Terrorism and the Metaphysical Innocence of Civilians

After the ISIL terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, liberals have been quick to push what they consider the adult interpretation, empathizing with the culprits, protecting them from “Islamophobia” and laying much of the blame with the American government’s military involvement in the Middle East. So-called conservatives in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere instead demonize Muslims, turning the attacks into a very different kind of teachable moment. Liberals have feminism-fuelled empathy as well as technocratic interest in the facts, and so they call upon the United States and its allies to stop meddling in other countries, whereas right-wingers seized the opportunity to further dumb-down Westerners, reducing the conflict to a religious war between Good and Evil; Americans, for example, must be blameless, whereas all Muslims are in league with the savage terrorists who serve the devil even as they consider themselves martyrs for the true God Allah.

Lost in these exchanges is a logically prior question, which is whether civilians in a modern democracy could even potentially deserve blame or punishment for the deeds of their government and military. Putting aside the question of whether in the case of the 911 attack or the Paris one, ordinary Americans or Parisians deserve blowback, we should consider whether modern democratic citizens in general could ever, under any circumstance be responsible for their nation’s actions. Given the political and economic structure of such a society, are such citizens necessarily innocent of whatever might be done in their name? Indeed, we should reflect on what’s actually meant by calling victims such as those in the ISIL attack “innocent civilians,” as in “The bloodthirsty barbarians targeted innocent civiliansin their cowardly terrorist attack.”

The Corruption of Modern Democracies

Before we begin, note the difference between direct and indirect democracies. Modern democracies are almost all indirect, meaning that the citizens don’t directly select their nation’s policies. Instead, they elect representatives who then decide how their country should be governed and how their military should be used abroad. This means that the citizens in question are at least somewhat removed from the high-level decisions that could invite international praise or condemnation. Also, because the terrorist attacks are supposed to be about punishing Westerners, I’ll focus on this negative side of the issue, although the analysis will also apply to the positive side, to whether the citizens might ever deserve praise for decisions made at their governmental level.

It might still look as though the answer were obvious, especially when there’s a stark choice between candidates in an election. To the extent that voters marginalize extreme candidates, such as bigoted xenophobes or radical environmentalists, the voters could logically be held accountable for steering their country in a more moderate direction, if not for any specific policy fulfilled by the elected representative. But because public relations has become something of a science, this account of democracy which likely informs the terrorist’s rationalizations is woefully naïve. What we discover in elections in so-called advanced democracies like the U.S. is that the nominees for high office learn to hide their actual opinions, to campaign from the so-called center so that they all appear moderate. The result is that it’s hard to tell the candidates apart. Their political debates, for example, revolve around micro-issues because the candidates are smart enough not to inflame the electorate with divisive rhetoric on the big, controversial issues. Indeed, those candidates who differ from the mainstream consensus are precisely the ones who are marginalized by the mass media and by public prejudice. The candidates who attain their party’s nomination and are poised to run a powerful democratic nation are always groomed by political consultants, their appearances stage-managed, their speeches and talking points market-tested, and their policies themselves more and more dictated by large campaign contributors who typically dominate mainstream thinking so that both the liberal and the conservative politicians end up governing as neoliberals. 

In the United States, the process of marginalizing radicals, meaning those who reject mainstream assumptions, is streamlined, because the country has a two-party system. The voters are offered a choice between two candidates from the established parties, any independent candidate thus being implicitly conceived of from the start as radical, that is, as not part of the establishment. As I said, voters then have to read the tea leaves to discern what the candidates would actually do in office, because the candidates are trained to sound like winsome centrists so as not to offend potential voters with the reality of what their country faces or with who is actually running for office. For example, George W. Bush campaigned as a compassionate conservative, but after 911 revealed that he was a neoconservative. Barak Obama campaigned as a radical liberal who would change the system, but governed as a neoliberal centrist, especially in his handling of 2008’s Wall Street meltdown.

The current Republican Party looks like an exception to the rule, since it seems ready to nominate true radicals which would offer voters a genuine choice between mainstream neoliberal Hillary Clinton and a quasi-fascist right-winger. But the smart money is on one of two scenarios unfolding: radicals like Trump, Carson, and Cruz are early favourites only because the shrinking Republican base, which alone is politically engaged this early in the electoral process, is venting its frustrations by shoving such offensive characters onto the national stage, forcing the country to stomach the inanities spouted by the bogus candidates. It’s the equivalent of farting in a crowded elevator. The candidate who will actually be nominated will be an established, mainstream one like Rubio or even Jeb Bush. Alternatively, if a real or apparent radical isnominated, the handlers who run the Party will swing into action, conducting a makeover of the candidate, walking back his or her earlier, insane remarks. The latter happened when Romney and McCain ran for office: to win the support of their Party’s troglodytic base, they had to sound radical, but to win in the general election they had to sound moderate. Voters had to decide which was the real candidate, the troglodyte or the puppet of powerful special interests. To be sure, some Tea Party radicals have since been elected to U.S. Congress, but they represent a protest vote since their power is limited to creating gridlock and to coarsening the public discourse. No, it’s safe to trust in the following principle, which is just a corollary of the axiom that power corrupts: the closer a politician is to a real seat of power in a hypermodern democracy, the more her actions will appease the unelected centers of power that offer her or that sustain the seat in the first place, and this is so regardless of the politician’s rhetoric. 

The point is that in a hypermodern (postindustrial, “postmodern”) democracy, the voter’s responsibility even for the abstract choice of her nation’s general course is complicated by the above factors. In essence, this sort of political system is fraudulent, having been hijacked by oligarchs who ensure that the status quo is maintained regardless of superficial differences between the relevant candidates. In particular, the candidates habitually lie by omission, concealing their true preferences or hyping phony ones, offering the voters a false choice, that is, a non-choice of national direction. The corporate media cooperate by marginalizing critics of the status quo, reducing the acceptable political discourse to one within the narrow limits that suit the few energized political supporters who bother to participate in the long run. The non-voter might conceivably be held accountable for acquiescing to the status quo, but this too would be complicated by the fact that whatever the effect of their decision not to vote, most non-voters—indeed, almost half of eligible voters in the U.S.—intend to boycott what they consider to be a sinister or inept institution, in which case much of the population would agree with many of the findings of radical critics of the West such as the ISIL terrorists.  

Democracy and Limited Liability

We can begin to understand the complexities by comparing the modern democracy to a limited liability corporation. In both cases, there’s a crucial difference between individual and collective functions. In an indirect democracy, the citizens are distinguished from their political representatives who are directly responsible for their country’s policies, while the citizens are at best only indirectly so. In a limited corporation or partnership, the role of the shareholders or partners as such is separate from their role as persons, so that they’re liable only for their investments in the company. If the company goes into debt, they can’t personally be sued even though their actions as officers of the company may have created the debt. (A sole proprietorship is more like a direct democracy, since the partner has unlimited liability, meaning there’s no legal distinction between her public and private roles; that is, her business isn’t regarded as a collective person with emergent rights.) One difference is that in a democracy, the distinction mostly corresponds to a division between persons, since the voters don’t tend to have much power in the government. The politicians are also citizens and so they can vote, but they’re exceptions in that respect. Most voters invest in their government, as it were, just by voting, but their public role isn’t otherwise politically relevant, since they don’t work in the government or aren’t plutocrats with outsized influence on the politicians. Most shareholders in a limited corporation are likewise investors rather than managers, but the investors can have much more power in the company than voters have in their government, because their investments are monetary. If a shareholder owns 51% of the stock, she has control over the company even if the day-to-day management is handled by others. As for the managers, they may bring the company to ruin with their public actions as officers of the company, but they can’t be sued as private citizens; their personal wealth is protected if they have limited liability.

The economic purpose of limited liability is, of course, to encourage entrepreneurship. The idea is that when doing business in a corporation, you’re part of a collective agent. If only human individuals were involved, with no collective agency, your personal wealth would be at stake in your business decisions and so you’d hesitate to invest in or to manage a large company, in which corporate control is diffuse, unless you were wealthy and could afford to lose large investments. In practice, this prescription of entrepreneurship becomes euphemistic. The spirit of the law of limited corporate liability is captured by Adam Smith’s faith in the invisible hand of the marketplace. Capitalism encourages not just adventurousness but the sin of selfishness. The aim is to give human individuals the license to act in an inhuman fashion in their business dealings, at the corporate level, by severing their private holdings from their corporate role.

It’s rather like a hedonistic cult such as the one portrayed in the movie Eyes Wide Shut, in which individuals don disguises which allow them to pursue their sexual perversions in secret, maintaining the public illusion of their innocence as citizens. Likewise, despite whatever private morality an individual might profess, capitalism directs her to engage in unscrupulous business practices, since she’s legally protected from the fallout of whatever shortsighted, self-destructive decisions she might make as a manager or powerful investor. Only her holdings in the company will be at stake if her capitalistic vices contribute to the company’s downfall. She has no legal responsibility to help repair society, for example, if her products are shown to be catastrophic as in the case of cigarettes or fast food. (The companies can be sued, but not the immoral human individuals involved in the corporate practices.) In effect, corporate work may indeed be akin to an actor’s playing a make-believe role: she’s given a legal license to ignore her private convictions, to gamble with other people’s lives, to backstab her way to the top, and to ignore the social good, but that’s just an excuse to pretend to be a degenerate so that the invisible hand—which is that of the collective and of no individual human—might miraculously correct the economy’s course so that it self-regulates. The point is that the more selfish we are in business, the better off we’ll all be as a whole because fierce competition, approximating the unregulated kind you find in the jungle, weeds out inefficiencies. If the businessperson happens to be personally sociopathic, so that she’s not just playing a role in public, so much the better for society; she’ll be afforded the same legal protections from the disasters that predictably follow from the uninhibited expression of her vices.   

The main reason for this comparison between these political and economic ways of handling collectives is that they both involve one order of being emerging from another. Whereas individuals may be responsible for their personal actions, when they work together in large groups they have less control because their roles belong to the collective, emergent entity, to the democracy or the corporation. Control at the collective level is diffuse and so the individuals involved shouldn’t be held fully accountable for the collective actions. (You might compare this also to how major studio films are made: what might begin as one writer’s vision of a story is passed along to thousands of other players in the industry—to the actors, producers, director, rewriters, studio executives, test audiences, and so on—so that the resulting movie may not reflect that initial vision and the writer may even want to be disassociated from the fruit of that collective.) In a democracy, this division of labour is codified by the split not just between roles but between the individuals themselves: most “investors” are just voters who have no say whatsoever in what their political leaders do. Their democratic control is indirect and nebulous, at best, because direct decision-making powers are granted to a special class of citizen, to the elected representative. And in a corporation, this same metaphysical consideration about the difference between the parts and the whole is recognized by the legal protection of personal wealth from the results of actions taken in a corporate role.

The upshot is that the outrage at the terrorist’s audacity in attacking civilians in a modern democracy might be traced to an implicit understanding of this comparison. Just as individuals aren’t personally responsible for damages done by their corporate activities, voters aren’t responsible for their collective, national actions that are taken directly only by their political representatives. The assumption would be that voters ought to have something like limited liability. But this analogy is itself limited, because of the difference I’ve already discussed. In the economic case, there’s no such division of labour because the purpose of limited liability in that context is, as I said, to encourage selfishness, that being the supposed engine of collective happiness. If you invest in a company and you’re driven selfishly to protect your investment, without moral regard for competitors, you protect the investment by getting involved—which you can do in business but not so effectively in politics. To be sure, there are powerless investors such as those who own minimal amounts of stock in this or that company. But unlike in a democracy in which the sanctioned kind of investment takes the form of voting, which divides democratic power to such an extent that each voter’s power becomes negligible in a large voting population, in business investment and power are more closely related. Managers, in particular, are paid largely in the form of stock options. Whereas a politician’s political investment in the country is limited to one vote, a manager can own millions of dollars in the company’s stocks. (She can even dump that stock to avoid not just personal culpability—as she thinks selfishly only of short-term gain and so plunders the company’s resources, increasing the stocks’ value before the inevitable collapse—but even the limited liability: her stocks would have fallen to zero value, but thanks to her inside knowledge of the damage she’s done to her company, she’s sold them in advance.)

The purpose of limited liability assumes, then, the businessperson’s ability to shape the outcome of her investment. Powerful investors are able not just to invest huge quantities, but to decide how to capitalize on those holdings, such as by hiring or influencing the managers. And unlike politicians, the managers likewise have dual control. In democratic politics, the split between voter and politician, and the egalitarian nature of the political investment mean that even if voters were directed by a comparable Darwinian logic to vote selfishly, they couldn’t effectively follow up on their narrow-mindedness (unless they were plutocrats who could act outside the political system, effectively turning the democracy into a mockery). They can write letters to their representatives, but because of the division of labour (not to mention the gerrymandering, the expert management of public opinion in campaigns, the timid, compliant corporate media, and so on), the politician needn’t take them into account in her policymaking. Some voters do vote selfishly, as in the case of so-called American values-voters who ignore the fact that their government is constitutionally obligated to be secular. They seek to overturn women’s abortion rights, to have creationism taught in science classrooms, and the like, but because of the division of labour, their “representatives” are free to renege on their values-based pledges once in office. As Thomas Frank shows in What's the Matter with Kansas?, such voters have thus been conned into systematically voting against their economic interest. But these radical, Tea Party voters are having the last laugh by purging the GOP of all moderates and electing genuine troglodytes who aren’t even interested in governing.

Innocence and Subhumanity: Consumers as Cattle

In any case, there’s a more fitting comparison to help understand the outrage at jihadist terrorism. Once again, posit the two orders of being and the division of labour. But put aside the emergence of collective agency from the sum of individual human contributors, and reverse the direction of investment. Instead of assuming that a multitude of people invests in a minority that represents the collective, that is, leaving aside the stock-holders and the consumers who all invest their money in a corporation run by a relatively small number of powerful investors and managers, suppose a minority invests in a multitude. Compare, that is, indirect democracy to the relation between farmers and their livestock. Once again, we have two orders of being: the livestock are domesticated animals owned and operated by the much better-informed farmers. The farmers invest in the livestock by feeding them and setting up the farm to shelter them; in return, the livestock supply the farmers with produce (eggs, milk, meat, wool, manual labour). The word “stock” in “livestock” refers to a quantity of something accumulated for future use. Here, then, the investment isn’t monetary, as in the case of a company’s stock; the real investment is in the centuries of training of these wild animals to domesticate them so that they become properties of some humans, numbers on a chart rather than untamed instruments of the wilderness that’s indifferent to our interests. Domesticated animals are servants of their human masters. They’re often mistreated, especially in the larger, corporate farms, but they needn’t be so. Livestock are to farmers, then, as are democratic citizens to their power elites.

Of course, theoretically, the power relations are supposed to be reversed. A democracy is supposed to be a society in which the majority rules. The majority holds the power to change its government not just by voting in a new one, but by revolting against one that fails to uphold the law. This expectation traces back to the Renaissance idolization of the individual. The Church proved to be corrupt and ignorant about nature, and the Scientific Revolution proved that lone Renaissance men, geniuses in various fields could almost singlehandedly usher in a new age of progress. The liberal myth was that everyone has the potential for such genius, for justifying the rights conferred on her in a free society, by producing great works of science and art. Modern democracies are individualistic in spirit. But as modernity has given way to hypermodernity, as we’ve lost faith in our founding secular myths, having seen how democracy and capitalism degenerate, we needn’t be so naïve as to believe that the Enlightenment ideals are other than propagandistic myths. For the reasons I’ve already gone over, the majority’s rule in a hypermodern democracy is superficial and illusory. There’s the deep state to contend with, that is, the long-term bureaucrats in government and the national security sector, as well as the chiefs of the big banks, major regulatory agencies, colleges, mass media outlets, and transnational corporations. As I said, this powerful minority of individuals establishes a national consensus that the status quo which serves that minority most of all should be upheld at all costs.

Moreover, just as the livestock depend on their masters, the majority depends on that top one percent. True, there’s some interdependence in both cases, since the farmers require the produce to survive, and the oligarchic deep state needs the money flowing from mass consumption. But in either case there’s a power asymmetry. The farmers control the livestock because of their vastly superior knowledge; they’re people and the livestock are animals, after all. Similarly, with their vastly greater wealth and much more influential social positions, the members of the oligarchic deep state control the multitudes of voters and consumers. For example, just as the livestock are literally fenced in, the voters’ freedom is circumvented by their false choice of candidates in a corrupt political system. In 2008, they intended to vote for a transformative, messianic figure so that the United States might rise like a phoenix from the ashes left by Bush II; instead, they got Obama’s continuity with Bush’s economic and foreign policies. Of course, Bush and Obama have very different backgrounds and characters, and their policies aren’t identical, but they’re united by the neoliberal consensus to serve the American establishment. A true radical in the highest political office is duly marginalized or assassinated. For instance, any compassionate side of Bush II’s conservatism, owing to his embarrassing born-again Christianity was bypassed by V.P. Dick Cheney, who infamously created a shadow national security apparatus to tilt the country towards endless war in the Middle East.

Suppose this unflattering comparison between democracy and the farm is plausible. How is it relevant to the question at issue? The thought is that when Western states are terrorized by bloodthirsty jihadists, the outrage isn’t accounted for just by the barbarity of the terrorists’ actions. Thanks to Hollywood and the computer game industry, we’ve long become desensitized to extreme violence. Of course, because we’re cattle-like, we’re protected from images of real death and violence as well as from death and violence themselves so that we may fulfill our function of consuming in the short-sighted, domesticated, infantilized fashion. We nevertheless each consume thousands upon thousands of simulations of extreme violence, so it’s not the terrorist’s barbarism that shocks us. When we stand outraged that the terrorists would intend to slaughter “innocent civilians,” we’re not reacting solely to the fact that those civilians are killed in a certain manner. It’s the desecration of the civilians’ innocence that so offends our sensibilities. But why? As complicated as is our influence over our democratic governments, we do exercise some control by voting in the centrist parties that bomb Muslim countries—even if we do so like cattle that habitually push a lever to be fed. The countries we bomb are impoverished, so their indignant young men lash out against soft targets if only to gain attention from the sensationalist mass media, to obtain recruits to their theocratic cause. These psychological, economic, and strategic reasons for jihadist terrorism are plain, so whence the mystery and the outrage in the West? Why do we presume that we’re so innocent that the terrorist attacks against us must be demonic emanations?

I submit that our presumed innocence is due to our relative subhumanity, compared to the godlike powers of the richest one percent of persons in Western civilization. We’re innocent in that, compared to the oligarchs’ palpable divinity—their wealth enables them to do practically whatever they want—we’re sheep that have wandered back into Eden, blissfully ignorant and helpless. We’re pets into which our power elites have invested fortunes to discover what we most want and how best to keep us safe, yielding the noosphere of associative advertisements and the ravenous national security industry. When we’re attacked by a terrorist, there’s a violation of the deep state denizens’ implicit property rights over us. The terrorist’s effrontery is that of the fox that squeezes through the farmer’s fence and carries off some chickens. In the hypermodern context, “innocent civilian” is a euphemism for “benighted pet.” Our primary role isn’t to fulfill the Enlightenment ideal of being a community of Renaissance geniuses. After WWII and the revolutions in public relations and market research, most of us are meant to consume—and that’s it. As Denzel Washington’s character explains in the movie Training Day, there are the sheep, the everyday citizens, and there are the wolves that protect them, the dirty cops who walk on Dick Cheney’s dark side, doing the ugly work that must be kept from the sheep to preserve their illusions.

Our “innocence” is metaphysical, not legal or moral: we occupy a lower link in the great chain of being.Consequently, the terrorist’s denial of that innocence is no mere political opinion, but an indirect blasphemous assault on the true gods, on our domesticators. Exoterically, the terrorist may mean to compel free citizens to alter their voting habits, by terrifying them into compliance. To the extent that the terrorist has that agenda, he labours under an obsolete conception of modernity, as I’ve explained. The great majority of Western citizens are powerless precisely because of their metaphysical innocence. They are unknowing and unenlightened, herded and manipulated by their “leaders,” that is, by their domesticators. Even were the masses to rise up in an American or European Spring to match the fleeting Arab one, the revolutionary democracy they would establish would inevitably become corrupted in the foreseeable, natural respects. The Arab Spring returned to the Sectarian Winter, because dominance hierarchies in the Middle East are robustly tribal rather than more narrowly economic, unlike those in the West. Our democracies degenerate into stealth plutocracies, whereas theirs collapse into full-blown dictatorships (Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin are obvious exceptions).

No, the audacity of terrorism doesn’t belong to the terrorist’s harbouring of a quaint expectation that Western citizens could end the bombing campaigns in the Middle East, by voting in some preferable party. Indeed, any such expectation is likely a projection of Western liberals onto the radical Islamist. Instead, the power of terrorism is in the terrorist’s ability to strike a blow against true gods, the Western oligarchs, by undermining the ideology that sustains their dominance. The terrorist intends to attack “innocent civilians,” negating that innocence by desecrating a secular sanctuary. But if the innocence of those civilians is lost in the carnage, if we can no longer function as cattle-like consumers, worshipping our superiors by supplying them with mountains of cash, the oligarchs’ godlikeness is likewise undone and the mass hallucination of the Western social order is threatened with dissolution.

Again, exoterically, the Islamist terrorist means to strike a blow on behalf of the supernatural deity, Allah. Islam, however, is transparently an ideological support for theocratic dominance hierarchies in the Muslim world. Muslims are taught above all to submit, to know their place before a transcendent god, which gives way to their overlooking of the gross inequality between dominant and oppressed persons in their lands. The use of theistic religion to rigidify natural boundaries between strong or sociopathic persons and weak, gullible, or submissive ones is as old as civilization. Suicidal murderers from the Middle East are of course conditioned by Muslim propaganda and they believe that Allah’s will trumps secular laws and human power dynamics. But there obviously is no Allah. The gods who rule are the alpha beasts at the apex of every dominance hierarchy throughout the animal kingdom; the gods who live but don’t rule are the omega undoers of natural regularities, whose prophetic visions of ideal worlds drive our replacement of the wilderness and even of dominance hierarchies with our artificial habitats and anti-natural social arrangements, including science and egalitarian democracy. In effect, then, Islamist terrorism is an instrument in a struggle between rival gods. Dictators and the bureaucratic mullahs of the Middle Eastern deep states sustain the mass delusion of Islam, which in turn inflames the majority of bitter, oppressed and jealous Muslims, some of whom are inevitably radicalized and driven to militancy, thanks to the medieval mindset of their religion. The top one percent of the Muslim world likely share the same inner emptiness as that of the West, since earthly power naturally corrupts them all, rendering them more or less sociopathic. Regardless of the megalomaniacal, theistic fantasies that may haunt their extroverted, atrophied minds, their lack of conscience and complex emotions enslaves them to natural, in this case animalistic forces. They serve as robotic avatars of the wilderness, that is, of the natural world as we find it, prior to our modification of it. Their state-sponsored terrorism, then, amounts to one family of gods’ insult against another pantheon. The Middle Eastern oligarchs mock the Western ones, attempting to end the latters’ supremacy by demolishing the structure of Western society.  

Consequently, our shock from being targeted by terrorists is akin to the believer’s loss of religious faith. The blinders fall from our eyes and we see that we’re all just scurrying animals, neither gods nor blessed pets. Our social orders are based on delusions and on our training that can come undone due to traumas like 911. Were the relevant innocence of civilians just a matter of our not being at all responsible for certain coups, assassinations, and other war crimes, this would be decidable on empirical grounds and there would be no need for politicians to defend our way of life by demonizing the enemy. At best, the terrorist would be merely mistaken on a question of fact. Instead, our innocence is metaphysically necessary: regardless of which Western party is in power and which actions it undertakes, we civilians are always blameless, just as chickens, sheep, and cows can’t comprehend the farmer’s responsibilities, let alone join in them. To speak of our culpability is to commit a category error: we average Westerners are lesser beings than our economic masters. When we’re decimated by the fox-like terrorist, our innocence is lost because we’re no longer shielded as the living properties or “human resources” of invincible oligarchs. Like Xerxes in the movie 300, whose cheek is cut, ending the illusion of his godhood, our oligarchs’ presumed right to rule over us is crippled by the fact that terrorized citizens are liable to wet the floor rather than consume the table scraps that are left for us. As the Joker says in The Dark Knight, massive death rates from cigarettes or fast food are tolerated as long as they’re “part of the plan,” but as soon as someone dies in an entirely unexpected way, there’s mass panic because our society depends on trust—specifically, the pet’s trust in its master. Soon after 911, Bush II was criticized for advising the populace to get back to shopping, but there was nothing more for him to tell them. The American intelligence and defense departments are autonomous and run by the deep state which outlasts presidents; voters are certainly out of the loop. When dealing with a herd of cattle, then, what more is there to do than to point the dumb animals to the nearest field of grass and urge them to consume?

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Clash of Worldviews: Islamist Terrorism Edition

MODERATOR: Welcome, viewers, to another clash of worldviews, the show that pits philosophies against each other. This evening, we’re joined by noted liberal secular humanist, Adam Garnett, self-proclaimed postmodern pessimist and cynic, Heather Fogarty, and influential conservative Muslim philosopher, Tariq Shadid. Recently, Islamist terrorists have been in the news for ISIL beheadings and immolations in Syria and Iraq, Boko Haram kidnappings in Nigeria, shootings on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, and the killing of Parisian cartoonists and Danish Jews and free speech supporters. Adam, why don’t you start things off by laying out the liberal’s case against those terrorists’ ideology?

ADAM: Sure, but I wouldn’t call it a “case,” exactly. A case is an argument that supports a viewpoint in a rational context in which the listeners understand and assent to logic and the rule of evidence. Religious faith, though, has utterly overtaken the sanity of these radical Islamists. Debating their ideology would be like teaching quantum mechanics to a four year-old.

But let’s begin by familiarizing ourselves with some highlights of the history of how we got here. In the eleventh century, al-Ghazali, the jurist, Asharite philosopher and Sufi mystic refuted the classical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, in the name of Islamic theology. Whereas that philosophy was naturalistic, al-Ghazali’s book, Incoherence of the Philosophers, contends that nature entirely submits to God’s will, having no independent causal power. The laws of nature are just elements of God’s rationality, so that all the events we perceive are caused directly by God. When faced with the epistemological problem of skepticism about knowledge of the external world, al-Ghazali retreated to a kind of mysticism that substitutes God for that world and appeals to faith that God can do anything. In The Incoherence of the Incoherence, Averroes, the medieval polymath, defended classical philosophy, but while that defense led to the rise of naturalism and secularism in modern Europe, Averroism was rejected by most of the Muslim world, and so the way was cleared for today’s Islamist puritans who scoff at modern science and liberties. “God is great!” they chant, meaning that defiance of God is impossiblebecause Islam is the one true religion that reflects God’s oneness and supremacy: the whole world isn’t just created by Allah but sustained, moment by moment, by him, so that when the radicals act out of intuition that they carry out God’s will, it’s God who acts through them. There is only illusory opposition to God, since everything must submit to the mightiest being, by definition. That’s the Asharite mysticism that al-Ghazali codified, which places revelation and mystical intuition before reason.

Later, in the eighteenth century, the Salafi reformer, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahab, preached that Muslims should return to monotheistic purity. He made a political pact with Muhammad bin Saud, who used the fundamentalist ideology to conquer territory and establish the Saudi state that survives to this day, by funding Salafism but directing it outwards to alleged external threats to Islamic purity, thus protecting the decadent Saudi family. Salafisreject scholastic philosophy (kalam) as a foreign, ancient Greek import that encourages free-thinking and debate to make theology rational. Adhering to a minimalist interpretation of Sunni, that is, the equivalent of Catholic Islam, Salafis regard speculative philosophy as a heresy of arrogance, of setting us up as rival gods who can learn the truth through our rational powers, without divine guidance, whereas the Islamic imperative is to submit to Allah. Salafis thus preach that the Quran, Hadith, consensus of elite Muslim scholars, and traditions from the first three generations of Muslims provide sufficient guidance for Muslims. In essence, this Salafism, which dominates Saudi Arabia and the UAE and which is the source of most Islamist terrorism today, is about submission to dogmas.  

Moderate Muslims and milquetoast centrists like President Obama contend that these terrorists merely distort true Islam and that no major religion justifies their savagery. Invariably, they remind us that the vast majority of Muslims reject the terrorist’s interpretation of Islam as “extreme” and as a “distortion” of the faith. Of course, anyone saying this should drop what they’re doing, pick up the nearest whip and flagellate the flesh of their back for wasting their listener’s time with a fallacious appeal to popularity. It goes without saying that the “correct” theological interpretation needn’t be the one that most people accept. More importantly, this debate about whether today’s militant jihadists betray or practice their religion isn’t worth having. There is no correct answer to the question, because the debate is theological. It’s exactly like asking which interpretation of Christianity is correct, Catholicism, Protestantism, or Fundamentalism (Evangelicalism). Even in Christianity, which at least honoured classical wisdom in medieval scholasticism, leading to naturalistic, systematic theology which ironically opened the door for modern science, reason has a precarious position, because of the alleged rival sources of knowledge in revelation, faith, and intuition. As I’ve just recounted, Islam as a whole lacks even the pretense that its theology owes its worth primarily to reason. Of course, for Muslims, reason is supposed to be compatible with faith, but that’s only because reason—like the whole of nature itself—is assumed to submit to God in the sense of being nothing without the deity. Christians went as far towards rationalism as to entertain deism, the possibility that God created an autonomous world that operates according to natural rather than divine laws, which reason can discover. By incorporating Sufi mysticism, Islam left no such room for reason’s authority and thus no room for modernity.
 

But my point now is just that because this is so, Islamic hermeneutics isn’t subject to fact-based standards of correctness. Reason or evidence has no final say in the matter of whether the Quran supports the notion that disbelievers who insult the Prophet should be beheaded (8:12; 33:57, 61; 47:4). The power of those entrusted as authority figures in Islam is paramount. Revelation is compelling not because it’s rational to assume that the angel Gabriel spoke to Muhammad, but because good people are supposed to have faith that scripture is a message from the Supreme Being. Faith, trust, intuition—these are Islamic virtues of submission to the most powerful individual, and they’re what make for the Muslim’s peace: peace by not banging your head against an immovable wall. Are there more tolerant ways of interpreting the many militant, indeed apparently savage passages of the Quran? Of course there are, because Arabic words can have many different meanings and because theology isn’t a science that proves anything without resorting to fallacies of force. All that matters here is that because Islam privileges faith far more than reason, Muslims have surrendered their ability to decisively refute the terrorists’ fundamentalist ideology. And the majority will accept an interpretation of their religion that makes its practice relatively easy, because most religious people aren’t saints or martyrs and so they succumb to secular temptations.

Given, then, that militant Islamist fundamentalism stands as a legitimate form of the religion, which has an alien epistemology that denies the independence of both reason and nature, what should a modern, civilized person say about the terrorist’s jihad? The modern world is plainly at war with fundamentalist Islam and potentially with the whole Muslim world, because there is no reliable opposition in that world to the terrorists. True, only a tiny minority of the huge Muslim population takes up arms against the West or kills civilians. But most Muslims are Sunnis, which means they’re conservative and thus liable at any moment to agree with the terrorist’s call for ultraconservatism, that is, for a puritanical, literalistic interpretation of Sharia and the other Islamic scriptures. Again, having disarmed themselves by embracing mysticism, most Muslims have mainly their cowardice or heretical attraction to secular Western ideals to prevent them from fighting against globalization, which is the spread of the Western monoculture. Theological moderation in Islam is an utterly perilous venture; indeed, since Muhammad himself defended Islam for ten years as a military commander, assuming he existed at all, the Muslim moderates are pitifully outmatched by the militants.

TARIQ: You’ve no need to convince me of the legitimacy of the mujahid’s interpretation of Islam. I support the jihad against Western domination of the Middle East through puppet dictators. This is a war for the preservation of Islam’s purity, and unlike the Church which gave in to secular temptations by allying itself with the pagan Roman Empire and then with classical rationalism in the modern period, Muslims have the faith to resist, if that be Allah’s will. The true Christians, the Gnostics and mystics, were persecuted as heretics by the faithless orthodox Christians, who reduced God Almighty to his mere temporary mouthpiece, Jesus. In Islam mystics rule, which means only that Islam is a genuine religion, not a farce like Christianity, let alone like Judaism which in practice is the worship of law or money.    

Your rationalism amuses me, though, Adam. Salafi Islam is lunacy or transparently fallacious, you say, the mere groveling before powerful authorities. But your appeal to Reason indicates that you’re committed to obsolete modern myths of progress and of humanity’s virtual godhood through our rational self-control which allegedly allows us to become omniscient through science and omnipotent through technology. Are you unaware that those myths have given way to postmodern hyperskepticism even in the West, let alone in the Muslim world which was never foolish enough to fall for modernism, the West’s substitute religion? Are you truly so uninformed that you think Einstein and quantum mechanics haven’t undermined the earlier deterministic materialism; that Sade, Freud and Darwin didn’t demolish the pretensions of modern civility; that Marx didn’t establish the unsustainability of unbridled capitalism; or that the American left-wing itself, from Chomsky to Taibbi haven’t shown that American democracy is a fig leaf for that country’s plutocracy? From Nixon to Bush II and Barak “Drone King” Obama, American democracy has perpetrated one fiasco after another, so that only the most blinkered Americans still retain faith in their fevered dream of liberty. You think the jihadists are insane, but whence the sanity of the average American who still thinks her government looks out for the middle class more than for the top one percent?

Even in science, the purported haven of rationality, utility is more important than truth. Ask scientists whether their theories are True and they’ll shake their heads with pity, itching to ignore your time-wasting philosophical musings so they can get back to work. Science is a pragmatic business and its methods of openness and experimentation are means of achieving practical goals. Scientists employ models or simplified maps of what they call natural reality, but they don’t believe there’s any magical correspondence between the two. Maps are tools that enable the user to navigate the land. 

So when you speak of Islam’s failure of rationality, take care to ensure you haven’t just arrived at this brave new world, skipping over the last couple of centuries like Rip Van Winkle. Your rationalism is old and musty and covered in cobwebs. Welcome to postmodernity in which the Western secularist doesn’t enjoy an intellectual advantage so much as a taboo against disposing of the neoliberal doubletalk that props up the modern myths even while taking technocratic steps to secure an increasingly dystopian global society that makes an utter mockery of those myths.   

ADAM: Let me get this straight: you’re saying you agree that civilians should be killed just because they’re not Muslims. In effect, you’re praising bin Ladin, for example, for the attacks on 911. Is that right?

TARIQ: You yourself said there’s a state of war between the West and the Muslim world. You want the mujahidin to fight that war according to the conventions worked out by the Western victors of WWII. That’s because you Americans, Canadians, and Europeans are living in the past like old Van Winkle. You decry the so-called terrorists for not waging war in the conventional fashion which holds between states and which therefore requires that both sides be equally wealthy to afford tanks, jets, and warships. What happens when one side dominates the other through proxy regimes which steal their people’s wealth and squander it on private palaces? If the impoverished people can summon the courage to rebel, they fight as insurrectionists in which case the targeted nation state will call the rebels brigands or terrorists and hold the insurrection as unlawful. Here again we encounter the pretense of modern civility, the bizarre notion that modern warfare all by itself hasn’t warranted a repudiation of the Age of Reason’s conceits. Millions died in the two global wars in which the combatants included the so-called enlightened, liberated, capitalistic nation states with their advanced weaponry. German liberals fell under the sway of the demagogue Hitler and helped him scapegoat and exterminate the Jews, while the noble Americans firebombed Tokyo and nuked Nagasaki and Hiroshima. After the carnage, the civilized statesmen drew up some laws of warfare to preserve “stability,” which is another way of saying that the conventional view of warfare is an instrument for preserving the status quo in which America and its allies dominate the rest.

You speak of innocent civilians, thus betraying your lack of confidence in your liberal institutions. Don’t the majority of civilians rule in a democracy? Don’t Americans insist on civilian control of their military? And yet Americans are so cowardly that they’ll hide behind their soldiers as though the civilian consumers were blameless for what the denizens of their sprawling military bases do even though the civilians vote for centrist political parties that agree on the fundamentals of neoliberalism and American hegemony. You whine when mujahidin kill American civilians on your home soil, when those Muslim purists are obviously seeking revenge for the tens of thousands of Muslim civilians killed in the Middle East in conflicts sustained covertly or overtly by American-led powers. When a drone pilot kills a Muslim family or wedding party, mistaking the civilians for terrorists, that’s called “collateral damage,” because Americans are experts in using technocratic language to dehumanize themselves and others, having become the slaves of their technology. But when jihadists kill American civilians, that killing’s denounced as “savagery.”

The drones kill civilians by accident, you’ll say, whereas the jihadists intend to kill “noncombatants.” Again, there’s no need at all to respect the distinction between American soldiers and civilians, because if the civilians are innocent, that could only mean they have no control over their country’s war machine in which case their liberal institutions are bankrupt and a revolution is in order. The jihadists might then be thanked for getting the ball rolling. Otherwise, the civilians who vote their commander-in-chief into office can’t be considered blameless for what their military does in the name of their country’s ideals. And has it occurred to you that the cowardice of neoliberals like Obama who use drones to attack America’s impoverished foes from a position of complete safety is as offensive to virile Muslims as a beheading is to the squeamish, feminized American consumers? Your military uses tanks and warplanes to swat a fly and then you cry that you didn’t intend to flatten the house in which the fly buzzed—when that’s the obvious result of such a disproportionate use of force. You let loose the proverbial bull in the china shop and then pretend to be so stupid as to have not foreseen that the bull would shatter some plates. Why should Muslim insurrectionists care more about American intentions than about the natural consequences of certain actions? And why respect American talk of immorality when there’s no secular basis for morality in the first place? Again, welcome to the brave new world of postmodernity, Mr. Van Winkle.  

ADAM: Disgusting! I’m just appalled that you haven’t already been arrested and carted off to Guantanamo.

TARIQ: I’m a thinker, not a soldier. I don’t participate in the jihad. I’m merely trying to understand the world we inhabit. If you ask me whether I think the so-called terrorists are justified in waging war against modernity, I’d say first that talk of such justification is itself obsolete. Wars happen when worlds collide. And in this case, what we’re seeing is the inevitable conflict between Islam, the pinnacle of monotheism, and modernism. If you ask whether I applaud the killing of Western non-Muslims by Muslims, I’d say I’m a harsh critic of Western cultures and I suspect the jihadists will eventually be hailed as heroic rebels who fought bravely against dystopian, deeply self-deluded regimes. The chief difference between jihadists and Western progressives is that the latter lack the will to die for anything, because they believe in nothing as a result of their growing disenchantment with the modern metanarratives. Both sides agree on their radical rejection of the status quo of globalization and American consumerism.

The second difference between them, though, is that the jihadists would replace the new world order, the so-called Pax Americana, with a caliphate, whereas progressives ultimately have no idea what they’d substitute for dysfunctional democracy, capitalism, and the materialistic Western culture. Progressives demand a return to Glass-Steagall and to a higher tax rate to support the middle class, as though the American middle class wasn’t an aberration due to global asymmetries resulting from the Second World War, and as though the American government hasn’t been captured by the factions it would be charged with regulating. Again, American progressives look to the Democrats to fight for their values, as though that party hasn’t likewise been captured by centrists and neoliberals. Progressives have nowhere to turn to and postmodern hyperrationality has subverted their values, so they denounce jihadists out of jealousy. If only progressives had something worth fighting and dying for, they could see that they should be sympathizing with the jihadists rather than demonizing them.

ADAM: Sympathize with the maniacs who want them dead? Yeah, right! Anyway, Tariq, you’re mixing up politics and religion, but let’s focus on the religious motivation. After all, the most comical terrorist act is the killing of cartoonists for mocking Islam. That wouldn’t happen without the Quran’s many fractious passages. There’s just no respect in Islam for freedom of speech. God allegedly wants everything to submit to him, as though disobedience could be possible without freewill. If God made us free, maybe we’re supposed to exercise our judgment and God should respect our efforts to find our way, just as we admire our children as they grow into their adult character. If we’re not free, defiance is impossible, so by murdering cartoonists the terrorists themselves are blaspheming by implying that God doesn’t already cause the cartoonists to draw their satires.

TARIQ: If you deserve to die because you’re implicated in mass murder and in destroying whole ecosystems and threatening the planet’s ability to sustain life, maybe you should indeed sympathize with your executioner.

But you want to talk about freedom of speech. What you fail to see, Adam, is that children don’t grow up if they’re permitted to say or to do almost whatever they like. You think American secularists are more mature than Middle Eastern Muslims? No, your fellow secularists are infantilized because they have too much liberty for their good. You respect the wrong kind of freedom, the freedom to choose between options without having any higher guidance as to which option is best. You think any such restriction infringes on your absolute right to self-determination. So you whiz back and forth, consuming this and that, ever more discombobulated and anxious that maybe materialism and hedonism—which the unguided, isolated individual inevitably embraces thanks to the manipulation by demagogues—are curses rather than blessings. You’re entranced by things that don’t matter in the end, by techno-toys and houses and cars and jewelry and even family, ignoring the Absolute rather than perceiving it through religious ecstasy or a sense of the sublime. You think you’re a self-controlling individual even after cognitive science has found no basis at all in the brain for genuine freewill. You’re a machine, according to your rational, naturalistic worldview. Yet you still bloviate about your precious freedom, Mr. Van Winkle, as though you were entitled to that bit of Judeo-Christian ontology that modern science has made untenable for you. You want the freedom to say whatever you like, as though the speech of lost, selfish, infantilized, feminized consumers were worth more than an infant’s prattling.

HEATHER: This is all very rich, dipping into postmodern critiques to prop up the medieval religion of Islam, just like how the undercover terrorists themselves enjoy the benefits of modern society before they lash out at it. A most hypocritical tactic, I must say!

TARIQ: No, it’s heroic rather than hypocritical, hiding in the belly of the beast, enduring Western beastliness until the opportune moment when you can free yourself from the materialistic inanities by sacrificing yourself as you take a piece of the monster with you. Again, I suspect that in the coming centuries the mujahidin will be widely praised as martyrs for the greater good.

HEATHER: Nah, those thuggish cultists are pathetic because they’re humiliated by America’s earthly success. What a paradox is set before these true-believing Muslims: they worship the one true God but the Great Satan evidently rules the world. And Allah allows that defiance to happen for what reason exactly? Is Allah so impotent or hidden, after all, that he allows the infantile Western world to trample the Middle East, to force Muslims to submit not just to Allah but to those puppet dictators? The cause of terrorism isn’t religious ecstasy or divine guidance or anything like that, but rank cowardice. The terrorists want to blot out the world that causes them so much distress by threatening their religious faith and rubbing their nose in the fact that functional atheists are presently much more powerful than God-worshippers. Instead of reconciling themselves to the harsh truth that Islam itself is utterly backwards and irrelevant, given what we now know about the natural world, the most resentful Muslims take up arms to destroy the West to eliminate the ground for that crisis of faith.

The terrorist wants to say, “See, the Great Satan isn’t so powerful after all. We’ll bring down the United States just like we brought down the Soviet Union. And Allah won’t be so easily mocked.” But what these Muslim fundamentalists don’t want to realize is that not only is Allah indeed being mocked every day—and not just by cartoonists but by the very existence of modernity—not only that, but God can’t be what these fundamentalists think he is, given all of that mockery. As Adam was saying, mere secular disobedience should be impossible if God is so great that submission to him is metaphysically necessary. How much more theologically intolerable, then, must be the earthly supremacy of America’s relatively liberal, anti-Islamic culture? As they currently stand, the existence of the United States and of the other modern societies such as Israel is a sufficient disproof of mystical Islam. That’s ultimately the root of Islamist terrorism.

TARIQ: You may be right that the mujahidin are appalled by America’s success. But you’re wrong to discount religious experience as a large part of their motivation. They interpret natural order as a sign of Allah’s rationality, so that they sense that God is behind every event they experience. Imagine their excitement and camaraderie as they honour that feeling of divine unity by smiting the deluded secularists who think nature is godless and self-sustaining, who are misled by the illusion of God’s absence.

ADAM: What illusion? Show me Allah! Point me to his voice so I can hear it.

TARIQ: He speaks through angels and prophets and scripture.

ADAM: Then you’ve shown me only intermediaries who offer hearsay. 

HEATHER: And even if natural laws could be interpreted as signs of an intelligent designer’s rationality, that rationality would have to be alien and inhuman, because quantum mechanics, for example, is counterintuitive to animals like us. Why be so quick, then, to worship something you can’t possibly understand? Moreover, why submit to something just because it’s much more powerful than you? Don’t you know that might doesn’t make right?

TARIQ: Allah is morallyperfect, not just the inescapable master of the universe. His mercy and compassion are beyond compare.

ADAM: Yeah, he’s merciful and compassionate as long as you do exactly what he wants, submitting to him as a slave—and it’s everlasting hellfire for the rest. You call that moral perfection? Who’s living in the past now, Mr. Van Winkle? Welcome to the Age of Reason in which we’re free to see through such theological rationalizations of tribal bigotry.

TARIQ: There’s no illogic there, contrary to your prejudice against authentic religion. Allah’s benevolence is manifest in his granting eternal paradise to those that please him, whereas he could destroy us all without warning and start again or not be so generous as to create a world in the first place. God’s morality is fearsome in its rigidity because his morality is real, unlike the moral value of modern libertinism, which is bogus. Meandering freedom to consume is merely an excuse to sin in perpetuity. There is an absolute difference between right and wrong only because there’s a singular God with a definite character who establishes the moral law. Without God, there would be only our feelings of what we like or dislike, which would make morality as arbitrary as our taste in fast food.

ADAM: Regardless, you’re misusing the words “merciful” and “compassion” when you apply them to such a monstrous deity who punishes us either for exercising our God-given freedom or for doing exactly what some of us are evidently programmed to do, which in the modern world is to see for ourselves how the world works and to use that knowledge to our advantage—all in the obvious absence of any Supreme Being who might disapprove. You can resort to the mystical distinction between God’s transcendent oneness and nature’s illusory multiplicity, but that’s just another way of saying that God himself is evidently nowhere to be found.

TARIQ: And why should that be otherwise? Who are you to stand face to face with the source of the universe? Do you know how much urine would flow down your leg were you forced to witness even the Big Bang, let alone the unutterable majesty of the Supreme Being? Your eyeballs would fall out of their sockets, your brain would explode, and that ocean of urine I spoke of could hold a whale. But of course you suffer from Faustian arrogance because you feel you’re the master of your little artificial world. You drive down the streets and stare at passersby as though you were invulnerable, ensconced behind your seatbelt. Not even the 911 attacks woke you up for long: it’s back to sleep in your dream world in which you’re safe in the bosom of the transnational corporations. What a shock the last Americans are in for when their sins will finally be paid for in full and their free society is free to sink back into the earth.

HEATHER: Even if that were to happen, it would prove nothing, Tariq. Societies come and go. So what? Did the collapse of the Ottoman Empire demonstrate Allah’s nonexistence? Of course not, since your theistic beliefs aren’t meaningful enough to be falsifiable.

TARIQ: Ah, but Muslims are humble before God so they’d accept their destruction as God’s will. Western secularists are arrogant because their current hegemony deludes them into thinking they’re gods upon the earth. There is no God but Allah; all before Allah are nothing by comparison.

ADAM: But since you yourself admit that Allah is necessarily hidden from us, because our brain would explode from an encounter with him, you’re implying now that Muslims are nihilists, because they occupy a world they consider unreal and can’t support their claim to have God’s word in their possession. Maybe that’s why some fervent Muslims are so quick to maim, murder, and destroy. If the natural world were so insignificant compared to Allah’s greatness, what would be the difference if civilians were beheaded or ancient Buddhist statues were dynamited or the Twin Towers were reduced to rubble and ash? Set your sights on that which can’t be seen, meanwhile ignoring everything perceivable. And they call that the deepest spirituality…

MODERATOR: Well, I'm sorry to say that that will have to be the last word for now. I’d like to thank our participants for their stimulating discussion. Stay tuned for a soap opera or for some such triviality.

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The Man-made Gods of Monotheism

The relation between monotheism and polytheism is a curious one. Polytheism has often been an animistic sort of pantheism in which, due to ignorance and overconfidence in the utility of the religious imagination, the folk identify natural forces with spirits or other magical beings. Average folks tended to be superstitious polytheists, whereas monotheists sought a premodern Theory of Everything which required a reduction of the culture’s folkloric pantheon. The more absolute and solitary the deity, the more removed God became from the natural world and so the more polytheists had a right to think of monotheists as virtual atheists. For their part, monotheists called polytheists idolaters, worshippers of false gods, but at least those gods were tangible. Meanwhile, the monotheistic God’s transcendence, supremacy, and indeed its inherent impersonality entailed an egalitarian vision of human interrelations, since we’re all made equally insignificant by comparison with that unknowable God. Tribal superstition and warfare ought to end, concludes the monotheist.

But however laudable the social role of monotheistic religions may be, we modernists have nothing to distract us from perceiving that their Gods are fictitious, which is to say that they’re symbols that united certain groups by laying out a mission that’s authentic to the people’s cultural identity. By looking at the cultural context of the rise of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, including the syncretic relations between those religions and others, we can appreciate how those religions worked in their day and why today they’re obsolete.

The Negative Tribalism of the Israelites

Judaism is ethically monotheistic, meaning that Jews think ethical deeds are more important than theology and they think this because they believe God transcends the created world. We can’t understand God and so we should follow the moral guidelines that are nevertheless revealed, without trying to outsmart God by identifying him with something we can control. Judaism is thus strongly opposed to idolatry, since the idolater takes God to be something limited and natural, such as an animal or a force of nature, which makes God subject to our manipulation through magic. Jews are most interested in the personal relationship between God and his created people. God is a subject rather than an object and so he isn’t found within any statue or other image. God is supernatural and thus his greatness isn’t affected by the shifting tides of our politics.

This ethical monotheism has a sociological origin in the fact that during the formative Babylonian exile, after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 587 BCE, the Israelites were desert nomads and thus social outsiders. In the Second Temple period, influenced by Hellenistic religion and Zoroastrianism, Jews came to worship a God who was likewise an outsider, a solitary, immaterial and absolute deity who could interact with his created world but who also stood apart from it. Just as the Jews wandered between empires, as dramatized in the Exodus myth, Yahweh slipped between nature and his heavenly realm; as Jews longed for a God that could understand the plight of lonely wanderers or of oppressed but righteous people, Yahweh seemed to have created a world so he could have someone to talk to. Jews felt they could cast righteous judgment on the idolatrous cultures that put theology before ethics and thus that got caught up in religious bigotry and tribal warfare. If God stands apart from everything in the world and thus from anything we can manipulate, no nation is especially empowered by God; we’re all equal since God transcends us all. God is above our earthly concerns and so we can’t enlist him to fight our battles for us—just as the Jews were alienated from or conquered by the great civilizations of the ancient world (Babylon, Macedonia, Rome). Such, at any rate, is the logic of ethical monotheism.

But Jews weren’t content with having an outsider God that merely reminded them of their afflictions and that spoke to the existential basis of the theistic imagination. As social outsiders, Jews suffered only from an acute form of the angst that afflicts us all as sentient beings who feel alienated from all of nature, having been liberated from the robotic routines of animal life. The great sin of Judaism is that Jews turned their existential religion into an inverted sort of tribalism. Whereas idolaters identified God with some positive, concrete entity, such as an animal or a human king, and used that symbol to unite the culture, Jews identified God with nothing and used that negative symbol to empower them as the “chosen ones.”

We have, then, two equally absurd spectacles: there are the idolaters who foolishly hold as sacred something that’s manifestly not so, going as far as to destroy those who desecrate their holy statue, and then there are the Jews who hold no (mere) thing as sacred, but who nevertheless fail to follow through on that atheistic existentialism and who instead devise a negative form of tribalism. Instead of glorifying themselves as worshippers of some fleeting bit of nature, Jews boosted their self-esteem by maintaining that they were on the best personal terms with the deity who is as good as nothing, as far as our cognitive powers are concerned. Idolaters used the power of their concrete religious symbols to whip up the ignorant masses and create empires that lasted centuries, while Jews conquered lands mainly in their imagination and in their scriptural fantasies; the earthly triumphs of the Israelites are as immaterial as their deity.

No, monotheistic Jews have usually been outsiders and that status drove them to conceive of the outsider God, but because the early Jews envied the power players in the empires of their day, they turned that one, tenuous bond between them and their God into a Jewish idol that could comfort them in their years of isolation or captivity. Their covenant with God, as laid out in their scriptures, became their idol, and Jews could take pride in the fact that God burdened them the most because he was most interested in them. Of course, Jews couldn’t bring themselves to outright boasting. The biblical heroes are always the lowliest of men, which illustrates the Jewish assumption that Jews are unworthy of God’s attention. Indeed, the existential, virtually atheistic side of Judaism prevents Jews from the gauche sort of tribalism of the flagrant idolater who pretends to have power over God due to his complete understanding of the source of divine power. Instead, Jews have it both ways, combining the sobering existential lessons of what is effectively atheism with a twisted, negative tribalism. Jews were intrinsically unworthy of God’s favour, just as all lowly humans are, but in their telling, Jews nevertheless have been favoured historically by God Almighty for millennia, which is at least part of what any idolatrous people would say about itself.

Christian Incoherence and the Emptiness of Jesus’s Sacrifice

By blurring the line between the Jewish God and messiah, Christians brought to fruition that negative tribalism, making possible a quasi-Jewish empire about which the Jews had hitherto only fantasized. The first Christians were likewise social outsiders, having been Jews conquered by mighty, polytheistic Rome. Their resentment drove them to deify their favourite rabbis and rebels, just as Jews had often been tempted by their neighbours’ idols and by the worldly success and comfort that went along with such crass symbols. One such Jewish idol, the divine Jesus Christ, caught on and conquered Rome—or at least was used by certain Roman emperors to revivify their failing domestic religion. And so many quasi-Jews had their earthly empire after all—indeed, one empire after the next, right up to the present, effectively-Christian and thus semi-Jewish American one.

To their credit, the authentic Jews resisted the temptation to succumb to that crude, positive idolatry, preferring their negative variety which again allowed them to have it both ways. Just as the pre-Christian Jews could only look on as the positive idolaters enjoyed the benefits of their religious naivety, worshipping their sacred objects which inspired their masses to conquer rival clans, post-Christian Jews could only admire the chutzpah of Christians for stealing their God’s thunder. So near yet so far to an end to their wandering in the spiritual desert, Jews must have thought as Christianity became the official Roman religion in the 4^th century CE and Christians bastardized the Jewish scriptures, claiming to have superseded the Jews’ ethical monotheism. Here were world conquers quoting from the Hebrew Bible, claiming that Jesus fulfilled all of the Jewish prophecies and that God had finally intervened in the world to such an extent that he became one with part of it, in the person of Jesus. Even as corrupted Judaism finally triumphed on the global stage, Jews remained ever the outsiders, alone with their reclusive God.

Sir Walter Scott spoke of the tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive. There have likely never been religionists with more effrontery than Christians and so their ironies and duplicities are especially rich and convoluted. Armies of comedians ought to be investigating Christian history and theology on a full-time basis, mining these endless deposits of absurdity. Christianity is simply the most aesthetically appalling of the major religions, which means that this religion is the most hideous to look upon. If you don’t feel dirty speaking about Christianity, you need to do more research.

According to Christians, God took pity on all of us and decided to save us once and for all, by incarnating himself. God became a mortal person and tried to relate to us on such equal terms, but the jealous Jewish leaders and Roman authorities, representing all of us in our ignorance, crucified Jesus, thus demonstrating the extent of our anti-spirituality. We are so lost, according to this religion, that we killed the one true God in our midst. We set ourselves apart from God by literally failing to recognize divinity, having been distracted by worldly matters such as greed, power, and envy. Based largely on Plato’s cave analogy, the Gnostics made this explicit by speaking of nature as a realm controlled by demons, imprisoning us even though we carry within us spiritual fragments of the transcendent realm where the true God rules. That God sent an emanation of himself into this evil domain to remind us of our true home, because we’ve been blinded by the profane things of this world. Garbled versions of this narrative found their way into the New Testament, in Paul’s letters and the Gospel of John.

The point is that we’re utterly lost because of the separation between the true, transcendent God, the one Christians call the Father, and the created, material realm. In Christian terms, we suffer from original sin and so are incapable of saving ourselves from death. We’re meant to be immortal, but we’ve been corrupted by the demons that are associated with natural forces. We have immortal spirits, but if we confuse the illusions of the material world with the ultimate prize, God will be forced to punish us for eternity, because we won’t have proven ourselves worthy by remembering our true spiritual identity. We’ll have failed to live up to God’s expectations and have debased ourselves. Again, God’s solution was to send us the ultimate messenger, to give us one last reminder of the spiritual stakes. For love of us, God even used our blindness against us, making the best of the crucifixion by counting Jesus’s death as sufficient payment for all of our sins, thus leaving nothing to stand between God and us—except the pittance of our need to acknowledge what God has thusly done for us.

It’s that last point that gives the game away. We’re supposed to be lost to original sin and at the mercy of God or of demons, and God defeated the demonic forces on our behalf by conquering death through the resurrection of Jesus. That first century event should have been the apocalyptic end of the demonic reign in God’s creation. So why are we still here and why do we still face the threat of hell? Why are we still fettered by original sin? Because God’s incarnation evidently didn’t suffice to rescue even a single person from the devil’s clutches. Something else is needed, namely our recognition of God’s efforts, our confession that Jesus is Lord, or some other trivial addendum to God’s supernatural victory over Satan. Here is another indication of the secret Gnostic basis of the Christian synthesis of Judaism and paganism. God could only come part way to us, because his distance from us is too great. Again, the Gnostics make this explicit by saying that God is only the indirect creator of the natural universe. Our more direct creator is only a blundering or evil demigod, that is, a fallen angel or demon. Our ultimate God, who gives us hope that our moral principles aren’t tragically misplaced, is ontologically removed from nature because he’s too noble to set foot in this cesspool of a material world.

Against all odds, God gritted his teeth, steeled himself, and entered the fallen realm, after all. But he underestimated the depth of our corruption and was crucified for his troubles. Miraculously, God won in the end, conquering death in the resurrection and revealing Jesus’s “spiritual body,” his immortal core which we all share. Having delivered his message, reminding us of the otherworldly realm, Jesus “ascended to heaven”—which again shows that Jesus’s victory over natural death could only have been another natural illusion. Why did Jesus flee nature? Why didn’t he personally spread the Word rather than let the Word speak for itself, as it were, through the Holy Spirit, that is, through the zeal of fallible Christians? Because the demonic powers of nature are evidently still in place, despite Jesus’s alleged heroism. Jesus fled because he conquered nothing, due to the dualistic logic of Jewish monotheism.

The monotheistic God is transcendent, which means “he” stands apart from the world (and thus God isn’t at all male, for example). Christians borrow monotheism from Judaism, but they combine that with pagan polytheism, giving us the demigod Jesus who battles the rival, demonic demigods that rule nature in the highest God’s inevitable absence. This is why it took God so long to save us, and it’s also why he didn’t really save us at all and why Jesus couldn’t remain on earth in his resurrected body: because Judaism doesn’t sit well with the plain idolatry of pantheism.God waited so long to enter our world, because he’s supposed to be the transcendent, immaterial and thus forever-absent God of the Jews. And as soon as his spiritual war with the demons was won, thanks to Jesus’s resurrection, Jesus had to return to the spiritual realm from whence he came, because the two realms are like oil and water. The spiritual realm should have overwhelmed and fully redeemed the fallen, natural one as soon as the spiritual messiah had defeated his enemies, but alas the fact that Jesus had to ascend to heaven shows that no such ultimate vindication had been accomplished.

That is, in aesthetic terms, the coherence of the Christian narrative demands a metaphysical unification to support Jesus’s moral victory over the forces of evil. God personally entered the fallen world and proved that death no longer has any hold over us, since Jesus died and then rose again, showing us all that death isn’t the end, that there’s a spiritual world out there which is our true home. Alas, that home remains a distant figment of our imagination—according to the Christian narrative itself! Where is Jesus now, according to Christians? Oh, to be sure he “lives in their hearts,” but that’s just Hallmark card sentimentality. The risen Jesus in all his glory is nowhere to be found in nature, because Jesus defeated nothing on the cross. He conquered nothing. Natural forces still control the universe, ensuring the transience of all material things. If he lived at all, the spiritual radical Jesus was defeated by the earthly powers of his time. This is why Christians look forward to “the Second Coming” when Jesus will hopefully finish what he started. Sure, Jesus lived on in some people’s memories and in the lower class’s resentments, but supernatural forces had nothing to do with the origin of Christianity.

Jesus had to ascend to heaven after he rose again, because his death was metaphysically insignificant.Fallen nature plainly endures. And that’s why faith is so important in Christianity. Through Jesus’s “finished work on the cross,” God supposedly won this battle against the forces of original sin, and yet God still counts on us to meet him halfway, to have faith in Jesus, to confess our sins and so on. Only Jesus’s work plus our meager complementary efforts suffice to save us from the tragic fate of being mired in nature. We are fallen creatures, but supposedly we can overcome our limitations and appreciate what God did through Jesus, now that Jesus freed us. Thus, prior to becoming Christian, we’re free and yet not free. Jesus broke the chains that bound us to Plato’s cave, but we still stumble around in that cave until we begin to speak of the bright world beyond the cave’s entrance. Of course, we’re no less corrupt than we’ve ever been; so-called original sin, which is to say our animalistic heritage, remains exactly as it was before the first century CE. The difference between being chained to the cave and stumbling in the cave without being chained is precisely nil; witness the fact that there were spiritual radicals before Jesus’s arrival. Again, no ancient roman crucifixion has had any metaphysical impact on nature whatsoever.

What’s happened instead is that a crypto-Gnostic myth gained hold of the West, which spread semi-Jewish monotheism. That monotheism is only for social outsiders, however, and so it had to be combined with nature-friendly polytheism. Thus, God had to be kept apart from the world, to honour the Jews’ need for a lonely, alienated God who matched their condition as frustrated nomads. But God also had to be made one with the world, to honour the pagan’s positive tribalism and more naked idolatry. This syncretism is the reason for the wishy-washiness of Christian theology. God enters nature but doesn’t triumph over it; the realms remain as separate as they’ve always been and the end of history when God will finally reign is always just over the horizon, like a rainbow, but we can still worship something concrete here and now, namely Jesus. God is alien and beyond our comprehension, which is why Jesus couldn’t tarry after his supposed victory over Death, but the idolater can thrill to Jesus’ behind-the-scenes adventure, as he battled the forces of evil on the cross, travelled to the underworld in the three days before his resurrection and freed the spirits trapped there, and performed more miracles after he rose from the dead. We can have no control over God the Father, but we can claim God’s supernatural victory just by uttering a few magic words, becoming a Christian through faith rather than just deeds.

Again, the deep waters of Christian absurdity flow from this syncretistic origin of the religion. Jewish monotheism plus Roman polytheism equal incoherence at every turn. Of course, because the myths are fictional, the incoherence can be overcome by adding twists to the narrative. But Christians thereby weave a web that traps them. Indeed, all religions are syncretistic. For example, the central Jewish myths are modifications of Babylonian ones. Jewish monotheism assimilated the predominant polytheism. But the ancient Jews were thereby only critiquing their neighbouring cultures. Jews didn’t steal those myths and pass them off as theirs, because Jews hardly ever reigned and they didn’t literalize those myths or confuse the midrashic art of myth-making with the factual telling of history. By contrast, Christians took over the entire Hebrew Bible without even bothering to prove their artistic merits by reworking the stories, even as they violated the essence of Jewish monotheism by concretizing and trivializing the myths, mistaking historical interpretations for ultimate truths. Moreover, Christians sold out the existential, outsider aspect of Judaism, not to mention Jesus’s radical critique of social norms, to accommodate Roman imperialism. The audacity of Christian syncretism—which is to say compromise—is thus boundless.

Allah the Alpha Male

Islam performed much the same role as Judaism except that Muhammad and his early followers were enthusiastic proselytizers, like Saint Paul, rather than alienated and often humiliated outsiders like the Jews. Like the Canaanite and Babylonian religions, pre-Islamic Arabia was polytheistic. Although there were pre-Muhammad monotheists in the region, known as the hunafa, the Arabs at that time were consumed with folklore that posited all manner of supernatural creatures, including ghouls, demons, goblins, and gods, as well as various superstitions such as demon possession and the evil eye. Muslims would call that period jahiliyya, the Age of Ignorance, meaning the time before God decided to guide the Arabs. Just as Jews subscribed to ethical monotheism, teaching that practice is more important than tribal loyalty based on worship of false gods, Muslims preached that petty tribal allegiances are dwarfed by the imperative to submit to God’s will. Islam began as a sort of Jewish fundamentalism which hearkened back to Abraham’s ultimate act of submission, to his obedience to God’s command to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Instead of fearing monsters that hid in the shadows, Arabs should spend all of their religious energy on worshipping the one true God, Allah. God is great, declared the Muslims, and Islam is the systematic submission to God in acknowledgement of that axiom. In place of the Deuteronomic code, Muslims codified sharia, a system of legislation based on the Koran and on the life of Muhammad.

But Islam was no Judaism. Muslims were much more ambitious and less humiliated than the persecuted and conquered Jews. Whereas Jews conceived of a God fit for contented nomads, a solitary, intangible, restless deity at home neither in heaven nor on earth, Muslims projected their urge to dominate, conceiving of God’s greatness mostly in terms of omnipotence, not benevolence or even wisdom. To be sure, Allah is considered great in all respects, but there’s a categorical imperative to submit to Allah only when Allah is thought of as being infinitely more powerful than us, in which case submission is driven by fear and awe. In so far as God is great, meaning transcendent, with respect to his love of all creatures, there’s no reason to submit to God. You don’t submit to someone who loves you. Even in so far as God knows everything, you don’t necessarily want to follow whatever God says, because a truly wise being should understand that less intelligent creatures may need to find their own way. Becoming dependent on revealed wisdom is a sure path to infantilization. Moreover, a wise God would understand that such submission is impossible, at any rate, because divine revelation would have to be interpreted so that the lesser creatures would inevitably guide themselves, which of course is what happened to Islam as soon as Muhammad died: the religion broke into quarrelling sects, as all religions do.

No, Muslims submit to God because Islam replaces the Jewish emphasis on the personal, ethicalrelationship between divine and mortal beings, with a supernatural version of the mammalian dominance hierarchy. In most social species, the weaker members submit to the stronger ones. This is simply a strategy of channeling power to the most useful hands, which belong to the ablest hosts of the species’ genes. It goes without saying that this biological master-slave dynamic makes no sense at all when interpreted as the fitting relationship between a transcendent deity and its creatures. Any positive characterization of that deity is anthropomorphic and thus metaphorical, which is to say that monotheism is logically equivalent to atheism. Again, Judaism implied as much, and Jewish anxiety led the Israelites to imagine a nomadic God who is so absent and immaterial he might as well be nonexistent. But Jews didn’t follow through on their existential revelations and resentments in the wilderness, and so they made a tribal religion out of virtual atheism. In so far as God is inconceivable, it makes as much sense to submit to God as it does to run around with your pants on your head and raspberries stuffed in your ears, and chanting your favourite pop song backwards. As Samuel Beckett understood, those who dwell on the Absolute have an excruciating sense of the absurd and so they’re left waiting for “Godot.” In fact, it makes no difference at all what we do in relation to a truly transcendent God, because there’s necessarily no interaction between us. Again, monotheists with intellectual integrity ought to live as if they were atheists.

In any case, Muslims miss the point about Abraham’s submission to God: the relationship is two-way rather than one-way. Even in nature, alpha mammals depend on betas and gammas, because the genes are best protected by a cohesive group, and so the submission is largely ritualistic and superficial. The weaker members expose their neck or their belly and the leader symbolically damages those delicate areas, to establish the habits that make up the dominance hierarchy. Similarly, God tested Abraham’s dedication to him and when Abraham passed the test, God stopped him from slaying his son and blessed him with abundant progeny. Why, then, does Yahweh care about human submission? Because Yahweh needs us as much as we need him—and perhaps even more so. The monotheistic God learns how to be a person only by interacting with other people and that’s why he creates us, according to the myth’s inner logic. God’s purpose isn’t to terrorize Abraham and demonstrate his superior strength, like a mere predator; rather, it’s to confirm that God has a friend in Abraham, because the monotheistic God is a pathetic figure, as explained in Jack Miles’s God: A Biography. Indeed, it was left to Philipp Mainlander to draw the logical conclusion from the Abrahamic religions, that the isolated, transcendent God would be suicidal.

Zoroastrianism and Postmodern Depravity

All of these monotheistic religions are echoes of Zoroastrianism, which religion in turn was the result of Zoroaster’s explicit simplification of the Persian pantheon in the 7^th century BCE. Zoroaster reduced the many Persian gods to two forces, to constructive and destructive ones, and maintained that good is stronger than evil and that good will vanquish evil in a final cataclysmic battle, leaving the one true God, Ahura Mazda, the light of wisdom. Instead of God creating the world, the world creates God through a process in which we participate by performing good deeds. This process theology influenced all of the subsequent monotheistic religions, including Gnosticism, and it resurfaced in modern Western philosophy, in Hegelian metaphysics, and in the contemporary deification of technology, called transhumanism.

Note that Zoroastrianism is consistent with Richard Dawkins’s Darwinian dictum that being begins with simplicity and becomes more complex through evolution. The prospect of building God by some mechanism or process is at least conceivable, whereas the notion that God is prior to all means of doing anything is flagrantly irrational, since the question remains as to what caused God. Note also that Zoroastrianism reverses Mainlander’s pessimistic theology, according to which God nevertheless is ontologically prior to everything else and creates the world by becoming it through a process of supernatural decay. There are, then, pessimistic and optimistic process theologies, depending on whether the monotheist says God is just the alpha or just the omega. In either case, God isn’t eternal, but comes either at the beginning or the end of a process.

In any case, the conclusion to draw from these considerations is that monotheists inevitably put their mark on their imagined God, thusly signing their fiction. As ideological art, theology serves several purposes, the primary one being the cultural unification of a populace. This unification couldn’t happen if everyone consciously treated theology as the art that it plainly is, so theological speculation is supposed to be about ultimate truth, not just entertainment or the domestication of the masses. In the same way, the monotheist assumes that the transcendent God isn’t any particular thing, but is in fact the ultimate Thing which is identical with nothing, as far as we can think or say. These are the unconscious suspensions of disbelief that are required for theistic religions to work. In the same way, the beta wolf that exposes its neck to the alpha has to fear that the pack leader will tear into it instead of just growling and threatening to do so, which is all that usually happens. That fear is the mortar that holds together the underlying social structure, the pecking order.

Cultures express their vitality with myths that speak to the people’s deepest concerns. Cultural differences, then, naturally show up in different ideas about God. The very idea of the one, ultimate God is a fiction told differently by Jews, Christians, and Muslims to suit their cultural preoccupations. Judaism expresses the weary nomad’s sensibilities, Christianity mainly cynical Roman pluralism at the expense of a creative vision, and Islam the Muslims’ ruthless ambition and machismo. Their Gods are just symbols that embody those cultural identities. But a culture is healthy to the extent that the symbol, which is just an artwork made of ideas, is mistaken for reality so that the believers don’t hesitate to preserve their traditions. Without the traditions the culture declines and the collective way of life is extinguished, more or less as Oswald Spengler theorized.

Monotheistic religions had their day. They made some sense in their time, but now they’re anachronistic. Only empty shells of Judaism and Christianity remain (although institutional Christianity began as little more than such a shell), while Islam still awaits its inevitable reckoning with modernity. New myths are needed to inspire the masses, to make our mark on reality. Alas, the prevailing postmodernmyths are those of popular culture that celebrate avarice, sex, and infamy; that proliferate any number of Hollywood stereotypes and urban legends; and that infantilize the masses and apologize for natural plutocracies and for the elites’ decadenceand dereliction of duty. Our reigning Western myths may be authentic to our cultural identity, but they portray us as cretins who will certainly be derided in the coming centuries just as we naturalists and humanists mock the blinkered monotheists of the premodern age.

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