not come into the world to make men better, but to make use of their weaknesses.” Their weaknesses were to be used in such a way that, when properly instructed, the people (Das Volk) would realize that salvation lay in serving the nation and the race, and in the process, subordinating or losing altogether their individuality. Individuals (other than heroes like himself) had no place in Hitler’s design for the world; nations and races did. “Oneness,” whether in the German nation or the Aryan race or the Communist Party is achieved by fundamentally the same process as the suppression of an Old Adam and its replacement by a morality of service to the group. Along with that goes a radical division between the forces of good (those who belong in the faith) and the forces of evil (those who do not). The disciplines of Christianity and of National Socialism of course do not have the same content; but they do have the same conceptual framework—conversion, redemption, mobilization, achieving a purpose in life, understanding what we are put on earth to do, and (which is the political cornerstone) having a strong sense of the superiority of one’s own faith, of being privileged, and therefore leaning toward protective, even paranoid, antagonism. But is not New Testament Christianity a religion of love, a universalistic faith in which everyone, once they are saved, will find a place in Heaven? Fascism has no such doctrine of salvation: Jews, for example, could never “fellowship” with National Socialism. Enemies are not to be “saved,” but hated and, when the opportunity arises, exterminated. Likewise, Fundamentalist Christianity, as seen, for example, through the eyes of Randall Terry, preaches that

the ne e d f or e ne m ie s

•

141

violence, even killing, is countenanced by God. A similar unforgivingness characterizes the wilder statements of Pat Robertson: assassinating the president of an ungodly regime is within the Godly moral code; and (letting the Lord do the dirty work) those who offend against His wishes can expect divine retribution in the form of floods, plagues (for example, AIDS), hurricanes, and high casualty terrorism. That version of the Christian God is indeed a God of vengeance, sometimes portrayed as if He, like Hitler, takes pleasure in violence. So also do some of those who do His work. Here is Falwell in a Fundamentalist duet with Pat Robertson: “In keeping with this, Pat’s fondest wish is to witness the Tribulation—the bloody seven-year cataclysm through which God will restore His kingdom on Earth. It’s going to be absolutely spectacular. The Lord will finally manifest His divine wrath against the Sodomites, the Feminists, the Secularists, along with all the other blasphemers.”()

Absolutely spectacular! With such relish is the “bloody seven-year cataclysm” contemplated! Recall Hitler glorying in the beer hall fracas and the beer-mugs that flew like howitzers, and his bloodstained fighters, and how his “heart almost rejoiced at this spectacle which recalled memories of the War.” There are other similarities. Hitler’s Fascism is authoritarian, centered on a leader, who commands the respect or, better, the unthinking adoration of his followers. All knowledge comes from him; he is infallible, the fount of inerrant wisdom, a characteristic that the Fundamentalist God shares alike with some Christian and non-Christian rulers—with Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the Bishop of Rome, and every king who claimed to have a divine right (a manifest destiny) to rule. The pattern is repeated down the chain of command: recall Peter Gay’s “universal principle that the higher governs the lower everywhere.” Revealed religion is not democratic. There is one source for Truth, which is delivered by his agents; vox populi does not determine vox dei. Under such regimes God, in the person of his agents, rules; this is theocracy and the people have no voice, other than what they say in prayer to Him and in praise of Him. There are other similarities of a more peripheral kind: Fundamentalists and Fascists are heavily patriotic. Both, as we saw, thrive on animosity, not on love. Both flourish where there is a high level of diseducation, and where, as a consequence, there is a low level of accountability for the leader, who is thereby unhampered by an ethic of responsibility and is free to follow the ethic of whatever are his/her absolute ends. Given these underlying similarities between the discipline of Fascism and the discipline of right-wing Fundamentalists, it is to be expected that there will also

142

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

be parallels in the techniques that each of them use to bring their followers into line and to teach them the required discipline. Fundamentalists, as I said, see themselves as saving individual souls. They do have a one-to-one technique for conversion. It is called “witnessing.” The Persuader tells the story of his own epiphany, thus giving the process a companionable tone and an immediacy that is lacking in more abstract kinds of discourse. Witnessing might sometimes be, so to speak, craftsman work: tailored to the individual. Certainly witnessing goes on: it is richly illustrated in Colson’s account of his own conversion and of how he helped others to go down the same road.18 But the major effort (including witnessing from the podium) goes into bulk-salvation. Falwell and others, as I described earlier, are hooked on large numbers; head counts become a measure both of success and of moral worth. There is also, of course, a practical side to this: the bigger the flock, the bigger is the shepherd’s political clout and the more is the money that goes to him and his organization. Televised preaching to a congregation, seated in a vast auditorium, the preacher up front with a discreet microphone attached to his head, the cameras panning from time to time to show at least an attentive, often an enraptured, but, above all, a huge audience, the lighting and the décor testifying to a high level of professional theatricality—all these inescapably recall Leni Riefenstahl’s enchantingly sinister films of Hitler’s mass meetings in the 1930s: here too the same ocean (the metaphor is irresistible) of upturned faces look adoringly at their leader. This is the technique of the Roman circus, of the King Emperor’s Durbar in India, of “Progresses” in the royal barge on the Thames, of Presidential inaugurations in the United States, of May Day parades in Moscow, of dictators anywhere reviewing their armies, and even of the time-arrested Trooping the Colours and Changing the Guard in London. They all are entertainments, amusements, like firework displays—what in India is called a tamasha, an occasion to have fun and to be impressed by grandeur, by sublimity, by majesty, and above all, an occasion when thoughts of one’s own interests, even an awareness of one own individuality, are drowned in a sea of unthinking oneness, of adoration for a quasi-divine person. These are diseducating occasions and Hitler knew how to use them; so also do the televangelists. I cannot end on that note, having earlier called the televangelists “pipsqueaks” and Hitler a Titan. Certainly there are similarities in the techniques they used to turn their followers into devotees, to diminish the mercenary element and to base the tie between them and their followers on a morality (in the mode of Kennedy, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what

18. Harding and Crapanzano both describe attempts by interviewees to “witness” the interviewer.

the ne e d f or e ne m ie s

•

143

you can do for your country”). In the Domesday book of history, however, the American Christian Fascists will not, as I said, be written large when set against Hitler or Gandhi. Those two men moved the world and were able to do so because they commanded (in very different ways) a religious following. The Christian Fascists, despite the bold face they put on, are a sideshow in world history, and even on the American scene, if they are compared to Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1930s, the Nazis got past a tipping point, past what economists, writing about Third World development, used to call “takeoff,” the point at which, hopefully, economic growth becomes self-sustaining. The Nazi campaign to mobilize the German Volk reached that point in the mid 1930s: they cornered for themselves the moral high ground of German patriotism. They did it by an essentially moral appeal, helped out, in the style of religious zealots anywhere, by exterminating (not converting) the opposition. Christian Fascists have not reached that point. There is opposition: the moral high ground they claim to occupy is not theirs alone, but also is occupied by a different variety of Christianity that does not countenance violence. It replaces the antagonism with persistently optimistic messages about kindheartedness, warmth, happiness, self-fulfillment, bonding with fellow-believers in a positive way, the evils of greed, the evils of dishonesty, and an array of other behaviors that constitute (at least in its Sunday version) mainstream American middle class morality. Voices are raised to dispute the religious right’s message about values and its connection with the Republican Party. “For the most part the religious right has been limited to the Republican Party . . . A voice of biblical values cannot be in the pocket of one party . . . There ought to be more than just gay marriage and pro-life issues because the Bible is concerned with all of life . . . We need to do everything we can to relieve poverty, heal the sick and protect the Earth.” (Los Angeles Times, 16 September 2006)

There are other voices within the Christian Right (none of them very loud) that regret this intimacy with the Republican Party and the involvement in politics. It is not “in accordance with the spirit of the Gospel.” True religion is contaminated. Here again is David Kuo: If we were to have any hope of achieving the $8 billion for suffering Americans the President had promised, we first had to show the West Wing we could help them politically, and, second, we needed to show that giving up on us would hurt them politically. (2006, 200)

And, . . . the name “Jesus” doesn’t bring to mind the things he said he wanted associated with his followers—love for one another; love for the poor, sick, and imprisoned; selfdenial; and devotion to God. It is associated with antiabortion activities, opposition to

144

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

gay rights, the Republican Party, and tax cuts. Can anything that dilutes the name of Jesus be worth it for Christians like me? (2006, 261)

and, the words of Tony Campolo, cited earlier, . . . a social emphasis to impart the values of the kingdom of God in society, to relieve the sufferings of the poor, to stand up for the oppressed, to be a voice for those who have no voice.

These movements—a Protestant version of Liberation Theology—draw their inspiration from many passages in the New Testament, for example from Matthew 11: 5: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, and the lepers are cleansed the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.

or Luke 4: 18, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has appointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering the sight of the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.

There are other more practical reasons for the relative insignificance of rightwing Christians. The United States, compared with some of its modern European counterparts, is a violent place, and with a frontier tradition of forcible self help. But the rule of law is still more or less intact, and it is hard to imagine a “Night of the Long Knives” (that is, systematic and organized political murder, as distinct from the spontaneous violence, usually racist, that from time to time disfigures America’s inner cities).19 So far as I know, no televangelist, not even those who recommend assassination, preach their sermons while brandishing a pistol or while being protected by uniformed and armed bodyguards. Also, and perhaps more to the point, Christian Fascism, Falwell’s braggadocio notwithstanding, is not a mass movement, nor, despite the plethora of formal organizations so named as to suggest nationwide significance—Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” Kennedy’s “Campus Crusade for Christ,” Dobson’s “Focus on the Family,” Gary Bauer’s “American Values,” Bill Bennett’s “Empower America”—despite all these and many others, is there much likelihood of Hitler-style consolidation: there are too many Chiefs; not one of them dominates. Christian Fascism is a movement, but it also is an arena (or a market) in which competition rules and concerted action is achieved only with difficulty. 19. This could be an opportunity for writers of political fiction, or at least for my readers, to amuse themselves. Who, among the Fundamentalist stars or among the God-bothering politicians, would be the equivalent of Hitler? Which unhappy televangelist would be cast as Ernst Röhm? Or as the bluff commonsensical Göring? Or the sinister and unfeeling Himmler? Or the popinjay Mussolini?

the ne e d f or e ne m ie s

•

145

I presented the Fundamentalist televangelists not quite as stick figures, but certainly with an element of caricature, highlighting, and perhaps making too prominent certain characteristics: their business mentality, their propensity for antagonism, and, in some cases, what cannot be other than their dishonesty and their shamelessly hypocritical opportunism. Hitler too is painted in the bright colors of exaggeration—difficult to avoid when my principal sources are Nazi propaganda and Hitler’s own rhetoric. In neither case did I attempt to enter into a dialogue with their creeds, looking at how they stand with truth—asking whether their Truth is also truth. I focused instead on how the creed that they profess influences their performance as politicians and on how they make use of it to gain power. The following three chapters will examine in more detail the creed (and its political effects) of a politician who, his physical appearance notwithstanding, would defy presentation as a stick figure—Gandhi. He was an obsessively religious man who, like Hitler, dominated his country’s politics in the first half of the last century.

Part III

A Religion of Love

b

5

G ANDHI The Freedom Fight

b The Freedom Fight Mahatma1 Gandhi, an indefatigable sermonizer and the apotheosis of nonviolent political muscularity, was a leader who, in his own unique way, stood up to imperialists—and largely baffled them, as he sometimes baffled his own entourage. Gandhi was the inspirational leader of the Congress Movement in India’s “Freedom Fight” against the British. He headed the Movement (although seldom holding office and frequently at odds with other leaders over policy and strategy) from about 1919 until 1947, when India achieved her independence.2 The Indian National Congress had been founded in 1885, by a group of highly educated Indians—lawyers, educators, writers, and journalists—at the urging of A.O. Hume, a Scotsman retired from a distinguished career as a civil servant in India and continuing to reside there. The Congress conducted itself as an unofficial advisory body (and in a modest way, as a pressure group) intent on persuading the British to allow greater Indian participation in the governing of India. It employed entirely constitutional methods: participation in public affairs (so far as was allowed) and the presentation to the Government of policy statements (“memorials”). Gandhi radically changed

1. The honorific Mahatma, meaning literally “Great Soul,” corresponds roughly to our idea of a “saintly” person. The title was bestowed on him by the poet Rabindranath Tagore. Gandhi professed to be embarrassed by it: “Thank God my much vaunted Mahatmaship has never fooled me” (Harijan 1936). 2. There is a succinct outline account of his ins-and-outs with the Congress in Bose 1947, 208–315.

150

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

the organization and its political style: by the end of the 1920s, the Congress had become a revolutionary (but intendedly nonviolent) mass movement. Its top leaders were still drawn from the educated urban classes, but they were joined by a vast array of the lesser elite, urban and rural reproductions of themselves at lower levels of the Indian middle class, and, beneath them, an immense foundation of ordinary, often illiterate, politically unmobilized villagers and townsmen. The “Indian National Congress” became the “Congress Movement,” and memorials were replaced by movements—Civil Disobedience, Non-cooperation and eventually, in 1942, Quit India. These campaigns were regulated (or so Gandhi intended) by the principle of nonviolence. What kind of charisma made it possible for Gandhi to accomplish all this? Did it give him freedom to maneuver? There is an unequivocal answer—in the light of history it might be more nuanced—in a comment by Jawarharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister and foremost among the several “secular” leaders who complemented Gandhi’s essentially religious style of conducting politics. What Nehru writes (and the ambivalent chagrin that he sometimes displayed) seems to show clearly that Gandhi’s charisma was entirely his own, entirely personal; it did not, despite his almost thirty years of leading the struggle for India’s independence, draw its main strength from the Independence Movement. Indeed, Nehru said unambiguously that the reverse was true: the Movement needed Gandhi. Provoked by a journalist who had suggested that Gandhi’s presentation of himself as an ascetic and a holy man, his style of dress (a dhoti, a shawl, and sandals), and his endless and seemingly unworldly and politically unrealistic moralizing and sermonizing, might bring the Congress into ridicule,3 Nehru, who himself had strong misgivings about the patently religious style of Gandhi’s politics, even so wrote: But without him where was the struggle, where was Civil Disobedience and Satyagraha? He was part of the living movement; indeed, he was the movement itself. So far as that struggle was concerned everything depended on him. (1962, 288)

Nevertheless, the ultimate goal, as Gandhi repeatedly and vehemently insisted, was not political power, but moral regeneration. “I had no political ambition. My politics were subservient to the demands of truth and nonviolence . . .” (SG, 266). The struggle for self-rule (swaraj) was not an end in itself but incidental to satyagraha—the struggle (graha) for Truth (satya). The campaigns to disrupt British government in India through the Non-cooperation Movement in 1920, the Civil Dis-

3. Churchill, the imperialist, was moved not to ridicule, but to outrage: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of the type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the vice-regal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor” (Ashe 2000, 296).

gandhi

•

151

obedience Movement in 1922, the Salt March in 1930, and the many other protests and agitations between 1919 and 1942, culminating in the Quit India Movement that landed most of the Congress leaders, high and low, in jail or drove them underground (and some of them into violence)—all these overtly political actions went along with sarvodaya (“the uplift of all”), a social work campaign that combined welfare activities with moral and spiritual education, the goal being to recreate Rama Rajya (God’s kingdom) in which every individual’s lifestyle is regulated by moral values, and every individual is embedded in a social order of self-sufficient village communities (the negation of industrialized urban society).4 Morality began with and resided in the individual as a moral agent; it anteceded and could not be created by governments; moral regeneration comes only from within, from the heart. One activity that pervasively symbolized adherence both to the Congress Movement and to Gandhian values was khadi: individuals spin cotton to be handwoven into cloth that would replace goods produced in the industrial mills of Lancashire (and Gujerat). His main activity for some years had been Khadi propaganda, and with this object he had taken extensive tours all over India. He took each province by turn and visited every district and almost every town of any consequence, as well as remote rural areas. Everywhere he attracted enormous crowds . . . I do not think any other human being has ever traveled about India as much as he has done. (Nehru 1962, 191)

Nehru identifies very clearly the idiom of Gandhi’s charismatic appeal to the masses. It was religious; it addressed the emotions and sidestepped reasoning; its tone was imperative; it spoke in absolutes, not conditionals; and its content was Gandhi’s version of what Christians call “redemption,” with Gandhi less a politician than a savior: Gandhiji,5 indeed, was continually laying stress on the religious and spiritual side of the movement . . . the whole movement was strongly influenced by this and took on a revivalist character as far as the masses were concerned. (Nehru 1962, 72)

Religion in that context made Nehru uneasy: I used to be troubled sometimes at the growth of this religious element in our politics. Even some of Gandhiji’s phrases sometimes jarred upon me—thus his frequent reference to Rama Raja as a golden age which was to return. But I was powerless to

4. It is an irony that Rama Rajya has in recent years been appropriated to service a very different value and one that absolutely contradicts Gandhi’s philosophy: a menacing intolerance of other religions than Hinduism. 5. The suffix “-ji” indicates respect.

152

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

intervene, and I consoled myself with the thought that Gandhiji used the words because they were well known and understood by the masses. He had an amazing knack of reaching the heart of the people. (1962, 72)

This charismatic style enabled Gandhi to follow his conscience. In 1924, two years into the campaign of nonviolent non-cooperation, “a mob of villagers had retaliated on some policemen by setting fire to the police-station and burning halfa-dozen or so policemen in it” (Nehru 1962, 80–81). Gandhi immediately called the campaign off. The leaders of Congress obeyed, but, Nehru wrote, “This sudden suspension of our movement . . . was resented, I think, by almost all the Congress leaders—other than Gandhiji, of course.” He added two rhetorical questions which show clearly that his moral priorities were not those of Gandhi: “Were a remote village and a mob of excited peasants in an out-of-the-way place going to put an end . . . to our national struggle for freedom? Must we train the three hundred and odd million Indians in the theory and practice of nonviolent action before we could go forward?” “Mob,” “excited peasants,” and above all “burning half-a-dozen or so policemen” give these remarks a patrician tone and an ends-justify-means slant, both of which are diametrically un-Gandhian.6 They show clearly that for Nehru, independence was primary; moral regeneration as an end in itself was politically unrealistic and significant only as “Rama Rajya” propaganda, “well known and understood by the masses.” Nevertheless, resentful or not, at that time the leaders of Congress listened to Gandhi’s conscience and obeyed his orders. In September 1932, there was another event that shows not only how Gandhi was not beholden primarily to the cause of national independence, but also why at this time Congress leaders, whatever they thought of Gandhi’s priorities, acknowledged his authority and obeyed his orders. Nehru, then serving one of his frequent periods in jail, learned that Gandhi, also imprisoned but in a different jail, had announced that he would “fast unto death.” He was protesting a proposal by the Government to establish separate electorates for untouchables. The Government’s intention, one assumes, was to make sure that untouchable interests would be represented in the legislature. Gandhi, very much the friend and champion of untouchables and the resolute foe of untouchability, objected. He saw the proposal, as he and others saw many Government moves, as emanating from a strategy of divide and rule. But he also believed that morality (in this case doing away with untouchability) could only come from a change of heart and could not be produced by legislation; separate electorates would emphasize and thus perpetuate the beliefs and values that excluded untouchables from the rest of Hindu society. Therefore, 6. According to another account (Ashe 2000, 229) this incident, which took place at Chauri Chaura in Uttar Pradesh, was not the semi-accident that Nehru makes it out to be. Not “half-adozen,” but twenty-two policemen were incinerated or beaten to death when they ran out of the burning building.

gandhi

•

153

his proclaimed target was not the Government but his fellow Hindus—to coerce them into changing their morality: “If the Hindu mass mind is not yet ready to banish untouchability root and branch, it must sacrifice me without hesitation.” Suicide by fasting is an extreme form of tapas, which is the use of self-denial to influence the course of events, whether natural or social, in order to avert evil. Suicide is the ultimate self-mortification and the threat of it places enormous pressure on those responsible for whatever has made the self-selected victim seek death. The mystical powers of tapas aside, the authorities no doubt were aware that Gandhi’s death in prison would send rioters into the streets and, at the least, severely test the Government’s capacity to maintain law and order. As one might expect, the Government did not wait for evidence that the “Hindu mass mind” heard the word of Gandhi’s Truth, had seen the light, and “banished untouchability.” They summoned Dr. Ambedkar to the Yeravda jail (he, as an untouchable and the leader of his people, favored separate electorates) and had him negotiate with Gandhi. A compromise was reached—no separate electorates but seats reserved for untouchables—and the fast ended after six days. Given his secular leanings and his political priorities, Nehru’s first comments on hearing of the fast were predictably disapproving: I felt annoyed with him for choosing a side-issue—just a question of electorate. What would be the result on our freedom movement? . . . After so much sacrifice and brave endeavor, was our movement to tail off into something insignificant? I felt angry with him at his religious and sentimental approach to a political question, and his frequent references to God in connection with it. He seemed even to suggest that God had indicated the very date of the fast. What a terrible example to set! (1962, 370)

Then he heard about the outcome: . . . the tremendous upheaval all over the country, a magic wave of enthusiasm running through Hindu society, and untouchability appeared to be doomed. What a magician, I thought, was this little man sitting in Yeravda prison, and how well he knew how to pull the strings that move people’s hearts! (1962, 371) 7

In May 1933, Gandhi launched another fast and once again Nehru deplored the intrusion of religion and irrationality.

7. Nehru’s—no doubt unintended—twist on Gandhi’s metaphor of “strings” and “hearts” symbolizes the difference in their presuppositions about politics and human nature. For Nehru, the strings are in the hands of a puppeteer and they are “pulled.” For Gandhi, the strings were those of a musical instrument. He had written about hearing, as a child, a blind musician whose “fingers swept the strings with an unerring instinct and everyone listened spellbound. Similarly there are chords in every human heart. If we only know how to strike the right chord, we bring out the music” (SG 124).

154

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

It seemed to me sheer revivalism, and clear thinking had not a ghost of a chance against it. All India, or most of it, stared reverently at the Mahatma and expected him to perform miracle after miracle and put an end to untouchability and get swaraj and so on—and did precious little itself! And Gandhiji did not encourage others to think; his insistence was only on purity and sacrifice. (Nehru 1962, 373)

But, again, he could not forbear to admire its political efficacy; and he noted, somewhat ruefully, that it was culturally apposite. What a problem and a puzzle he has been not only to the British Government but to his own people and his closest associates! Perhaps in every other country he would be out of place today, but India still seems to understand, or at least appreciate, the prophetic-religious type of man, talking of sin and salvation and nonviolence. (Nehru 1962, 253)

Nehru even confessed to quasi-religious sentiments, to being half-taken in by a “curious illusion”: To some extent the revivalist element in our movement carried us on; a feeling that nonviolence as conceived for political or economic movements or for righting wrongs was a new message which our people were destined to give to the world. We became victims to the curious illusion of all peoples and all nations that in some way they are a chosen race. Nonviolence was the moral equivalent of war and of all violent struggle. It was not merely an ethical alternative, but it was effective also. (1962, 76)

Gandhi “did not encourage others to think.” In my language, those others were “diseducated.” Nehru, certainly, would not have found that adjective offensive or inaccurate if applied to the masses (perhaps also to some of his colleagues). Gandhi, too, might have accepted it, but only by putting quite a different spin on “education.” Nehru’s “clear thinker” is the rational, empirically oriented critic who has an eye on consequences; Gandhi’s philosophy took the pupil beyond that kind of rationality to a firm and fixed knowledge of God’s absolute Truth; to be diseducated is not yet to know that Truth. In other words, with respect to “truth,” Nehru was a scientist; Gandhi was not—he believed in Truth.8 Each of them, I think, would have accepted that description of himself.

Peacemaking In the months preceding and following independence, a complicated set of events severely tested Gandhi’s charismatic authority over both his politician-lieutenants

8. Nehru read the Natural Science Tripos at Cambridge. He was also, like Gandhi and Ambedkar, called to the bar at the Inns of Court.

gandhi

•

155

in Congress and the Indian masses. These same events pitted his universalistic faith—“all men are brothers”—against a different kind of religiosity, which, feeding on hatred, manifested itself in murderous encounters between faith-based communities, uprooted fifteen million refugees, and cost, it is estimated, at least half a million lives.9 Attlee’s Labour Government in Britain, newly elected at the end of the Second World War, decided for both practical and ideological reasons (and in the teeth of Churchill and the Conservative diehards) that the time had come to leave India. A Cabinet Mission, sent out from London in March 1946, recommended that the successor be a single federated state, with regional areas of representation adjusted to allow Hindus to dominate in Hindu areas and Muslims in Muslim areas. This was a response to demands, voiced by Jinnah, the Muslim leader, for two successor states, India and Pakistan. There followed a complex series of maneuvers as the British negotiated with and between Jinnah and the Congress leaders, who sometimes took Gandhi’s advice and sometimes did not. These negotiations were accompanied by increasingly intense and widespread civil disorder, until, in June 1947, Congress reluctantly decided to accept partition as a necessary evil, the alternative being civil war. Events in this year before his death provoked from Gandhi an uncharacteristic expression of self-pity. Here he is, addressing a prayer meeting on 1 April 1947: My writ runs no more . . . No one listens to me any more. I am a small man. True, there was a time when mine was a big voice. Then everyone obeyed what I said; now neither the Congress nor the Hindus nor the Muslims listen to me. Where is the Congress today? It is disintegrating. I am crying in the wilderness. (Chatterjee 1986, 116)

“My writ runs no more . . . neither the Congress nor the Hindus nor the Muslims listen to me.” His entourage (“Congress” in the lament) made the decision that he did not want: partition and a separate Muslim state. Neither did his lieutenants want partition; but in the end they rejected Gandhi’s absolutism—no partition at any price—and looked instead at its likely consequences: prolonged and intensified violence would have been catastrophic. The common people (“the Hindus” and “the Muslims” in his lament) in communities in Bihar, Bengal, Punjab, and elsewhere responded to rumors of murder in other places by turning on their own minorities and slaughtering them. In earlier years, when violence broke out, Gandhi could end it simply by calling off the campaign that

9. All Men are Brothers is the title that Krishna Kripalani gave to his collection of Gandhi’s sayings. I have not found that sentence in Gandhi’s own writings. It comes originally from Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the form of “All men will become brothers” and originates in a poem by Schiller, where it appears as “beggars become the princes’ brothers.”

156

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

had occasioned it. But the killings, which began about August 1946 and culminated in the massacres that followed independence and the flight of refugees in both directions between India and Pakistan, were not of an order that could be halted by anyone’s fiat, not even Gandhi’s. He did try: the months leading up to independence were spent living in the troubled areas; and sometimes his presence brought relative calm and a stop, at least for a time, to revenge killings. As always, it was the messenger, the personage, more than the message that was the effective peacemaker. Gandhi’s thinking seems to have still been in the mode of moral regeneration that earlier had led him to believe that a change of heart would end untouchability: if Hindus and Muslims found Truth and learned to love one another, there need be no Pakistan. Separate states, like separate voting lists, would only intensify and make permanent the sense of difference and the antagonism. But, as he said, neither the Hindus nor the Muslims listened to him. J.B. Kripalani, a devoted Gandhian, who presided over the June 1947 meeting of the All-India Congress that accepted partition, said on that occasion: “I have been with Gandhiji for the last thirty years . . . Even when I differed from him I have considered his political instinct to be more correct than my elaborately reasoned attitude. Today I also feel that he, with his supreme fearlessness, is correct and my stand is defective. Then why am I not with him? It is because I feel that he has as yet found no way of tackling the problem on a mass basis. . . . Today he is himself groping in the dark. . . . He says he is solving the problem of Hindu-Muslim unity for the whole of India in Bihar. May be. But it is difficult to see how that is being done. . . . though he can enunciate policies they have to be in the main carried out by others and these others are not converted to his way of thinking.” (SG, 244)

Gandhi had “not yet found a way of tackling the problem on a mass basis.” In other words, as Fischer remarks, “The country was not responding to Gandhi’s pleas for peace and brotherhood” (1954, 175). Fischer goes on to speculate that Gandhi, knowing that was the case, did not try to force the hand of Congress by committing himself to “fast unto death” against partition. But he did use that weapon twice more before he was murdered. When independence was declared on 15 August 15 1947, he ignored the celebrations and spent his time in Calcutta, as a peacemaker and would-be protector of Muslims. In the night of 31 August, a gang of marauding Hindus broke into the home of an elderly Muslim widow, which had been put at Gandhi’s disposal, shouted abuse at him, and began to wreck the house. Gandhi argued with them—it seems without much effect. The police arrived and cleared the house. Later, tear gas was used to disperse a crowd outside. The following day, near to the house, a grenade was thrown into the back of a truck carrying Muslims away to a safer area. Two were killed. Gandhi witnessed the event. On the evening of 1 September 1947, he

gandhi

•

157

announced a fast that would end “only if and when sanity returns to Calcutta” (Brown, 272–87). What followed seems to show that he had not lost his “amazing knack of reaching the heart of the people.” The police, including their British officers, fasted for one day to show their support. Representatives of community organizations, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian, trade unionists, groups of merchants, and even the leaders of “hooligan gangs” came to beg him to end the fast. He required them all to sign a pledge of nonviolence. After three days, he ended the fast and, according to Fischer, while the religious massacres went on in other parts of India, Calcutta and both the Hindu and Muslim sections of the now partitioned Bengal “remained riot-free” (1954, 178). In the months following the promulgation of independence, fifteen million refugees fled from where they had lived to the country where their religion was dominant. Refugees were massacred on the roads and in trains. In the cities of both countries, those of the minority faith who had not fled were in constant peril. Gandhi returned to Delhi and campaigned for tolerance, in particular for an end to violence against Muslims, preaching often to hostile Hindu audiences (including the RSS, from which his assassin came). The violence abated somewhat, and then, around the end of the year, seemed ready to erupt again. On 13 January, he began a fast, announcing that it was directed at “the conscience of all”—Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs—and he expected “a thorough cleansing of hearts.” The fast was a very public affair; thousands of people filed past the bed where he lay; from time to time he addressed the crowd through a microphone, until, when his voice became too weak, his messages were read for him and broadcast on All-India Radio. There was an inundation of telegrams from all over India and even from Muslims in Pakistan. On 18 January, a delegation of a hundred people attended him, signatories to a promise that violence would cease and that confiscated property would be restored. The delegation included leaders of the Congress Government, diplomatic representatives of Pakistan, and leaders of communal organizations—Christian, Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu, including even the RSS. He ended his fast on that day, no doubt rejoicing that he still had that “amazing knack of reaching the heart,” this time not only of the people, but also of the elite. He had in fact already done that in a very direct way. On the third day of the fast, he dictated a letter to Nehru, now Prime Minister, directing him to pay to Pakistan the very large sum, five hundred and fifty million rupees, which was Pakistan’s share of the assets of the undivided India. Nehru, Sardar Patel, and the finance minister, John Matthai, came to Gandhi and explained why they would not make the transfer. Patel spoke for an hour and a half. Gandhi, saying, “You are no longer the Sardar that I knew,” began to weep. The delegation retired, presumably confused and embarrassed; they called another cabinet meeting, which, when it was told of Gandhi’s distress, voted to transfer the funds.

158

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

These three accomplishments—taming faith-inspired hooligans in Bengal, leaning on the hard-headed leaders of the new India until they did what they were morally obliged to do even when the immediate material pay off was dramatically negative, and mobilizing well-wishers across the religious and political divides to speak up in favor of nonviolence—seem to show that when Gandhi said “my writ runs no more,” he was wrong. It did run: violence stopped at least in Bengal; Patel (the formidable politico who in the succeeding months brought India’s princes to heel) yielded to him; and the nation, joined even by some of its enemies in Pakistan, acknowledged the magic of his charisma. It also seems, at least on the surface of things, that the devotion he commanded gave him authority. But the reality, as ever, was more complicated.

Failures That neither Nehru nor some others in Gandhi’s entourage believed in his design for the good society is demonstrated by what they did after independence (formally promulgated on 15 August 1947). Even before then, once it became clear that that the problem was no longer how to win independence, but what form it would take and what to do with it, control of policy was substantially out of Gandhi’s hands. The form of independence—partition into two nations—was accepted over Gandhi’s vehement opposition. As for policy, in the decade after independence sarvodaya and satyagraha remained prominently on display in the political shop window, and there was a sustained effort to set up a system of local government (panchayati raj), but the effective goods on the shelves mostly were chemical fertilizers, weed killers, pesticides, scientifically improved seeds, steel plants (one Russian, one German, one British, and one Indian), dams, cement factories, and other capital intensive forms of economic development, all of them straight denials of Gandhi’s vision for swaraj. Local government institutions soon took on the characteristics of a boss-and-clique political party system, which Gandhi would have deplored. Nonviolence survived as a philosophy and, for a time and often in a most hypocritical way, as a form of political agitation. Nevertheless, if, as Fischer claims, there were no more killings in Bengal after Gandhi’s intervention, then words like “magic” or “miracle” remain—indeed, are more than ever—appropriate. The killing went on elsewhere in India, but the final fast in Delhi that forced Nehru and Patel to pay Pakistan what it was owed and that brought together the leaders of different organizations to pledge support for an end to the killings and the restoration of confiscated property, did demonstrate Gandhi’s remarkable charismatic hold over his entourage and over a wider Indian elite. But even that case has another side to it. One has to remember, first, that signatures are only one step on the way toward implementation (I am thinking

gandhi

•

159

of the promise to return stolen property), and, second, that the signatories had recent and firsthand experience of communal violence and its disutility (to use a word that suggests that they might also have also been using their judgment and counting the material cost of prolonged violence). These were pro-tem victories and far short of the moral transformation that Gandhi desired. Given the utter transcendence of that goal, things could hardly have turned out otherwise. Partition-generated violence was somewhat checked, for the immediate occasion; but the tension between Hindus and Muslims has continued down the years; Sikh True-believers murdered Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter and at the time, India’s Prime Minister, and in revenge, more than two thousand Sikhs were massacred in Delhi; her son Rajiv Gandhi, also Prime Minister, was assassinated by Tamil nationalists; India and Pakistan have fought two wars, tension over Kashmir continues, and both countries can now brandish nuclear weapons at one another. “All men are brothers” is as distant as it ever was, and the unregenerate Old Adam still thrives in India, as everywhere. At a prayer meeting on 30 January 1948, twelve days after his fast was ended and the pledge of nonviolence given, Gandhi was shot and killed by Nathuram Godse, the publisher of a right-wing Hindu weekly newspaper. The following two chapters will go through parts of this story again and expand some of them, first to show in more detail what underlay the devotion bestowed on Gandhi and, second, to ask why in some instances his charisma was politically effective and in others it was not. There are two keys to understanding that pattern: one is the difference between the disciplines that I have called secular religions and those that invoke divinities; the other is the divergence, within the Godly religions, between Gandhi’s humane universalism and the bellicose particularism of those other creeds that he called “formal” or “customary”—Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, and the like—and with which, despite his wishes, he found himself fatally embroiled.

6

G ANDHI ’ S C HARISMA

b Calculation The question that shaped the previous chapter calls for a more detailed answer. Does personal charisma give leaders more freedom to maneuver than causederived charisma? It should, because their authority does not depend on being seen to serve a cause. The instances of the murdered policemen, Gandhi’s fast in Yeravda jail, and funds handed over to Pakistan despite opposition from the heavyweight Sardar Patel are just three examples that seem to demonstrate that Gandhi’s authority was personal, not derived from the nationalist cause. Gandhi could do what his conscience told him, defying Nehru and others who saw their movement to be first and foremost a struggle for independence and for power. His charismatic authority was his own. But that first assessment ignores the complexity of Gandhi’s influence over his followers. One may ask, first, whether it was entirely charismatic. Was there not also an element of calculation in the minds at least of some of those who accepted his authority? Purely charismatic authority commands obedience even from those who in other respects anticipate a negative pay off. It is a commonplace among economists (whose science brackets out charisma and other manifestations of religiosity) that people are more likely to vote their conscience when it does not hurt their pockets (North 1990, 59–60). Politicians may think the same way. Freedom Fighters, with whom I talked in Orissa in 1959, said that the goal of national independence by itself did little to mobilize peasants; they responded better when independence was linked with agitation against extortionate landlords or profiteering merchants or heavy-handed officials. Gandhi knew this well. Many of his civil disobedience campaigns were constructed around quite specific and concrete grievances, targeting unjust regulations

gandhi’ s charis m a

•

161

or avaricious landlords or intransigent owners of textile mills. He had formulated rules for civil disobedience, one of which was that a campaign must be directed only at practical issues that were open to clear and relatively immediate solutions. “Civil disobedience can never be in general terms, such as for Independence. The issue must be definite and capable of being clearly understood and within the power of the opponent to yield” (SG, 134). That example seems ill chosen. “Independence” is quite specific and, as events showed, it was within the power of the British to yield. “Moral regeneration” would have been a better example of a goal that is impractical: it is anything but specific, and the “opponent,” confusingly, is oneself. What matters most, perhaps, is immediacy and locality: not the purely moral judgment “this is good,” but one that comes nearer to a pay off calculation, “this is good for us.” His motive, by his own account, was not the one that I am suggesting—to make sure people knew what the pay off would be. He was concerned with Truth: agitation was only justifiable if it was within the power of the offender to see and acknowledge Truth, and so to willingly remedy the wrong. Ordinary people probably also saw what I have chosen to see and cared less about a mill owner’s soul than about getting grievances remedied. In other words, whatever Gandhi believed he was doing, on at least some occasions, his charisma was backed by worldly common sense and a tacit acknowledgement that people also think about pay offs. In some settings he was quite practical: he writes in his autobiography that he was an adept at the politician’s most worldly task, which is fundraising. There must also have been an element of a pay off even in the case of his idealistic middle class volunteers. Some of them, no doubt, whole-heartedly accepted the religious elements in Gandhi’s politics; others must have seen themselves as the victims of an oppressive imperial administration and in that quite specific way were motivated to work for national independence. For them, what mattered was not Gandhi’s religious ideals, but his ability to mobilize the masses in the cause of independence. The rules of engagement that he drew up for the satyagrahis point in the direction of practical politics; his theoretical statements, however, remain almost militantly innocent of utilitarian considerations. Satyagraha is a technique of moral persuasion; it is intended to appeal solely to moral sensibilities and not at all to material interests. The goal is to convert opponents, not to humiliate or defeat them. Neither violence nor bribery are permissible instruments. Both parties, in what begins as a clash of wills and should end as a meeting of minds, must agree on what is the right thing to do, and their agreement is a sign that they have found Truth, which Gandhi equates with God. If they continue to have different ideas of Truth, as Gandhi pointed out, laying a question-begging but effective stymie on the Hunter Commission—more on that later—their divergence merely shows that they have not yet found God’s Truth; when they do, they both will know it.

162

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

This seems to be another instance of a wish used to hide a reality; it prompts a closer look at what counted for nonviolence. Satyagraha is a complicated technique. “If the method of violence takes plenty of training, the method of nonviolence takes even more training, and that training is much more difficult than the training for violence” (SG, 132). First, there are directives that govern both actions and attitudes. A fundamental rule is that in no circumstances can bodily injury be inflicted on the other person, the “wrongdoer,” as Gandhi calls him (again begging a question). But more is required, and it is considered no less fundamental: to be effective, nonviolence calls for a frame of mind in which there is no hatred, no resentment, no desire to inflict injury, a total excision of negative emotions. In addition, fear must never be the motivation; satyagraha is never cowardice. There are passages in Gandhi’s writings that qualify almost as macho: “the road leading up to God is for the brave, never for the cowardly . . . there is no room for cowardice or even weakness . . . I would risk violence a thousand times [rather] than [risk] the emasculation of a whole race” (SG, 131–32). Second, persuasive encounters are tactically structured. At stage one, reasoning is used to search for a shared definition of the truth; if that fails, the satyagrahi, in stage two, uses the technique of self-suffering to dramatize the issue and persuade the other person to see reason (if one may put it that way); if that too fails, the opponent, as he/she has now become, is open to such nonviolent coercive tactics as boycotts and strikes, so long as they are conducted without inflicting bodily injury and always in a loving, salvationist frame of mind. That such measures might succeed because they inflict material losses, physical inconvenience, and mental stress on the opponent, who now might better be called a victim than a fellow-seeker after Truth, and whose acceptance of that particular Truth might then be insincere and involuntary, not a true acceptance, not moral at all, but the product of rationally assessing the negative pay off—such possibilities seem simply to have been left out of Gandhi’s thinking. A successful nonviolent encounter, which means that no blood was shed, was ipso facto an instance of voluntary moral conversion, not intimidation. It is not easy to put that spin on, for example, the case of the separate electorates in which Gandhi’s fast compelled the government to climb down, because not yielding would have brought violence to the streets. On the other hand, as one of Gandhi’s many apologists remarks (in this case Joan Bondurant 1965, 11), fasting and civil disobedience is a much better way to promote Truth than breaking heads. But it does suggest another historical question (and by me unanswerable): How often did persuasion by words alone prevail and how often did the encounter proceed to the semi-coercive, not-quite-blackmailing use of self-suffering or to the more blatantly direct coercion of boycotts and strikes, which entrain material disruption and therefore deprivation? How often did those “persuaded” in this fashion—or even by

gandhi’ s charis m a

•

163

the prospect of such techniques—consider themselves not converted but outsmarted? Ambedkar’s epithet “rascal” suggests that some of them might have done. In 1943, when Gandhi completed a 21-day fast in prison, the Government member responsible for law and order made a speech in the Legislative Council, saying that “it is certainly repugnant to Western ideas of decency to exploit against an opponent his feeling of humanity, chivalry and mercy or to trifle with such a sacred trust as one’s own life in order to play on the feelings of the public for the sake of some purely mundane object.” Gandhi had two replies. One was entirely moral; it was surely preferable to “exploit” the opponent’s “finer feelings” by fasting and self-suffering than to assassinate him. The other reply was not wholly consistent and perhaps even a give-away: fasting brought results. He pointed out that when the British allowed an imprisoned Irishman to starve himself to death and so become a martyr, one of their own leaders (Asquith) said that it was “a political blunder of the first magnitude” (SG, 157–58). On this, as perhaps on some other occasions, Gandhi seems to have had one eye on Truth and the other on the political pay off.1 None of this, however, diminishes the fact that Gandhi had a substantial charismatic hold over many of his fellow-politicians and over a multitude of ordinary people. From what did it derive?

Charisma: the Mass Audience Gandhi’s charismatic performances played to two distinct audiences and had a different significance for each, although his own motivations, as he described them, were an unseamed oneness, never trimmed or adjusted to suit either audiences or the different persuasions within them.2 One audience was what Nehru called “the masses,” those who apparently were attracted by the “religious and spiritual nature” and the “revivalist character” of Gandhi’s appeal: “[H]ow well he knew how to pull the strings that move people’s hearts!” Certainly he did; but for sure his “revivalism” was very different from that displayed in Fundamentalist Christianity or present day rightwing Hinduism.

1. Gandhi might have said that neither on this nor on any other occasion did he fast for “some purely mundane object.” The Viceroy thought that fasting was a device to get out of prison and was ready to set him free; but Gandhi refused. He was, it seems, deeply offended by a statement from the Government that he was responsible for the violence that followed the arrest of himself and other leaders in 1942. The fast, presumably, was undertaken to get the Viceroy to accede to Gandhi’s “truth,” which was that the Viceroy, not Gandhi, had caused the violence. See Brown 1989, 341–42. 2. The word “performance” is not intended to suggest he was insincere, only that charisma is a function of how one’s conduct is perceived by others.

164

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

Gandhi’s religion was markedly un-institutionalized. It lacked formality: it had no sacred edifices, no ecclesiastical ornaments, no dignitaries, no prelates, no priesthood, no courts, no colleges, no churches, and no formal hierarchies to hold the faithful accountable to the faith. Certainly he had congregations, both the “enormous crowds” that came to hear him speak and the more structured cadres whose activities were as much religiously, as politically, motivated—the devoted sarvodaya workers and perhaps some satyagrahis, who sincerely believed in the redemptive powers of Truth and nonviolence. From where did Gandhi get that “amazing knack of reaching the heart of the people?” It is, of course, impossible to know what is in anyone’s heart, even one person’s—sometimes not even one’s own—and to imagine knowing what is in the minds of millions is a fantasy. But there are answers to be found in Indian culture and in what it says about the kind of character that would be “understood by the masses.” The magic, in other words, lay in the idiom that Gandhi used and the character that he presented; there was no magical appeal in the moral and ontological specifics that he preached. The personage that he presented to the public is not difficult to read. Gandhi was born into the lesser elite, the son and grandson of men who were the chief administrators (“prime ministers”) of small princely states in Gujerat. He became a lawyer, was trained in London, and was called to the bar in 1891. He practiced law for a short time and not very successfully in Bombay and then, from 1893 to 1914, spent twenty years in South Africa as a lawyer and political activist, using the technique of satyagraha to protest discrimination against Indians. He returned to India in 1915 and became increasingly involved in the nationalist cause. Throughout that involvement, which ended with his assassination in 1948, he never presented himself, either to the public or to those close to him, in the style of a professional lawyer. Recall Churchill’s imperialist outburst: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of the type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the vice-regal palace . . . to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor.” The message conveyed by the style of a “half-naked fakir” is not so much studied disrespect for the Viceroy, as Churchill implies, but a statement by Gandhi that he is not one of the ruling race; he is not even one of India’s westernized elite, despite having been called to the London bar. His entire lifestyle carried that message: he is seen to walk everywhere, as the humble people of India do, he is not carried in a litter or conveyed in a carriage; when he travels by train, he travels in the execrably ill-appointed third class; therefore he is one of the people, not one of their masters.3

3. The transport symbolism was not carried to extremes. He had cars at his disposal and in the partition riots in Bengal, the government provided a train, equipped with a public-address system,

gandhi’ s charis m a

•

165

But in other respects he is not an ordinary person. His richly anecdotalized ascetic habits, the virtual absence throughout his life of material possessions, his gentleness of manner, his studied humility, his non-stop sermonizing, his daily meditations, his proclaimed reliance on prayer and the guiding hand of God, not to speak of the practice of well-publicized self-mortification as a way to exert power over those in authority—all these mark him as a man of religion, engaged with the world but not moved by worldly values. The sadhu, a holy man and a sage, commanded widespread respect throughout India. Darshan, the mere sight of such a person—let alone an audience with him—is enough to convey spiritual enrichment and impart wisdom. In short, it was the messenger and his way of life that made contact with the masses, not the message that he preached. Empowered by the ability to “pull the strings that move people’s hearts” and by their unquestioning adoration, Gandhi could do things that the movement’s “secular” leaders could not do. Gandhi was a Hindu, but the religion he himself embraced was different: it encompassed all other religions. It was also, surely, incomprehensible to the great mass of the Indian people, irrelevant to many in his entourage, and markedly offensive to some True-believers in the religions that it claimed to subsume. Let me explain what I mean by religion. It is not the Hindu religion which I certainly prize above all other religions, but the religion which transcends Hinduism, which changes one’s very nature, which binds one indissolubly to the truth within and which ever purifies. It is the permanent element in human nature which counts no cost too great in order to find full expression and which leaves the soul utterly restless until it has found itself, known its Maker and appreciated the true correspondence between the Maker and itself. (AMB, 73)

Reading this, and looking at the way of life that he required those close to him to adopt, at the ideal of sarvodaya (service of others), at self-denial, at the banishment of all emotions other than the love of Truth, at the insistence on nonviolence, and at some of his more specific everyday demands, such as the requirement that everyone must perform the degrading tasks that untouchables hitherto had been compelled to do, must treat untouchables as if they were morally equivalent, must sit down with them and share meals with them, eating food which they had cooked—he even advised “every woman to have her food and drink consecrated by the touch of a so-called untouchable” (MDG, 140)—then, looking over that list of negative indulgences, it is hard to believe that the message in itself could have much enthused Nehru’s “three hundred and odd million Indians.”4

4. For the most part, his statements on the caste system in general, as distinct from the usage of untouchability, were quite conservative. See Brown 1989, 207–8.

166

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

In short, the charisma that gave him his religious hold over the masses was not derived from his own universalistic religion, but was on loan from Hinduism: the beliefs and values that, in part, gave him his popular magic—darshan, asceticism, tapas—belonged to popular Hinduism. The Hindus who murdered him evidently read into his use of Hindu idioms an obligation to serve the cause of Hinduism by being militantly intolerant of other religions. That was the price he paid for “All men are brothers.”

Charisma: Elite and Entourage How did the “revivalist” image and Gandhi’s own universalistic creed sit with the elite? There is no simple answer, because the elite—on both sides of the freedom fight—had many faces. Churchill, contemptuous and angry, spoke for some of the British in India. General Wavell, the Viceroy of India from 1943 to 1947, certainly a more temperate man than Churchill and generally not given to abusive rhetoric, in a letter in 1946 had this to say about Gandhi’s contribution to a conference that broke down: Gandhi ran entirely true to form: his influence is still great; his line of thought and action at any given moment and on any particular issue is as unpredictable as ever; he never makes a pronouncement that is not so qualified and so vaguely worded that it cannot be interpreted in whatever sense best suits him at a later stage; but, however double-tongued he may be, he is quite single-minded on the one objective from which he has never swerved in the last 40 years, the elimination of the hated British influence from India. My distrust of this shrewd, malevolent, old politician was deep before the Conference started; it is deeper than ever now. (quoted in Brown 1989, 368)

Fourteen years earlier, one of Wavell’s predecessors as Viceroy, Lord Willingdon, said of Gandhi: “[W]hile he may possibly have his saint-like side, on the other he is the most Machiavellian bargaining little political humbug I have ever come across” (quoted in Brown 1989, 262). There were others, who respected Gandhi’s sincerity, his courage, and even his obstinacy; there were senior officials who tried hard to prevent violent responses to nonviolent satyagrahis, both because violence would likely be counter-productive and because such conduct would diminish their own respect for themselves as the guardians of “good government and natural justice.”5 Outside the

5. This sentiment is a prominent feature of Philip Woodruff’s The Men Who Ruled India, in particular the second volume, which has a sub-title, The Guardians, which sounds Platonic, but also suggests those charged with the care and education of a minor.

gandhi’ s charis m a

•

167

official world, a few Britons and others, captivated by Gandhi’s philosophy or by his “sainthood,” sympathized with and sometimes took an active part in his campaigns. At the other extreme there were Indians who detected in Gandhi’s religious presentation of himself nothing but dishonest posturing, or at best naïveté. On the extreme left, R. Palme Dutt, a Marxist theoretician, an Indian, and a member of the British Communist Party, offers this splendid display of stingin-the-tail sarcasm: . . . the ascetic defender of property in the name of the most religious and idealist principles of humility and love of poverty; the invincible and metaphysicaltheological casuist who could justify anything and everything in an astounding tangle of explanations and arguments which in a man of common clay might have been called dishonest quibbling, but in the great ones of the earth like [Ramsay] Macdonald or Gandhi is recognized as a higher plane of reasoning; the prophet who by his personal saintliness and selflessness could unlock the hearts of the masses where the moderate bourgeois could not hope for a hearing—and the best guarantee of shipwreck of any mass movement which had the blessing of his association. (quoted in Ashe 2000, xi–xii)

Mistrust came also from other directions. Sometime late in the 1950s, long after Gandhi had been assassinated, I heard on a BBC program the recorded voice of Dr. Ambedkar respond to someone who had just called Gandhi a “saint:” “He was no saint! He was a rascal!” The word “rascal” in the Indian English of those days did not bear the mildly indulgent suggestion that it sometimes has now; a near-enough gloss (recalling Nixon’s claim about himself) would be “crook.” Ambedkar, an untouchable and the spokesman for India’s untouchables, was some twenty-five years Gandhi’s junior. Like Gandhi, he was a lawyer admitted to the London bar, and, unlike Gandhi, he held degrees from Colombia University in New York and from the London School of Economics. He spent a lifetime combating untouchability. He was Law Minister in the Constituent Assembly of 1946–49 and a primary designer of India’s constitution, and into that constitution (with Nehru’s backing), he inserted provisions that recognized India’s minorities—both the tribal peoples (adibasis) and the untouchables—as distinct categories in the population and deserving special preferences. It was a replay of the 1932 encounter with Gandhi over separate electorates; this time Ambedkar clearly prevailed. His contributions to the Assembly’s debates in favor of these wholly un-Gandhian measures contained some sharp attacks on Gandhi’s romantic vision of swaraj in the new India, in which the village would be the lynchpin of a largely nonindustrialized society—“I hold that these village republics have been the ruination of India. What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance,

168

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

narrow-mindedness and communalism?” (AVARD 1962, 24–25).6 The constitution that he designed was a straightforward contradiction of the canonical Gandhian idea that moral regeneration was an indispensable precondition for social reform. Ambedkar, like Nehru, was a clear-eyed and practical realist: moral ideas were no more than a manner of speaking; they also were ideals that would not become the social reality without an appropriate institutional setting.7 Gandhi took no active part in the debates (other than occasional comments in his journal Harijan) and he was murdered before the Assembly completed its work, but his views were strongly presented by legislators of the Gandhian persuasion: Ambedkar successfully faced them down. One can infer that in the 1932 encounter over separate electorates, Ambedkar considered that ending untouchability by reconstructing the “Hindu mass mind” to be at best unrealistic; at worst, it was a deliberate sham intended to block measures that would in fact improve the status of untouchables—his later use of the word “rascal” hints at that. After this resolute dismissal of reform-by-religion, it is ironic that in 1956, when it had become clear that the constitutional safeguards and the many “head-start” programs were not substantially improving the standing of untouchables, Ambedkar, in a public ceremony in Nagpur, led his people in a mass conversion out of Hinduism and into Buddhism. Within Congress there were some who did not believe that sarvodaya, satyagraha, and the derivative morality-based techniques of symbolic action, such as khadi, could win the struggle for independence. N.K. Bose described them: But having been in the thick of it, I often observed that the interest of many workers in satyagraha was not very deep. They were more interested in dealing hard blows on the imperial system which had brought our country to the verge of ruin than in the conversion of the British opponent. There were perhaps few in Bengal who subscribed to the revolutionary impact of Gandhi’s political method or of his decentralized economic system; and therefore that cause was losing by default. Many felt enthusiastic when the battle raged full and strong; but when it came to preparation or to reconstruction of India’s rural economy through revolutionary constructive activity, the latter fizzled down into dead routine which knew no expansion. (MDG, 15)

6. AVARD is an acronym for the Association of Voluntary Agencies for Rural Development, a non-governmental organization aiming to promote rural development through Gandhian “constructive activity.” 7. Gandhi was aware of the basic philosophical difference between his creed, which avoided violence, and Marxism, which countenanced it: “My fundamental difference with Socialists is well known. I believe in the conversion of human nature and in striving for it. They do not believe in this” (SG, 88). Gandhi’s change-of-heart model and the Marxist mode-of-production enforcement model, insofar as they exclude each other, are correspondingly distant from any practical reality.

gandhi’ s charis m a

•

169

In 1942, the Quit India movement caused the British to round up Gandhi, Nehru, and other senior leaders of Congress, along with as many local leaders as they could, and put them in jail. Some eluded detention and continued the movement by violent methods, mainly by destroying government property, much to Gandhi’s distress. The most spectacular defiance of Gandhian nonviolence came from a prominent member of Congress, a Bengali, Subhas Chandra Bose, who not only preached armed resistance but set the example: in 1940, he escaped from house arrest in Calcutta and made his way through Afghanistan and the Soviet Union to Germany where he helped the Nazis recruit an Indian Legion from soldiers captured in the north African campaigns. In 1943, the Germans put him in a submarine and conveyed him to the Japanese, who used him to recruit Indian soldiers captured in Burma into an Indian National Army. This army fought alongside the Japanese in Burma without much success and surrendered in 1945. Bose was killed in an air crash before the war ended. He is the odd man among India’s leaders of that time. He admired Hitler; he admired Mussolini; he admired military strength; he inclined toward Fascism, styling himself Neta (the equivalent of Duce or Führer); what he stood for was everything that Gandhi deplored. It is therefore another irony that in India in the 1950s, in bazaars and in private houses, a common devotional portrait was a triptych of Gandhi (center), Nehru (on his right), and Bose (on his left), the head of each glowing saint-like in a halo of light. The complexity of Gandhi’s charismatic authority over his entourage is further revealed in the attitudes of two elite politicians, both of them his devotees: one is Nehru and the other a less widely-known freedom fighter, twice the Chief Minister of Orissa, sometime Governor of Bombay, and sometime Minister in the central Government in Delhi, Harekrushna Mahtab. Mahtab appears from his writing and from what people in Orissa said about him to have been a deeply religious man and a devoted Gandhian; he meditated; he prayed for guidance; but from what he writes, one gets the impression that his belief in the Gandhian creed (but not in the man himself) was selective. He wrote, “To understand Gandhi’s leadership properly one [has] always to keep in mind that he was trying to make the masses move with faith and confidence to achieve the national objective” (Mahtab 1965, 4). If that is a claim about Gandhi’s motives, it does not accord with Gandhi’s own account. Nehru too appreciated Gandhi’s political usefulness, but was uncomfortably aware that Gandhi’s motivations were more religious than political. For Nehru “revivalism” was an abomination. Mahtab’s state of mind is less clear: writing during the topsy-turvy of Orissa’s politics in the 1950s, he remarked on the need for India’s political leaders to “hark back to and restudy” the techniques, the “method” as he called it, that Gandhi used to make the right political decisions. He recalled how, in earlier years, he had consulted Gandhi about the problem. He knew that Gandhi prayed to God and received “intuition”; Mahtab also prayed for guidance, but,

170

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

he confessed, God did not send him intuitions. What could he do? “Gandhi smiled,” and said that the word “judgment” would serve as well. It is hard to imagine Nehru asking that question. It also is hard to work out exactly what Mahtab intended this story to indicate. That Gandhi was offering the next best thing to someone who did not possess the divine gift of intuition? Or that Gandhi was revealing a little of what was in the magician’s box, in effect saying that “prayer” and “intuition” were merely politically useful covers for “judgment” (which here can only mean calculation) because they shifted responsibility for decisions onto the highest authority and thus made the decisions incontestable? It seems unlikely that Gandhi thought that way, Lord Willingdon notwithstanding, but who can say? As always, to ask about psychological reality is to leave a question hanging in the air—in this case not only Gandhi’s sincerity but also Mahtab’s beliefs about Gandhi’s sincerity. Mahtab’s beliefs are trenchantly stated but not entirely clear. He was an extremely hard-headed, even ruthless politician; he prayed and practiced regular devotional exercises; he was a faithful admirer of Gandhi; he despised the Gandhian social worker tradition as it was practiced after Independence by such people as Vinoba Bhave or by a man who also served as Chief Minister of Orissa, Nabakrushna Chaudhuri. I held that Vinoba Bhave unwittingly undid what Gandhiji did and his [Bhave’s] movement, because of lack of any logic behind it, became [a] hypocritical and superficial show. (Mahtab 1986, 108)

and, Gandhiji was let down badly also by the constructive organizations which he had built to secure man-support for his political activities. Those organizations, from the beginning, developed a kind of self-righteousness and consequently superiority complex and thus were cut [off] from the people and the political current. (Mahtab 1973, 46)

Behind these statements there is a clear rejection of the Gandhian idea that moral regeneration is a precondition for a better world. A village-based “nonmechanized economy” that went along with sarvodaya and cottage industries, which had neither machinery nor electrical power, could only create a society that would perish from its own poverty. Mahtab, as chief minister of Orissa, was an enthusiastic and for the most part effective promoter of large scale, capitalintensive development. What is to be made of this? Notice first that, like Nehru, Mahtab fully appreciated Gandhi’s ability to “make the masses move with faith and confidence to achieve the national objective.” Notice also the remark about prayer, intuition, and judgment, and its implication (I think) that rational judgment

gandhi’ s charis m a

•

171

can be a stand-in for God-given wisdom. What did Mahtab believe? Certainly, he knew that “revivalism” was good for rounding up the masses. He must also have known that to be a prayerful person, visibly practicing devotions, at least did not spoil a leader’s popular image. Whether or not he believed that Gandhi actually received divine guidance, I cannot tell; nor whether he really hoped to get divine guidance himself. Four things, however, can be reasonably inferred from Mahtab’s writings: first, Gandhi’s charismatic influence over him depended to some degree on their serving the same cause (India’s freedom); second, it did not depend at all on the philosophy of Gandhian “constructive work” (except insofar as it could “secure man-support” for political activities); third, it may have depended somewhat—I have no means of knowing—on a belief that Gandhi was in touch with God; and, fourth, it depended strongly on the quite magical enchantment that captured many of those who had faceto-face contact with Gandhi. Here is Nehru’s eloquent, respectful—even loving—assessment of Gandhi’s personality: For it was clear that this little man of poor physique had something of steel in him, something rock-like which did not yield to physical powers, however great they might be. And in spite of his unimpressive features, his loin-cloth and bare body, there was a royalty and kingliness in him which compelled a willing obeisance from others. Consciously and deliberately meek and humble, yet he was full of power and authority, and he knew it, and at times he was imperious enough, issuing commands which had to be obeyed. His calm deep eyes would hold one and gently probe into the depths; his voice, clear and limpid, would purr its way into the heart and evoke an emotional response. Whether his audience consisted of one person or a thousand, the charm and magnetism of the man passed on to it, and each one had a feeling of communion with the speaker. The feeling had little to do with the mind, though the appeal to the mind was not wholly ignored. But mind and reason had second place. This process of ‘spell-binding’ was not brought about by oratory or the hypnotism of silken phrases. The language was always simple and to the point and seldom was an unnecessary word used. It was the utter sincerity of the man and his personality that gripped; he gave the impression of tremendous inner reserves of power. (1962, 129–30)

To surrender oneself in a face-to-face relationship with such a personality is a religious experience—something that one accepts as a simple truth that defies analysis, a “feeling” that has “little to do with the mind.” Look over the other words that Nehru uses: “willing obeisance,” “commands which had to be obeyed,” “emotional response,” “charm and magnetism,” “feeling of communion,” “spell-binding,” “utter sincerity,” and “tremendous inner reserves of power.” These interaction features and the character that gives rise to them together constitute Gandhi’s mystique, a word which means that his devotees did not feel any need to ask themselves why they were devoted. For those

172

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

who feel it, personal charisma, to say it again, is like beauty and love and the believer’s Truth: it is primordial. Seen from the outside, however, a display of devotion is an analyzable phenomenon: what enchants can be identified and its consequences can be analyzed. Features in particular cases (as in Nehru’s portrait of Gandhi) can be readily described and one can then say that without these features the person would not have devotees; therefore these features are a necessary, but not a sufficient, cause of the devotion. One also can look over one’s acquaintances and decide what are the characteristics that deny them that kind of loving respect. It is also relatively easy to produce a media-usable formula for creating the public charisma that Reagan or FDR or Churchill enjoyed. But a recipe for the Gandhian style of face-to-face sustained charisma, supposedly good for all occasions, would be as unconvincing as a recipe for love. A formula for either of these—charisma or love—would leave unwritten a large residue of what we experience, but do not know how to reduce to analytical form. That is why we have pseudo-descriptors like “it” or “a certain something” or “whatever it is” and metaphors of magnetism or of seduction; they stand for a quality-cluster that is otherwise ineffable. N.K. Bose, writing (about 1940, seven years before he became Gandhi’s personal assistant during the violence in Bengal) comes to a similar conclusion: the magic for Gandhi’s entourage was not in the philosophy but in the person: This is the prospect which Gandhi holds out to his comrades; no vision of any distant millennium, but only a vision of the thorns which we shall encounter in our pilgrim’s march . . . If that be the character of Gandhi’s philosophy, devoid of hope, of romance, how is it, one may ask, that men follow him in their thousands even when he calls upon them to proceed to the portals of death? The secret lies in the character and personality of the man, in which his philosophy has clothed itself, rather than in any direct appeal which lies in that philosophy. (SG, 352–53)

It is clear that the control exercised by Gandhi over Nehru and other members of his close entourage (and others, like Mahtab, who moved in a somewhat more distant orbit) did not depend only on his political usefulness for “the national objective.” Some of Gandhi’s entourage whole-heartedly accepted his philosophy of Truth-searching through social work; some also were believers in his God and his religion; and some, rationalists like Nehru, rejected the mysticism and yet bowed before his will. Look again at Nehru’s sketch: “something of steel in him, something rock-like which did not yield to physical powers, however great they might be,” and “a royalty and kingliness in him which compelled a willing obeisance.” The choice of words speaks to the mystique of a personal charisma. So also does—and quite unambiguously—Nehru’s transparent grief (and the metaphor he used) on the occasion of Gandhi’s murder: “The

gandhi’ s charis m a

•

173

light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere . . . our beloved leader . . . is no more.”

Single-Mindedness “Truth” colors every part of Gandhi’s life; it is hard to find a piece he wrote or a sermon he preached that does not contain at least the idea, if not the word. His “truth,” to say it again, was neither the truth of science, empirically validated, nor only the simple negation of falsehood, but rather the mystical “Truth” that inheres in the divine. That kind of Truth can be a formidable political weapon. It has the capacity to stop rational opposition in its tracks; it cannot be tamed by reason; it can only be accepted (or rejected) emotionally. Like other forms of religion, it is unassailable within the framework of its own assumptions and it refuses to entertain alternative assumptions. Neither, therefore, can decisions taken in its mode be logically disputed. Truth (along with a charismatic personality) blocks open-minded reasoning. An example of this stonewall style of nonreasoning is found in an exchange between Gandhi and a member of the Hunter Commission in 1920. They were talking about satyagraha: Member: However honestly a man may strive in his search for truth, his notions of truth may be different from the notions of others. Who then is to determine the truth? Gandhi: The individual himself would determine that. Member: Different individuals would have different views as to truth. Would that not lead to confusion? Gandhi: I do not think so. (Ashe 1965, 196–97)

They were talking past each other. The member’s “truth” was open to testing by evidence; Gandhi’s Truth was categorical, God’s Truth.8

8. The Commission’s brief was to inquire into the massacre in 1919 (by a small armed force under General Dyer) of several hundred people, who had assembled in the Jallianwala Gardens in Amritsar to protest the Rowlatt bills. These bills reinstated lapsed wartime regulations, which allowed, among other things, detention without trial for those suspected of sedition. Gandhi had already called off the campaign because it had occasioned violence. But the protests continued, the one in Amritsar being the occasion for the Jallianwala Gardens massacre. At that time, the Viceroy’s Legislative Council contained both official members and elected representatives, the socalled Dyarchy (“double rulership”), which Ashe (2000, 294) calls “a fiction camouflaging autocracy”—the Viceroy and his officials still called the shots. On this occasion, the Indian members voted against the Rowlatt bills, but the official view prevailed. That decision set Gandhi off on a fast. The bills remained law but no one was ever prosecuted under them, and they lapsed after three years. See Brown 1989, 128–29.

174

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

Gandhi’s Truth made him strong in his dealings with others. “Truth” meant that he never had to stand alone: God guided him and God gave him Truth because, as he wrote, Truth is God. Political action, like every other kind of purposive action, has a superstructure of rationality that must rest ultimately on a nonrational foundation of first principles. Those first principles for Gandhi were God’s Truth and he seems to have had a sufficient hold on it to make him unswervingly confident that he always knew right from wrong. Of course, he made mistakes and he readily acknowledged them. When, in March 1919, he organized a nonviolent protest against the Rowlatt Bills and the protests turned violent, property was destroyed and some English civilians were murdered, he straightaway called off the campaign, saying that he had made a “Himalayan miscalculation.” But this and other acknowledged blunders were miscalculations of objective conditions; they were about the facts of what was the case, and never about what should be the case, about morality.9 To know where God’s Truth resides makes for confident decisions and confidence is a necessary (again, not a sufficient) qualification for leadership. Having an open line to God’s truth made Gandhi powerfully obstinate in his dealings with others. He had, he said, “destroyed many letters in South Africa, because when he depended on the opinion of others in order to assure himself of the rightness of his path, it was like depending on an adventitious aid. Truth had to stand on its own strength; and so he had burnt the letters just as he had removed many an impediment which had likewise come in his way” (1949, 139). Elsewhere, congratulating himself, he describes an exchange of letters in South Africa with the Attorney General of Natal, which ended amicably with the Attorney’s comment, “I see you will never take a no for an answer” (Gandhi 1949, 308). On occasion, he dealt with his entourage in the same way. Nehru testifies to Gandhi’s obduracy: . . . his is hardly an open mind. He listens with the greatest patience and attention to people who make new suggestions to him, but behind all his courteous interest one has the impression that one is addressing a closed door. (1962, 516)

He might have added, in this context too, “Clear thinking had not the ghost of a chance.” The Gandhian style of debate in search of Truth turns out in practice to be less a cooperative endeavor than a contest in inflexibility that, as in the exchange with the Hunter Commission member or with the unfortunate Khalipur Rahman, reduces the opponent to silence.

9. The “Himalayan miscalculation,” it seems, was launching people into satyagraha who did not “thoroughly understand its deeper implications” and who were not “pure-hearted” (Gandhi 1949, 392).

gandhi’ s charis m a

•

175

Paradoxically, given the centrality of nonviolence, Gandhi’s Truth fostered in him—apparently so caring a person—what looks to an outsider like a crass inability to empathize with human suffering. In the encounter with Abdul Rahman, Gandhi insists that it would be better to be murdered as a Hindu than to save one’s life by a feigned conversion to Islam. Evidently the God who is Truth should not be mocked by an untruth and, besides, in death the victims would find His Truth. There are also chilling stories in Gandhi’s autobiography of inflicting on sick members of his household (and on himself) “nature treatments” that might at other times and in other places have had him in trouble with the law. Again, there is (judged by my humanistic values) a gross insensitivity in his readiness to make people suffer (tapas-style) in the service of a higher morality. He writes (1954, 244–45) of an incident on his farm in South Africa, which he describes as an “experiment” intended to test his belief that “boys and girls could live together without harm.” He sent them off to bathe together, having “fully explained the duty of self-restraint.” Then he was told that a youth had “made fun of” two adolescent girls while they were bathing. Gandhi caused the girls to have their hair shaved off (a disfigurement which is the mark of widowhood) and he did the tonsuring himself. He did not do it to punish them (they were guiltless), but to give them “a sense of security and at the same time to sterilize the sinner’s eye,” which I suppose means that the “sinner” would be less tempted to make a pass at girls with shaven heads. Erikson (1969, 237–38) extracts Freudian meanings from this incident, which also is not without a kind of violence; it was intimidation and those intimidated, whatever Gandhi’s intentions, must surely have included the two blameless girls. Nor can one fail to perceive the God-like arrogance of “experimenting” in this fashion. Certainly, that kind of cruelty falls far short of the faith-based horrors perpetrated down the ages by one or another set of True-believers; nevertheless, it is what I think Gilbert Murray meant when he spoke of neglecting “the real needs of men and women through basing our life on dreams,” and it surely also deserves the Lucretian comment—Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. For Gandhi, of course, his religion was not the bringer of evil, but its solvent. If what he did to the girls was cruelty, then benevolence was its apparent motive. In the quest for Truth, pain and this-worldly suffering, whether physical or psychological, is a price to be gladly paid, because the quest for Truth is a moral imperative. He wrote (prophetically): “An assassin’s bullet may put an end to my life. I would welcome it. But I would love, above all, to fade out doing my duty with my last breath” (AMB, 71). The same sentiment is voiced against a larger backdrop: “I would far rather India perished than that she won freedom at the sacrifice of truth” (AMB, 218). A similar ruthlessness appeared in the instructions that he gave, during the killings in Bengal, to one of his lieutenants, who was charged with raising and distributing relief funds:

176

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

Gandhi . . . explained that we should proceed in such a manner that the Government might be put in the wrong and the struggle lifted to the necessary political plane. Whatever steps had to be taken, should be taken only after the Government had been made to confess that they were unable to do anything more for the sufferers, or had failed to restrain the rowdy Muslim elements. If, in the meantime, which he hoped would not be more than a week or so, a few of the sufferers died of exposure, he was hard-hearted enough (main nirday hun) not to be deflected from his course by such events. The whole struggle had to be lifted to the political plane: mere humanitarian relief was not enough for it would fail to touch the root of the problem. (MDG, 100)

“If, in the meantime . . . a few of the sufferers died of exposure. . . .” At first sight, this sounds like the worst kind of realpolitik—a purely political tactic intended to show up the weakness (or malice) of the opponent. Certainly some of his people would have heard the message in that straightforward way. But the “political plane” relates also to his conviction that Government intervention, whether to enforce peace or provide relief, does nothing to change the moral evils that were “the root of the problem.” More on this later. The obstinacy that comes from self-confidence does not automatically make a leader powerful; some obstinate leaders find themselves written off as irrelevant (as, toward the end of his life, was happening to Gandhi). Nor is it clear why Gandhi’s own conviction that God guided his decisions should enable him to dominate others, like Nehru, who did not believe a word of it—“Instinct!” said Nehru, “I prefer to call it that rather than ‘the inner voice’ or an answer to prayer” and added, “Very often that instinct is right” (1962, 505). Then, did Nehru and others simply use him “to achieve the national objective?” Is that all? It does not seem to have been the whole story when one reads what they—Nehru, Mahtab, and many others—wrote about him. There is still the irresolvable “whatever it is” that is represented by the word “charisma.” Certainly the respect that Nehru had for him was anchored in the person and not in an intellectual acceptance of the God in Gandhian “Truth.” As for Gandhiji, he was a very difficult person to understand, sometimes his language was almost incomprehensible to an average modern. But we felt that we knew him quite well enough to realize that he was a great and unique man and a glorious leader, and having put our faith in him we gave him almost [a] blank cheque, for the time being at least. Often we discussed his fads and peculiarities among ourselves and said, half-humorously, that when Swaraj came these fads must not be encouraged. (Nehru 1962, 73)

He was a “unique man and a glorious leader” and they “put their faith in him and gave him a blank cheque for the time being at least.” They put their faith in him and not in his philosophy, his “fads.” The word “fads,” narrowly interpreted, might refer only to his extreme asceticism, and in particular to his obsessive

gandhi’ s charis m a

•

177

concern with diet and sexual urges.10 But “fads” must have included matters that more directly concerned public policy—for example, Ruskin-derived pastoralagrarian fantasies about Rama Rajya or the notion that moral regeneration was a sufficient instrument for social reform.11 Nehru did not want independent India to be reconstructed as a collection of self-sufficient villages; he wanted a modern industry-based nation that could hold its own in international arenas; he wanted a socialist state and 5-year development plans. He put up with the fads—sarvodaya and satyagraha—not because he accepted them as vehicles for redemptive truth, but because they served a political purpose and because he, like many others, was captive to Gandhi’s charisma. Hinduism, the image of the sadhu, and the common understanding of tapas made Gandhi’s popular charisma possible; his own universalistic religion did not. Neither did his beliefs appeal to skeptics like Nehru. But those beliefs did shape Gandhi’s conduct and therefore also his style of leadership. The following chapter will set this charisma in the context of the political reality of his day, explaining why it was sometimes effective and why at other times, faced with other kinds of faith, it was not.

10. In this context, “swaraj” means not only self-rule (independence for India) but also self-control (mastery of the passions). See the chapters on Brahmacharya in the autobiography and Chapter 18 in Bose 1953. 11. For the Ruskin connection, see the autobiography, 249–50.

7

G ANDHI ’ S R ELIGION AND P OLITICAL R EALITY

b He who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his own and of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics, for the quite different tasks of politics can only be solved by violence. —Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation.”

India is supposed to be a religious country above everything else and Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and others take pride in their faiths and testify to their truth by breaking heads. —Nehru, An Autobiography

Gandhi and Hitler In the perspective of history, and in the minds of most people, Hitler and Gandhi are chalk and cheese—some superficial features in common but essentially different. Both were heads of state, in the case of Gandhi de facto, never de jure, and often somewhat uncertainly (because he denied his eminence and because his entourage sometimes chose not to take his advice), while Hitler, after 1933, was both the actual and the formally appointed leader. Both Gandhi and Hitler died violent deaths. Both were intent on creating a new morality. Both were men of faith, had enormous confidence in what they believed and, until things began to go very wrong, in what they did and could do. Both of them, despite the fact

g a n d h i’ s r e l ig io n a nd p ol itical re al ity

•

179

that they made a point of deploring it, graduated beyond charisma to a quasidivine status. But history and even an ill-informed man-in-the-street surely consider Gandhi to have been a person worthy of respect, at least saint-like, if not saintly. No one now thinks in that way about Hitler (apart from periodic outbreaks of Führer mania): the common judgment is that he was the epitome of wickedness, satanic. Gandhi, critics notwithstanding, is mostly remembered with respect and affection, even by those, like Nehru, who thought his ideas about the good society at least irrelevant, if not harmful for the India that won its freedom in 1948. A simple conclusion about the part religion played in their politics would be that there had to be a difference because Gandhi was deeply religious (in the Godly sense), spiritual, even a mystic, the promoter of “revivalism” (Nehru’s word); Hitler, on the other hand, was hard headed, a dyed-in-the-wool secularist, anchored in the mundane world (although he misread it calamitously), and definitely no respecter of conventional Christianity. But this is too simple; first, there are some radically different verdicts about each of them, both in their lifetimes and afterwards; second, it glosses over the complexity and the internal contradictions in each man’s faith, especially Gandhi’s. The judgments that people around him made about Gandhi’s religion and its influence on his politics varied with those doing the judging. They run the whole range from approval to condemnation. Moreover, neither critics nor devotees were unanimous about just what kind of religion it was that Gandhi introduced into politics. Ambedkar thought Gandhi’s religiosity was a posture, a camouflage for a policy that denied untouchables their proper place in society. Others, like the two viceroys, had similar opinions: “this shrewd, malevolent, old politician” (Lord Wavell) or (Lord Willingdon) “the most Machiavellian bargaining little political humbug I have ever come across.” Others believed that Gandhi was sincere, but they did not all see the same political significance in his religiosity: Mahtab accepted Gandhi’s religion as a True faith but he also had an eye on its political pay off; others, like Nehru, who also never doubted Gandhi’s sincerity, deplored the “revivalism” but at the same time marveled at the political miracles that it worked on the masses. The masses themselves surely recognized Gandhi as a man of religion, but the religion that moved them was popular Hinduism, beliefs about sadhus, darshan, and the like, not Gandhi’s austere regime of selfsacrifice. In short, the portrayal of Gandhi’s religion in the political arena is a version of the blind men and the elephant: each one “sees” only the part that he is touching and takes no account of what others say. Nor is it easy to pin down the essentials of Gandhi’s religion. In the last resort (although he himself would probably have denied it), his religion was of the secular kind. His goal in politics—a just and orderly society based on our common humanity—is not radically different from the goal of Humanism. (Of course the method he advocated was, in its emphasis on the virtues of suffering

180

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

and on the gratification suffering afforded to the sufferer, anything but Humanistic.) His preaching contains innumerable references to God phrased as if God is a person who sits in judgment, but when he equates God with Truth, he writes that memorable sentence about God being “even the atheism of the atheist,” a claim that Humanists could accept. The music is what matters, not the fantasized composer. Of course, there are differences. Gandhi and the Humanists do diverge radically, at least in one respect, over what is to be considered “moral.” The Humanists are positive in the word’s two senses—both optimistic and indifferent to the fantasies of revealed religion. They base their “religion” on the simple idea that all human suffering is bad, suffering inflicted in the name of God, and hence avoidable, is very bad, and that suffering could be diminished by clear thinking which dispenses with God and revealed knowledge. Gandhi’s view on the world was not positivist in that way; nor was there much optimism in it. In this respect, it took on Christianity’s morbid assumption that suffering is the price of redemption, without taking on the notion of Heavenly bliss as compensation for misery here on Earth. In short, the religion that Gandhi introduced into politics, whether through the guidance that it gave him or in the direct political use that he made of it to define situations and so influence the attitudes and actions of others, has many internal contradictions. His charisma allowed him to congratulate himself on inconsistency: “I have never made a fetish of consistency. I am a votary of truth and I must say what I feel and think at a given moment without regard to what I may have said before on it . . .” (AMB, 216). Moreover, contradictions apart, his religion had other, more serious weaknesses: it denied the inevitability of conflict over power; and it contradicted and ultimately was confounded by the combative religions that were already in the field. Religion has a different profile in Hitler’s politics. It has none of the overt contradictions that characterize Gandhi’s thought and actions. Both Godly and secular religion did play a role in Hitler’s thought, but their respective domains were very clearly separated: Godly faith stayed on the sideline and by far the dominant influence came from the secular religion of National Socialism. That faith guided Hitler’s actions; it also was the weapon he used to enthuse followers and to attack enemies. Christianity as a guiding philosophy was more or less written off. Its institutions, in particular the Roman Catholic hierarchy, were politically significant only as models of domination and as potential and sometimes actual opponents in the political arena. There are, however, as I said when modifying Trevor-Roper’s assertion that Hitler was entirely materialistic, some clear indications of spiritual awareness. Hitler talks about “Creative Force,” “Providence,” “Nature,” “God,” and on occasion he confesses to having acted in that idiom—“I sank down upon my knees and thanked Heaven out of the fullness of my heart.” But conventional religious behavior of this kind was a minor part, almost closeted, in Hitler’s philosophy and it had little influence over what

g a n d h i’ s r e l ig io n a nd p ol itical re al ity

•

181

he did as a politician. The faith that moved him was the religion that he put together from ideas about Germany’s manifest destiny and his own role in it, about the Aryan race, about the glories of war, about National Socialism, about the People’s State, and, not least, about its betrayers and its enemies. A major difference in the religions that Hitler and Gandhi introduced into politics is the value they set on violence. This, in turn, is linked to Gandhi’s universalistic faith, which concerned itself with the souls of individuals (and which turned out to be no match for the combative religions). Hitler, from the outset, was moved by, preached, and made use of a religion that was based on exclusivity, that focused on groups and was indifferent to the fate of individual souls (or individual bodies), and was wholly concerned with power and domination. Both were guided by an ethic of absolute ends: they did not compute the cost in human suffering that might result from their decisions. For Gandhi, of course, it was not easy to accommodate within a religion of love an ethic of absolute ends. He resolved this contradiction in two ways. The first was practical: when a campaign resulted in violence, he called it off (sometimes effectively, sometimes not). On those occasions, he let himself be guided by an ethic of responsibility. The second was a theodicy: suffering is itself a virtue and to suffer is to be redeemed, a view that sometimes does not go down well with those who are suffering. Hitler’s secular religion had no such metaphysical refinements. Neither Gandhi nor Hitler were hypocrites; neither of them were opportunists making cynical use of their religions to conceal their true political motives.

Faith and Responsibility Throughout his life, Gandhi believed that moral values—things “of the soul”— were prior to, and independent of, institutional arrangements. This led him, on occasion, to disregard reality even when it took the form of human suffering. This insensitivity, already noticed in the case of the two girls whose heads he shaved, reappears in a letter he wrote about an industrial dispute—a lockout of coalminers—in Britain. He was responding to a somewhat bizarre argument that the miners would lose the battle because they bred too fast and so there were too many of them; it would be better for them to practice contraception and not have so many mouths to feed. Nehru quotes this confused “wages-of-sin” sophistry in Gandhi’s letter: . . . if the mine-owners are in the wrong and still win, they will do so not because the miners overbreed, but because the miners have not learnt the lesson of restraint all along the line. Need they drink, gamble, and smoke? Will it be any answer to say that mine-owners do all of these things and yet have the upper hand? If the miners do not claim to be better than the capitalist, what right have they to ask for the world’s sympathy? We are called on to pay homage to democracy under a promise of

182

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

a better world when it reigns supreme. Let us not reproduce on a vast scale the evils we choose to ascribe to the capitalist and capitalism. (1962, 516–17)

Nehru, after remarking on the “closed door” that was Gandhi’s mind, comments: He suspects also socialism and more particularly Marxism, because of their association with violence. . . . He has also no desire to raise the standards of the masses beyond a certain very modest competence, for higher standards and leisure may lead to self-indulgence and sin. (1962, 156)

Gandhi sometimes, it seems, had a blind spot for human suffering if that was the price to be paid for virtue. Here is another instance. After Mussolini’s colonizing armies had invaded Abyssinia in 1935, Gandhi made this comment: Now nonviolence is the activest [sic] force on earth, and it is my conviction that it never fails . . . Thus if [the Abyssinians] had simply said; ‘You are welcome to reduce us to dust or ashes but you will not find one Abyssinian ready to cooperate with you’ what could Mussolini have done? He did not want a desert. Mussolini wanted submission and not defiance, and if he had met with the quiet, dignified and nonviolent defiance that I have described, then he would certainly have been obliged to retire. (SG, 121)

So much that is unrealistic is taken for granted in that conditional clause “if [the Abyssinians] . . .”! How many Abyssinians were True-believers in nonviolence? And even if they all had been, it is difficult to imagine a “quiet, dignified, and nonviolent” resistance being offered from inside a cloud of mustard gas.1 The same line of thought appears in the advice he gave during the Calcutta killings (recall what he would have had Abdul Rahman do): The communal feuds you see here are, in my opinion, partly due to the presence of the British. If the British were not here, we would still go through the fire no doubt, but the fire would purify us. (MDG, 219)

This is not, as the first sentence seems to imply, only a condemnation of British “divide and rule.” More emphatically, it asserts Gandhi’s credo that peace not backed by moral acceptance is no better than strife. If, through deliberate courage, the Hindus had died to a man, that would have been deliverance of Hinduism and India and purification for Islam in this land. As it was,

1. He had the same message for the Czechs, facing invasion by Hitler; and for Germany’s Jews; and for the British themselves. “Their war with Hitler and with the Japanese should be abandoned in favor of nonviolent resistance” (Brown 1989, 319–23).

g a n d h i’ s r e l ig io n a nd p ol itical re al ity

•

183

a third party had to intervene . . . Neither the Muslims nor the Hindus . . . have gained by the intervention. (quoted in Pyarelal 1956a, Vol. 1, 246)

That was said to those who “reacted to Gandhiji’s virile advice with incredulity, bordering on consternation . . . to have offered nonviolent resistance would have meant allowing . . . every Hindu to be killed.” This at first sight incomprehensible refusal to grant legitimacy to a third party intervening to bring about peace only makes sense when one remembers that the goal of satyagraha was not peace itself but moral regeneration. Forcible pacification would leave sentiments of enmity unchanged. Gandhi’s attitude on the use of the British army for the maintenance of internal order; his insistence on being left alone to settle directly with the Muslim League after the British had quitted, even if it meant civil war rather than enter into a diplomatic deal with the British however favorable; his readiness to face chaos and anarchy in preference to peace imposed by British arms, not only remained unchanged, they stiffened as time went by. The members of the Working Committee with their purely political approach, felt out of their depth in these uncharted waters. (Pyarelal 1956a, Vol. 1, 228)

Hardly; they, the members of the Working Committee, with their “purely political” outlook, were the ones with their feet on the ground. There is a disconcerting similarity of consequence between Gandhi’s advice and whatever Jim Jones said to make his congregation join him in suicide.2 Those who follow the preacher end up dead. In fact, there is in his attitude and his messages an ironic and unacknowledged realism: moral perfection will never be a reality, therefore the endeavor itself must be the ultimate end. Truth, which is the goal, is never a state of affairs but an inspirational image, a goal that in this life is never reached. If one reflects on the centrality of moral endeavor in Gandhi’s philosophy, it becomes clear that neither ending untouchability nor even stopping faith-based slaughter were anticipated consequences; they were only images that fuelled moral endeavor. Gandhi’s Truth was that the struggle itself is Truth. I am but a poor struggling soul and yearning to be wholly good—wholly truthful and wholly nonviolent in thought and word and deed; but ever failing to reach the ideal which I know to be true. It is a painful climb, but the pain of it is a positive pleasure to me. Each step upward makes me feel stronger and fitter for the next. (AMB, 77)

Again the reward is the journey, not the destination. A passage at the end of N.K. Bose’s Studies in Gandhism describes, in words that verge on the lyrical, the essence

2. This bizarre event is described at .

184

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

of Gandhi’s philosophy: it is suffering, devotion to God and Truth, and endless, unremitting endeavor with no expectation, Bose notes, of a millennium, of God’s kingdom on earth, of the ideal becoming the lived-in reality; there is not even a promise of Heaven in an afterlife. The lived-in reality was duty, a perpetual endeavor to find Truth. Not (Bose is quick to say) that Gandhi’s demeanor was habitually “morbid;” a life spent in searching for Truth was the good life. Gandhi was, as in the aptly chosen title of Judith Brown’s book, a “prisoner of hope.” So much for the presuppositions underlying Gandhi’s religiosity. What did it do for his politics? We have already worked out a logic of effects. To know that every decision is God’s decision (and therefore by definition right) should make believers strong against adversity. To the extent that leaders truly believe that God guides their hand, they should not be burdened by misgivings. To the extent that followers feel that they too participate in this oneness with God, the leaders’ charismatic authority is enhanced. Of course, there will be limits: the chances are that a persistent rejection of the inexorable facts of nature—or of human nature, which was Gandhi’s nemesis—will sooner or later be penalized. In the meantime, however, the God-guided are spared the agonies of indecision and over-the-shoulder apprehensions about having made the wrong decision. That is what should be the case; but in fact, reality can penetrate faith’s cordon, and Gandhi himself, as you will see, was sometimes a prey to misgivings. There is a transparent and willful inattention to reality in any philosophy that shifts responsibility for political decisions onto God. At its root is the Gandhian conviction that morality (which is what he means when he asserts that religion must always have a place in politics) is the alpha and omega of social well being: if the morality is right, nothing can be wrong. “All men are brothers” is a moral truth, God’s Truth, and if all men knew that and lived by it, there would be no untouchability and no communal violence. This is again Hamlet’s “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” interpreted now not as a comment on the subjectivity of moral judgment, but rather as practical strategy: “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6: 33). Do what is morally right and God will see to it that in the end everything will turn out well. Of course, even those who still have faith may also think about what will happen before the end is reached; recall Kripalani’s sad comment on why the Congress voted, against Gandhi’s wishes, to accept partition: Gandhi had “not yet found a way of tackling the problem [of faith-inspired carnage] on a mass basis.” Then did his morality handicap him in the political arena? One way to take advantage of a faith-based following and avoid the perils of faith-induced myopia is to be a hypocrite. Some of what I wrote earlier about some of Gandhi’s followers— their calculation and their “tacit” attention to a pay off—points in that direction. Gandhi’s autobiography does show him, lawyer-like, planning his campaigns, both inside and outside the courtroom, with careful attention to practical detail. But in

g a n d h i’ s r e l ig io n a nd p ol itical re al ity

•

185

reading what he said himself and what others wrote about him, to think of him as anything other than sincerely True-believing is difficult—Dr. Ambedkar notwithstanding. Gandhi himself was quite clear about the difference between True-belief and the world of practical action. God’s guidance is only for the morality that separates good from evil; about such matters, as Nehru said, Gandhi was unshiftable. The non-moral world, however, where actions are measured against their consequences, was different; it required judgment (the word he used to answer Mahtab’s question about intuition). Judgment could lead to mistakes; mistaken decisions reveal themselves in actions that offend morality, as when nonviolent agitation turns violent. But there is never a hint, so far as my reading in Gandhi’s voluminous writings has taken me, that God-given intuition should trump observed fact. Nor should it be allowed to cancel reason: Dr. Rajendra Prasad asked me, ‘Does your instinct go so far that you would prevent us from accepting the long term proposal, whether we understand you or not?’ I said, ‘No, follow your reason since my own reason does not support my instinct.’ I myself have not followed my instinct unless my reason backed it. (quoted in Pyarelal 1965a, vol. 1, 230)

At first sight, the morality he enjoined in his rhetoric, being quite inflexible, should have been a handicap in arenas where the competitors are the political soulmates of economic man, for whom winning is all. That sentiment is nowhere in Gandhi’s philosophy; nothing can be justified by advantage alone; no action should be taken that is known not to be morally right (even if it is sincerely directed towards an end that is a moral imperative). Such all-transcending ethical scruples should make it difficult to prevail against an opponent who does not have them and does not play by the rules. F.E. Smith said of his fellow politician, Austen Chamberlain: “Austen always played the game [played fair and square according to the rules]—and always lost it.” But which rules? Again the case is not that simple. “Game” implies a single set of rules on which the players agree. In India in the first half of last century—as in most places and at most times in politics—the contest was also to decide what set of rules would apply. Sometimes this situation produced a straightforward negation: “Civil disobedience,” “Non-cooperation,” and the “Quit India” campaigns were plain declarations that the rules set by the imperial power to regulate political competition would not be observed. But in another respect, Gandhi and his British adversaries appeared to be in agreement. Rules range from quite specific regulations, such as the ordinance that made the manufacture of salt by individuals illegal (the occasion for the 1930–31 Salt March) to highly abstract rules of “fair play” or “natural justice.” The rules that are the essence of Gandhian philosophy—nonviolence, never telling lies, never cheating (recall the time and circumstances of his insistence on paying Pakistan its share of public funds)—are highly abstract; they are also the rules that shape the New Testament ethic, which,

186

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

normatively at least, guided the policy and actions of the imperial power. Gandhi, therefore, had a claim at least to share what his opponents considered a moral high ground (and, perhaps, to better represent it because he lived up to its principles and they, being hypocrites, did not). I do not know how much Gandhi’s public and vehemently stated adherence to these ethical principles gave him power over the British—certainly not over the likes of Lord Willingdon and any others who saw him as a “Machiavellian bargaining little political humbug.” In any case, it was not Gandhi’s ethics that drove them to relinquish their hold on India, but it did have an effect on the way the contest was conducted. I will come to that shortly. Nor did the supreme value he set on moral regeneration give him authority over the Congress; its members had a more immediate, more palpable, and more attainable target in their sights. Most of them must have known that moral regeneration could never have become the lived-in reality, whatever Gandhi did to make it so. His entourage dressed themselves in the mode of khadi; they talked the political language of nonviolence and of sarvodaya; the younger ones sacrificed education and middle class careers to become political activists, they practiced satyagraha, and they went to prison in their hundreds; but one wonders how many of them subscribed to the prototypically religious irrationality of believing that to sincerely embrace an ideal is a good enough substitute for achieving it. How many of them worried about the insistent non-calculation of consequences? Nehru certainly did, and Gandhi too must have done when he called off campaigns that had become violent. Nevertheless, for Gandhi nonviolence was not a scientific truth open to empirical testing; nonviolence was a constituent of Truth, a moral imperative religiously held in the mode of fiat veritas, et pereat mundus—Truth must prevail, even if the world perishes. Others, like Nehru, saw the need to be practical and to keep a cold eye on consequences. That led to the conclusion that the nonviolent method was not meant for all contingencies, and was thus neither a universal nor an infallible method. This conclusion was intolerable for Gandhiji, for he firmly believed it was a universal and infallible method. . . . it must function . . . even in the midst of strife and violence. (Nehru 1962, 209)

Nor could many of those who came in their thousands to hear Gandhi speak have accepted his Truth as a reality that would affect their lives. Truth was an ideal, a goal, an aspiration, which Gandhi, in a transport of rhetorical exaltation while writing the peroration to his autobiography, described as an “indescribable lustre, a million times more intense than that of the sun we see daily with our eyes” (1949, 420). If he had said that to a mass audience—perhaps he did— would they have known what he was talking about? How many of them could have said, sincerely, that Truth’s “indescribable lustre” had brought them to hear Gandhi? Of course there was an “indescribable lustre,” but it emanated not from

g a n d h i’ s r e l ig io n a nd p ol itical re al ity

•

187

Truth but from Gandhi himself. If his “prophetic-religious” message was heard at all by the mass audiences, they “heard” it in the diseducated mode of darshan, taking inspiration from the mere sight of him, not from what he had to say about “sin, salvation, and nonviolence.” That must have been the case when he fasted to prevent separate electorates and “a magic wave of enthusiasm” ran “through Hindu society.” “Hindu society” was enthused about Gandhi, not about ending untouchability, which is still one of India’s problems more than 70 years later.

Secular Disciplines in the Freedom Fight On the other hand, it might be said, independence was achieved and the credit— some of it—goes to Gandhi and his religiously stiffened single-mindedness. Is that the case? One short answer might be that the Second World War bested British imperialism, not Gandhi’s religion. The question, however, is still there. Gandhi’s religiosity may not have delivered the coup de grâce, but it was certainly effective when used against the imperial power to “make the masses move with faith and confidence to achieve the national objective.” It was much less able to make the same masses move away from their “faith and confidence” in Hinduism, Islam, or Sikhism, the religions that inspired them to murder one another. Then was the British Raj the less formidable opponent because it never was presented as a religion? The terms “Hindu,” “Sikh,” and “Muslim” identify people who are “religious” in the everyday sense of the word: they believe in spiritual beings, they have ideas about the afterlife, about saints, and about various other non-mundane trimmings that concern cosmology and morality. The Tamil secessionists who murdered Rajiv Gandhi (and similar language-and-culture-based fanatics elsewhere in India) are not religious in that sense, but in the wider sense of the word they are: they have faith in the unquestionable rightness of their cause; they go to extremes, whether of self-sacrifice or of violence against others; like believers in the spiritual religions, they are expected not to count the cost to themselves; in short, theirs is an ethic not of responsibility, but of absolute ends. Is it the case that a religion of that kind sustained British imperialism? Certainly the way it was celebrated on formal occasions points vaguely in that direction. As a child (about 6 years old), I was recruited into a troupe of infants who danced on 24 May around a maypole, each of us holding a ribbon that was red or white or blue. The occasion was “Empire Day.”3 In the literature celebrating British imperialism, in everything from Kipling (with an occasional touch

3. There were other pageants in that month. This was about 1930 in the midst of the great depression. While the children were schooled to celebrate Empire Day, some of their parents, three

188

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

of acid) to Philip Woodruff’s two volumes entitled The Men Who Ruled India, “service,” “sacrifice,” and “loyalty” are prominent values. Words like “calling” or “vocation,” which have strong religious overtones, feature in the memorials that British civil servants in India wrote about each other and about themselves. But the word “religious” is over-extended if it refers only to a strong sense of duty (except when it is used ironically) because institutional duties and loyalties can be rationally justified as enlightened self-interest, which entails cost counting. More than that: blind loyalty to a formal organization is not a virtue but a vice, because it is an obstacle to clear thinking. The imperialism of British India, certainly by the time that Gandhi came on the scene, had mostly the values of a bureaucracy (not that its thinking was always clear and notwithstanding the pomp and circumstance of the King-Emperor’s Delhi Durbar in 1911) and next to nothing in common with faith-based or nationalistic or any other kind of fanaticism, other than perhaps racism, which, in the case of India, somehow managed to be both ingrained and ambivalent. Rationality, unhindered by religious intuitions, made it clear in 1947 to the Labour Government in Britain that remaining in India was not a practical proposition and that the time had come to get out (a reckoning aided, one supposes, by the canonical disdain that Socialists are expected to have for imperialism). In short, Gandhi and his friends, helped out by the Second World War, defeated British imperialism in part because the imperialists were not sufficiently stiffened by religious enthusiasm (spiritual or secular) to prevent them from adjusting their goals to the realities of their situation.4 But that does not end the question. It was Nehru who wrote, somewhat hesitantly, that nonviolence might be a “moral equivalent of war and all violent struggle.” For him and most of the other leaders of Congress, the goal of the freedom fight was not moral regeneration and the end of realpolitik, but victory over the British. In the end, this was achieved. Does this suggest that Gandhi, whatever his religious priorities, had in fact discovered in satyagraha an effective moral weapon that made violence unnecessary? To fully make that case it would also have to be true: (i) that this was the weapon that ended British rule in India; and (ii) that it was truly moral, used in a way that conformed with Gandhi’s ethical standards: persuade the opponents to perceive and accept what was right and do so solely for that reason and not because they anticipated any kind of pay off other than a clear conscience.

weeks earlier, celebrated “Labour Day” and marched downtown in processions organized by trade unions and the left-wing political parties. 4. Of course there were lapses, a spectacular one in Gandhi’s time being the Jallianwalabagh massacre and General Dyer’s 1919 descent into fanaticism, which, although duly condemned by the authorities and putting an end to his military career, brought to the surface racist sentiments that were generally kept more under wraps. In Britain, Dyer’s conduct was commended in the House of Lords and a purse of twenty thousand pounds, raised by public subscription, was presented to him.

g a n d h i’ s r e l ig io n a nd p ol itical re al ity

•

189

Neither proposition carries much weight. The first is a matter of history. One can make a simple blanket claim, as I did earlier, that the Second World War, not Gandhi and the satygrahis, put an end to British imperial rule in India. Or one can give some credit to satyagraha and, since most historical outcomes are over-determined, qualify the assertion in a dozen different ways by looking further into the context: the British sowed the seeds of their own imperial demise by creating an educated Indian middle class and giving it nationalist aspirations;5 nonviolent protest would not have swayed rulers who did not already have an ideology of “natural justice and good government,” and so forth. In any case, the historical question remains moot until one can be sure that the nonviolence used against the British met Gandhi’s “change of heart” criterion. That proposition—that Gandhian nonviolence was genuinely and exclusively moral—likewise has to be qualified. First, it might be argued that satyagraha was not a matter of morality at all, but of plain rational calculation: violent protest would have provoked violent suppression and that would have intimidated the masses. Certainly, there are politicians who make that kind of calculation. I talked with a young and cynical opposition politician in Orissa in 1959, when nonviolent protests in a pseudo-Gandhian style were in vogue. It was good, he said, to provoke the police into firing on a crowd so as to have a martyr or, at the most, two; more martyrs than that made people stay off the streets and weakened the campaign. Second, whether the procedure measured up to Gandhi’s own demanding moral standards is doubtful. Recall his definition of an authentic satyagraha: the encounter should end with both the satyagrahi and the “wrongdoers” agreeing on the definition of Truth.6 If the wrongdoers yield out of fear or because they think it prudent, having been outmaneuvered, then in Gandhi’s reckoning, the technique of nonviolence has failed because there was no change of heart. In that case, nonviolence would not have proved itself to be a “moral equivalent of war and of all violent struggle.” But, as always, an absolutist all-or-nothing insistence on perfection, which is characteristic of the religious mind in pursuit of Edenic oneness, draws attention 5. Hitler thought so. “When one treats a people as the English have continually treated the Indians, the unpardonable folly is to send the youth of the country to the universities, where it learns things that it would be better for it not to know” (Table Talk, 203). 6. One wonders how often Gandhian fighters for justice conceded that their own cause was unjust and that they, not the opponent, were wrongdoers. In a successful satyagraha, the “wrongdoer” must agree that the cause against which he/she is fighting is itself an offence against God and Truth. Gandhi did put an end to some campaigns—the murdered policemen or the violence in 1919 over the Rowlatt Acts—but he did not do so because his cause was unjust; the fault lay with the means used, because they offended God and Truth by occasioning violence. Defining from the outset the other person as the “wrongdoer” begs the question and allows only one outcome to an encounter: the only mind to be changed is that of the “wrongdoer.”

190

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

away from a significant reality. If one drops the insistence on moral conversion and instead focuses on the body count—or, less dramatically, on the violence/ civility ratio in the encounter and its aftermath—then satyagraha (or any other discipline of self-restraint, including prudent cost/benefit calculation) is both a workable and relatively moral substitute for “war and all violent struggle.” That self-restraint is in complementary distribution with violent struggle is, of course, true by definition. What matters, however, is their ratio—their relative magnitude—and what determines it. In India, the British did not fight an irrational rearguard action, as they did in Kenya and Malaysia, or as the Dutch did in Indonesia, or the French and the Americans did in Vietnam. The style of the British departure from India had many causes; satyagraha alone does not account for its relative civility. Exhaustion from the Second World War and diminished resources made their going a matter of prudent selfinterest; there were no white settlers, as in Kenya or the Rhodesias, and there was no “Communist threat,” as in Malaya; the new Socialist regime in Britain was in principle opposed to colonialism; and many other variables are part of the mix that prevented the fight over India’s independence from being a fight to the finish. But for sure Gandhi and his philosophy have a place in the equation. Imagine how different the outcome might have been if the tone had been set not by Gandhi, but by the fascist sympathizing Subhas Chandra Bose, or, from the other direction, if Hitler had been victorious, and Congress had found itself dealing with a Himmler or a Heydrich. Gandhi’s civility was, to some extent, matched by his British opponents: bureaucratic minds look for rational solutions and are schooled not only to follow rules, but also, at a more abstract level, to play by them. Many—not all—of the former Freedom Fighters whom I interviewed in Orissa in 1959 took pleasure in recounting the manner of their going to prison when the Quit India movement began in August 1942. A typical tale went like this: This is how we did it. First write to the Collector saying what you would do; then publish it in all the newspapers. Police used to come and wait. The satyagrahi goes there with bag and baggage knowing he will go to jail. He stands up and says, “No one is to help the war effort; no one is to give a single penny.” Then the police approach and take you to jail. Mr. Wilcox tried my case; nothing to dispute; plead guilty; sentenced to one year’s imprisonment or a fine; refuse to pay the fine and go off to prison. I was four or five days in the district jail and then I was taken to the central jail in Berhampur. Others came; forty or fifty Congress members, many MLAs, were in the jail.

They talked of these and other events as of a performance that was scripted and orderly. Of course, in 1959 they were looking back as victors, perhaps ready to show magnanimity to someone from the land of the “wrongdoers.” Rarely did they have bad things to say about the British officials they encountered. Certainly

g a n d h i’ s r e l ig io n a nd p ol itical re al ity

•

191

they remembered incidents when crowds got out of hand and the police responded with excessive violence, but several of them—independently and unprompted— described an occasion when Gandhi himself came to Cuttack and addressed an immense crowd assembled on the wide dry-season sands of the Katjori river; and the crowd remained perfectly orderly, perfectly disciplined. For Gandhi, orderliness was a manifestation of godliness: “The congregational prayer is having a magical effect. The crowds run into thousands—sometimes hundreds [of] thousands. Yet there is perfect order and pin-drop silence during the prayer—no jostling, no noise. It is a revelation” (Pyarelal 1965a, Vol. 1, 155–56). Freedom fighters were proud of their disciplined self-restraint. Some of them were ready to acknowledge a similar quality in at least the senior officials who put them in jail. This self-restraint goes along with the same mutual respect for the opponent that defines sportsmanship. The contest is conducted without enmity, with civility, with a readiness to see and accept the opponent as a person behind the role, deserving respect. Gandhi writes in his autobiography of the first satyagraha that he conducted in India (1917 at Champaran in Bihar): A sort of friendliness sprang up between the officials—Collector, Magistrate, Police Superintendent—and myself. I might have legally resisted the notices served on me. Instead I accepted them all, and my conduct towards the officials was correct. They thus saw that I did not want to offend them personally, but that I wanted to offer civil resistance to their orders. In this way they were put at ease, and instead of harassing me they gladly availed themselves of my and my co-workers’ co-operation in regulating the crowds. (1949, 343)

This same absence of rancor—even a kind of playfulness—shines out of an incident described by Pyarelal Nair, Gandhi’s one-time secretary and his biographer. Gandhi’s last period in jail, which began in August 1942, ended on 5 May 1944 when the Inspector-General of Prisons for Bombay, Colonel Bhandari, came to the Aga Khan Palace Detention Centre in Poona and told him that the guards would be removed the following morning and that he would be free to go. Gandhi, the lawyer, asked “half in jest, half earnest” about the railway fare to which released prisoners were entitled. Colonel Bhandari assured him that a travel warrant would be provided, and then said “Now, please, do not come back again. See! My hair has turned grey with worry!” (Pyarelal 1965a, Vol. 1, 3).

Gandhian Morality and “Sectarian” Religions Gandhi’s charisma mobilized the common people in the struggle for independence and it made at least a dent in imperialism. But it did not prevent those same common people from perpetrating the evils his religion abhorred. Why

192

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

could it not better curb the faith-based enthusiasms that tormented India at the time of partition? What is written about his moral campaigning in 1946–48 has a different quality from accounts of the earlier confrontations. The later reports convey an enormity of issue and a climate of desperation that was absent, for example, from the fasts over separate electorates or in support of striking millworkers in Ahmedabad. The reasons are obvious: the mass killings and the threat of civil war. In the earlier encounters, Gandhi’s opponents were civil servants and businessmen, habitual bottom-liners, cost/benefit attentive; they might be obstinate and hard-hearted, but mostly they were not fanatics.7 In 1947 and 1948, Gandhi faced an entirely different kind of opponent: religious enthusiasts with absolutist minds even more closed to counting costs than Gandhi’s own. The “wrongdoers” who perpetrated faith-based massacres cared nothing for civility. There were also practical reasons. Against the British or against a particular set of mill owners or landlords or even officials, Gandhi could pick the place and the occasion to launch a campaign and it is evident that he did so with tactical and logistical forethought; and when he made a mistake, he called the campaign off. He had the initiative and could commit his resources wherever and whenever he thought they would be most effective. The partition-violence was not like that. He did not have the initiative; it lay with the mobs and their religioninspired agitators. The outbreaks of violence were not centrally planned and they occurred simultaneously in different places. He used his primary weapon, which was his presence, and went to wherever he believed the violence was worst. There were some successes, as I noted, but the overall failure brought him near to despair. “Truth and Ahimsa [nonviolence] by which I swear and which have to my knowledge sustained me for sixty years, seem to fail to show the attributes I ascribed to them” (MDG, 52). Facing the realities of death dealing strife in Bengal, he was overheard “murmuring to himself, ‘What should I do? What should I do?’” (MDG, 71). In the end, the close encounter with mob brutality in the house where he was staying in Calcutta drove him to use his ultimate weapon, fasting. The publicity this attracted—it was even greater in the later radio-broadcast fast in Delhi—distributed his presence to a national audience, and in that way, somewhat compensated for the random incidence of religious hooliganism. There is another more fundamental reason why his charismatic authority wilted before religion inspired fanaticism: it has to do with moral communities and their boundaries, that is, with the way that moral worth is apportioned. Only universalists do not discriminate in their ethical judgments; for all others,

7. The police, especially the rank-and-file, on occasions ran wild in dealing with satyagrahis. For an example see Ashe (2000, 291–93).

g a n d h i’ s r e l ig io n a nd p ol itical re al ity

•

193

the morality that counts in persuasion focuses less on general ethical principles and more on particular loyalties. Gandhi preached a universal morality—all men are brothers. It is possible, I suppose, that his mass audiences, in his presence, believed what he said, but the moral world in which they otherwise lived and acted, and into which they had been born, was not formed in that way: it was structured over and over again into ever widening circles of diminishing moral worthiness, representing, at each boundary, a separation of “us” from “them.” Every moral community, including the Heavenly host, owes its existence to those who are excluded from it. Gandhi’s religion tried to remove the barrier by making inclusion available to everyone. So also does New Testament Christianity, at least in sermons about “fellowshipping with Jesus,” and so do some other religions. But until the inclusion happens, outsiders are also potential enemies, and oneness can then become a process not of conversion and inclusion, but of annihilation. Faiths that make their way into a political arena are in search of power and they soon discover—paradoxically if their goal is Edenic oneness—that they cannot exist without enemies. I do not know why that has to be. That it is so is attested by centuries of internecine encounters between conflicting faiths. Gandhi’s benign universalism—hate their sins but love all sinners—does not have “the ghost of a chance” in encounters with the other variety of religiosity that feeds on enmity and likes to hate the sinners. Neither did Gandhi have a chance; he was murdered by militant Hindus, because, they said, he had betrayed Hinduism. By this they meant that he had reproached them for hating Muslims. Gandhi’s Truth is universalistic—there is room for everyone in heaven. His basic schema has only two levels: there are individual souls and there is the ultimate oneness, the final collectivity, which is Rama Rajya, or Heaven, or the Kingdom of God, where there is no strife. But this scheme is a crucially incomplete presentation of any mundane reality: insofar as universalistic religions are evangelical and their devotees go out to spread their gospel, they enter a political arena and come into conflict with rival collectivities. But in the Gandhian scheme, these other collectivities cannot be rivals because all religions are encompassed within the one true religion. That is the irony of “All Men are Brothers” and of the tragically futile (if logically correct) message that the evils of untouchability or of faith-based massacres will end when there is an appropriate change of heart. But the reality is that asserting a potential does not make it real. Perhaps Gandhi’s statement should be turned around: if religion is to remain itself and uncontaminated, it must have nothing to do with politics. Weber is right: “He who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his own and of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics . . .” Gandhi preached incessantly that this was not the case: a morality that did not discriminate and was universally applicable would allocate resources in a just and effective manner and free the world from political strife. In his

194

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

actions, he tried to make this logical truism a political reality. He acknowledged no enemies; there were only people who were mistaken and who could be brought to know the truth, alike when they were the agents of the imperial power in 1919 using the Rowlatt bills to withhold civil liberties, and when it was Sardar Patel in 1948 trying to play realpolitik with funds that were owed to Pakistan. Gandhi consistently treated as brothers those whom others exploited or reviled; for him there were no untouchables; in the great killings he went to neighborhoods where Muslim minorities lived, in the faith that his presence and readiness to sacrifice himself would protect them from gangs of murderous Hindu fanatics. By his definition, religion could not be a divisive force: “By religion, I do not mean formal religion, or customary religion, but that religion which underlies all religions, which brings us face-to-face with our maker” (AMB, 73). Different religions do not have to be in conflict: Gandhi’s universalism “transcends Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, etc. It does not supersede them. It harmonizes them and gives them reality” (AMB, 77). But in fact the harmony existed more in his words than in what other people practiced, and the reality was at best a rivalry and often conflicts, all too frequently violent. The end of realpolitik and the triumph of morality, which was precisely Gandhi’s aspiration, has become the reality neither in India nor anywhere else, this side of Heaven.

Gandhi’s Universalism and Political Action Godly religions place no limits, upper or lower, on faith; to be a True-believer is an all-or-nothing state of mind. One has faith; or one does not. Therefore—for the believers—faith cannot be taken to excess. No dominant figure emerged in the 1947–48 strife from within any of India’s three committed traditional religions—Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism—to question the faith that led to excesses. For sure there were individuals who preached against the misuse of faith, or who, in response to Gandhi’s appeals, pledged themselves to end the violence, or who, like Khalipur Rahman, acted in a theologically incorrect (but admirably humanistic) way to mitigate religion’s horrors. But the message of restraint was not widely heard. Restraint requires understanding, which is an intellectual thing, and the intellect has trouble standing firm against the tides of raw emotion that Godly religions generate. Why could Gandhi’s religion not excite similar emotions? One answer is that his philosophy was not in accord with Everyman’s experience of the everyday life that is lived with other people. Gandhi’s religion speaks only to an ideal world in which everything that is desired is at hand; there is nothing to compete over; nor are political institutions needed to allocate power because power has been abolished (except in the case of God); everyone is equal in His

g a n d h i’ s r e l ig io n a nd p ol itical re al ity

•

195

sight. “ . . . there is no such word as an external enemy” (quoted in Pyarelal 1965a, Vol. 1, 320). And, If 400 millions of India could speak with one voice, move together and act together as one man, freedom would be theirs for the asking. Prayer is the greatest binding force, making for the solidarity and oneness of the human family. If a person realizes his unity with God through prayer, he will look upon everybody else as himself. There will be no high, no low, no narrow provincialisms or petty rivalries . . . If we are in tune with God through prayer, no matter how big the gathering, perfect order would prevail and even the weakest would enjoy perfect protection. Above all, realization of God must mean freedom from all earthly fear. Political slavery . . . is incompatible with acceptance of the yoke of God; salvation is not for the slave. (quoted in Pyarelal 1965a, Vol. 1, 155)

Gandhi’s is a religion for societies already in Heaven, for Utopias that exist nowhere except in our moral imaginations. There are no adversary politics in Heaven; there need be none in our world. That unlikely message did not accord with Everyman’s mundane experience. Gandhi’s religion, intent on oneness, denies difference; traditional religions glory in it. Everyman’s world is an everyday experience of systematic inclusion and exclusion. It has to be; without that experience there would be no categories, because a category entails something outside itself; and without categories there would be no collectivities; and without them, there would be no social world, and we would live lives that are, in those famous words, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. In other words, Everyman’s everyday experience is not that of “an ordered moral government of the universe,” but of power and a conflict over power uninhibited by and often instigated by the contentious religions. Gandhi’s universalism and adversary politics sit ill together. This is not because he rejected the idea of struggle: on the contrary, he saw human existence as inevitably, even desirably, nothing else but struggle. Nor was it because he despised a fighter: the contempt he had for cowardice and passivity is well in line with warrior values. Nor is his religion politically inept only because he rejected violence. What made it incompatible with politics was its determined inclusiveness, its universalism, its denial of fundamental difference: all human beings are alike; none are evil, only mistaken; salvation is for everyone; God’s mercy is infinite and “all men are brothers.” The essence of the warlike religions, by contrast, is not the all-embracing oneness that in heaven awaits True-believers, but the obligation to rally here on earth around the cause and its leader in order to exterminate non-believers before they exterminate us. In Gandhi’s religion, there was no palpable collective cause around which to rally. Redemption was for the self, the individual soul, and was to be achieved by swaraj, self-restraint. Gandhi’s God has no armies, because He has no enemies.

196

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

Beyond that lies yet a higher level of Gandhian abstrusity: not only is there no collective cause, there is also—somewhat ambiguously—no leader; in the end there is no personifiable God. To me God is Truth and Love; God is ethics and morality; God is fearlessness. God is the source of Light and Life and yet He is above and beyond all these, God is conscience, He is even the atheism of the atheist . . . He is the purest essence . . . He is patient with us . . . He is also terrible . . . He is ever-forgiving . . . He is the greatest democrat . . . He is the greatest tyrant . . . (AMB, 75–76).

Despite the frequent anthropomorphic gender-specific references to Him as if He were a being, a person who judges and guides, the God of those sentences turns out to be not that at all, but an ideal and a discipline: despite the masculine pronoun and despite God having qualities that ordinary mortals may have—“patient,” “ever-forgiving,” “democrat,” “tyrant”—this version of Gandhi’s religion does not require one to believe in and worship a divine being, but only to have a conscience and follow a discipline. Religion is a faculty inside each individual, accessed by prayer and meditation or even by “judgment.” “God is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist.” God in such a philosophy is neither He nor She, but It: “Truth is God. God is, because Truth is” (AMB, 85). Gandhi said that religion had everything to do with politics, but the ideas that constitute his own religion are, in a variety of ways, absolutely incompatible with political action. “Must we train the three hundred and odd million Indians in the theory and practice of nonviolent action before we could go forward?” Nehru asked, adverting to the discipline’s impossible rigors, physical and intellectual. Nor, in the troubles of 1947–48, could Gandhi’s religion—a philosophy so intangible, so impalpable, so impersonal, so chilling—begin to compete for the loyalty of the common man against the traditional religions of India. Those other religions, like all non-secular religions, deal in forces that are intangible, but they do so through symbols that give a presence to those forces, both the good and the evil. A presence, especially when it is a charismatic presence (or its negative equivalent), is so much more commanding than is an abstract idea; a presence, even only as an image, reaches directly into the emotions; an abstract idea remains caught in a tangle of intellectual complexities that raise doubts and invite refutation. It is not easy for us to stand shoulder to shoulder with our comrades and fight the good fight against evil when the evil is essentially within ourselves. We are not built that way; political action, when directed toward the public good, is ipso facto inhibited when the actors, each intent on their individual advantage or individual salvation, lose sight of their collectivity. “For me, politics bereft of religion are absolute dirt, ever to be shunned . . . Therefore, in politics also we have to establish the Kingdom of Heaven” (AMB, 90). Religion is pure love; politics entail enmity. But the “absolute dirt,” which

g a n d h i’ s r e l ig io n a nd p ol itical re al ity

•

197

is Gandhi’s way of talking about the competitive actuality of politics, is a reality. So also, of course, are the ideas (various versions of his “Kingdom of Heaven”) that exist as institutions designed to bring order by prescribing the ends of public policy and the legitimate means to attain them. But the institutions are not a oneness; there are different versions of the right and the good; they contradict each other; and the upholders of each different morality set compete for dominance. The strife-free ideal is not achieved merely by saying that political strife is filth. Gandhi’s philosophy, by rejecting the idea of enmity and forfeiting the emotive force of hatred, ensured its own defeat when, by the mere act of bringing its message to others, it entered a political arena. The reality is that in their nature politics entail competition, and that, when religions enter the arena, competition becomes enmity, rivalry becomes hatred, and the possibility of reasoned compromise is much diminished. In 1947–48, the aggressive religions, not Gandhian brotherhood, dominated the field—deplorably so, for sure, but still the reality. Then what place does religion have in politics? Religion, if it is broadly defined as conscience, self-restraint, and respect for a discipline, encompasses three modes: (i) right conduct (civility, sportsmanship, consideration for the feelings of others, and the like—in other words, any variety of Humanism); (ii) secular religions (nationalisms, communism, fascism, the manifest destiny presupposition, free market principles, and so on); and (iii) Godly religions in which a discipline is handed down by a supreme being as authentic revealed Truth. The difference between these three modes of faith that is significant for politics is not that the third invokes supernatural beings and the others do not, but rather the extent to which any of the three is willing to countenance reality and to follow an ethic of responsibility. The adherents of (i) are, by their nature, more ready to accept responsibility for consequences and adjust their faith to fit reality: they recognize that faith, which upholds their disciplinary routine, may be taken to excess. Type (ii), Godless religions, since they purport to be based on reason, in theory should have some capacity to recognize reality and bow to it, but their history is studded with faith-based disasters: the Ukrainian famine of the 1920s; the ten years of Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76), and the earlier “Great Leap Forward” and the famine of 1959–61 in which up to an estimated 30 million people died; market capitalism’s Great Depression of the 1930s—the result of blind faith in market mechanisms; the cataclysm that Hitler caused to fall upon the Germans; and a host of contemporary evils, hopefully less disastrous in their outcome, perpetrated by secular leaders who take to religion and inoculate themselves against an ethic of responsibility. Logically, the secular religions should be better equipped to recognize reality, even if their record denies this. Godly religions have no reason to do so: God’s Will is absolute and by definition is never open to an ethic of responsibility. Secular religions, since their presuppositions are held as first principles and

198

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

protected from questioning, also are pre-rational; but they do, on occasions, yield to an ethic of cost counting. First, when their adherents refuse to take account of consequences, it is often less because they believe it would be a sin to do so (as is the case with Godly religions) than because those in power want to stay in power and calculate that they can do so by concealing what they know to be the objective truth. To the extent that their guide is advantage, not faith, they are then less ready to fight mindlessly to a finish (which is a boost for hypocrisy as the lesser of two evils). Second, because the believers in secular religions have no God to hear their prayers and set things right for them, they have an incentive to find out why things went wrong and put them back in order. They search not only for wrongdoers, but also for faults in the system and in the ideas that sustain it. Bizarre though it sounds, Gandhi’s religion shares one of its features with witchcraft: individuals and their moral failings are responsible for what goes wrong. Witchcraft explanations—asking who is to blame—require less intellectual effort and therefore more readily persuade the diseducated than do natural or procedural explanations. That was precisely the sentiment that a religious fanatic would have used to justify the 1947–48 faith-based slaughter: the world will be better when those evil people have been removed from it. That also was Gandhi’s explanation for evil. He chose, however, to locate the evil within ourselves; in doing so, he denied himself an essential weapon in the politician’s armory—an external enemy.

8

T HE F IRST C AUSE AND THE L AST W ORD

b Propagating the Faith So—one more time—what is religiosity? What is its essence? What forms does it take? What are its causes? What are its consequences? We also return to asking what matters more: what you believe or how you believe it. Is the content allimportant and the mode of belief insignificant? True-believers think so; for them the mode of belief is, by definition, a constant and it is the content that defines True religion. I do not see things that way: both the substance and the mode of belief matter. Certainly the content is important, because it has consequences, good or bad (depending on how you judge good and bad). But the manner of belief also matters: if it is inflexible, accountability is ruled out, because there is no way in which codes that have adverse consequences can be changed. In that case True-Believers are beyond redemption, and incapable of reform. In all three examples—the Christian Right, National Socialists, and Gandhi’s creed—the sustaining religion is not something to be investigated to find out if it is true or false; it is not open to examination, and therefore to possible correction. Religion is dogma: it is authoritative. Religion, in that way, is a mode of belief: blind faith, an unwillingness or an incapacity to doubt or to question the faith, whether it takes the form of a belief in spiritual beings, the founding truth of a philosophy, a discipline, or beauty in one or other of its many manifestations—the style of a painting, a sculpture, a musical composition, an artifact, the character of a person, the intellectual elegance of a sentence or of a mathematical or a scientific proof—anything that is a first cause, its own justification. Such sentiments are, as I said, pre-rational; they may be used as a basis

200

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

for reasoning but they themselves are not the product of reason; they are reason’s launching pad. They are, of course, (from a position outside themselves) open to reasoned examination of their causes and consequences, but they themselves are things not of the intellect, but of the emotions, “of the soul.” They are not to be doubted; they are dogma. Dogma, by definition, should sell itself. As Lord Robbins said, talking about the assumptions that underlie neoclassical economic theory, “They have only to be stated to be recognized as obvious.” But the human mind does not always work that way, and the practitioners of religion—the professionals, so to speak—know that their creed does not always have a sellers’ market; it has to be sold. They have two ways to spread the gospel—or, to be cynical, to dominate the faith market. The first is moral: it is to persuade, to ease the passage of Truth into the prospective believer’s mind by sermonizing, “witnessing” (in the fundamentalist style), or in a variety of other ways, some of which were outlined earlier, theoretically in Chapter 2 and later, pragmatically, in the account of Hitler’s techniques for propagating the creed of National Socialism. How, then, do people acquire this capacity for true belief? Commonly, they do so either through indoctrination, or as an epiphany, or both. They are taught how to recognize right from wrong conduct and how to place that code in a social and a cosmic context that makes it seem not only appropriate, but also the last word on the subject—God’s will, human nature, the evolutionary process, Creationism, fate, or whatever else they adopt as a first cause that itself does not need a cause; it just is and that is all we need to know. One does not ask who is God’s Creator: He is His own. This self-sufficiency, this primordial quality, is a feature not only of Godly religion, but also (with or without a Divinity) of whatever code of conduct, whatever discipline, is accepted as fundamental: nonviolence, the Golden Rule, the dominance of males, racism, nationalism (My country right or wrong!), socialism, the free market, and so forth. They all provide a place to stand; they themselves are not in need of one—they are the foundation. All three of our examples—the Christian Right, Gandhi-ism, National Socialism—have this foundational quality. That is why I define them as religions. The second way to spread the gospel is not moral but instrumental—prizes and penalties, rewards and punishments. Believe because it will pay you to do so! For non-believers, the pay off will be negative. The “pay off” to morality should be having a clear conscience, and in all three cases—Gandhi, the Christian Right, and National Socialism—the creed is clear: “Do what is right only because it is right!” The practice, however, is not so clear-cut. Gandhi comes nearest to the ideal: it is difficult to find cases in which he appears to have been motivated exclusively by a desire for power, and there are none that I have found where his prime motive was clearly material gain. The other two cases are more equivocal. The leaders of the Christian Right say that they are motivated by their duty to

t h e fir s t c au se and the l as t word

•

201

do the Lord’s work. Some of them, however, have a style of life that puts their sincerity in doubt: the tithes that went to pay for an air-conditioned dog kennel and gold-plated bathroom fixtures suggest hypocrisy.1 Even those who do not flaunt their wealth in that way seem often to have at least one eye set on power: for example, they boast about their ability to seat and unseat politicians. There are other incursions by instrumentalism into faith, as I noticed earlier. The popular portrayals of the joys of Heaven and the miseries of Hell are distinctly instrumental in their mode of persuasion. So also—and in a more direct fashion—is the attempt to coerce faith by legislating it. This is the path that leads from moral persuasion eventually to the brutal “conversion-by-the-threatof-extermination” that characterizes the regimes of Pol Pot, Hitler, and the more militant wing of the Christian Right.

Walk Gently So much for the mode of belief. I come now to what is believed. In this, there are two basic elements: beliefs and values. The values are moral, signifying a discipline, a code of conduct, knowing right from wrong, good from evil. Values are the foundation that one comes to when the child’s repeated “Why” is terminated by the single authoritative word “Because!” Beliefs are the complementary ideas that underlie and make sense of the code of conduct. They are exemplified in the series of answers that are available before the categorical “Because!” is reached. My categorical imperative is to walk gently. There are, however, many faiths, both secular and Godly, that give legitimacy to not walking gently—Pol Pot’s communism, Hitler’s nationalism, Randall Terry’s menacing “We will find you, we will try you, and we will execute you.” Or, if they do not do so in that histrionic fashion, they may have a selective definition of what constitutes violence— think of Gandhi and the girls whose heads he shaved. The two criteria that identify Gilbert Murray’s good person are, first, being “careful not to neglect the real needs of men and women through basing our life on dreams”—that is, to base one’s actions on a critical and reasoned view of reality; second, to “walk gently,” which means being aware of and watchful for other people’s welfare. Neither of these rules logically require fantasies about supernatural forces and supernatural beings. In practice, however, both these and other disciplines do seem to require some means of translating the codes into action; they do not sell themselves. That, I suppose, is what Gilbert Murray intended by the “great work left for religion.”

1. .

202

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

Why “walking gently”? Religion is an empty box that can contain anything that people choose for their version of Truth, and the “anything” does not necessarily include walking gently. In fact, many different things, including some that I consider are foolish or evil, are promoted as the fundamental moral precept, the foundation for all others—biblical “inerrancy,” for example, or Hitler’s racism. The chosen foundation has to be taught, and since teaching is a distant cousin of brainwashing, “walking gently” is, in the last resort, the product of diseducation—of agreeing not to question a fundamental rule. All morality can only be, in the end, absolutist and therefore a kind of diseducation. There is no way to prove that one form of diseducation is better than another: we can only accept the chosen one as an imperative. To select it as such is to lay a foundation, a first principle, a prime directive that by definition needs no anterior principle to justify it: it simply is Truth. Those who endeavor to walk gently do so because it is right, and for that reason only. We cannot plausibly explain why people knowingly accept a moral rule as an absolute, except to say that they have been taught that they should and believe that they should. That is the point at which Weber’s “mature” politician, looking always to the likely consequences of his actions, nevertheless sooner or later encounters a categorical imperative and “ . . . reaches the point where he says: ‘Here I stand; I can do no other’” (1948, 127). From this perspective, paradoxically, even self-interest can be a kind of morality: actions motivated by it can be pronounced neither good nor bad until one knows whether or not they make for walking gently. Matthew, again (7: 20): “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” “Walk gently!” is a categorical imperative—direct, explicit, and unconditional. By definition—of course, mine—it is positive in its effect on humanity at large. For me, that is settled. But one still may ask how it relates to politics. The answer is that, if it were to become everyone’s directive, it would deprive politics of their definitional feature, which is their adversarial nature. If everyone followed the rule religiously (so to speak), to the letter, there would be no political arena and we would have attained the oneness fantasized at the end of Chapter 1: a “flawless [and benevolent] bureaucracy, run by managers in accordance with policy and procedure manuals.” More poetically, it would be Gandhi’s Rama Rajya, Heaven on Earth. But, once again, the reality is not and never could be like that. There is no perfectly adjusted society.2 Any society that cannot or refuses to recognize in itself imperfections caused by changes in both the natural world and in the world 2. Perhaps it is as well that we do not live in a perfectly adjusted society. We would all be suffering from Weberian disenchantment, or, to use less subtle terms, life would be monumentally boring. If all the mysteries of life are resolved by God, the first cause of everything, then (borrowing from Milton) there is everywhere “peace and consolation, calm of mind, all passion spent.” Vegetables, I suppose, have no passions; nor can they be bored.

t h e fir s t c au se and the l as t word

•

203

of knowledge and technology, will self-destruct, unless it learns how to make the appropriate adjustments. In the nature of things, political adjustments (that is, those which concern power) are rarely accomplished exclusively by debate and rational assessment of what will best serve the general good; selfish interests always have at least a part in the reckoning; the Old Adam is still there. Moreover, even when there is agreement about what constitutes the general good, there is likely to be an argument about how to achieve it. Politics and walking gently do not go naturally together. Then can antagonism be kept within limits? Obviously it can; otherwise society—civilization—would long since have destroyed itself. But the balance is fragile since walking gently is itself dependent on circumstances, theoretically achievable only when nothing—not power, not food and other goods, not fame—is in short supply and consequently, there need be no winners and losers. One can fantasize situations in which that could be true of material goods; by definition, however, it cannot be true of power or fame. Only humility, that is, being indifferent to fame and power—recall Gandhi’s “with all humility”—makes walking gently possible. But that kind of humility is not the norm; for most people and on most occasions, the norm is pride, sometimes disguised as “self-respect,” which may be measured by the capacity to intimidate others. (In a radio interview, I heard a man complain about the rats in his apartment: “They don’t give you no respect.”) Willy-nilly, competitors incline toward antagonism. What begins as a debate can become a fight because debating requires at least the consent of the other person and his/her willingness to follow the rules even when that leads to defeat or at least to a compromise that stops short of total victory, whereas force does not. Consent is a product of reason and the intellect; antagonism is a product both of the emotions and of a calculation that force has a better chance of winning what is at stake, than does walking gently. If this is the case, then, in the short run those who walk gently are likely to be no more effective in politics than was Gandhi’s satyagraha in putting an end to the faith-based slaughter that disgraced India’s partition. At the very least, they are handicapped when faced by an opponent whose religion condones violence. Morality is its own kind; it need not be—cannot be—derived from anything else, neither from enlightened self-interest nor from a God that does not exist. Gandhi was right: Truth exists only in the minds of those who accept it for its own sake, not for what it can bring them (other than a clear conscience). None of the politicians named in this book (excepting Gandhi, but certainly including the clerical politicians) behaved in a way that suggests that conscience alone—or even primarily—moved them. The prime mover, clearly revealed in their words and actions, seems to be an appetite for power. There is nothing novel in this. Gilbert Murray’s “walk gently” is a more wide reaching, more flexible, less dramatic version of Gandhian nonviolence, which,

204

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

as I noticed, turns a blind eye on psychological and economic ways to put in the boot. “Walk gently” is a very comprehensive formula for the good society, in line with, but less specific than, the New Testament’s “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophet” (Matthew 7: 12). Jesus, in this sermon, seems to rule out violence (except for those given to masochism); Gandhi also rules out violence; so does Gilbert Murray. All three were aware, as is anyone who does not live in a fantasy world, that nonviolence is an ideal, that in the real world violence is common, and that, in some organized religions, violence to advance the faith is actively encouraged. Gilbert Murray again: “ . . . the worst things ever done in the world on a large scale by decent people have been done in the name of religion.” Of these, not the least is the systematic discouragement of critical inquiry into both social and natural systems. That discouragement is mandated by spiritual religions (Christian and other politicized fundamentalisms) and by those secular religions that purport to have all the answers (Hitler, Pol Pot).

Morality and Evolution Faith has roots that go deeper than the practical need to make up one’s mind about what is to be done. I remarked, at the outset, on the emotional discomfort experienced when facing Gilbert Murray’s Unknown, the apprehensions about what will become of us when we do not know how to cope with the cosmic (or the social) world around us. But there is more to the urge that moves us when we encounter a puzzling situation than just our safety or our material comfort. Solving a puzzle can be its own justification, its own reward. There is a positive enjoyment in, for example, deciphering the clues in a cryptic crossword; but if a clue defeats us, we do not feel we are in danger; we feel frustrated and may decide that we need to improve our capacity for lateral thinking. Nor do most of us work at a crossword in an instrumental mood: to win a prize. (There often is no prize, and if there is it is likely to be a reference book that is already on our shelves.) We work at crosswords for the same reason that people are said to climb mountains: they are there. Finding a solution is its own reward; there is no pay off (positive or negative), in any practical sense. The difference parallels that between expediency in religious motivation—for instance getting to Heaven and avoiding Hell—and (Gandhian style) doing what is right simply because it is the right thing to do. Foundational presuppositions are similarly comforting, but they sometimes turn out to be unstable. A determined inquirer is uneasy about leaving things in the “given” category. We have an itch to ask questions, and the itch persists until we find a final closure in the theory that, by itself, explains everything. Such a theory relieves the itch because it brings about a suspension of disbelief: it has

t h e fir s t c au se and the l as t word

•

205

the status of a “Truth that is beyond questioning.” In other words, as Gandhi said, “God is Truth, and Truth is God.” (This is the case even when God takes the form of expected utility.) The urge to question is stilled not by the use of reason and the intellect, but simply by a fiat, vehemently asserted, that God is Truth, or that free market capitalism (or socialism) is the only acceptable way to manage an economy, or anything else that is taken for granted. God (or expected utility or whatever is accepted as fundamental) is a first cause that cannot be questioned because He (or It) is not a testable thing at all, but a special kind of presupposition that is primal and even sacred. Mission accomplished! Can we explain those feelings? Why, whatever the problem, is the “problem solved” feeling always gratifying? It just is; it is part of “human nature.” Perhaps— not entirely a whimsical idea—evolution could account for our need to assure ourselves that the problems can be solved: those who have a gene for chronic and uncontrollable anxiety tend not to survive (whether or not the anxiety is realistic). That kind of proposition belongs with an elaborate set of conjectures that link evolution with morality. We can begin by asking whether there are other means than God’s guiding hand (and his wrath) that will lead us down the “paths of righteousness” and make us walk gently. Can we be disciplined only by hearing what the preacher says? One possible alternative is that morality might be subsumed by self-interest, which is instinctive, a part of human nature. If so, God (along with his preachers) could be left entirely out of morality’s landscape. The idea of enlightened self–interest seems, at first sight, to do this: follow the moral code not because it is moral, but because following it has a positive pay off and not following it has a negative pay off. Rewards in Heaven and the torments of Hell are an instance. Hobbes’ remedy, at first sight, seems also to be an instance of enlightened self-interest: behaving properly now will spare you from a terminating war of all against all. But Hobbes also posited Leviathan, a ruler, a “mortal God,” who is the Commonwealth, a “multitude united in one person.” The mortal God compels those who are motivated only by raw self-interest to take into account the needs of others. That argument inserts religion back into the equation: Society—Leviathan, the “Commonwealth”—is a manifestation of God. Enlightened self-interest would make morality redundant. Therefore, one might expect it to have been the economist’s way to explain why societies do not self-destruct. Enlightened self-interest is based on calculation—adjusting means to ends—and ultimately on the premise that social man, so richly complex, can be usefully rewritten as (a more sophisticated version of) the simple one-dimensional instinct-guided economic man. But economists, perhaps despairing of the human capacity to calculate the benefits of enlightened self-interest, instead construct a natural system that “neither knows nor cares.” In that system, moral sentiments and moral protestations are no more than a fanciful misrepresentation of the underlying reality. The idea of a moral sense is redundant: to postulate morality as an active agent hinders rather than helps the understanding of a social

206

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

system; morality is merely a figment that has no power of agency. Moral sensibility is not like access to air and water, a pre-condition for human existence; nor is it a sixth sense—people do not instinctively forego present satisfaction; left to themselves they usually decide that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. In short, the economists’ presupposition is that all morality, even the vestigemorality that might have been involved in enlightened self-interest, although it is subjectively experienced and is actively promoted, in practice can be ignored. Everyman has his price and morality has no objective influence on a social system.3 In that discourse, morality has no more relevance in making sense of the social order than it does in understanding the weather, the climate, planetary systems, life cycles, or any other natural system. But that leaves unexplained forms of behavior that respond to moral sensibilities: people do not always behave as if there is no “ought” in their lives. To bracket out moral scruples—my chorus again—is to ignore facts and manipulate data to fit a theory, which is different from, but no better (and much less entertaining) than a fantasized world of spiritual beings. Expected utility is to rational choice analysis as God is to True-believing—both require an “Only believe!” Nor can the rational choice theorists say, as Hobbesians or Gandhians could, that it might indeed be the case that people do not always behave in the way that their morality requires, but at least that is how they say they ought to behave, and their judgment is itself part of the social order that is being investigated. This supposed fact—that altruism is never part of human nature—is so patently at odds with human experience that it has given rise to a mathematically sophisticated literature that descends from Darwin’s remarks on the origin of “social instincts” (Chapters 4 and 5 of The Descent of Man). This literature sets out to save the day for the natural-systems mode of social analysis by demonstrating logically that unselfish decisions, whether or not altruism is the motive, will have a positive pay off, if not for the individual now, then in the long run for the group.4 If that were not the case, then human society would long since have self-destructed. Cooperation, which is the foundation of social order, comes about through a process of evolution: those who do not know how to cooperate—who do not “acquire the gene” (so to speak) for cooperation or, in everyday words, who have no conscience—are not the fittest to survive. Cooperation (one aspect of our “walking gently”) may appear to be morally directed, but in fact it is a “social instinct,” the product of a “heartless, witless” evolutionary process.

3. By “objective” they usually mean “quantifiable.” Only in the subjective world of neoclassical economists is that which cannot be measured treated as unreal. 4. A readable presentation of these ideas (accessible to those who are defeated by mathematics) is Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation (1984).

t h e fir s t c au se and the l as t word

•

207

Everyday experience of altruism and moral sensibilities are thus explained—or explained away.5 Morality-through-evolution does not take into account motivations. People in general do not turn the other cheek or even avoid those sins which feature in the Ash Wednesday Commination service—“fornicators and adulterers, covetous persons, idolaters, slanderers, drunkards, and extortioners”—because they want to make life possible for future generations. Even if they did, they would not be motivated by the economists’ expected utility, but at best by “psychic utility,” which is a cover word for—a covert acknowledgment of—moral sentiments and conscience. Still less are people moved to help out an impersonal evolutionary process; nor do they feel constrained by it; indeed, few of them have heard of it.

Oneness and Its Consequences: Diseducation To be religious in the Godly mode is to use one’s imagination, to accept and live by a metaphysical fiction that describes no demonstrated reality existing outside the believers’ minds. Imagination provides a discipline, a design for living, a vision of what the good life might be, and a guide for coping with life’s actual vicissitudes. Faith domesticates those vicissitudes: it explains why they happen and why they and all other things that we experience are as they are. The vision is of an imagined reality, of what life might be if it were perfect—Rama Rajya, the Kingdom of God on earth, Communism’s classless society, Aryan rule and racial purity, or the Panglossian “all is for the best in this best of possible worlds.” The question that has concerned me most directly is about consequences. What follows when people are guided by a faith? Certainly, as the True-believing Evans-Pritchard writes, “ . . . there has to be a religion of some sort.” Nehru, not at all a True-believer, is of the same mind: faith provides solace—seemingly a necessary solace—to individuals; it satisfies a “deep inner craving of human beings.” That clearly is the case for most people (although, for “fellows whom it hurts to think,” there are less ethereal ways to quiet their inner cravings and see “the world as the world’s not”). The solace and sense of security provided by religious faith comes with a cost. Its most general and, to my thinking, its most deplorable effect is to stifle curiosity

5. True-believers are not easily defeated. They can turn the tables on this and other brands of evolutionary theory by asking where did the gene for altruism come from. There must be, after all, an “invisible hand,” as Adam Smith said: and it is the hand of God. Notice that the evolutionary explanation of the origins of morality is the inverse of EvansPritchard’s claim that “it is precisely through religious systems that social evolution, or progress, has been brought about, for it is the most significant of evolutionary forces, the chief agent in natural selection.” Theories of moral evolution assert, on the contrary, that social evolution spawns morality.

208

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

about and, therefore inquiry into, the Unknown. (That outcome, I will argue later, is not a necessary one, but it is, unfortunately, frequent enough to impede the quest for knowledge.) When ignorance is allowed to prevail—even enforced by some True-believers—the vicissitudes of life (both the agreeable and disagreeable) are intellectually domesticated as acts of God and, by that very label, they are perfectly explained; they are His workmanship, the telos that He has ordained. Here again is William Jennings Bryan at the “Monkey Trial,” replying to a question by Clarence Darrow: Darrow: You have never in all your life made any attempt to find out about the other peoples of the earth—how old their civilizations are, how long they have existed on the earth—have you? Bryan: No sir, I have been so well satisfied with the Christian religion that I have spent no time trying to find arguments against it. I have all the information I want to live by and to die by. ()

For a non-believer, however, the “act of God” label is not a terminus, not an explanation, but an invitation to investigate. William Jennings Bryan is not everyone’s model, not even that of all True-believers. The religious tendency to stifle inquiries by the methods of natural science into the Unknown has not always prevailed. Certainly, intellectual discouragement would not be the right frame in which to portray the emergence of natural science. Religion begins with questions and those scholars (whether Greek, Hindu, Muslim, Christian or whatever else) who immersed themselves in thought and debate about life’s mysteries are the founders, the first to ask systematically why things are the way they are. Out of that scholarly tradition comes natural and social science. In short, there is no practical contradiction between religion and science. There is a logical contradiction: the founding presupposition of science is naturalism; that of religion is supernaturalism. There is no way to encompass that contradiction within a single truth. The noise erupts only when one or the other party defines the situation not only by denying the legitimacy of the other’s presuppositions, but also by attempting to suppress them—that is by resorting to political action. That, however, does not have to happen: in practice religion and science can be compartmented; then, despite the craving for oneness, for a single Truth, they can co-exist in the same civilization. They can co-exist even in the same mind. There is no practical contradiction between believing in a Creator and using the methods of natural science to make sense of what He has created. A substantial part of the religiously dogmatic Evans-Pritchard’s splendid ethnography—possibly not all of it—is unaffected by his religious convictions; and there are many, many other instances. Isaac Newton, the prototypical scientist, also studied theology and accepted the Biblical account of creation. Roger Bacon, a Thirteenth Century Franciscan friar, devoted the latter part

t h e fir s t c au se and the l as t word

•

209

of his life to experimental science and wrote a treatise on it. (Despite the fact that the work was commissioned by the Pope, Clement IV, his Franciscan masters condemned the book and put him in prison.) Nor is anything illogical taking place when a True-believing scientist deals with the Unknown by deciding where the hand of God is not needed and the laws of nature provide a sufficient explanation. In other words, natural scientists (or social scientists) can vigorously pursue the truth of their particular science, always ready to admit that they might be wrong in their deductions, while reserving Truth, which by definition is never wrong, for matters that are beyond rationality and the intellect. Nonetheless, to promote scientific research is to deny the maxim that all is for the best in this best of possible worlds, because God made it so. Things could be better, and inquiry into them by the method of science makes that possible; prayer or sacrificial offerings, by themselves, do not. Fastening responsibility (credit or blame) on a divinity is in effect to say that nothing can be changed, except by Him.

Oneness and Its Consequences: Strife Why is faith caught up in struggles for power? The seed is in human nature. Underlying the effectiveness of faith is an unreflecting craving for, and often a Gadarene haste toward the oneness that, in a huge variety of guises, seems everywhere to answer to a “deep inner craving of human beings.” That hankering is manifested also in politics (despite the fact that oneness contradicts the essence of politics). Oneness is to be made a social, intellectual, and political reality, whether by crusade-jihad methods or by Gandhian persuasion, by force or by trickery—per forza o per frode. The intellectual oneness—the one theory that explains everything—is the intellectuals’ Ignis Fatuus, their Will o’ the Wisp; it also is a defining feature of God’s Kingdom on Earth; and it is also the goal of all those who aspire to power (and do not realize that enmity is part of the package). Oneness may be variously conceived as a consummate dictatorship (Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and various other leaders came near to that); or as the kingdom of God on earth; or as the dharma, or as the “well-governed Commonwealth . . . that great Leviathan”; or as the harmony envisaged in “all men are brothers”; or as a nirvana where there are no debts to be redeemed, no scores to be paid off. But oneness never becomes an actuality, because Nature makes such perfection impossible. “Witless” and “heartless,” Nature marches to its own beat. It is not in lock-step with human needs; it changes without first consulting those who must adapt to it. No society’s technology (social or material) can be in perfect and stable adjustment with its environment. Basic human needs of every kind— health, enough to eat, tranquility in the face of the Unknown, and the like—are

210

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

not spontaneously satisfied. Populations outgrow the means of sustenance. The result is strife, because Nature (in its other sense, human nature) has been more generous with the instinct to survive at another’s cost, than with the instinct to sacrifice oneself in order to save others. The willingness to sacrifice oneself is a characteristic of morality, even for Hitler—“the Aryan willingly subordinates his own ego to the common weal.” That sense of responsibility diminishes with every step outward from the center. Recall the moral community’s definition of the good politician: he/she is “one of us.” That too is a part of human nature. Self-interest is the source of strife; that is clear enough in the political world. Power is by definition in short supply: the higher your power, the lower mine. The same is true of material goods, not by definition but in actuality: some things are scarce and they are fought over. Equal shares, and even equal privation, may be an ideal, but the reality that people more often see is selfishness (especially when they are the losers). “Things of the soul” also become objects of competition and give rise to strife because religions are contaminated by power, by the mundane reality. Those who have faith in God, usually without acknowledging what they are doing, create a market in which the different brands of salvation compete with one another for followers and the resources they bring. Since the God whose mercy is said to be infinite is a fiction, the decision about who merits that mercy is made not by Him but by His devotees, and their mercy is not infinite. They demand conformity with the rules of their particular creed: those, for example, who categorically deny that there ever was a “Creator” and who thereby refuse to “fellowship with Jesus,” risk being denied the benefits of Christian redemption; often they are penalized in more worldly ways. Charity (caritas, brotherly love) stops at borders. The idea of Edenic oneness then becomes, in practice, an exclusionary device: it serves to promote solidarity within the community of True-Believers by marking and stigmatizing and consigning to Hell those who are not of the faith. In short, the idiom may be different, but in actuality, religion and politics are quite similar. All politics are in practice adversarial; so also most religions, willynilly, engage in strife. Those that refuse to fight exist only with difficulty: bad money (to speak from a Gandhian or a Quaker or a New Testament universalistic point of view) tends to drive out the good. Gandhi’s universalism presents itself as a solution, as a way to keep politics out of religion; it envisages an amicable oneness of faith, in which the different “sects” (his word for Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and similar faiths) acknowledge their commonalty and live by it. That kind of universalism cannot be sold to most believers, because their faith explicitly rejects it. Gandhi thought otherwise and once again made his case by fudging the line between the ideal and the real. “Let me explain what I mean by religion. It is not the Hindu religion, which I certainly prize above all other religions, but the religion which transcends Hinduism, which changes one’s very nature, which binds one indissolubly to the truth within and

t h e fir s t c au se and the l as t word

•

211

which ever purifies” (AMB, 73). His logic is correct: if to have a discipline—to be “ever purified” by a “truth within”—is to have a religion, then, since all creeds come with a Truth and a discipline attached, they all are encompassed in the one transcendent category. Given his definition of religion, the argument is logically correct, but it has nothing to do with the world of religious practice. For Ordinary Joe and Ordinary Jill, in India and elsewhere, what signifies is not the transcendent category, but their own particular faith, whether Godly or secular. In what they do, as distinct from what (according to Gandhi) they should do, the goal of religious oneness is unattained. At every level, from daily rituals to rites of passage, to the higher reaches of metaphysics, those who follow a particular creed behave as if their creed is not only distinctive but also effortlessly superior to all others, the one and only Truth. Gandhi’s transcendent religion is a fantasy, the product of his hopes and his imagination; once again the world that is has been confused, in his philosophy, with the world as he would like it to be. In theory, Universalism puts an end to adversarial politics. But in practice the outcome is more often the opposite: politics undermine Universalism. In the real world, the practice of politics is inescapably confrontational. Theoretical oneness, achieved through a logic of sublation (and at the urging of the totality itch), in practice is replaced by a oneness in which a dominant creed has eliminated all the rest, if not also their believers. This is the case even when the “crusaders” are nonviolent: moral pressure, in the manner of satyagraha, is still adversarial. The spiritual wish is still not the political reality. For practical purposes the religion that brings peace and harmony and subsumes all others—Gandhi’s vision—is an ideal that can never become a reality; organized religions are sustained by antagonism. Where unity in faiths appears to exist, it is produced not by sublation—the amicable discovery of a shared morality—but by force, and is therefore spurious. Religions of love, even those that are sincerely held, cannot change the scene. To make that possible, believers would need power, which they do not have, and if they had it and used it, their religion would no longer be a religion of love. As Gandhi’s philosophy makes clear, his system—satyagraha—does not work until the wrongdoers acknowledge their fault, voluntarily change the nature of their religion, and so give up their own distinctiveness and the power that they had before the conversion. Given what we are, Humanism and other universalist nonviolent religions, which aim at oneness, live on as ideals that rarely can be long sustained as actualities.

Diseducation and Authority Having any kind of faith, other than propositional, is a manifestation of diseducation, which is an inability or a refusal to examine religious ideas and their derivative ideals and disciplines, and to subject them to criticism. We make

212

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

complicated situations simpler than they are. Faith blinds the faithful to reality, to the inexorable forces of Nature, which is, as Housman said, witless (unaware of what it is doing to us, unaware of anything at all) and therefore heartless (unguided by any morality). Faith diseducates the faithful and, even as it gives them comfort, exposes them to dangers that the benefit of experience, processed as reasoned knowledge about the workings of Nature, might have spared them. But, in practice, faith cannot be reasoned away into nothingness. Emotion sustains faith; reason questions it. Emotion, which is not premeditated but instinctual, is the agent, the efficient cause of actions. Reason is the attempt to work out beforehand or understand retrospectively the consequences of actions; it is not the mover; often it is a brake. Religion is anchored in the emotions; the emotions produce action; and action, whether it is planning or practice, is the essence of politics. Therefore—as Gandhi said, but for reasons other then mine—there is no understanding politics without also understanding religion. Religious faith (both spiritual and secular) is well characterized by a somewhat dubious derivation from the Latin word ligare—to bind, to tie together, or to unite—which adequately conveys not only the restrictive features of both secular and spiritual religions, but also their congregational propensities and their seeking for oneness. Religion in both those forms is tainted not only by (Whitehead’s words) the “dogmatic fallacy” (This is the one and only Truth!) but also by the “static fallacy” (The fundamentals of our existence never change!). Dogmatic religions repress the intellect, they sponsor action without sufficient thought or concern about its consequences and, because they forbid inquiry, they stifle the faculty for creative imagination, which (not Evans-Prichard’s revealed religion) is the agent of civilization. In short, as I have already argued, dogmatism diseducates. Diseducation is an essential element in the exercise of authority. Faith, in the course of enchanting the faithful, diseducates them. In the practical world of politics (or anywhere else), the craving for the security that comes from making sense of the Unknown is an opening that allows those hungry for power (who know that faith generally trumps reason) to make opportunistic use of our tutored gullibility. The reasoning that goes into a well-considered decision is likely to be tedious in its detail, complex, and for an already diseducated audience, which is impatient for an answer, difficult to follow. Leaders then benefit from having followers who have been schooled not to think and therefore not to criticize; they enjoy the kind of uncalculating legitimacy that is denied to those other leaders whose followers are in the habit of making a rational assessment of the leader’s performance (whether measured against utility or against moral standards). Diseducated followers, because they do not or cannot calculate the moral or material cost to themselves of what they are told to do, may

t h e fir s t c au se and the l as t word

•

213

go the extra mile that educated and questioning followers, habitual scrutinizers of consequences, would refuse. In short, True Belief ministers to authoritarian rule, which can only be kept in bounds by systematic doubt, by carefully focused disrespect for those who manage the system and the measures they take. (Mindless and persistent questioning of everything leads, of course, not to solutions, but to a standstill.) This authoritarian tendency is apparent in the kind of leadership that God, portrayed as the Supreme Being, symbolizes. Look at His appellations in this hymn: Immortal, invisible, God only wise, In light inaccessible hid from our eyes, Most blessèd, most glorious, the Ancient of Days, Almighty, victorious, Thy great Name we praise. Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light, Nor wanting, nor wasting, Thou rulest in might; Thy justice, like mountains, high soaring above Thy clouds, which are fountains of goodness and love. To all, life Thou givest, to both great and small; In all life Thou loves, the true life of all; We blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree, And wither and perish—but naught changeth Thee. Great Father of glory, pure Father of light, Thine angels adore Thee, all veiling their sight; But of all Thy rich graces this grace, Lord, impart Take the veil from our faces, the vile from our heart.6

The hymn is a command (not even an invitation) to “Only believe,” to forget about “patient inquiry.” God needs no one to vouch for Him. It is enough that He is immortal, the sole source of wisdom, unresting, victorious, who “rulest in might,” but at the same time is invisible, “in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.” God is endowed with the ultimate level of intelligence. He is not only the smartest operator in the business, but also the best informed. He knows everything, effortlessly. He has none of the computational problems that bother his mortal counterparts. He has the highest level of power and, once again, he is not faced with the logistical problems that trouble this-worldly power-holders. He need not strive to gain or maintain his power; certainly He has enemies who threaten His rule, but they can never overturn it. In that

6. This and the tune are at

214

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

way, He perfectly symbolizes the ideal of an authoritarian ruler. His authority can never be questioned; His power is secure; His rivals may challenge Him, but they never win the battle and only serve to make His identity secure. Even when He makes life hard for his adoring subjects, they believe that He does it always for their own good. In short, He represents, through a caricature of perfect authority, both the condition for which mortal leaders strive (and never achieve) and the intuition that guides them. God, unlike mortal leaders, is never at a loss. He is magnificent, awe inspiring, even ferocious, terrifying, the leader of leaders, the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords. Sense the ecstasy in this excerpt from Revelation (19:11–16): And I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse; and He who sat on it was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and wage war. His eyes were a flame of fire, and on His head were many crowns; and he had a name written that no one knew but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood, and his name is called The Word of God. And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations; and he shall rule them with a rod of iron; and he treadeth the wine press of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.

God’s qualities are unique, transcendent, ineffable: Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see: to whom be honour and power everlasting. (1 Timothy 6:16)

Again the message is: Do not question! Do not try to understand! He dwells in “light” that is “unapproachable.” Only accept! Only trust! Only worship! Only adore! That, in short, is the terminal (all-is-answered) quality of His Truth. We relieve the itch to understand by asserting that God is Truth: that puts an end to the need for “patient inquiry.” That this is the case—here is my apologia again—is regrettable. Intuition, which is guesswork, will sometimes be inevitable. Its use, when it is inevitable, certainly is unfortunate but it is not a moral failing: there is no question of guilt because incapacity is in the domain of Nature. “Cannot” makes “should” and “should not” irrelevant. But a faith-based unwillingness to analyze, deliberately shutting down the faculty that enables reasoning from experience, deliberately closing one’s eyes to consequences, being guided by an ethic of absolute ends, and deliberately subordinating intelligence to the religious instinct is a moral decision, not a fact of nature; it is an offence against humanity; it

t h e fir s t c au se and the l as t word

•

215

is the moral failing that is the cardinal sin of True-believers.7 Of course, they do not see things that way: for True-believers the cardinal virtue is exactly to elevate faith over reason. That verdict applies to both secular and Godly faiths. But the third kind of faith, presuppositional (methodological), is the mother of imaginative speculation, of new knowledge, of—Whitehead again—“adventuring with ideas.” Speculative presupposition, together with a respect for evidence, is the means by which we adjust our belief systems and our systems of action to the ever-changing constraints of nature. Without intellectual understanding, nature remains unpredictable and therefore uncontrollable. An all-powerful God, on the other hand, because He is the answer to every question, makes the intellect redundant. Dogmatic faith, when it overpowers the intellect, takes us down a path that leads at least to suffering and perhaps to extinction.

Only Think! Nature is witless and heartless; it “neither knows nor cares,” but it is a major presence in our lives. We can control it only by understanding how it works; to the extent that we do understand it, we can avoid its dangers and benefit from its resources. We control Nature—we even exploit it—by adapting ourselves and our social systems to its constraints. In a sense, we outwit Nature, which should not be difficult since Nature—other than in a metaphorical sense (as when, for instance, we talk about the “ingenuity” of a virus)—is witless. In principle, every problem that Nature (including human Nature) presents to us, including religious dogmatism itself, has a solution. For unbelievers—those who do not countenance the Christian idea of God—the true menace is the posture adopted by some Truebelievers (especially those who have a hand in politics), when faced with that part of Nature that is Gilbert Murray’s Unknown. The values that guide extreme fundamentalists do not countenance compartmenting science and religion: they insist, in effect, that the Unknown is sacred, God’s mystery, and we have no business exploring it by the methods of science: that was the posture of William Jennings Bryan. The ineffable God—the “only wise”—makes known to us by the method of revelation all that we need to know; what is Unknown is His domain and to inquire into it by the methods of science is to question his decisions and his omnipotence and so to bite the Edenic apple. Religion, seen in that way, is a complacent, even thankful, admission of ignorance and a refusal to do anything about it.

7. As I write this, Christian Fundamentalists in California have gone to court to prevent stem cell research. President Bush has vetoed a bill, passed by both houses of Congress, which would have allowed federal funds to support the research.

216

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

The logic of last ditch Christian Fundamentalism is that Nature is a manifestation of God’s Will and to use such words as “control” or “exploit” or “manage” or “manipulate,” or even “understand,” are at least inappropriate, if not blasphemous. Nature is God’s instrument, and God, who is neither heartless nor witless, cannot be managed or manipulated, let alone controlled. He should be beseeched in prayer and—the Gandhian posture—with “all humility.” Prayers for his intercession (and even prayers of thanksgiving) are an implicit statement that reason alone cannot save us. Here, at the end, is another anecdote, told to me by a man who trained wouldbe pilots. He was putting a candidate (a young prince from an oil rich kingdom) through a test that would qualify him to fly helicopters. The instructor moved his set of controls to cause a maneuver that required immediate correction. The candidate did not respond and the instructor, looking across at him, saw that his eyes were firmly shut and he was muttering what, presumably, was a prayer. Situations like that give prayer a bad name. The appropriate knowledge is available, but the Godly person has not taken the trouble to acquire it. Why should he? If God is at hand with a miracle, what incentive is there to learn how to do the job for yourself? That, mutatis mutandis, is the logic of Robertson, Falwell, DeLay, and many others who attribute natural disasters to sinful behavior and advocate remedies that have nothing to do with the situation, thereby displacing other remedies that might have helped: outlawing homosexuality or vandalizing clinics will not lessen the damage done by hurricanes, but better dykes might. The “vitality, even the existence” of civilized society is not, as Evans-Prichard claimed, sustained by organized religions that base themselves on revealed knowledge: by some of them, it is imperiled.

R EFERENCES

b AMB. See Kripalani 1960. MDG. See Bose 1953. SG. See Bose 1947. Table Talk. See Trevor-Roper 2000.

* Ashe, Geoffrey 2000 [1968]. Gandhi: a Biography. New York: Cooper Square Press. AVARD 1962. Panchayati Raj as the Basis of Indian Policy. New Delhi: AVARD. Axelrod, Robert 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books. Barth, Fredrik 1959. Political Leadership among Swat Pathans. London: Athlone Press. Bondurant, Joan V. 1965. Conquest of Violence: the Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. Bose, Nirmal Kumar 1947. Studies in Gandhism. Calcutta: Indian Associated Publishing. 1953. My Days with Gandhi. Calcutta: Nishana. Brown, Judith M. 1989. Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope. New Haven: Yale University Press. Burke, Kenneth 1970. The Rhetoric of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press. Caro, Robert A. 1982. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power. New York: Knopf. Chatterjee, Partha 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. London: Zed Books Ltd. Crapanzano, Vincent 2000. Serving the Word. New York: The New Press. Colson, Charles W. 1976. Born Again. Grand Rapids: Chosen Books.

218

•

god- b ot h e r er s a n d o t h e r t ru e-b el ie ve rs

Epstein, T. Scarlett 1962. Economic Development and Social Change in South India. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Erikson, Erik H. 1969. Gandhi’s Truth. New York: Norton. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1962. Essays in Social Anthropology. London: Faber and Faber. Falwell, Jerry 1981. The Fundamentalist Phenomenon. New York: Doubleday. 1982. Finding Inner Peace and Strength, New York: Doubleday. 1986. If I should die before I wake. New York: Thomas Nelson. Fischer, Louis 1954. Gandhi: His life and Message for the World. New York: New American Library. Freud, Sigmund 1961 [1930]. Civilization and its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton. Gandhi, M.K. 1949 [1927–1929]. Autobiography: the Story of My Experiments with Truth. Trans. Mahadev Desai. London: Phoenix Press. 1954 [1928]. Satyagraha in South Africa. Stanford, California: Academic Reprints. Gay, Peter 1966. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Vol. 1. The rise of Modern Paganism. New York: Knopf. 1969. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Vol. 2. The Science of Freedom. New York: Knopf. Harding, Susan Friend 2000. The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Harris, Sam 2004. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: Norton. 2006. Letter to a Christian Nation. New York: Knopf. Hitler, Adolf 1942 [1925]. Mein Kampf. Trans. James Murphy. London: Hurst and Blackett. Hobbes, Thomas 1946 [1651]. Leviathan. Oxford: Blackwell. James, William 1960 [1902]. The Varieties of Religious Experience. London: Collins. Kripalani, Krishna 1960. All Men are Brothers: Life and Thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House. Kuo, David 2006. Tempting Faith. New York: Free Press. Lewis, W. Arthur 1962. Foreword in Epstein, T. Scarlett. Mahtab, Harekrushna 1965. Lectures on Gandhian Philosophy. Annamalainagar: Annamalai University. 1973. Gandhi: The Political Leader. Cuttack: Cuttack Students’ Store. 1986. While serving my nation. Cuttack: Vidyapuri. Marett, R.R. 1941. A Jerseyman at Oxford. London: Oxford University Press. Mendonsa, Eugene L. 1982. The Politics of Divination. Berkeley: University of California Press.

re f e re nce s

•

219

Middleton, J. 1960. Lugbara Religion. London: Oxford University Press. Murray, Gilbert 1951 [1912]. Five Stages of Greek Religion. New York: Doubleday. Nehru, Jawaharlal 1962 [1936]. An Autobiography. Bombay: Allied Publishers. North, Douglass 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press. Pyarelal [Nair] 1965a [1956]. Mahatma Gandhi—The Last Phase. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House. 1965b. Mahatma Gandhi—The Early Phase. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House. Rauschning, Hermann 1939. Hitler Speaks: a Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims. London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd. Robbins, Lionel 1937 [1932]. An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. London: Macmillan. Russell, Bertrand 1931. “What I Believe.” The Nation. 29 April. Vol. 132. Sharlet, Jeff. 2005. “Inside America’s most powerful megachurch.” Harper’s Magazine. May. Strachey, Lytton nd. [1918?]. Eminent Victorians. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Trevor-Roper, H.R. 1962 [1947]. The Last Days of Hitler. New York: Collier. 2000 [1953]. Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944. Trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens. New York: Enigma Books. Weber, Max 1948 [1919]. “Politics as a Vocation” in Gerth H. H. and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul: 77–128. Whitehead, A N. 1948 [1933]. Adventures of Ideas. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Wilcox, Clyde 1996. Onward Christian Soldiers? Boulder: Westview Press. Woodruff, Philip 1963 [1954]. The Men who ruled India. Vol. 1. The Founders. Vol. 2. The Guardians. London: Cape.

I NDEX

Abortion, 60, 63,72, 98; and clinics, bombing of, 95; and disasters, 193, 113; and Roman Catholics, 66. See also Delay, Tom; Falwell, Jerry; Operation Rescue; Roe v. Wade; Terry, Randall Abyssinia, 182 Acts of God. See Diseducation; First cause Afghanistan, 93 Agape. See Caritas Aggression: and Hitler, 122–29; and the Religious Right, 95–100; See also Enemies, need for Agnew, Spiro T. 48 Agnostics, 3, 7, 19, 31 Ahimsa. See Nonviolence Ahmedabad, 192 Al Qaeda, 91n9, 106 Algorithms, 53–56 All Men are Brothers, 155n9,159, 166, 184, 193. See also Universalism Altruism, 207n.5; and human nature, 206–207. See also Walk Gently! Ambedkar, Dr. B. R., 48; career of, 154n.8, 167, 181; conversion to Buddhism, 168; clashes with Gandhi, 153, 167–168, 179; on Village Republics, 167–168 Amritsar. See Massacres Anglican Church, 41, 50, 74 Antagonism. See Enemies Arlington Group, 104–106 Aryans. See Hitler Ashe, Geoffrey, 150n3, 167, 173n8, 192n7 Assassinations, 73, 95. 159 Astrology. 55, 133n11, 139 Atheism, 7, 19, 31n7; Gandhi’s definition of, 20, 180, 196; Hitler on, 132; in the United States, 31 ATMs (Automatic Teller Machines), 9 Attlee, Clement, 40, 155

Atwater, Lee, 112n24 Augustine, Saint, 27 Authority, 32, 106; and diseducation, 211–214; and God, 136, 139. See also Charisma, Gandhi, Hitler AVARD, 168n6 Axelrod, Robert, 206n4 Baker, Marty, 9 Barth, Fredrik, 82 Beliefs, 15–38; modes and content of, 2, 199. See also Faith; Faith-based initiatives Bennet, William, 47, 104, 144 Berrigan brothers, 73 Bevan, Aneurin, 40 Bhagavad-Gita, 130 Bhave, Vinoba, 170 Bible, The: inerrancy of, 10, 137, 138n; New Testament, Ethics of, 10, 20, 41, 99, 104, 106, 132,140, 144, 185, 193, 204, 210 Bigotry, vii, 1, 2, 7 Bisipara, 77–80, 114 Bob Jones University, 95 Bondurant, Joan V., 162 Bose, Nirmal Kumar, 37, 149n2, 168, 172n2, 184 Bose, Subhas Chandra, 169, 190 Boy Scouts, 96 Brahmins, 54, 77, 81–83 Bribery, 56–57, 161. See also Persuasion British Raj: bureaucratic values in, 187–191; how it ended; 190; and morality, 185; racism in, 188; rituals of, 188; and the rules of the game, 187–191 Brown, Judith M., 157, 163n1, 165n4, 166, 173, 182 Brown, T. E., 74–75 Brownback, Sam, 91n9, 165n4

222 | i n de x

Brownshirts, 121, 125, 128. See also Hitler; Massacres; Röhm, Ernst Bryan, William Jennings, 11, 205, 215 Buchanan, Pat, 19–20, 33 Bureaucracy, 36, 50, 202. See also British Raj Burke, Kenneth, 27–28, 35, 66 Burton, Dan, 110 Bush, George W., 47, 50, 92; and the Christian Right, 105; Kuo on, 58–59, 90; and “Mission Accomplished!,” 48; and stem-cell research, 215n7 Cabinet Mission, 155 Cadillac Principle, 9, 86 Cain, Archie, 74–75 Calculation. See Models Cambodia. See Pol Pot Campolo, Tony, 10–11, 72–73, 144 Caritas, 12, 103–106, 210 Caro, Robert A. 57 Case-material, 7, 65–66 Caste system. See Ambedkar, Bisipara; Gandhi Categorical imperatives, 18, 201–202 Chamberlain, Austen, 185 Champaran, 191 Character, and moral communities, 57–58 Charisma, 160–173; formula for creating; ineffable quality of, 172; manufactured, 172; of Pol Pot, 116 Chatterjee, Partha, 155 Chauri Chaura. See Massacres Chenoweth, Helen, 110–111 China. See Mao Zedong Christian Fascism. See Religious Right (Christian), and Fascism Christian Fundamentalists. See Religious Right (Christian) Christian worldview, 102–103 Church and State, 81–88; Brahmins and Ksattriyas, 82; Vicar of Bray, 75–76; Jesus and the Pharisees, 81; Pakhtouns and Saints, 83. See also Hitler; Religious Right (Christian) Churchill, Winston, 47, 48, 150n3, 155 Civil Disobedience Movement, 73, 150, 160, 152, 185 Clairvoyance, political, 51–56 Clerics, 71–114; as businessmen, 85–89; and fund-raising, 89; and hypocrisy, 74–81; involved in politics, 89–95. See also Church and State Clinics, fire-bombing of, 95 Clinton, Bill, 55, 57, 100,105, 108–111 Colson, Charles W: autobiography of, 101n20; conversion of, 101, 142; and

Gandhi, 104; and homosexuality, 105. See also PFM Commination Service, 50–51 Committee to Re-Elect the President (“CREEP”), 100 Commonwealth. See Leviathan Communism, 3, 18, 72; in Cambodia, 116–118; and Gandhi, 182; and Hitler, 131, 136n15. See also Mao Zedong, Stalin Compromise, 114, 120, 124, 197, 203; and Gandhi, 153; and sublation, 62 Compassionate Conservatism, 58–59, 73 Concordat, 136n14 Conflict, inevitable in politics, 209–211 Congregation; size of as a measure of success, 87–88 Congress Movement, origins and development of, 140–150. See also Civil Disobedience Movement; Gandhi; Non-cooperation Movement; Quit India Movement. Congress Party, and Gandhi, 149n2, 156 Consensus, 42–44 Consequences. See Ethic of responsibility Constituent Assembly, 167–168 Conversion, 11, 25, 37, 61, 86, 98, 142, 168; in Cambodia, 117; and Hitler, 126 Corruption, 58; and clerics, 94; Hitler on, 71, 134 Costs. See Information; Opportunity costs Crapanzano, Vincent, 142n Creationism, 2, 73, 94, 144, 200 Credo quia absurdum, 36 Crossman, Richard, 3 Crouch, Paul, 9, 85–86 Cultural Revolution. See Mao Zedong Czechoslovakia, 50, 182n. Darrow, Clarence, 11, 208 Darshan, 165–166, 179, 187 Darwin, Charles, 206 Darwinism, 2, 94, 105. See also Evolution Decalogue, 10, 92, 105 Decision-making, 39–67; complexity of, 51–56 Defining situations, 46–65. See also Persuasion Delay, Tom, 106–111, 216; on the Columbine massacre, 113 Demagoguery, 58, 124 Dharma, 4, 34, 41 Disasters, 79–80, 114, 209; political exploitation of, 11, 32, 97n. 103, 113, 140, 216. See also Witch-hunting Disciplines, 2, 3, 17, 26, 41, 187–191 Diseducation, 64, 96, 111, 114; and authority, 211–215; Hitler’s techniques for promoting, 125–128; and morality. 202; and

inde x | 223

oneness, 207–209; and redemption, 128; and the religious right, 65–66, 88, 140; and the Roman Catholic church, 64. See also Dogma Disenchantment, 19, 30, 202n Dispositions, 52–53 Disraeli, Benjamin, 33, 48, 55 Dobson, James C., 83, 90, 104, 144 Dogma, vii, 2–5, 22–23, 66, 123–124, 100, 212, 215–216 Dominationism. See Religious Right Durbar, 142, 188 Dyarchy, 173n Dyer, General, 173n, 188n4 Economic man, 24, 44, 54–56, 111, 185, 205. See also Homo Religiosus; Utility models Ellsberg, Daniel, 106 Emotions, 2, 6, 53; and the intellect, 16–21, 63; and morality, 46–50; and propaganda, 96, 118–126 Empire Day, 187 Empiricism, 4n2, 15–22. See also Natural systems Encompassment. See Sublation Enemies: manufacturing, 122–125; need for, 116–145; and Religious Right, 95–100 Enlightened self-interest, 204–207 Enlightenment, The, 22, 24, 32–33, 116 Entourages, 35, 63, 103, 149, 155, 166–172 Erikson, Erik H., 175 Eros, 41, 60 Ethical convictions, 56–64 Ethic of absolute ends, 117, 118n, 181, 214 Ethic of responsibility. 118n, 141, 181, 197, 198 Evangelism, 10–11 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 1–2, 20n, 32–36, 46, 49, 114, 207n, 208, 216 Evolution: and Evans-Pritchard, 2, 33; and morality, 204–207; and the Religious Right, 94n, 105, 118. See also Darwin; Darwinism; Monkey Trial Expediency, 11, 15, 111–112, 204 Failure of nerve, 39 Faith, 1–3, 15–23, 129, 178–186, 199–201 Faith-based initiatives, 58–59, 90, 107 Falwell, Jerry, 71; and abortion campaigns, 87–99; on aggression, 97; and Armageddon, 141; and head-counting, 87–88; and Moral Majority, 65, 96; and the Taliban, 98; and the Twin Towers disaster, 32; and Bishop Tutu, 102

Famine, 117, 197 Fascism, 3, 26, 32, 64n, 72, 96, 137–145. See also Hitler; Mussolini; Religious Right (Hindu) Fasting, 153, 162–163, 163n1, 192 Fellowship, The, 91 First Cause, 199–216 First World War, 71, 124, 132, 140 Fischer, Louis, 156 Focus on the Family. See Dobson, James C. Foucault, Michel, 6 Fox Films, 8 France, Anatole, 23, 89 Franco, General, 134 Freedom Fight, 149–159. See also British Raj; Congress Movement; Gandhi, Mohandas; Nehru, Jawarharlal Free-market Capitalism, 3, 4, 18, 26, 30, 89, 99, 205 Free-market Christianity, 89 Freud, Sigmund, 16, 18, 80 Fundamentalists. See Religious Right Gandhi, Indira, 159 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 8–12, 20, 37, 39–41, 147–198; on Abyssinia, 182; and Ambedkar, 48; arrogance of, 175; asceticism of, 150, 165, 176; on atheism, 20, 180, 198; authority of, 158, 163–173; British comments on, 150n, 166–167; charisma of, 160–177; and Chauri Chaura massacre, 152; Churchill on, 150n; on coal-miners in Britain, 181; on consistency, 180; on cowardice, 162; declining influence of, 155–159; and decision-making, 169–179, 185; and the need for enemies, 193–195; enigmatic quality of, 176–177; fads and peculiarities of, 150, 177–177; failures of, 158–159; fudging ideal with real, 156, 181–187, 197, 210–211; and fund-raising, 161; and funds for Pakistan, 157; and God, 196; and Hinduism, 210–211; and Hitler, 178–181; humility of, 39–40, 165, 167, 203; and Humanism, 175–176, 179– 180; and the Hunter Commission, 161, 173; and independent India, 158–159; inhumanity of, 37, 175–176; Mahtab on, 169–171; on Marxism, 168n7, 182; and the masses, 163–166; and moral regeneration, 150–151, 177n10; N. K. Bose on, 37, 168, 172, 184; Nehru’s encomium of, 171; and nonviolence, his faith in, 182, 186, 192; obduracy of, 173–176; Palme-Dutt on, 167; and partition of India, 155–156; as peacemaker, 154–158;

224 | i n de x

on peacekeeping by the British, 172–178; on politics and morality, 191–198; and redemption, 15, 180, 195; and religion, 194, 196; and “sectarian” religions, 191–194; self-presentation of, 163–166; on sin, 154, 181–192; sincerity of, 163, 188–167, 171; and Socialism, 182; and swaraj, 42, 150, 158, 167, 177n10; and Truth, 173–175; Universalism of, 210; and Untouchables, 152–156; his vision for free India, 158–159; See also Fasting; Nonviolence; Prayer, and Gandhi; Satyagraha; Tapas Gandhi, Rajiv, 159 Gay, Peter, 34–35 Gay rights. 105, 143, 144. See also Homosexuality Gingrich, Newt, 111 Gluckman, Max, 28n6 God: as the first cause, 206n, 295, 208; His “infinite mercy,” 210; His Forgiveness. See Repentance; His guidance. See Intuition; Gandhi’s version of, 196; as Leviathan, 42, 205; qualities of, 196, 213–215 Godse, Nathuram, 159 Good works, 96. See also Hezbollah, PFM, RSS, Sarvodaya Gospel, 11, 23, 41, 98 Graham, Billy, 11, 89 Great Leap Forward. See Mao Zedong Greenspan, Alan, 49 Haggard, Ted, 89 Hamas, 96 Harding, Susan, 8, 142n Harris, Sam, 24n Hate. See Enemies “Hate the sin, love the sinners!,” 10, 11, 103–104. 121, 193 Heaven, 27; and Gandhi, 184, 196; and Hitler, 134, 137 Heaven and Hell, 51, 72 Heaven on Earth, 193, 197, 202. See also Rama Rajya Herbert, Sidney, 41, 103, 114 Hezbollah, 96 Hierarchy, spirit of, 26–28 Himmler, Heinrich, 144n, 190 Hindu Fascism, 96n16. See also Religious Right (Hindu) Hindu Mahasabha. See Religious Right (Hindu) Hinduism. See Darshan; Dharma; Gandhi; Tapas Historical materialism, 117

Hitler, Adolf, 9, 10, 24, 35, 50, 61, 64, 118–137; on “ardent and even hysterical passions,” 98n19, 118–121; and Aryans, 127, 130, 138, 140, 181, 207, 210; on the Bible, 132n10; on bourgeois values, 120, 124, 128; on British rule in India, 189n5; on Christianity, 118–121, 124, 130–137; on Church and State, 85, 135; on Creative force, 133; and decisionmaking, 134; on the need for dogma, 123–124; on the need for enemies, 120, 122–126; on failures, explanations for, 126, 140; on faith and power, 111, 115, 119; on General Franco, 134; Gandhi, comparison with, 178–181; on “impudent and loud-mouthed liars”; on intellectuals, 125, 127; on Jesus Christ, 120; on Jews, 120, 124–126; on Lloyd George, 124–125; on Marxism, 119–126; and Mass Assemblies, 127, 142; on the masses, psychology of, 119; on Mussolini, 136; and National Socialism, 118, 130, 134, 136; and a new morality, 124–125; and Nuremberg rallies, 89; on patriotism, 124, 125, 132n9; and propaganda techniques, 125–126; racism of, 126; Rauschning on, 127, 127n, 133, 133n9; and reality, 133, 139, 139n; and redemption, 121, 140; Reichstag, burning of, 136n15; and religion, 118–121, 180; on Roman Catholics, 64, 135–136; on science, 122, 133; self-confidence of, 139; on self-interest and group loyalty, 126–127, 130–140; spirituality of, 121, 133; and Storm Troops (Sturmabteilungen), 125, 128. See also Röhm, Ernst; Trevor-Roper on, 131–132, 139n; violence, his pleasure in, 129; on women, 122 Hobbes, Thomas, 42–43 Homo Religiosus, 111–113. Homogenizing. See Oneness Homosexuality, 18; and the Arlington Group, 105; and marriage, 72, 89, 105, 143–144; and disasters, 103, 215; and the Religious Right, 86, 97, 103, 105 Houseman, A. E., vii, 5, 41 Human Nature, 6. 44, 54, 117, 122, 153n, 205, 209 Humanism, secular, 23–26, 118; defined, 25; and Gandhi, 175–180; hostility toward, 19–20; and politics, 197, 211 Hume, A. O., 149 Humility, 39, 40, 165, 167, 203, 216 Hunter Commission, 161, 173 Hutcherson, Ken, 97

inde x | 225

Hyde, Henry 110 Hypocrisy, 9, 12, 30, 107–110; in the eye of the beholder, 80 Ideologies, 17–18. See also Disciplines Ignis Fatuus, 209 Indian National Army, 169. See also Bose, Subhas Chandra Indian National Congress. See Congress Movement. Individual, the; 53. 60, 62; as a complex of selves, 60–61; and Gandhi, 195; in Hitler’s philosophy, 127; and religion, 84, 140 Information, 51–65 Institutional Rules, 43–46, 209–215 Instrumentalism, 8, 15. 67, 200–201. See also Utility models Intellect, and faith, 7, 15–28, 215–216 Intelligent Design, 3, 11, 94, 94n14 Intuition, 21, 26n, 30, 35–36, 46, 56, 137, 160–170, 185, 214–21. See also Defining Situations Invisible hand, 42–44, 207n Iphigenia, 37 Iran, 93 Iraq, 48, 49, 105–106 Irish Politics, 92–93, 163 Islam, 3, 11, 92–95, 137; Nation of, 93; See also Muslims Jallianwalla Gardens, 173n, 184n4 James, William, 31 Jesus, 7, 71, 91, 204; and Caesar, 81; in the desert, 83; fellowshipping with, 1, 72, 100–106; and Pontius Pilate, 22; and Republicans, 72, 143–144 Jewish Defense League (JDL), 92 Jews. See Hitler Jinnah, Mohammed Ali, 155 Johnson, Lyndon, 57 Jones, Jim, 183 Judaism, 123. See also Religions, organized Khadi, 151, 168, 186 Khalipur Rahman, 37, 174, 194 Kingdom of God on Earth. See Heaven on Earth; Rama Rajya Knowledge, 15–38, 122; as divine revelation, 20–21; as an end in itself, 36; expanding, 207–209; See also Diseducation Kripalani, J. B., 156 Kripalani, Krishna, 155n Ku Klux Klan, 92 Kuo, David, 59, 91, 143

Labour Government, 155, 188 Land Letter, 105–106 Leadership, 35–36, 44, 57, 174, 186, 107, 213–215; and true-belief, 4, 35–36, 52, 59, 141; See also Charisma Lenz, Frederick, 84 Leviathan, 42, 205, 209 Lewis, C. S., 3 Lewis, W. Arthur, 54, 85 Liberation Theology, 74, 144. See also Religious Left Lloyd George, David, 58, 124–125 Local Government, 91, 94–95. See also Panchayati Raj Lord’s Resistance Army, 118 Love: of money, 54, 55–60, 85; Ovid on, 15, 15n; religions of, 11–12, 40, 41, 106, 119, 140, 147–211; of truth, 165. See also Agape, Caritas, Eros Lucretius, 37 Luther, Martin, 126 Mahtab, Harekrushna; 169–170, 179 Maior et sanior pars, 65, 65n Manifest Destiny, 18, 25. 90, 115, 141, 197 Mao Zedong, 117, 141, 197, 209 Marett, R. R., 32, 35 Marxism, 117, 124; and Fundamentalist Christians, 72, 74. See also Gandhi; Hitler; Pol Pot Massacres: Amritsar, 173n, 188n4; St Bartholomew’s Day, 118; Chauri Chaura, 152n; Columbine, 113; Night of the Long Knives, 125, 144 Masses, the, 35, 111. See also Gandhi; Hitler Mass killing, 116–118 Mass meetings, 89, 127, 142, 191 Matthai, John, 157 McClendon, Bishop Clarence, 85 Mendonsa, Eugene L., 113 Menon, Aubrey, 84n4 Methodists, 74–75 Methodology, 24, 25, 34, 36, 45 Middleton, John, 113n26 Miracles, 33, 115, 216 Misotheism, 19, 31 Models, 40–51; techniques for changing, 60–65. See also Methodology Monkey Trial, 11, 208 Morality: antecedes reason, 25–26, 151; and diseducation, 202; and evolution, 204–207; and social order, 43–46; techniques for changing, 56–65; as a weapon, 44, 82, 106–111. See also Economic Man; Fasting;

226 | i n de x

Moral Order; Neoclassical economists; Tapas; Utility models Moral absolutes, 18, 45, 57,61, 97, 118, 202. See also Ethic of absolute ends Moral communities, 57–58, 194. See also Moral Absolutes; Universalism Moral Majority. See Falwell, Jerry Moral order: in Bisipara, 77–80; and contradictions in, 45–46; and natural order; 43–46; techniques for changing, 56–65. See also Dharma Moral regeneration. See Gandhi, and moral regeneration; Hitler, and a new morality Moral sensibility, vii, 201–205 Moral standards, our own, 46 Moral systems, 43–46 Motives, 12, 29, 37n, 46–65. See also Diseducation; Economic Man; Emotions Moulin, Léo, 65n Murders. See Assassinations; Massacres; Mass killings Murray, Gilbert, vii, 2, 5, 16–29, 39–40, 83, 175, 201–204 Muslims, 30, 31n, 37, 82, 104, 154–160, 191–194 Mussolini, Benito, 64n, 96, 136, 144n, 182 Narayan, R.K., 84n4 Nation of Islam, 92–93, 95 National Prayer Breakfast, 91 National Socialism. See Hitler Nationalism, 25, 159, 187 Natural systems, 4, 4n2, 23, 28–38, 41–46, 111–114, 205–207 Nature, 5, 6, 8, 13, 22, 41–44, 112, 207–216. See also Unknown, The Nehru, Jawaharlal, 167, 169, 178; on Chauri Chaura massacre, 152–154; on religion, vii, 3, 16, 154, 207 Neoclassical economists, 4, 42, 44, 49, 200, 206n3 New Testament. See Bible, The Nightingale, Florence, 41 Nirvana, 27, 34, 82, 209 Nixon, Richard, 18, 57, 100, 101, 109, 133n Nkrumah, Kwame, 61–62 Non-cooperation Movement, 150, 152. 185 Nonviolence, 150, 154, 157, 158, 203; ambiguity in, 162–163, 175–176; effectiveness of, 182, 191–192; See also Gandhi, and nonviolence; Satyagraha North, Douglass C., 160 North, Oliver, 73 Obstinacy. See Single-mindedness

Old Adam, 42, 140, 159, 203. See also Economic Man Oneness, 34–35, 44–45, 93, 112, 127, 130, 142, 193–198, 202, 207–211. See also Simplification Operation Rescue, 93, 95, 95n Opportunism, 4, 7, 40,79, 80, 106–111, 160–163 Opportunity costs, 54. 56 Opus Dei, 91, 92, 95 Order, problem of, 40–43 Ovid, 15 Pakistan, 82, 155–158 Palme-Dutt, R. 167 Panchayati Raj, 158–167–168 Paraclerics, 100 Partition of India, 155–158 Patel, Sardar, 157–158, 160 Patrick Henry College, 95 Patriot Act, 48–49 Patriotism, 63, 96, 141, 143. See also Hitler, on patriotism Pay-off. See Utility Models Pentagon Papers, 100 Persuasion, 56–64, 111–115. See also Propaganda PFM (Prison Fellowship Ministries), 100–106 Pilate, Pontius, 22 Plautus, 59 Plotz, David, 104 Pol Pot, 11, 116–117, 201, 204 Politicians: and their comeuppances, 110–111; gall of, 94, 109 Politics: “absolute dirt,” 104, 196; defined, 43; Disraeli on, 44; Sidney Herbert on, 41; and religion, 89–95, 116–144, 178–198 Pope, The, 74, 87, 209 Power, defined, 43 Power-seeking models. See Economic Man; Utility models Power and Solidarity matrix, 51–52 Prasad, Rajendra, 185 Prayer, 7, 17, 18, 83–86, 94, 198, 207–209, 216; for a Cadillac, 86; and Gandhi, 155, 165, 191, 195–196; and Harekrushna Mahtab, 169–171; and Hitler, 130, 137; and Nehru, 176 Prayer breakfasts. See National Prayer Breakfast Prejudices, 29–30, 32. See also Presuppositions Presuppositions, 3, 12, 15–38, 45, 94n14 Prison Fellowship Ministries. See PFM Profumo, John, 57 Pro-life, 62, 88, 93, 143. See also Abortion; Operation Rescue

inde x | 227

Propaganda: and the Christian Right, 73, 88, 95. See also Hitler, and propaganda techniques Proselytizing, 27 Psychic Utility, 107 Pyarelal [Nair], 183, 185, 191, 195 Quit India Movement, 150, 169, 185, 190 Racism, 25, 106, 188. See also Hitler, racism of Radio Pastors and Televangelists, 1, 8, 10, 12, 32, 99, 142–144; and fund-raising, 85, 88, 102; See also entries for individuals Rahman, Khalipur, 37, 174–175, 142–144 Rama Rajya (God’s Kingdom), 151. 151n4, 152, 177, 193, 202, 207 Rationality. See Reason. Rauschning, Hermann, 127n, 129, 132n9, 133. 134 Reagan, Ronald, 73, 133, 172 Reality, 18, 28, 32, 35, 40, 65–67. See also Case Material; Hitler, and Reality; Methodology; Truth Realpolitik, 122, 176, 183, 194 Reason, 4–7, 15–38, 107, 109; limits of, 2, 36, 51–56, 65–66, 111–115, 119, 122–129, 173–177, 182–186. See also Diseducation; Gandhi, obduracy of; Hitler, and reality Redemption, 27, 34, 89, 100, 103, 114, 189, 210; and diseducation, 128; and Gandhi, 15, 180, 195; and Hitler, 121, 140; See also Salvation Reichstag, burning of, 156n15 Religion: defined, 2–3; psychological need for, vii, 2, 16–17; ubiquity of, vii, 2. See also Authority; Diseducation; Dogma; Ethic of absolute ends; Ethic of Responsibility; Evolution; Morality; Politics; Radio pastors and Televangelists; Science; Violence Religions: and business, 9, 84–89; Godly, 16–20, 26–38, 85; Greek, 22; organized, vii, 3–4, 4n1, 204, 211, 216; secular, 3, 9, 16, 17–28. See also Christian world view; Hinduism; Humanism; Islam; Sikhs Religious Left, 71–74. See also Campolo, Tony Religious man. See Homo Religiosus Religious Right (Christian), 4, 8–12, 71–113, 137–145, 211–216; and authoritarianism, 211–215; and dominationism, 94; and Fascism, 137–145; and free enterprise, 84–89; and fund-raising, 85, 88, 105; and hate, 95–100; mythology of, 138; opposition to, within Christianity; and politics in USA, 89–95; political prospects of, 142–144.

See also Abortion; Bible, New Testament ethics of; Campolo, Tony; Evolution; Fascism; Homosexuality; Kuo David; Nature; Patriotism Religious Right (Hindu), 93, 93n12, 96, 157, 159 Religious withdrawal from the World, 83–84 Repentance, 100–111, 112n, 140 Republican Party, 9–10, 42, 57, 71–73, 89–95, 106–111, 143–145 Revelation. See Intuition Revelation, Book of, 214 Riefenstahl, Leni, 142 Robbins, Lionel, 54, 66, 200 Robertson, Pat: and Ariel Sharon, 4, 8, 47, 80, 216; and Armageddon, 97n; and “the good citizens of Dover,” 11, 97n; and the President of Venezuela, 97; and theocracy, 98 Roe v. Wade, 88 Röhm, Ernst, 121, 125, 144n Roman Catholics, 32, 60–63, 65, 92, 93, 115, 136n14; and the religious left, 71–74. See also Hitler, and Roman Catholics; Opus Dei Roosevelt, Franklin D. 47, 58, 60, 172 Rosin, Hanna, 95 Rowlatt Bills, 173n, 174, 181n6, 194 RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), 93, 93n12, 96, 157 Rules of the Game, 187–191 Rumsfeld, Donald, 49 Ruskin, John, 177, 177n11 Russell, Bertrand, 34 Sadhu, 165, 177, 179 Saint Augustine, 27 Saletan, William, 108 Salt March, 151, 185 Salvation Army, 98 Salvation, 5, 17, 23, 27, 42, 119n6, 142, 178, 193,195, 196. See also Redemption Sanctuary Movement. See Religious Left Sannyasi, 83–84 Sarvodaya, 151, 158, 164; Mahtab on, 170; and politics, 168, 177, 186 Satyagraha, 150, 161–163, 168, 173, 183; effectiveness of, 188–190, 211; moral ambiguity of, 189n6; See also Ahmedabad; Amritsar; Champaran; Chauri Chaura; Gandhi, and moral regeneration, and nonviolence, and Swaraj; Salt March Scandals, 1, 7, 8, 12, 73, 201. See also Burton, Dan; Chenoweth, Helen; Clinton, Bill;

228 | i n de x

DeLay, Tom; Gingrich, Newt; Hyde, Henry; North, Oliver Schiavo, Mrs., 106–111 Schuler, Robert, 11 Science, 16, 22–23, 28–34; and Hitler, 122, 131–135, 139; and religion, 207–209, 215–216; and the Religious Right, 11, 94, 138–139; See also Reality; Scientism Scientism, 28–29 Scopes trial. See Monkey Trial Second World War, 72, 137, 140, 155, 187–189, 190 Self, composite nature of, 60–63 Separatism. See Church and State Sharlet, Jeff, 89 Sharpton, Al, 89 Sikhs, 157, 159, 178, 187, 194 Simplification, 31, 34, 46–67. See also Disasters, political exploitation of; Diseducation; Oneness Sin, 11–12. See also Disasters, political exploitation of; Gandhi, on sin; “Hate the sin, love the sinner”; Old Adam; Repentance; Salvation Sincerity, 9, 57, 80, 116. See also Gandhi, and sincerity; Hypocrisy Single-mindedness, 41, 67, 166, 173–177 Sinn Fein, 93 Society, perfectly adjusted, 36, 202, 202n. See also Heaven on Earth; Rama Rajya Socrates, 19, 64 Southern Baptist Convention, 87, 105, 138 Spiritual beings, 3, 16, 31, 187, 199, 206 Sportsmanship, 187–191 Stalin, Josef, 87, 117, 141, 209 Stem-cell research, 139, 215n Strachey, Lytton, 41 Sublation, 35, 62 Suicide, 75, 82, 95, 185. See also Tapas Supernatural knowledge. See Intuition Swaraj, 42, 150, 158, 167; double meaning of, 177n10, 195; See also Gandhi, and moral regeneration Tagore, Rabindranath, 149n3 Taliban, 83, 98, 98n1 Tamasha, 142 Tamil Nationalists, 158, 187 Tapas, 153, 163, 166, 172, 177. See also Fasting Televangelists. See Radio Pastors and Televangelists Templeton Prize, 102 Tennyson, Alfred, 29, 41, 44, 128

Terry, Randall, 4, 93, 98, 127, 140, 201 Theocracy, 42, 91, 93–94, 93n10, 94n13, 98, 137, 141 Theodicy, 5, 105n, 181 Totality-itch. See Oneness. Trevor-Roper, H. R., 131, 132, 139, 180 Trinity Broadcasting Networks, 86 Trinity Marketing Group, 9 True-Belief. See Faith; Faith-based initiatives Trust, 56–60. See also Diseducation; Faith Truth, 4n2, 10, 15–38. See also Gandhi, and truth; Intuition; Moral systems; Natural systems; Satyagraha Twin Towers catastrophe, 32, 97, 193, 113 Ulster, 55, 93 Uncertainty, 21, 45, 64, 123 Uncharted, The, 16, 18, 19, 20, 33n8, 36 . See also Unknown. The Universalism, 87, 122, 159, 193–198, 210–211. See also Gandhi; Humanism; Moral communities Unknown, The, 5–6, 26, 64, 204, 208–215. See also Uncharted, The Untouchables, 77, 152–153, 156, 165, 167, 179, 184, 187, 196. See also Ambedkar; Gandhi Utility models, 43–64, 85–96, 110–112, 205, 206, 207. See also Economic Man Vatican, 72, 74, 92, 136. See also Roman Catholics VAT (Values Action Team), 91n9 Vicar of Bray, 75–76 Violence. See Falwell, Jerry, and aggression, on Armageddon; Gandhi, and nonviolence; Hitler, violence, his pleasure in; Hutcherson, Ken; Massacres; Murders; Nonviolence; Robertson, Pat; Terry, Randall; Walk Gently! Voltaire, 6 Voter Registration, 90 Vulgate, 22n, 71, 79 Walk gently!, vii, 3, 19, 20, 21, 25, 107, 201–205 Watergate, 101 Wavell, General, 166, 179 Weber, Max, 19, 19n, 118n, 119n6, 178, 193, 202, 202n. Welfare Work. See Good Works Whitehead, A. N, 212, 215 Wilcox, Clyde, 11, 82

inde x | 229

Willingdon, Lord, 166, 170, 179, 186 Wilson, Charlie, 92 Witch-hunting, 37n, 77n, 77–80, 114, 140, 198 Witnessing 72, 142n

Woodruff, Philip, 166n, 188 Worker priests, 74 Youth movements. See Good works