This is a post for those who think that religion lies behind the geopolitical conflicts of the world. I write in response to those political cretins who continue to blame religion for 9/11, in complete ignorance of history, context, and aftermath. That ignorance is, of course, wilful, a deliberate evasion of some very awkward questions.
I mean the kind of people who post the “Imagine no religion” quote set against the backdrop of the Twin Towers. Do a quick google and you will find that meme all over the place. Sharing a meme saves hard thinking, let alone engaging in some hard politics. Shallow in the extreme. Politics and philosophy by soundbite, a massaging of unthinking prejudice.
This kind of thing is wrong on so many levels that it is not even worth making the effort to respond. But a quick riposte might serve some purpose. It may be better to be reasoned rather than abusive, and raise some awkward questions in an attempt to make those pointing the finger at religion here think.
Forget the dull, dreary repetitive indulgence of Lennon’s Imagine, how about really trying to show some imagination and imagine religion. That means going beyond flaws so obvious that the lamest of intelligences can see them and grasp the core of religious truth. Use a phrase like that and the brave soldiers of the positivist age stand in need of revival by smelling salts. I have another revivalism in mind, that of the imagination.
To see things as they really are, the eye must catch fire. In fact, there needs to be a full sensuous awakening.
‘Unless the eye catch fire, The God will not be seen
Unless the ear catch fire, The God will not be heard
Unless the tongue catch fire, The God will not be named
Unless the heart catch fire, The God will not be loved
Unless the mind catch fire, The God will not be known.’
William Blake, Pentecost
Some kinds of ‘atheism’ are as easy as falling off a log in this godless age, which is why so many indulge in falling off. I spare genuine atheists, who are too busy affirming life and its qualities to engage militant assertions of ignorance and prejudice.
The target I am aiming at here is so soft as hardly to be worth bending down to aim a blow at. The irony of people extolling the virtues of imagination whilst sharing a lazy two-bit Internet meme is hilarious. Are people really so deadened in all sensibility as to be oblivious to their inanity?
Like Einstein said …
Like Wittgenstein said …
‘When we can’t think for ourselves, we can always quote.’ (Wittgenstein).
This is interesting. I went to a Catholic sixth form and was taught by the brothers. To the jaundiced Lennonists out there, this is ripe terrain for indoctrination. It was the opposite. Stuck for an answer in class, I said ‘I don’t know.’ Brother Victor angrily shouted ‘think!’ We were all encouraged to think, question, be critical.
Think!
‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’
Although knowledge also comes in handy with the ignorant, the prejudiced, and the bigoted (religion and irreligious both).
It’s not worth a blow on a rag man’s trumpet, in truth.
So why am I blowing so hard on this? Because such posts are not really about religion, they are about politics, and a rotten rancid politics at that.
I spent the best part of my life as an atheist. Well into the 2000s, the argument of much of my written work was avowedly atheist. If I didn’t spell it out philosophically, my critical analysis was often directly irreligious. I argued for an ascending theme of power, from the individuals composing the demos upwards to self-constituted forms of authority, as against the descending theme which saw power as deriving from God. But I read widely, think deeply, engage with others, and learn by experience – and my life has often been a hard experience. As a survivor of the Hillsborough Disaster of 1989, I started to question life and its meaning and purpose (if any) deeply. I’m not alone in doing this. My book on Dante – a profoundly religious thinker who knew the tragedy of exile– will shortly be published. My work on Tolkien, another deeply religious thinker, has garnered substantial praise in recent years. (Citations at the bottom). Tolkien himself is a much respected figure, a man who was on the Somme and lost all his friends in that battle. He was a great scholar, not a stupid man, and not to be dismissed with a line from a dreary pop song written by a dreary narcissist. “I don’t believe in anything but me,” as Lennon’s “God” goes. Ayn Rand would love it, centred as it is on the deified “I.” It’s perfect for an age in which solipsism seems to hold all the trump cards, and the solipsists are out in force asserting their right to do as they please and think as they like – to the extent of posting the tired clichés of memes, that is. Which is about as much political and intellectual effort as they can muster.
I now argue for ‘the reality of religious truth and experience.’ The book I wrote to that effect hit a top 5% on Academia after publication in 2018. It was volume 3 of a study on the two hundredth anniversary of Marx’s birthday. Over the first two volumes I argue – quite cogently I think (and John Bellamy Foster for one sang my praises) – for the relevance of Marx’s critical and emancipatory theory. But in volume 3 I identified a failing in the atheistic core of Marx’s argument, something which effectively opened the route to the age-old delusion of ‘men as gods,’ discrete individuals seeking to live in accordance with their own self-created values and recognising no truth outside of those. Nietzsche’s view that there are no facts only interpretations stands in this line of descent, and is militantly irreligious. I expose the flaws in this mode of thinking systematically. So I am not engaged in any religious apologetics here, but a profound examination of the modern condition of nihilism. I recognize that people whose philosophical endeavour amounts to posting common memes are hardly likely to incline themselves towards such an examination, but to give up here in the interests of saving time merely resigns one to suffering constant irritation at the hands of the lazy, the ignorant, and the indolent. I remain an optimist, holding that somewhere in the thickest of skulls is some quantity of grey matter that, with help of a prevailing wind, may start to function as it ought.
My favourite pastime on FB is watching arguments about secondary or tertiary level problems that ignore a primary reason why there should be no argument. I have had to make a conscious effort to make this a favourite pastime, rather than keep dissipating energy in frustrating and nearly always futile attempts to get some simple point understood, if not necessarily accepted. I don’t mind contrary views one bit. I have FB friends who are atheists and are most reasonable people. So reasonable, indeed, that it is easy to believe that they have the stronger argument, certainly with respect to facts and logic. They know the arguments and form a reasonable conclusion. Such people cause me no worry whatsoever. It’s the other kind, those who proceed by unreasoning assertion, sweeping generalization, and crude caricature.
Analyse more deeply and you'll find that causality with respect to the Twin Towers and geopolitics generally has squat to do with religion. I find it impossible to let the assault on religion go unchecked. I am now a Friend of St Tudno’s church in my new home of Llandudno. Good people who do good works in the community. In every service I have attended, the dominant theme has been one of righting wrongs and serving the cause of justice against injustice. How can God be neutral when the rich and powerful fleece the poor was the refrain of one service. The same point applies with respect to my old church of St Thomas of Canterbury. What is most galling is to know that many of those making a target of religion here do squat when it comes to politics and joining with others in order to redress injustice. They will express a loathing of politics, a stance which allows them to do nothing to correct asymmetries in power and resources in the social world. How convenient.
As a religious thinker –steeped in fact and logic (degrees in history and philosophy, top honours - I would like those who claim religion to be responsible for all the world’s ills to tell me where I am going wrong and how, having protested the many crimes of international politics my entire life, and engaged in politics to remedy those injustices, I have missed some essential truth when it comes to the causes of political problems. Because when I analyse these problems and crises, I see finance, I see economic relations, I see systemic asymmetries in power, entrenched institutionally. I don’t see religion. I see the use of religion by the powerful to rationalize their power. But that’s not religion, no more than the use of science and employment of scientists by the war machine is science.
To put it simply (we are dealing with people whose thinking proceeds at the level of memes), I’d love to know – in lieu of an analysis of the geopolitics – how religion is responsible for the tragedies and catastrophes of western relations with the middle east. I see the use of religion as a tool of politics, but that is something entirely different.
I’d also like to know where the irreligious would ‘imagine’ people like me going in this future world without religion. I need to hear a damned good reason before I will be persuaded to go anywhere. I’m presuming that persuasion and reason will be the methods involved. But I remember having had this argument many times before. As soon as I establish that even without religion, conflict in human affairs is entirely predictable, then humanity in general tends to be dismissed as generally despicable. Which is not an answer, merely an evasion, and hardly news to religious thinkers who refer to original sin, the fall, and the reprobate nature of human beings. And the religious view has the merit of making the fallen condition general, which is not the case with respect to those who condemn myriad others of being reprobates whilst sparing themselves.
So what is it that we are all missing? Do you think religious folk are stupid? Ignorant? I’d love to know. Plus John Lennon’s Imagine is total garbage – plagiarized words put to a dreary tune. Imagine people practising what they preached.
The tragedy of the Twin Towers has a definite history. But rather than investigate the geopolitics, it is much easier to engage in terror tropes, however much they may be disguised in banalities (Lennon’s utterly infantile Imagine for crying out loud) and generalities. How do we go from condemning the “some” and the “few” who incite these problems to religion in general religion? People who add the qualifiers here to the meme show some understanding that the meme is wrong, but are just too lazy to use another image. But let’s stick with the meme. Is it one religion in particular that is to be vilified? Or all religion? Or just some of each religion? The confusion here stems from the combination of intellectual laziness and prejudice. We are talking the local-global fallacy on steroids here. If you are taking aim at all religion on this day, then you will have to get it past those very Christian and very patriotic Americans who are in deep remembrance today. If you are talking of just the one religion in particular, then you are definitely veering into the territory of Islamophobia. These are good questions that need to be answered, and not ducked by assertions that all religions are bad/sources of conflict. Evasion fools no-one. And you need to look at that statement again and see who is provoking the conflict here.
9/11 was the moment when the 20th century ended and the 21st failed to begin. This was Fukuyama's end of history, but with a dysphoric rather than euphoric twist. Nihilism, beyond good and evil, a time of self-cancellation in which the ‘war on terror’ became the forever war, what Mark Fisher called 'the slow cancellation of the future.' It’s here, and we ought to make the effort to see how this experience says something about the military industrial complex and the disaster capitalism that has expanded since then. If we want to come out of it and avoid further tragedy.
We can talk numbers. Twenty years on, perhaps, people may want to reflect on how revenge gets you absolutely nowhere – other than reinforcing power dynamics that were already in play - as we see so starkly now in Afghanistan. We should also remember the half a million to a million – has anyone counted, do victims of this ‘war on terror’ count? – who have died as a result of this revenge, and those who died in the years before in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sudan and elsewhere. But, as the terror tropes, Islamophobia and racism ring loudly in our media yet again – a case not so much everything forgotten as nothing learned in the first place - it is worth noting that of the dead, the overwhelming majority of them were Muslims.
To point the finger at religion here very conveniently turns a blind eye to the murky forces of politics and economics which continue to pull the strings in global affairs. It is a wilful blindness: the confluence of financial piracy, political aggression, and moral bankruptcy is so blatant in these times that it is hidden in plain sight – normalized in such a way that people don’t see it or, more likely, don’t want to see it, lest it force them to show some political courage and take a stand against it. You would never guess that the Bush and Bin Laden families were friends and partners via the Carlyle investment group for years. As the planes hit the twin towers on 9/11, Osama's brother Shafiq was in a business meeting with ex-President Bush senior, the man he and his siblings used to visit on his ranch and affectionately call "Uncle George."
By the time the US invasion of Iraq was ready, the hawks in US foreign policy were still peddling 9/11 as one reason for the assault, and a majority of the US public continued to believe that Iraq had a hand in 9/11. There was no evidence of this and there has been none in over 20 years!
There was no New World Order, contrary to Bush snr claim, just utter tragedy with much worse to come.
In truth, the slow cancellation to which Fisher refers started much earlier, in the ruins of the postwar consensus and move away from the social contract in the 1970s, leading to diminution of the public imagination and privatisation and atomisation of life – there is no such thing as society, only individuals no longer looking to politics for the collective redress of common problems, in commitment to the common good. Rather than search for realities, such people will readily embrace surrogates and blame scapegoats.
Oh, and ask yourself what kind of person uses a tragic event and the deaths of others to promote their pet peeves and prejudices? The kind of people who feign concern in the shallows, but never venture remotely close to the deep to understand why things happen. And are more concerned to use a tragedy to peddle their views than express sorrow. The kind of people who use any remembrance in support of their causes. I find it all very distasteful, in truth.