Suffer the little children: the burden of God

Just when I thought I had a full grasp of the moral depravity that is suicide bombing, another level of horror is revealed. Al Qaeda’s preferred target group for recruiting suicide bomber is—orphans.

As one Pakistani political activist writes:

We have observed that most of the suicides bombers are orphans who are less than 17 years old. These vulnerable children are being used as the main tool for terrorism.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi Interior Ministry has announced that:

Al-Qaeda has over the past two years used 24 children to carry out suicide bombings in Iraq, the director of military operations for the Interior Ministry, Abdelaziz Mohammed Jasim, told pan-Arab daily al-Sharq al-Awsat.

In Somalia, a 13 year old orphan reports on how he was recruited to be a suicide bomber.

Adoption vacuum
Sharia increases the opportunity for jihadis to recruit orphans because it has usually been interpreted to bar adoptions (though a form of guardianship, or khalat, is permitted). Without adoption as an alternative in most Muslim countries, there is a larger pool of vulnerable recruitment targets in orphanages for al Qaeda and its ilk to recruit as self-activating bombs.

It is not surprising that Sharia should be resistant to adoption. Sharia arose in a society where lineage was crucial: the role of daughters was to breed sons for the lineage (hence the propensity for cousin marriage, so they “breed in”). If there is no living parent, a child’s status as “asset” for the lineage is much weakened. And permitting adoption would open up the risk that they become “assets” to another lineage. (As ever, Philip Carl Salzman’s analysis is a necessary starting point for understanding the social dynamics of Islam’s home region.)

There is a push to re-interpret Sharia to permit adoption, part of the general tension between Islam and modernity which has done so much to shape the contemporary jihadi outlook. (Which is not to say that jihadis are merely some modern phenomenon; it has been a recurring feature of Islam that it produces violent “purification” movements—after all, what was the Prophet himself after he took over Medina if not the leader of a violent religious purification movement?)

Use of orphans as a potential political asset is not unique to al-Qaeda. It was widely rumoured that the Romanian Ceaușescu tyranny sought to recruit orphans as loyal secret police operatives. Though not strictly orphans, the Kim dynasty that owns North Korea uses its illegitimate progeny in a similar fashion.

To use orphans as suicidal military assets is, however, rather more distinctively a jihadi activity. Iran used children en masse during its war with Iraq (which makes the regime’s current public angst about plummeting fertility grimly ironic). Child fighters have been a feature in Africa’s horrors and the Tamil Tigers used both child fighters and suicide bombers. But to specifically target orphans for recruitment—indeed, as your preferred source of suicide-bombers—seems a new, vile twist.

But we come back to the point about lineage. Orphans are cut off from family: this makes them both more vulnerable to recruitment and means they come with fewer entanglements. Being no lineage’s “asset”, their loss has fewer social resonances.

Loving death
Of course, part of the horror of using orphans is precisely their vulnerability. The Somali lad telling of how his jihadi recruiter/mentor offered him purpose and love missing from his life is repellent reading. The horror from so using children comes from the violation of innocence and the sense of life thrown away so early. But that assumes one loves and reveres life. This is not a feature of the jihadis.

[Read the rest at Skepticlawyer or at Critical Thinking Applied.]

Monstrosities of nature

Went to a paper at Melbourne University by Francois Soyer on Monstrosities of Nature: Demonic Possession, Ambiguous Gender and the Inquisition in the Early Modern Iberian World which, after putting the Inquisition in context, concentrated on the Portuguese Inquisition’s 1741-4 Maria Duran case.

Maria Duran was a runaway Catalan housewife (she left after her husband contracted syphilis) who went off and became a dragoon officer in the Spanish cavalry. She then turned up as a nun in a Portuguese convent where she had sex with various of the nuns. Her case was referred to the Inquisition. She was arrested in 1741, and interred for two years in solitary confinement. She was then questioned, tortured, tried (the trial record extends to 800 pages, one of the 47,000 trials carried out by the Portuguese Inquisition from its founding in 1536 to its abolition in 1820) and sentenced to 200 lashes and exile. After the sentence was duly carried out in a 1744 auto-de-fe, she disappears from the historical record.

There was witness testimony that she had been examined by a doctor, and found to be “a simple woman” but nuns and other women testified that she had a penis when she had sex with them—some of this recorded testimony was quite graphic. Given the lack of said penis when medically examined, the possibility of a demonic pact had been considered: it was all too hard for the local Church authorities, who referred the matter (and Maria) to the Inquisition. During the period of examination, she was re-examined by a doctor hired by the Inquisition and also made to stand naked in warm water to see if relaxing the muscles would make the alleged penis appear.

The Inquisition decided there was insufficient evidence to accept that any pact or demonic possession had occurred, that there was no sodomy—as no penis—but that she had told the nuns to not tell any confessor about what they had done: this was the crime she was found guilty of, publicly whipped and exiled. The actual details of her crime were not read out, this was felt to be too embarrassing.

Prior to going through the case, Francois Soyer took us through the origins, remit and operating procedures of the Inquisition. Both the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisition were arms of the state (the king appointed the Inquisitor-Generals) staffed by men of the cloth who enforced Church doctrine. They arose out of the problem of the conversoes; determining whether the forced converts were true Christians or not (since, having publicly accepted Christianity, apostasy was not permitted, so there was no going back).

Sexual concerns (homosexuality, bigamy, bestiality, solicitation of sexual favours by priests in the confessional) developed after the 1545-63 Council of Trent. Homosexuality was “sodomy” or “the abominable sin” (so awful, it could not be named). It was part of a demonic plot to destroy Christendom itself, with the example of Sodom and Gomorrah providing warning of what God would do to a society that tolerated it.

The Inquisition used torture but, as it was staffed by men of the cloth, it was not supposed to draw blood, so used bloodless tortures (which included what is now known as ‘waterboarding’). There would also be a doctor present, to ensure the torture did not go too far. A person could only be tortured once, but that was got around by “suspending” torture sessions rather than officially ending them. The auto-de-fe, held annually, were grand spectacles meant to both terrorise and educate. The Inquisition did not actually carry out punishments themselves: the guilty person was “relayed to the secular arm” but it was Church doctrine that was being enforced.

Francois Soyer found striking that, in 350 years (the Spanish Inquisition ran from 1480-1834), the procedures do not change: inquisitors were asking the same questions in its beginnings as they were in its final days. This was a society and an institution where ‘novelty’ was a bad word. The operations of the Inquisition were highly codified. For example, three denunciations were required for arrest: but they could be years apart. The Inquisition had a network of agents to provide information. Charges read out to the arrested person would be stripped of identifying people and place and, once arrested, people would essentially have to prove their innocence. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of trials resulted in guilty verdicts (though not necessarily on all counts).

The Inquisition tended to be sceptical of accusations of demonic possession, it required proof. Exorcism was only likely after such evidence was accepted, particularly if the person renounced the alleged pact. Medical evidence also tended to trump witness statements. The Inquisition was also much less likely to find people guilty of witchcraft than other areas in Europe, such as East Anglia in the 1640s, or parts of the Holy Roman Empire. (Due its insistence on evidence.)

In its own terms, the Inquisition’s concern was for the prisoner’s welfare: their salvation. But it was their welfare not as they might conceive it, but as Church doctrine conceived it. So, the initial examination was put in terms of, having heard the charges, did the person having anything they wanted to unburden themselves over. Reconciliation with the Church was always the first option.

The Portuguese Inquisition recorded about 5,000 denunciations for homosexuality, leading to about 500 trials. Overwhelming, those denounced or tried were men, and generally foreigners. (Makes one wonder if local mores of masculinity was what was being enforced.)

Recolhimento were religious houses for women held to be vulnerable and in danger of falling into prostitution and where they could stay in hopes of reformation (marriage, employment as a domestic, going to a convent). Husbands leaving to go overseas could leave their wives there. Maria had spent some time in one.

‘Hermaphrodites’ (which covered a range of conditions) were accepted as part of nature: what one was supposed to do, however, was pick a gender and stick to it. Failure to do so would attract the attention of the Inquisition.

Francois Soyer’s reading of the evidence of the nuns and other women who had sex with Maria Duran is that they were confronted by having the sex—especially her (to put it mildly) “aggressive” mode of operation—with a woman and concluded she had to be a man (hence the penis) and the devil had to be involved. Maria Duran had previously attracted the attention of the Inquisition over passing as a man: the Spanish Inquisition had merely given her a strict warning not to do it again. But the Inquisition records included details about how she managed to pass as a man—binding her breasts, having a gourd full of water in her pants she would release against a wall, publicly fondling the breasts of women.

I enjoyed the presentation and subsequent discussion, though I was struck by the way the academics and graduate students present had difficulty talking about the gender, sexuality and natural law theological issues. It is not that they said anything silly or stupid, it was just a general diffidence and awkwardness. Admittedly, I have done a fair bit of reading in all three issues: still, it was striking. A useful reminder that, like the nuns confronted by Maria Duran’s sexual predation, dealing with things outside your normal framings can be difficult.

Theology in speculative fiction

[An earlier version of the discussion of Carey and Chan as examples of Taoism in SF was previously posted elsewhere.]

I once asked a friendly wizard to summarise the difference between Buddhism and Taoism. He responded with this story:

The Tale of the Three Vinegar Tasters
Three sages (a Confucian, a Buddhist and a Daoist) walk into a bar. There in the middle of the floor is a big cauldron. Sage 1 steps forward, says I'll handle this and takes a sip. "Ewww! It's sour!" quoth he and recoils from it.

Sage No.2 steps forward, has a taste and says yes. "It's bitter. But then, life itself is bitter, so it all fits really."

Sage No.3 has a taste and says "Hmmmmm. Probably REALLY good with fish and chips."

Which made me laugh, but is also very Taoist, for it gave one much to ponder on very succinctly.

Taoism turns up in various speculative fictions: notably Barry Hughart’s delightful novels of Master Li (who has a slight flaw in his character) and Number Ten Ox. Two speculative fiction authors who incorporate Taoism in their stories in a rather more positive form than does Hughart (who presents the Buddhist-originated Taoist-as-self-seeking-alchemists view) are the urban fantasies of Kylie Chan and Naamah's Kiss by Jacqueline Carey.

Descendants of Angels
Jacqueline Carey is much the better, and more profound, writer. I know that some of my friends who tried the first book in her D'Angeline stories, Kushiel's Dart, were put off by the heroine of the first trilogy, Phedre's, concern for her own beauty and the dark eroticism but, if that does not bother you (or you can get past it), you are taken along in grand stories full of striking characters and a vividly imagined world.

One of the things that most struck me about Carey's D'Angeline stories was her theological insight: her ability to get into how different theological premises lead to very different consequences, including social consequences. The D'Angelines—descended from angels who came to Earth out of love of Elua, the earth-born child of the blood of the crucified Yeshua ben Yosef—are all about beauty and eroticism. To them, rape is heresy but willing eroticism is to be celebrated. They are polytheists for whom sex and gender are part of the divine: not monotheists for whom sex and gender are inherently deeply problematic because sex is not part of the divine and gender is tied up in the absolutely trumping authority of a God conceived as masculine (which thereby associates masculinity with authority and femininity with the lack of it).

Carey is true to her stories. So the heroine of the first trilogy, Phedre, is a courtesan (hence her attractiveness matters deeply to how she makes a living) and an anguissette, someone who can take pleasure from pain. In a sense, she is formed to be a courtesan, and of a very specific sort. Phedre is as she is, in a very particular culture. Just as the hero of the second trilogy, her adopted son of royal and traitorous blood, Imriel, starts off as whiny adolescent because that is what he is, where he is coming from. But he ends up somewhere well beyond that. (And, to be fair, he had some fairly horrible boyhood experiences.)

Phedre’s trilogy does not only explore the implications for human actions of our cosmological assumptions, to use the language Deepak Lal invokes to analyse culture, but also a world where theology really is history, really is grappling with part of how things are. In the last book of Phedre’s trilogy, Kushiel’s Avatar, what had seemed an interesting backdrop for the stories becomes a fundamental driver of the narrative as the aspirations of even the most cunning mortal characters become the flotsam of the plans of gods. Carey explores what serving a divinity that genuinely hungered for destruction would be like. Yet, even here, Carey gift for making even her villains understandable – which makes them all the more memorable and effective as characters – can make a monster a person yet still be a monster: they are made comprehensible, they are not thereby justified or vindicated.

Showing that the theological insight about monotheism and polytheism is not a one-off, Carey explains the difference between Taoism and Buddhism rather well in Naamah's Kiss, the first book of her third D’Angline trilogy. Our heroine, Moirin—part D'Angeline, part Old Folk of Alba (Britain)—becomes the student of Master Lo Feng, a Daoist sage from far Ch'in. In the course of their travels, the men of the party she is in, including Master Lo Feng, disguise themselves as Buddhist monks. So he introduces them to the teachings of the Enlightened One. There and elsewhere in the story, Carey shows she gets the difference rather well.

[Read the rest at Skepticlawyer.]

Why Latin Christendom overtook Islam (and Orthodox Christendom)

Scholars and others write about the golden age of Islam, how it created a brilliant, urban and urbane, sophisticated and scientifically curious civilisation when Latin Christendom was sunk in a Dark Age.

This is broadly true. Islam was the crossroads civilisation, the one in touch with all the other major civilisations of Eurasia, and so able to mix and match ideas. It had access to the achievements of Greek science. It had a common language of scholarship (Arabic). It used these advantages in a flourishing period of Classical Islam. Then Islam declined into a spreading stagnation—intellectual, scientific, technological, economic. So, the question arises, as Bernard Lewis famously asked, what went wrong?

What did not go wrong was the West. With exception of the Reconquista, Islam spent a thousand years generally advancing against Christendom until the Battle of Vienna in 1683. The stagnation of Islam was not caused by the West: on the contrary, it was the stagnation of Islam that allowed the West to counter-attack successfully and conquer most of Islam, to the extent that, by 1942, the only Islamic countries which were not protectorates or colonies were Turkey and Afghanistan. Even in 1453, when Sultan Mehmet II was about to take Constantinople, he was using guns which relied on infidel gunners.

So, what advantages did Latin Christendom, perched on a bunch of peninsulas on the edge of the Eurasian landmass, have?

The key factors are:
A range of political forms.
A range of legal forms.
Stronger use of the hereditary principle.
Effective competitive jurisdictions.
Belief in an ordered cosmos.
Ability to harness talent.

Most of these applied to also advantage Latin Christendom over Orthodox Christendom, which had the further disadvantage of suffering far more from Islamic and Mongol depredations.
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A range of political forms
Islam essentially only had one political model: autocracy. The autocrat might merely be a warrior king, or he might be able to claim extra religious sanction, but all Muslim rulership was autocratic. By contrast, Latin Christendom had republics, self-governing cities, hereditary monarchies and elective monarchies that varied notably within themselves and typically came to incorporate the representative principle, as it spread from the innovations of Alfonso IX of Leon and Castile. This political variety meant that Latin Christendom had far more institutional possibilities for the selection processes of history to work on.

A range of legal forms
Although Islam has a variety of schools of jurisprudence, it has only one basic set of laws, Shar’ia. While Islamic law was taken to come from God, in Latin Christendom, all law was human, even canon law. Latin Christendom had a wide range of legal system and laws, all of which were alterable. Latin Christendom had far more possibilities for the selection processes of history to work on plus the capacity to engage in legal experiments far more easily.

Stronger use of the hereditary principle
Not only was the hereditary principle much more widespread in Latin Christendom, applying strongly throughout the political and social structure, so much more stable across the society (since those who might attack hereditary suzerains were themselves holding their lands and service on the basis of the hereditary principle). It was also, with the evolution of primogeniture, much more stable in its internal operation within dynasties and landed families.

In Islam, warriors held tax farming rights, not lands, and these rights were revocable at any time, and were not heritable, being allocated according to the whim of the ruler. Amin Malouf contrasts the situation where peaceful succession occurred moderately regularly in the crusader states with the surrounding Muslim states thus:

Nothing of the sort existed in the Muslim states. Every monarchy was threatened by the death of its monarch, and every transmission of power provoked civil war … Let us note that in the Arab world the question is still on the agenda, in scarcely altered terms, in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Being landlords, the warrior elite of Latin Christendom had, compared to the Muslim warrior elite, much more interest in the long-term productivity of land and peasants, since that preserved (and hopefully expanded) their children(s) inheritance (what economists call longer time horizons).

Muslim traveller and chronicler ibn Jubayr noticed the difference, again contrasting the crusader states of Outremer with their Muslim neighbours:

Upon leaving Tibin (near Tyre), we passed through an unbroken skein of farms and villages whose lands were efficiently cultivated. The inhabitants were all Muslims, but they live in comfort with the Franj—may God preserve us from temptation! Their dwellings belong to them and all their property is unmolested. All the regions controlled by the Franj in Syria are subject to this same system: the landed domains, villages, and farms have remained in the hands of the Muslims. Now, doubt invests the heart of a great number of these men when they compare their lots to that of their brothers living in Muslim territory. Indeed, the latter suffer from the injustice of their coreligionists, whereas the Franj act with equity.

Incentives make a difference. There will be more investment in the creation and maintenance of productive assets, and better relations with people working those assets, the longer the time horizon of those controlling said assets. Over centuries, even a marginal difference in such things generation after generation will add up to major differences in economic outcomes and institutional development.

Effective competitive jurisdictions
Rulership in the Muslim world was autocratic. It was also unstable. The pattern of pastoralist conquest of settled river valleys establishing regimes which decay and are then replaced, as described by ibn Khaldun—and whose dynamics have been further explicated by more recent anthropological work, particularly by Phillip Carl Salzman—created fluctuating and unstable rulerships. This was not a good basis for institutional evolution. In particular, it was not a good basis for competitive jurisdictions to operate effectively in driving institutional development. Particularly once most of the Muslim Middle East became dominated by Ottoman rule.

Contrasting with the Middle Eastern pattern of isolated river valleys and coastal plains constantly threatened by nomadic hinterlands, Europe—as a mountainous peninsula of peninsulas, which inhibited unification ambitions while promoting the flow of ideas, goods, people and capital—had greater continuity in polities and in jurisdictional divisions. Competitive jurisdictions operated over time to develop institutions that embodied social learning including stronger defense of private property, more dispersed power arrangements driven by competition amongst jurisdictions to attract capital (financial, human, etc).

The same processes operated in the mountainous archipelago of Japan, but with less variety in law, political forms and cultural influences to work with. The Reformation—with its creation of greater religious variety—and the global break-out with the age of exploration making Latin Christendom the crossroads civilisation—the one in contact with all the others so able to mix and match ideas and capacities—magnified the effectiveness of competitive jurisdictions in driving technological, commercial and institutional development.

Belief in an ordered cosmos
From the C11th to the C13th centuries, all three of the Abrahamic monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) struggled with the impact of Aristotelian philosophy on the tradition of scriptural revelation. In Judaism (as epitomised by Maimonedes) and in Christianity (as epitomised by St Thomas Aquinas) Aristotelianism—and the belief in an ordered creation—won.

Not so in Islam. There the Aristotelianism of Ibn Rushd aka “Averroes” (whose writings were very influential in Latin Christendom) was decisively defeated by the occasionalism of al Ghazali. Mainstream Islam turned its back on the notion of an ordered cosmos, without which the further development of science is impossible. Even in contemporary Islam, there are continuing difficulties with science and a low rate of research and development.

I would argue that this outcome in Islam was significantly driven by the context of tribal society and predatory autocracy encouraging a particular conception of God whereby to suggest He was bounded in any way was a slight on His honour. Conversely, the notion of God—as the ultimate Good Authority—creating a structured order rather than being an arbitrary tyrant fitted in with Classical, Germanic, Celtic and (ultimately) Christian and Jewish notions of proper authority. Though, in both Christianity and Judaism, there were adherents of untrammelled Godly authority, these have always tended to lose out over time.

This belief in an ordered cosmos, assisted by the religious diversity after the Reformation (where priestly control over printing in Catholic Europe encouraged printing of banned books in Protestant Europe), the reaction against the Wars of Religion, plus the wealth of information brought back by the voyages of discovery and by exploration of the cosmos undermining Aristotelian physics, set the stage for the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and—coupled with the long-term effects of competitive jurisdictions and the diversity and forces for productiveness feeding into that—to Western economic, technological, intellectual and (for a while) territorial domination of the globe.

Ability to utilise talent
‘Islam’ literally means ‘submission’. A Muslim is ‘one who submits’. That is, submits to the word (and rule) of God. The trouble is, Islam is a system of layered submission, which turns it into a system of domination: believers dominate non-believers under the dhimmi system, men dominate women. In Latin Christendom, women were rulers and generals (Æthelflæd, Lady of Mercia, Mathilda of Tuscany), intellectual figures (Hildegard of Bingen), saints (Theresa of Avila), writers (Marie de France, Christine de Pizan) and so on in ways that were simply not true of Islam at the same time. There were far more women rulers in Middle Eastern history before Islam conquered the region than after.

Germanic law, Celtic law, Roman law before Christianisation all treated women much better than did Sharia. Even after Christianisation, Roman law and canon law were still better for women than Sharia. Which meant that Latin Christendom was better at harnessing the skills of its women than was Islam. As George Patton observed:

To me it seems certain that the fatalistic teachings of Muhammad and the utter degradation of women is the outstanding cause for the arrested development of the Arab. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have kept on developing.

Latin Christendom used female talent much more than did Islam, an advantage that has accelerated over time.

In embracing new knowledge and technology, Latin Christendom became Western Civilisation. As a result of the Enlightenment, Western Civilisation also began to harness the skills of its Jewish population in ways that Islam had long since abandoned and far more than Islam had ever done. Consider simply how many Jews have won Nobel Prizes, particularly in science.

Islam as a system of domination
Classical Islam was far more tolerant (at least outside Arabia), and far better at harnessing the talents of conquered dhimmis, than later Islam. That was due to the shift in the costs of intolerance. When Muslims were a small ruling layer over a majority non-Muslim population, the costs of intolerance were high. As Muslims became a larger and larger proportion of the population, the costs of intolerance fell and its level rose. The long-term tendency of Islam has been to become less tolerant, not more. Ottoman rule was the most murderously intolerant at the end of its rule, not the beginning. Just as the Jews fled the Muslim Middle East after the creation of Israel, so Christians have also been leaving.

Which means that Islam is less and less able to harness the talents and perspectives of non-believers (except as guest workers).

One can see similar patterns within Latin Christendom of intolerance increasing as its costs fell (Norman-cum-Hohenstaufen Sicily; Reconquista Spain with the expulsion of the Jews and the Moriscos) but the dominant long-term tendency in Western civilisation has been very much the other way.

Winston Churchill, in his book on the Sudan campaign of 1898, The River War, famously wrote:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries.
Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.
The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.
No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

There is something in what Churchill says. Islam is a universal monotheism without the softening factors of “love thy neighbour”, “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” and natural law theory. The things that saved Christianity from itself do not operate in Islam. One will search in vain for a text in Islam of similar sentiments and similar authority as Pope Paul III’s 1537 encyclical Sublimus Dei:

… to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.

It is clearly in the intellectual tradition that fed into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Something that has not escaped the attention of, for example, the Islamic Republic of Iran:

In his 7 December 1984 statement to the UN General Assembly's Third Committee, the Iranian representative, Mr. Rajaie-Khorassani, again put on record his country's position on the UDHR:

In his delegation's view, the concept of human rights was not limited to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Man was of divine origin and human dignity could not be reduced to a series of secular norms [...] certain concepts contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights needed to be revised. [Iran] recognized no authority or power but that of Almighty God and no legal tradition apart from Islamic law. As his delegation had already stated at the thirty-sixth session of the General Assembly, conventions, declarations and resolutions or decisions of international organizations, which were contrary to Islam had no validity in the Islamic Republic of Iran.[...] The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which represented a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition, could not be implemented by Muslims and did not accord with the system of values recognized by the Islamic Republic of Iran; his country would therefore not hesitate to violate its provisions, since it had to choose between violating the divine law of the country and violating secular conventions.

Islamic countries have felt the need to adjust the Declaration, issuing the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. It is precisely the universalism of the Universal Declaration (identified as “Judaeo-Christian”) that is objected to on Islamic grounds. (That there is an Organisation of Islamic Conference is revealing in itself: no one thinks to have an organization of Christian, Catholic or Buddhist states, for example.)

It is worth noting that as soon as the “love thy neighbour” precept is subverted, the behaviour of Christianity converges with that of Islam as the dynamics of universal monotheism—of supporting a (masculinized) divine sovereignty against which no human claims have standing—take over. Hence the Christian origins of dhimmitude, Georgian and Regency England and C18th Netherlands killing men for having sex at about the same rate as that of contemporary Iran as well as common law denial of property and other legal rights of married women.

Or sometimes even more so than in Islam. Consider the famous reaction of the Ottoman Sultan regarding the tens of thousands of Jews whose wealth and skills were now his to benefit from after Ferdinand and Isabella's expulsion of the Jews:

How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king, the same Ferdinand who impoverished his own land and enriched ours?

(Note the Sultan apparently does not consider Isabella worth noting as a ruler in her own right.)

Still, in its purest form, gospel Christianity bans one from using God to oppress one’s fellow human beings. In its purest form, the Islam of the Qur’an and the hadith permits, indeed requires, believers to use God to oppress their fellow human beings. People being people, Christians have often done precisely that, while many Muslims have failed to do so. But the underlying logics remain what they are.

Indeed, the most important dynamic in Christian history is that priests are the means by which Christianity is propagated but priests get their power from being “gatekeepers of righteousness”, from subverting love thy neighbour so that they can say who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down. Hence it is very apposite that the patron saint of preachers was a queer-hating, Jew-hating misogynist. That dynamic of propagating-but-subverting is at the heart of Christian history. Christ, after all, was crucified for subverting and denying priestly authority—what were the moneylenders in the Temple if not use of God to oppress one’s fellow humans?

The Quakers rejection of priesthood may not be coincidental to their very positive reputation. [Just as the oppressive history of the Catholic Church owes so much to its very elevated notion of priesthood.]

Plague and knowledge
The point is sometimes made that Islam suffered particularly from the effects of the Black Death. But, of course, so did Latin Christendom. The difference was that the Black Death in Middle Eastern Islam led to the undermining of commercial vitality and increased autocratic domination. Conversely, the Black Death in Latin Christendom had reverse effects: leading to more technological dynamism, commercialisation and mercantile power.

Similarly, Latin Christendom made massively more use of becoming the cross-roads civilisation than Islam had when it was so. Indeed, the exploration efforts of Prince Henry the Navigator, and Isabella’s sponsorship of Christopher Columbus, were both specifically aimed at outflanking Islam. At which they were spectacularly successful. (Henry and Isabella both being crusaders.)

The only reason the Muslim Middle East matters nowadays is because of oil: itself parasitic on Western technology. There are a lot of reasons for the long-term failure of Islam, but they are internal to Islam—to Islam as a religion and to the geography that created and moulded it. And oil itself is a curse as much as a blessing, since it entrenches autocratic rule and funds religious obscurantism in the same way silver flows undermined Iberian parliamentarism and entrenched autocracy and funded religious obscurantism in Spain and Portugal.

What is Middle Eastern Islam without oil? Try Afghanistan, or Yemen, or Pakistan, or Egypt. An American soldier makes the point very bluntly:

Had the Crusades not been waged; had the Habsburg Monarchy not turned back the Ottoman tide at the end of the 17th Century; had Isabel of Castile not driven the Moors from Grenada, you would not be reading this diatribe. You would be illiterate, ruled by a tyrant, and squatting on the dirt floor of a mud-brick shack picking your nose.

Perhaps the prospect of Muslim domination of Latin Christendom was not quite that much a near run thing. But its consequences would have been fairly grim. I doubt geography would have been enough, on its own, to counteract the other factors. As V.S.Naipaul observed, Islam is very thorough in its colonising of conquered lands.

All of which makes modernity very confronting for contemporary Islam. Hence the rise of Islamism and jihadi terror as modernising revolts against modernity both within Islamic countries and among Muslim émigré communities. Just as fascism and Nazism were modernising revolts against modernity in the period 1919-1945. Hezbollah, Hamas, al Qaeda, the Iranian regime are the equivalents of the NSDAP and similar movements.

No Islamic country has comparable power now to that of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan in the 1930s, but the organising and destructive capacities of modern technology provide their own level of threat. And there are far less bases inherent within Islam both for a full embracing of modernity, or to oppose said modernising revolts against modernity.

The reasons why Islam stagnated and Latin Christendom did not—indeed, came, as Western Civilisation, to dominate the globe—still operate. And continue to generate policy dilemmas.

ADDENDA This post has been edited to clarify and extend (but not change) arguments.

Theological Incorrectness

The growth of cognitive science has been one of the major intellectual advances of the last few decades. Largely kicked off by Noam Chomsky’s rethinking of the human aptitude for language, and attracting noted popularisers (such as Steven Pinker), it has been spreading across intellectual life. That humans have finally created something that is vaguely analogous to human cognition in its operation (computers)—something, moreover which we can “see” inside of—may have had something to do with this. (Chomsky works at MIT, after all.)

D. Jason Slone’s Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t presents the application of the findings of cognitive science to the study of religion. One of the strengths of the book is its presentation and synthesis of the work of a wide range of scholars.

Slone starts with two observations which are striking, given that religion is supposed to provide absolute truth: there is more than one religion in the world and religion contains all sorts of things people have to guess at (since most of us do not get to chat with the various superhuman beings religion postulates) (p.vii). But it is the difference between what people say they believe when “formally” asked and what they believe and do when making more rapid or personal decisions—the reality that received ideas from one’s culture (including theological ones) play only a partial role in what people say and do (p.4)—which is the starting place of the book’s analysis.
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The book has great chapter titles. Chapter One (Religion Is For Dummies and Romantics) notes, building on the work of psychologist Justin Barrett, how common it is, across religions and cultures, for people to believe what they are not supposed to, given the tenets of the religion they adhere to. A fact that, Slone points out, much analysis of religion neither pays attention to, nor can cope with.

When people engage in “online” (rapid, tacitly informed, cognitively constrained, prereflective) representations they often engage in abductive reasoning—constructing general principles to explain particular events (p.10). “God willed it” is a form of abductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning is efficient, in the sense that it provides answers without the effort of logical deduction (or, for that matter, empirical checking). Slone’s argument is that we use familiar cognitive processes that have evolved in ways that encourage religious belief, but often not theologically correct religious belief.

Before proceeding with his analysis, Slone argues for the scientific study of religion—noting both religion and science display differences between folk representations and reflective theories (p.12)—and critiques various traditional approaches to the study of religion. The first attempts at serious study he divides into naturalists (religion has a natural origin) and nonnaturalists (it does not), the latter further divided into socioculturalists (religion was generated by society or culture) and transcendentalists (religion comes from the interaction with supernatural reality). All of them were subject to postmodernist critique, not least because it became obvious that reliance on texts and “official” doctrine produced idealised, and thus inaccurate, pictures of religion as it actually was in the world (p.27).

Chapter Two, Religion Is What Your Parents Say is an extended critique of cultural explanations of religion. Slone brings out just how porous the concept of ‘culture’ is and how dubious use of it as an explanation (particularly for behaviour that is both variant with cultures and common across them). Included is both a nice description of postmodernist critiques and a useful critique of them. As he says:

Philosophically speaking, postmodernists have not explained anything. They have merely restated the question and affirmed the consequent (p.40).

The collection of data has been very useful, but its use has been greatly restricted by inadequate analytical approaches (p.45)

Chapter Three Religion Is Perfectly Natural, Not Naturally Perfect examines the use of cognitive sciences to study religion. The point is to concentrate on the ‘representations’ (what and how people think about religion) not on the content-claims of religious systems (much of which refer to imagined beings and forces not amenable to direct observation). Slone notes that Chomsky’s work is foundational for modern cognitive science because it gave confidence to the claim that culture is how it is because of the way our brains work, not the other way round (p.48).

The research has found that people use available conceptual schemes, but different ones in different circumstances (p.53). But certain features of the human cognition are more general (distinguishing between objects and agents, for example).

So, what makes a conceptual scheme religious?

A religious representation is representation that postulates the existence of superhuman agents (p.55).

As agents, they can act. Hence humans doing things to gods and gods doing things to humans (e.g. ordination, which apparently occurs in some form or other across religions) are both basic features of religion. And we have a natural tendency to over-attribute agency, since to under-attribute it tends to be more dangerous (p58).

We have an intuitive ontology, a sense of what is in the world, typically covering five categories—natural objects, artificial things, plants, animals, humans (p.60). Objects that people typically categories prototypically, not according to rigorous classical definitions (p.70). Religious representations violate that intuitive ontology, but do in a way that is surprising and thus memorable (i.e. “cognitively optimal”).

Such representations can be transferred doctrinally or “imagistically” but how counterintuitive they are will affect how easily they can be transferred. God being formless but omnipresent is harder to transfer than recently deceased ancestors can hear your prayers (p.63).

Chapter Four, Buddha Nature sets out how powerful and pervasive the notion of superhuman agents is in religion. Even in Theravada Buddhism, which allegedly is nontheistic. In reality, the notion that Buddhism is nontheistic is, Slone argues, a rather modernistic version of Buddhism transmitted to the West in response to the impact of modernist Protestantism and not reflected in folk Buddhism. So, Theravada Buddhism has a nun problem because it took a monk and a nun in lineage (ordination) succession to make another nun: the nun lineages all died, out so it is no longer possible to make another Theravada Buddha nun (Pp81-3).

Chapter Five (W.D.G.D.: What Does God Do?) looks at how people actually think about God (rather than as they are theologically supposed to). In particular, the persistence of the notion that we are a “locus of control” even in the face of theological notions of (for example) Predestination.

We are intuitively inclined to see causes, even when evidence is ambiguous. Add our tendency to abductively attribute agency, and religious reasoning clearly operates with natural human cognitive tendencies and is greatly advantaged in transmission if it does so:

… human beings are more likely to believe and employ a religious idea if it is (fairly) consistent with the accords of everyday cognitive concepts and inferences (p.91).

A nice example is how Calvinism was the dominant original theological position among the Puritans but Arminianism has come to dominate American Protestantism (Pp93-6). Effective preaching (and effective ritual) works with the natural processes of human cognition (p.98), particularly the tendency to attribute agency and cause (p.99).

The hypothesis that effective rituals need to:

… balance the special agent rituals (those rituals in which humans are recipients of actions from gods via priests) and special patient rituals (those in which gods are the recipients of actions from humans (p.99)

is applied to the rise of Baptism in American Protestantism, as the Puritan (now Congregationalist) and Presbyterian downgrading of baptism (to deal with children of members who had not experienced a common conversion event) led to a lot of conversions to Baptism, which used adult baptism as a central ritual event (p.100).

The central thesis Slone draws from the work of scholars engaged in the cognitive study of religion is:

Rituals and other religious activities … seem to follow from religious concepts. Yet the religious concepts do not determine, per se, what follows. Rather, it appears that cognitive processes drive the thoughts and actions of religious believers at both the individual and cultural levels (p.100).

The decline in Calvinism, which its deprecation of human agency, is a case in point.

Slone argues that long-running religious controversies make sense in terms of the patterns of human cognition:

The conceptual tension between divine sovereignty and free will, which has preoccupied some of the greatest minds in history, is a natural tension in Christianity that results from how the mind works. Since humans rely so heavily on notions of self-/human agency, it is difficult to believe that superhuman agents control everything. Yet, if they don’t, what exactly is the nature of their power? (p.101)

A tension which preliminary research suggests occurs across cultures.

One can see how human cognition might find any particular solution problematic. Not sure that that means human cognition is causing the inherent intellectual difficulty, however.

Chapter Six (I Would Rather Be Lucky Than Good) looks at luck beliefs (which show similar patterns across human cultures) and how the mind deals with probability. There is considerable research that humans tend to imbue things with purpose (grist to the natural law philosophy mill, of course) and have often very poor probability intuitions (e.g. ask a class how likely they feel it would be for two of them to have a birthday on the same day: their estimates will be much lower than the actual likelihood—in a class of at least 23, over 50%) (p.116).

The brute fact that Slone bases his analysis on, and explores in Theological Incorrectness is that religious people believe all sorts of things that, in terms of the doctrines of their religion, they should not. That is, religion as a cognitive and cultural experience is not defined by the doctrines of theologians.

But nor is it defined by “culture”. As Slone points out in his conclusion:

… cultural theories of religion are impoverished by lack of understanding of how the mind works and thus of why humans think what they and do what they do. Sociocultural theories of religion assume that the mind is a blank slate that learns what to think from culture. Not only is this mind-blind assumption inaccurate but it is illogical … Were humans merely cultural sponges we would find that each culture would be autonomous, confined and homogeneous … This paradigmatic assumption does not fit the facts.
A better explanation for why people believe what they “shouldn’t” is that people have active minds that are continuously engaged in the construction of novel thoughts and the transformation of culturally transmitted ideas (p.121).

If we look to the human mind we find that:

Three very important aspects of cognition that constrain religion are intuitive ontology (what kinds of things are in the world), intuitive causality (how do these things work), and intuitive probability (how things are likely to work). These basic cognitive capacities not only allow us to perform important functions required for survival, like analysis and prediction of environmental activity, but also produce postulations and presumptions that might be, on reflection, systematically incoherent. In this sense, theological incorrectness is a natural by-product of the cognitive tools in our mind-brains. (p.122)

And it is to evolution that we need to look to understand where those cognitive capacities come from, and why they are like they are. Not that that is a counsel of despair, moral or otherwise:

Religions preach ethics because people are prone to “ethical” behaviour, not the other way around (p.123).

Slone then makes a claim that strikes me as being too strong:

One can say, therefore, that religion is not a cause of behaviour per se. It does not determine how we think or act.

It is not the only determinant, but to suggest that belief does not have logics, and that people do not act on those logics, is just silly. Leninism, Nazism, liberalism: the doctrinal differences between these political ideologies really do matter. I take his point that cognitive habits act upon doctrines, but it is also true that people can (and do) adopt particular doctrines and act upon them. Consider this rather nice TED talk on how basic religious beliefs affect business (and other) practices.

A point Slone then immediately appeals to himself, as he concludes his book arguing strongly that religion can only be studied properly in the light of our understanding of how human cognition works: it must be scientifically grounded. Slone notes that such scientific “reductionism” no more abolishes other ways of comprehending things than knowledge of how light and sight works abolishes appreciation of the beauty of a Monet painting (p.124).

Theological Incorrectness is a fascinating excursion through religion as it ‘is’, its distance from religion as it ‘ought’ and the use of cognitive science to explicate that distance.

Culture and Conflict (II): Conceptions of God

Building on Anthropologist Phillip Carl Salzman's analysis discussed in my previous post, since God is the ultimate Authority, conceptions of God reflect the prevailing conceptions of authority. Thus, if authority is male, God is gendered as male: as He is in all the Middle Eastern monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and quasi-monotheism (Zoroastrianism). They are all very much God-the-Father religions. Judaism and Zoroastrianism are both particularist monotheisms lacking universalist aspirations. (Very Middle Eastern in a sense – our God is the God of the universe, but He is ours, so there.) The two universalist monotheisms – Christianity and Islam – arose in very different contexts with very different conceptions of authority and thus very different conceptions of God.

Christianity – growing up within a law-bound Roman Empire – was not originally concerned with political authority and social order (the Romans took care of those) but with moral order. But the legacy of Greek political thought and Roman order made it natural to think of God as law-bound, as a law-keeper. Otherwise He was a capricious and wilful tyrant. So the idea of God as a “constitutional monarch” who ruled over an ordered Creation, because a good ruler is law-bound, was natural to Christianity. In the words of Adelard of Bath in the C12th:

I do not detract from the power of God, for all that exists does so from him and by means of His power. However, this is not to say that nature itself is chaotic, irrational, or made up of discrete elements. Therefore it is possible for men to achieve an understanding of this rational order inherent in nature, an understanding as complete as the extent to which human knowledge progresses.

Even the conception of the Trinity creates a sense of God as being ordered.

Conversely, Islam grew up in a deeply tribal society where Muhammad created a political order as part of his new religious order. A tribal society based on balanced opposition with a radiating pattern of loyalties that get more intense the closer the kin connection. “Me against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and my brothers against the world” as the Arab proverb runs.

In tribal society, honour comes from winning, since one’s loyalties are entirely defined by connection and opposition. The more complete the victory, the greater the honour – for the greater the triumph over the defining opponent. So, the greater the domination, the greater the authority, for the greater the honour. Hence to suggest any limit on the absolute sovereignty of Allah is to impugn His honour. Even in suggesting that there is any ordering in His will. Contrast Adelard of Barth’s contemporary Al-Ghazali in his deeply influential The Incoherence of the Philosophers on precisely the same topic as Adelard was writing on above:

our opponent claims that the agent of the burning is the fire exclusively; this is a natural, not a voluntary agent, and cannot abstain from what is in its nature when it is brought into contact with a receptive substratum. This we deny, saying: The agent of the burning is God, through His creating the black in the cotton and the disconnexion of its parts, and it is God who made the cotton burn and made it ashes either through the intermediation of angels or without intermediation. For fire is a dead body which has no action, and what is the proof that it is the agent? Indeed, the philosophers have no other proof than the observation of the occurrence of the burning, when there is contact with fire, but observation proves only a simultaneity, not a causation, and, in reality, there is no other cause but God.

(Philosophers might note David Hume’s argument on causation being put several centuries before Hume.)

It is not hard to see which view is more conducive to the development of science. But not only the development of science. For if to suggest there are limits to the absolute sovereignty of Allah is to impugn His honour, then it is an easy step to the jihadi view that democracy is blasphemous because it intrudes on the sovereignty of Allah. Just as prevailing notions of authority affect the conception of God; conceptions of God, in turn, affect how the world is understood.

Al-Gazali’s view was contested within Islam – Ibn Rushd (Averroes) wrote his The Incoherence of the Incoherence in response. But al-Ghazali’s view won out because it resonated in Middle Eastern culture. Averroes was far more influential in the West, because his views resonated among the Christian heirs to Classical civilisation.

It is a great mistake to not acknowledge that Islam is a different civilisation, with different fundamental presumptions, than our own. Salzman’s book is deeply enlightening about those differences and from whence they arise.