Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Daly: Impact or ‘Impact statements’?

21 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by Bashir S. in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Critical Religion, feminism, gender, impact, Mary Daly, REF, Simone de Beauvoir, university, woman

In the run up to the next round of assessment in UK Universities (the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ or REF, 2014) research is routinely being framed in terms of its ‘excellent impact’ as well as its academic value and viability. Impact is defined as the research’s ‘excellent’ contribution to national UK ‘growth, prosperity and well-being’.
To improve their chances of getting a slice from the £3billion pie of research funding available, researchers must be able to produce evidence of this ‘excellence’; completing ‘impact statements’ that show what they are doing has changed or influenced lives, with an emphasis on lives outside the world of Higher Education and with more than a nod in the direction of government policy on economic and social benefits. 20% of the value of research submissions in 2014 will be related to this kind of measureable impact.
Patti Lather, an American cultural critic situated in the field of education, connects this notion – being presented as a matter of common sense – that academic research needs to be measured on the basis of a calculation of economic and social benefit, with a ‘turn to policy’ detectable now over a number of years and closely related to ‘neoliberalism with its managerial and instrumental demands’ (Lather, Engaging Science: Policy from the side of the Messy 2010). Whether or not it is true that – aside from policy makers – people are widely demanding measurable indications of knowledge as a transferable or exchangeable product from Universities in the UK – it is clear that these Universities have also had a long and proud tradition in the past, of fostering the kind of critical impact that throws ‘common-sense’ notions – about the nature of women as inferior to men and gender more generally as irreducibly heterosexual, for example – out of the window.

At the moment, UK Universities still appear on the surface of things at least, to be relatively upbeat about ‘impact statements’. For example, Dr Nadine Lewycky, Arts Impact Officer at Warwick University said recently that many researchers are already making a real impact. She was employed at Warwick University to help academics identify new ways of building ‘impact’ into their research and in the podcast, she claims all she was really doing in many cases, was helping her academic colleagues find the right language to make existing ‘impact’ more apparent in order to bring ‘academia into the public domain’.
Reading between the lines, however, this seems strongly to suggest that academics, are being required at the same time, to bring their research into line with a particular kind of language that defines knowledge in terms of a regulated domain or economy of transfer and exchange. The knowledge that is produced by research becomes framed as something essentially to be managed, measured and marketed. Ideas that academic research could also contribute to processes of individual or communal becoming, transformation or a matter of following the dictates of human curiosity in order to reveal something previously undisclosed or unsuspected or even as a means to great pleasure and delight, are increasingly likely to be met with raised eyebrows and the accusation that we are being naïve.

Common-sense dictates after all that people want to see what they’re getting for their tax-pounds – especially in a time of economic crisis – so ‘impact statements’ are one way to achieve the necessary transparency and accountability. But common-sense – which typically denies that there is any need for further analysis – is notoriously amenable to ideological manipulation. Common-sense dictates that taxpayers demand something they can see or point to for their tax-pound, yet this may not be true, or it may not be any more true than the fact that tax-payers also belong to complex networks of diverse and interrelated factors and forces in the context of which, determining what they want or need is a messy, untidy and hugely difficult business. What about our accountability to multiplicity and difference (Lather 2010, 14) to all those things that don’t fit neatly into the impact statement grid?

The idea that there is something wrong with an ‘impact imperative’ is not simply to dismiss the attempts of the research councils, or people like Dr Lewycky, to draw attention to the many wonderful things that are done in UK universities – for example, to help those who suffer from cancer or dementia or in all kinds of synergies with the work of the arts and forms of technology. Nor am I arguing that academics ought not to concern themselves with the lives and concerns of people outside their ‘ivory towers’. Arguably, it is very important to ‘reinscribe an applied edge to’ (Lather 2010, 28) the work we do. In this sense, being encouraged to go outside the university and talk with people about what we – collectively – do, can only be a good thing. The problem is the way in which the value of what we do via these processes is then being framed.

There are different ways to understand the impact of knowledge that is cultivated in Universities. Just to take one single example, in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir, Sorbonne-trained philosopher, posed the question ‘What is a woman?’ and came up with the disturbing answer that ‘she’ was effectively a male invention. A woman was not born as such – somehow ‘essentially’ female – but became one in conformity to the philosophical assumptions that framed the whole of European society and those global contexts colonized by it. The world was normatively male and women as well as men saw themselves very largely through the fantastical lenses of powerful men, buoyed up by the assumed superiority of their culture and education. Whatever could not be conformed to this view was dismissed; women were discounted as either bad or mad. Beauvoir’s book – The Second Sex – was controversial and upset people. It was scandalous and subversive. Yet within a couple of decades, these ideas had had an enormous impact and they were being widely applied in every conceivable context, ushering in a whole new wave of feminist thinking.

Armed with Beauvoir’s ideas for example, a brilliant and passionate young woman called Mary Daly turned her gaze on the Roman Catholic Church and its theology in the 1960s and came up with her own question: Why is the Church’s role in conditioning women so rarely referred to? Her answer, contained first of all in The Church and the Second Sex (1968) followed by a series of powerful discussions in subsequent books, was that philosophical assumptions that determined women’s value and role in life were woven into the very fabric of Christianity:

If God in ‘his’ heaven is a father ruling ‘his’ people, then it is in the ‘nature’ of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male-dominated.
Beyond God the Father (1973,13)

Yet like Beauvoir before her, Mary Daly ruffled feathers and upset people. Though she had her books published and was frequently ‘in the news’, she upset even feminists and her attempts to teach men and women separately caused a perfect media storm.

In an article in the Guardian published on the anniversary of Beauvoir’s birth, Toril Moi tells us that The Second Sex was both a source of inspiration and insight for countless women – ‘ “It changed my life!” is a refrain one often hears’ – but it was also a stumbling block, something many people including women and even feminist women ignored or rejected.

In other words, there are different ways in which to understand ‘impact’ than one that is determined through the collection of measureable, marketable data in response to a ‘common-sense’ demand for demonstrability. Beauvoir and Daly initiated debates that have extended over decades and their ideas have not always been found acceptance. Yet it would be crass to claim that these debates have not been profoundly important, affecting our understanding of what gender is all about and whose interests it has served in ways that now saturate the policy world of ‘equalities mainstreaming’ or ‘gender awareness’. In other words, whilst the direction of ‘impact statements’ is all about what the public is getting for its money, it says nothing about the bigger issues of impact that offend or contest common sense and sensibility and in which universities have always, in the past, taken a leading role.

Standing in between the demands of government and the demands of senior academics within the academy, the research councils must have a difficult balancing act to achieve. Yet it is hard not to feel that they are too compliant with the assumptions being promoted as common sense, that value is equivalent to the manageable and the marketable and that to have impact, university research must be measurable; from numbers of cancer survivors for ever increasing lengths of time to numbers/examples of citations, hits on websites, completed feedback forms, numbers of tickets purchased, books sold, tv & radio interviews broadcast, related primary school activities organized, blog entries written ……

The myth of religion and the tyranny of Richard Dawkins’ discontinuous mind

16 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Christopher Hitchens, Critical Religion, nature, religion, religion-secular binary, Richard Dawkins

In his New Statesman article “The tyranny of the discontinuous mind” [NS 19 Dec 2011 – 1 Jan 2012] Richard Dawkins suggests how arbitrary our classificatory dividing lines are. And yet the substance of his arguments rests on precisely such a dividing line – the one between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ or, put in a different way, between ‘faith’ and ‘secular’ reason. The heart of Dawkins’ untenable position is that he imposes on his readers the tyranny of his own absolutist distinction between scientific rationality and religious faith. When Dawkins criticises our “need for dividing lines, black-and-white answers and absolute definitions” he is not, it seems, including the dividing line which he draws between ‘religion’ and ‘science’, or between ‘faith’ and ‘politics’. In his writing it is an ‘either-or’ situation. Creationist theories of evolution might look scientific, but its not ‘real science’. The Mullah might look like a ‘religious’ leader, but he’s really a politician.

My contention is that the essentialized distinction between religion and secular reason deployed by Dawkins and fellow travellers such as Christopher Hitchens is thoroughly ideological, but its rhetorical deployment has created the delusion that it merely describes the way the world really is. Some thing or agent called ‘religion’ with its absurd metaphysical fantasies interferes with nonreligious realities such as secular states and proper knowledge. But this narrative is itself a myth.

Religion is in effect no different from a Platonic essence in Dawkins’ theories

Dawkins argues that an uncritical belief in metaphysical abstractions or Platonic essences [“…one of the most pernicious ideas in all history…”] can provide a fictitious ontological legitimation for racist categories, making the arbitrary and contingent appear fixed in the nature of things. This seems like a valid point. In a similar way feminists have persuasively shown that the typical deployment of gender categories legitimates male power at the expense of women by making gender inequality seem ‘natural’, in the nature of things. Dawkins discusses the ideological imperatives that lie behind the classification of US leaders such as Colin Powell and Barak Obama as ‘black’, pointing out that such a loaded classification could never be neutral or merely descriptive. Yet unfortunately Dawkins’ arguments rest on a similar mythical dividing line represented by a series of either-or binaries: religion and nonreligion, the natural and the supernatural, faith and scientific knowledge, God and the world. However, there is nothing given in perception and empirical observation that corresponds to any of these binary reifications. These are mutually parasitic reverse-images which, when studied in the multiple contexts of their actual uses, can easily be seen to have no clear dividing lines between them. There is no possible authoritative pronouncement about what does or ought to fall on either side of the binary apart from an arbitrary exercise of power.

The distinction between ‘religion’ and the nonreligious secular is itself a pure abstraction with no basis in empirical reality and very little meaningful content outside the shouting space of public rhetoric. When courts have to decide if a particular group is eligible to be classified as a religious charity the results are arbitrary. To take one example, the Church of Scientology is a religion in California but not in the UK. But both the respective courts which made these different decisions are classified as ‘secular’. But then why is the realization of justice in our lives, and the faith we have in the solemn procedures of the courts, not itself a form of religious practice? Does Dawkins really imagine that sharia law is essentially religious but the judicial system in the UK is essentially secular?

Religion as a malevolent agent stalking the peace-loving secular state

The religion which Dawkins attacks from his base in secular reason, and which he and Hitchens seem to imagine as a purposeful agent, is not a real target. But it is required so that the equally contentless idea of a nonreligious secular domain appears as something essentially different from religion in the way that paranoid fantasy is different from sober reality. Belief that there is something clearly distinct in the world called religion disguises the ideological commitments of the classifiers behind a façade of apparently neutral, objective description. The ability to point at Muslims as religious fanatics is subtlety linked to a wider discourse in, for example, International Relations, that wherever we look religion stalks the globe like a malevolent agent intent on doing harm to the peace-loving and only reluctantly violent secular state. It provides an ideological legitimation for progress and the belief that ‘science’ and secular politics is what will save us. Science (and politics) is what religion is not, just as religion is what science is not. But this is to reify two domains which are both imaginary and to badly confuse the logic of the concepts he is deploying.

The religion about which Dawkins claims to be an expert does not actually stand for anything real in the world. It is a general category with a complex and contested history and I challenge him or anyone to come up with a satisfactory definition of what the term means. The religion which Dawkins and fellow traveller Hitchens despises is in effect no different from a Platonic essence in Dawkins’ theories, a Form which manifests in the different empirical ‘religions’ which he assumes without much thought are instantiations of religion itself. Dawkins’ notion of the relationship between religion and the religions is not much different from an incarnation or avatar theology.

Worse, by supposing an essential difference between religious faith and secular reason, secular science itself inevitably acquires an essence of its own, to distinguish it not only from religion but also from things that may look like science but are not real science.

Dawkins writes as though the natural world is available for empirical inspection, while the supernatural is a purely imaginary domain. But which world of nature is available for empirical observation? Where would you point if you wanted to show someone nature? ‘Nature’ has no clear referent. Terms like world and nature are general categories and if you eliminate the terms that give them a meaningful context there is no way any human can observe ’a world’ or ‘nature’. God might be able to see a world, I don’t know. But Dawkins and I most certainly can’t. And the interesting thing is that Dawkins’ category of nature and world is parasitic on a discourse about God and the supernatural. Just as the idea of ‘atheism’ is dependent for its intelligibility on the idea of ‘theism’, so also his claims about the essential difference between faith and empirical reason is essentially no different from an anti- theological metaphysics. Religion is Dawkins’ target because he needs it for self-definition. Dawkins is confusing his own subjective emotional needs for objectivity.

Dawkins needs a historical perspective

Dawkins works with a series of essentializing binary oppositions which are at the heart of his whole argument about the irrationality of religion and the rationality of secular science. In this he is not original, but on the contrary is blindly reproducing the framework of liberal capitalist ideology which underlies western public rhetoric and foreign policy since its birth during the era of colonialism

The essentialized distinction between religion and nonreligious secular domains such as science or politics seems to have been invented in the late 17^th century within the combined contexts of Non-Conformity and colonial interests, but has taken on the unquestioned appearance of inevitability. A series of other binaries step in as equivalences: the natural and the supernatural, spirit and matter, faith and knowledge, God and the world. One side of all these binary essentializations is rational and real; the other side is unreal and deluded. But this itself is as much a delusion as ‘the God delusion’.

Despite the argument that biological evolution has no direction, concepts like religion, secular, science, politics and the state are impregnated with ideological nuances which Dawkins seems unaware of. For example, as far as I can see, the earliest consistent usage of the term ‘politics’ as a domain separated from another domain called ‘religion’ dates to the late 17^th century. The reified opposition between religious and secular domains arose historically out of an Enlightenment myth of human progress from the darkness of religion and superstition into the light of scientific reason. And his unexamined presuppositions are not essentially different from the dubious secularization arguments that legitimate the social sciences. The latter have acted as ideological agencies which transformed the meaning of ‘society’ from identifiable relationships between specific people (‘I was honoured to be in the society of the King and many eminent philosophers at Christmas’; or, at a more generalized level “I am a member of the Royal Society”) to the globalised metaphysical abstraction ‘societies’ which are in principle countable and measurable like organisms. This is the world of abstractions in which we all feel intuitively compelled to think today.

Of course, without general categories we could not think at all. But there are relative degrees of disinterestedness and neutrality in the way we classify our world. The binaries that appear throughout Dawkins’ preaching against ‘religion’ and ‘superstition’ may use old words but the classificatory deployment – and therefore the meaning – is modern. They form a semantic configuration of categories which is profoundly different from late medieval and early modern meanings, and different again from the many complex collective representations of non-European peoples. But Dawkins writes and speaks as though ‘religion’ and its binary opposite the ‘nonreligious secular’ is an intuitive universal, applicable to all languages, peoples and power formations at all periods of history. That those people did not realize that they were in the grip of religious illusion is irrelevant. Now that Dawkins and others have finally attained the truly rational and the really real, they are in a position to make judgements about the predicament that the deluded are not yet ready to understand.

Cranes and sky-hooks

On the one hand, according to Dawkins, evolution proceeds through the on-going construction of cranes rather than by way of metaphysical sky-hooks; yet the idea that ‘religion’ (irrational faith) is something essentially different from ‘science’ (rational knowledge) derives from an enlightenment discourse on the progressive advancement of humankind from lower to higher stages. Dawkins may vehemently deny that evolutionary biology is akin to the myth of human evolution from lower to higher stages; yet though he has ostensibly dropped the purposive element of the myth, he has uncritically incorporated some of its fundamental mythemes. He has uncritically adopted a version of secularization which portrays the light of science as a doctrine of salvation by secular reason leading us out of the darkness of religious stupidity. And this self-serving ideology, heavily inflected with liberal Protestant supremacy, legitimized tutelage of non-European peoples by colonial civil servants, politicians, missionaries, and capitalists. Of course, Dawkins denies purpose or direction in evolution. Yet in his own evangelical texts, Dawkins is actually setting up the metaphysical parameters which he claims to want to expose as hollow.

What does ‘religion’ mean?

Since the Reformation the Anglophone term ‘religion’ (presumably much like the term in German, Dutch and French) usually meant Christian truth as distinct from pagan falsehood, and this distinction in turn was as much about dominant claims to Christian civility and rationality as it was about abstract theological disputes concerning ‘God’. Christian preachers have always been as concerned with whether women of a certain class have the right to wear large hats as they have been about the correct articulation of the Trinity. Protestant missionaries have been as concerned that the savage natives live in ‘proper’ houses and speak a proper language as they have been about defining the complex (and some would say polytheistic) Trinitarian and Incarnational doctrine which supposedly defines the nature of God for such Christians. Evangelical Christians today construct their own missions of conversion on the basis of this opposition between civility and barbarity. Religion in this more historically specific sense was not an object in the world to be researched, described and compared alongside other so-called ‘religions’, but the truth about the world, including the proper or improper disciplines of civility. In this older discourse there cannot be more than one ‘religion’.

But the historically more recent modern discourse on ‘religion’ – and ‘religions’ in the plural – has been reified and universalised as a generic category, lacking clearly specific content, opposed to the equally modern generic category the nonreligious secular. Terms which still have specifically Christian meanings in some contexts are being deployed by Dawkins (and many others) as though they are neutral, descriptive and self-evident.

Part of a wider ideological discourse

The mythemes embedded in Dawkins’ arguments for the supremacy of something called nonreligious secular science over another unanalysed abstraction called ‘religion’ are part of a much wider contemporary discourse which is being reproduced in one way or another by academics, politicians, media commentators, by courts of law, by constitutions and the general public. This discourse is now so dominant that to challenge its basic categories appears counter-intuitive and even eccentric.

This appearance of inevitability has been powerfully strengthened by its internalization and reproduction by leading members of those institutions typically classified as ‘religious’ themselves. A good case in point is the invention of ‘Tibetan Buddhism’ as a religion, and the relatively recent adoption of this global discourse by the Dalai Lama. Yet the news agencies report that the Chinese and the Americans differ absolutely on whether or not the Dalai Lama is a real religious leader who can safely visit Taiwan, or a political leader hiding behind the cloak of religion and therefore an agent of mischief. The success of Dawkins’ arguments depends on turning a blind eye to the historically contextualized, constructed and contested features of such powerful categories, and to the wider but not so obvious interests which they serve.

What is it that makes African witchcraft beliefs, Japanese public street festivals, Theravada meditation, Scientology, the Indian caste system, devotion to Elvis Presley, water divining, yoga, the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Catholic monastic communities, and Calvinist attitudes to work and productivity ‘religious’ or ‘religion’ according to very widespread contemporary usage? And why, given this eclectic bunch, should we exclude devotion to capital, private property, the accumulation of money, or the ultimate act of self-sacrifice for the glory of the nation state? Why do we lump together such a vast spectrum of human practices globally into this simplistic either-or binary opposition: it is either religion or it is science? It is either ‘religious’ or it is ‘nonreligious’? It is either religion or it is politics? It is either spiritual or material? These are the mythemes of modern ideology which Dawkins innocently spins, imagining he is telling it ‘like it is’.

The very idea of ‘religions’ in the plural suggests the sharing of a common essence ‘religion’. But that in turn implies that the ‘nonreligious’ also has an essential dividing boundary. The reifications that Dawkins’ has unconsciously adopted (though he certainly didn’t originate them) are the mythemes on which his essentializing discourse depends and which are being reproduced by a whole range of agencies including the State and its educational and legal systems. Dawkins is ideological state apparatus. His arguments against the irrationality of something called ‘religion’ do not only and heroically reproduce that abstract and invented object, but simultaneously reconstruct the equally mythical secular basis of his own rational superiority.

The Coming of Nothing

13 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by Andrew W. Hass in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Critical Religion, nihilism, nothing

“Nothing will come of nothing.” We have all heard this phrase before. It takes many forms, and has a history that precedes Plato. But we know it most familiarly as the words of Shakespeare’s Lear, that king who foolishly turned the measure of his daughters’ love into pageantry and farce. When the daughter truest to her father refuses to say anything, and in fact, literally, says “nothing”, Lear draws on the ancient lineage of self-evident wisdom: nothing comes from nothing. It’s what the logicians call a tautology, and perhaps the purest of tautologies: since the formula A=A adds nothing to the argument, and simply loops us in a circle, so we end where we began, this nothing is most in play when itself is made the subject – nothing=nothing. Nothing could seem more obvious.

But there is something to the phrase that keeps coming back to haunt us, as if it contains an element of irresolution, something other than pure tautology. And keep coming back it does: philosophers, theologians, mystics and artists have all been fascinated with the concept of nothing, and with the ways we can and cannot speak about it. Something does seem to linger about as added, something that stands outside of the circularity of “nothing is naught” or “from nothing comes nothing”. Perhaps this is because the notion of nothing, whenever we try to articulate it, trips over the language we have at our disposal. The phrase “nothing is…” is part not of a pure tautology but of a pure contradiction, since the verb to be, however conjugated, denotes existence, the very opposite of nothing. Likewise the verb “comes” denotes the arrival of something. If nothing were to come to us, what would have actually arrived? If it really is nothing, how can we say it comes?

All this would be merely semantic aerobics, of the kind that, at best, simply tones our mental muscles for issues that really matter, were it not for the fact that the notion of nothing has made a significant incursion into our modern world recently. We might think of modern mathematics, for which the concept of zero has become indispensable. (In fact, modern calculus, on which so much of our modern technology, economics, etc., is dependent, is inoperable without it.) Or we might think of modern astrophysics, where the concept of vacuums and black holes are crucial. Even in the world of modern art and music, nothing has become an important “subject” – one thinks of John Cage’s notorious 4’33”, a composition of silence. Or Hans Freeberling, an artist who opened a gallery installation in 2001 entitled “The Art of Nothing”, which consisted of an empty gallery.

On a general cultural level, nothing makes its presence felt under the increasingly visible banner of “nihilism”. Now of course there are many kinds of nihilisms. There is the philosophical kind that says there is no such thing as reality, and everything is merely one big illusion. (Few in the West subscribe to this version, unless it comes in a form of Buddhism.) There is the existential kind that says life has no intrinsic meaning or value. There is the ethical kind that says all morals are ultimately a construction of power, and therefore no morality can ultimately or absolutely exist. There is the linguistic or semiological kind that says language or signs carry no meaning in and of themselves. There is the political kind that says no form of governance or social arrangement is viable without inherent and self-destructive violence, and therefore chaos or anarchy is inevitable. There is the economic kind that says there is no system available, locally or globally, that does not leave us in psycho-social impoverishment and with a self-divided spirit. Or there is the religious kind that says either God is dead, or faith in the divine has always been the stuff of superstition and delusion, and humans, metaphysically, are bound for nowhere. And in each of these cases, the nihilism, as general conception, can either assume that such a state is reality, or can desire to achieve such a state. (And both the assumption and the desire take manifold forms.)

Now why this growing prevalence of nothing and nihilism, in all their forms? Is it because, as many conservatives believe (“conservatism” being by definition an embattled stance against the coming of nothing in one form or another), we continue to witness the erosion of many of our most cherished, and “proven”, foundations of society, beginning with, most decisively, our belief systems? Or is it, as many liberals believe (“liberalism” being by definition the emancipation from old and constraining forms in the name of a self-inherited freedom), the result of disaffection towards and disenfranchisement from the ruling structures of power, which leave the coerced and the down-trodden in despair? Or is there something about the project of Modernity itself that, in its aggrandisement of the new, whether now in its neo-conservative or neo-liberal dress, has always invited the nothing perilously into our space and our experience?

I’ll have more to say about this last possibility in subsequent blogs. But for now I think it important to consider that many of the events we are presently witnessing in our world, from fundamentalist terrorism, to the Arab Spring, to government suppression in Syria, China, etc., to the (perhaps now sublimated) Occupy Movement, to the worldwide austerity measures and the backlash they have provoked from the populace, to the implosion of Churches under the divisive issues of sexuality and gender – all of these come from a negative impetus. That is to say, there is something about the ruling states of affairs, whether political, economic, military, social or religious, that invokes, and increasingly invokes, the reaction of a certain gesture towards nothing, or making nil. More than a gesture, often – a force. But how can nothing be instigated as a force? Nothing is, well, nothing. Yet in the name of nothing, much seems to be happening.

Lear had a hard lesson to learn about the nature of this coming of nothing. He, the old sovereign, was to be reduced, out in the tempestuous emptiness of the heath, to what his Fool would call an “O” – “Now thou art an O without a figure. I am better than thou art now: I am a fool, thou art nothing” (I.iv.183-185). The old sovereignty was giving way to something new, and in a folly that, at the outset, precluded the wisdom of nothing, he refused to see the truth of that new something – his one true daughter, Cordelia – until it was too late, and too late for all. Something might have come from nothing, if he was “Fool” enough to see it.

Nothing, we might say, gets bad press, and deservedly. For nothing strips away, tears down, erases. And we want a positive society. Yet there is always a substantive way to render nothing, and make it work for something. We see this even in the claim that “nothing gets bad press”: differently construed, we also know that, in today’s media-saturated world, no matter how negative certain press coverage might be, no publicity is bad publicity, since even bad press is somehow good for the cause. This is part of the perverse state of the world we live in, and may be the very thing we wish to eradicate. But to do so we’d have to negate the negation. And this is why nothing is becoming more and more a feature of our Late Modern world.

Mission studies, mission history, and the language of religious conversion

23 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by Michael Marten in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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conversion, Critical Religion, culture change, language of Christianisation, liberal education, mission, mission history, power, university

For those of us researching mission history, as much of my own research could appropriately be characterised, there are recurring questions about how to approach the issues raised. Coming as I do from a liberal Enlightenment university tradition, it is out of question for me that the study of mission history would be connected to the pursuit of mission activity in the sense of proselytism. I am far from alone in this: Andreas Feldtkeller is one of many who have argued coherently against this confusion (e.g. he does this elegantly and succinctly in Sieben Thesen zur Missionsgeschichte, series: Berliner Beiträge zur Missionsgeschichte, Berlin, Heft 1, September 2000).

However, these issues do still intrude. When, a few years ago, I initiated the Christians in the Middle East research network, now run with colleagues from Balamand and St Andrews, several enquiries came from individuals and organisations who were seeking to ‘convert’ Muslims in the Middle East to (a very evangelical kind of Protestant) Christianity: some sought an academic connection with us, others wanted to use our mailing list to promote their work; one enquirer even suggested we might want to make use of his staff in the region as ‘agents on the ground’ to promote our (supposedly) evangelical mission. Although one of the areas we are interested in is the study of missions from, to, and within the Middle East, especially historically, pursuing such activity today is emphatically not what the CME network was created for; these enquirers were rebuffed, politely but clearly.

Nonetheless, such interventions raise interesting questions about conversion and what is meant by this use of language. Specifically, we might ask what the proposed conversion is really from and to that these people are now trying to pursue, and that missionaries in the past have sought to bring about.

Simplistically, in this instance, we can point to a change from adherence to a tradition called Islam, to a tradition called Christianity. Indeed, such language of Christianisation is the dominant model for a great deal of mainstream church mission activity around the globe from the 18th into the 20th century; now this tends to be something that is pursued only by certain fringe groups and smaller denominations. In this model, existing beliefs were to be repudiated and replaced with new beliefs – the simplicity of this language conveys the simplicity of the process as many missionaries initially saw it in the past (and some still do so today). After all, many missionaries reasoned, the Greek New Testament used simple language to describe the transformation that the new believers in the gospels and Pauline letters were to undergo: metanoia is the key term here. This was used in the Septuagint (a Greek version of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible) to mean ‘after-thought, change of mind, repentance’ and is used in the New Testament to denote ‘repentance from sin’. What was argued on this basis is that the ‘former life’ of the convert was one of sin, and only turning away from that enabled salvation. This becomes a kind of ‘re-enculturation’: the complete abandonment of existing patterns of belief and behaviour and the complete adoption of new patterns of belief and behaviour (for a brief discussion of the problems with the term ‘belief’, see my posting here).

Of course, such ‘re-enculturation’ is impossible. Enculturation, as a process of socialisation and hegemony-production, is often defined as enabling competent engagement in a specific cultural context; further encounters with other cultural norms move into what is commonly called acculturation. There is a fluid boundary between these two, ever more so as discerning specific cultures without resorting to essentialist distortions becomes increasingly difficult in our globalised world (such distortions easily elide into racism: I am thinking of conservative writers such as Niall Ferguson, Samuel Huntingdon and others). In the 19th century, missionaries – representatives of European global dominance, whether they felt this gave them power or not – could perhaps still convince themselves that they were engaging with an alien culture when they left Europe, and that converts should follow their particular understanding of metanoia. However, as I have shown in the Palestine context (and many others have done so in other contexts), any conversion that might have taken place was always a process of acculturation: converts maintained significant elements of their enculturated norms, and amended or added to these in taking on the missionaries’ new norms. (Incidentally, I argue that despite the asymmetrical power relationships, it was the missionaries themselves who underwent the most significant changes in the missionary encounter: a process of reculturation.)

What does this mean for the question of conversion from and to? If, as I have argued in an earlier blog posting, we cannot usefully speak of different ‘traditions’ in a world religions paradigm then questions of conversion also become much more complex (scholars such as Suzanne Owen and our own Tim Fitzgerald have also argued this in other contexts). Following the argument above, we can say that ‘conversion’ is not so much about moving from one enculturated norm to another (what I have loosely called ‘re-enculturation’), but acculturation, and consequently, the language of ‘religious conversion’ becomes rather meaningless.

In conclusion, the most appropriate usage of the term ‘religious conversion’ seems to be – at best – as a descriptor of certain historical attempts to pursue a particular strategy of Christianisation, attempts that we should be glad are largely behind us.

Profits of Doom

22 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by Andrew W. Hass in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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capitalism, Critical Religion, economic theory, market crashes

There have always been prophets of doom. History is punctuated by exclamatory voices crying, in one form or other, that catastrophe is imminent or the end is nigh. These voices often pronounce their message in the name of some divine authority, whether the Hebrew prophets, who spoke on behalf of Yahweh, the Greek Sibyls, who spoke as ones possessed by Zeus and the gods, or the first Christian prophet, who audaciously claimed, or at the very least insinuated, he was God. Subsequent doomsayers have varied, yet most all have grounded their proclamations on some other-worldly source, even if these are of an astrological, astronomical, or occultic nature. There are limits, however: few have prophesied an alien invasion, for example, simply because the doom, to be taken with any degree of credibility and seriousness, must seem plausible within our immediate context. The signs must be ripe – as signs of our times. (How can you predict, much less give credibility to, alien times?)

So it was as I listened several months ago to one of the latest prophets of doom to emerge, and who subsequently went, as they now say, “viral”, I was struck by the utter disconnect from any divine or other-worldly authority. Today’s messengers of doom no longer need divine underwriting, because humankind has advanced to a point where, in the last century, it has become capable of destroying the entire world completely by its own devices. This is not just imminent doom; it is now, and entirely, immanent doom.

Typical to our world, the latest prophets also carry no sustaining effect. They are five-minute prophets, fame-mongers with proclamations designed for the transience of the headline, the ephemerality of the sound-bite. In this sense they are seldom real prophets by any proper definition. What also struck me in this case, however, was that, though none had heard of his name before, and few have heard of his name since, and though he was clearly and unashamedly out for his micro-minute of fame, his message was able to plunge deep below the surface of ubiquitous political, social, and economic gloom, into the subterranean depths of immanent doom.

The doom I’m speaking about issued from a BBC interview of an independent stock market trader Alessio Rastani, who, even in his own industry, was relatively unknown – http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/trader-on-bbc-sounds-alarm-about-market-crash.html. His notoriety rose dramatically when, asked for a television on-air interview, as an expert in the trading world, to comment on the state of the world markets, and the Eurozone markets in particular, he held nothing back. The markets will crash, he exclaimed, without any prelude or fanfare, because “markets right now are ruled by fear”. We’ve all heard such prognostications before, and, quite frankly, few of us would take this seriously, because we all know the markets are virtually impossible to predict with any accuracy. But this claim, in a long line of many just like it, was not the source of the doom. It was rather what he admitted shortly afterwards: “personally, I’ve been dreaming of this moment for three years.” Here was the predatory trader acknowledging that market economies and market stability are not his, or any of his colleagues, concern. He just wants to make money, and if a market crash can make him money – in his eyes, a ton of money – then it cannot come soon enough.

This brought to my mind Walter Benjamin’s famous fragment “Capitalism as Religion”, in which he claims that capitalism holds a similar structure to religion, with four distinguishing characteristics: 1) it holds to no special dogma or theology; 2) it is ceaseless, with no ritualised sense of time (no Sabbath, no sacred holidays); 3) it is wholly guilt-ridden, rather than repentance based; and 4) it necessarily conceals its God.* Now much has been made of these nascent thoughts of Benjamin, and increasingly much justification has been found for them. Few today would contest the ceaseless nature of capitalist forces, or that its dogma, if it has any, is, like its God, concealed amid the worldliness of its operations. Economies are wholly human affairs, and the attainment of wealth through capitalist mechanisms, capitalist strategies, and capitalist motivations buries any religious faith and fervour well enough below the surface of its gross materialism. But occasionally a deep rumbling within – implosive bank greed, or wild market volatility that follows upon such events – shows up the tenuous nature of its belief system, and the “cultic” nature of its structure (Benjamin’s term) begins to suggest a different level of operation. And one simply needs to reflect upon the motto written on all American paper money to see that the connection is, as Benjamin had seen already in the early 1920s, more than suggestive: “In God We Trust”. (Benjamin went even further, and compared the human images on banknotes to iconography.)

But the third characteristic, Benjamin’s notion of guilt, has always been the most difficult to ascertain. Benjamin claims that the cult of capitalism engenders blame, that an “enormous feeling of guilt not itself knowing how to repent, grasps at the cult”. Yet the statement remains oblique, and the author never elaborates just what this blame or guilt is for, and why it might include God himself in its comprehensive power. We are left, from the fragment, to supply our own reasoning: the guilt of profit for its own sake, perhaps, or in more Marxian terms, the guilt of alienation or of the exploitation of the labourer.

As I listened to Rastani, who was simply a momentary spokesman for the trading industry at its most voracious, the industry that brought a global fiscal meltdown through the sub-prime market, and against which a global movement has now begun to resist, I began to wonder if Benjamin had got this point about guilt correct. The revelation here was the very absence of any guilt. What left the interviewer’s mouth gaping, literally, was the vulture-like indifference to the suffering of the wounded animal. Or perhaps indifference is too kind – the rapacity. Guilt was not only missing; it was not part of this creature’s capability.

But there may be another way to read Benjamin on this point. The German word for guilt that Benjamin has used here is Schuld, which has two further related meanings: blame and debt. It is thus not simply that capitalism engenders culpability in either exploiting or being exploited; it is also that the system places us all in a position of unmitigated debt. And this is not merely financial debt, though for many, and increasingly, it may be financial. Like most religions, it involves a perpetual owing, a being on credit to the system (the gods/God), but now without ever a payment to come, or goods to be exchanged (exoneration, atonement, reconciliation, redemption). What Rastani, this current prophet of doom, betrays for us is that we lie in wait for a catastrophe that, whether it comes or not, never allows us to get outside the system that generates it. For if the market crashes, most of us are in debt for what we cannot pay. But the few who make money are also in debt, and at a more profound level – to the system that profited for them. They don’t make the money directly themselves; they are indebted to the system to enact this for them. (Money, we remember, has only ever been a token for what we have made. Commodities trading is only ever the exchange of tokens for what has been traded, money – an even further remove from reality.) We are all in debt to a system, to an economy of intangible forces, that we have no way to transcend, since what we’ve gained is itself the means for gaining it. As someone has astutely said of capitalism’s circularity, “Everything that has meaning is immediately identical with what it means”.† Our prophet in three years waiting is himself doomed, not because he may never strike it rich – enough in his industry clearly have – but because by striking it rich, he will, of necessity, be swallowed up in the despair of not being able to redeem himself, or of not being able to convert the material back into anything other than the material. Thus, as Benjamin says, all we attain is a “world of despair”.

Now the conversion of money back into material goods is precisely what any profit-seeker ultimately hopes for, since with material prosperity comes, the cult of the system tells us, peace of mind, self-direction, and the so-called good life. Yet every other religion, including even the ancient Epicureans, has taught the opposite: money does not bring happiness. This is a stock piece of wisdom. Why is it that the religion of capitalism has had such a difficult time understanding such a basic, and we might even now say, superficial teaching? Perhaps we can now answer: guilt – to abandon its God, Mammon, the concealed God of self-generating abstracted profit, or the commodification of money for its own internal sake, and not for the sake of the very self that is in despair, is to foreclose on the debt we owe it. But with such a guilt comes the very obliteration of our being, individual and collective. Such is the doom that awaits us.

That no one has yet found an alternative to this religion and its guilt, and least of all the religions of the West that have become synonymous with them – this is what is truly despairing. To their credit, the Occupy movements are trying to mount some countering force. If their momentum can be sustained, it may very well begin to disenfranchise capitalism in the form that we have come to know it. But this will not happen, I expect, unless that movement – any movement – sees and addresses the religious nature of the system, and addresses the immanent guilt and debt at its core.

*Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion”, trans. Chad Kautzer, in The Frankfurt School on Religion, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 259-262.
† Werner Hamacher, “Guilt History: Benjamin’s Sketch ‘Capitalism as Religion’”, trans. Kirk Wetters, in Diacritics 32.3-4 (Fall-Winter 2002), p. 87.

Cyborgs or Goddesses? Donna Haraway, Human Resources Management and the coming of the Performative Absolute

14 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by Richard H. Roberts in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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'Performative Absolute', attachment, chthonic, cognitive elite, Critical Religion, cyborgs, Donna Haraway, ecopsychology, goddesses, human resources management (HRM), intellectual property, learning, Monika Sjöö, music, ordeal, post-human condition, risk, somatic practices, song, teaching, utility

For a life-long, dedicated – indeed passionate – academic, a decision to draw back from writing and reflection for a year, and to step into the sphere of singing, music-making and shamanic practice is not taken lightly.

Such a decision can be precipitated by life-changing grief. Given societal changes in identity and expectations with regards both sexuality and gender, it is unusual, almost freakish, to remain with a single partner for decades. Thus to be in grieving and recovery at the end of a long conjugal trajectory gives rise to a compound sense of isolation: there is sorrow, but the very experience may itself soon be regarded as the relic of an unlamented past.

I well recall a sad discussion with a class of undergraduates in which they expressed their view that it was highly improbable that they would ever experience a long-term partnership of the kind likely to sustain a children and a family. As Anthony Giddens has pointed out, in late modernity the multiple burdens placed upon dyadic relationships are intense and frequently unsustainable over long periods as demands change over time.

Given this challenging scenario how might we adjust to such dramatic inter-generational changes in socio-cultural expectation when, as yet, our biological determinants and cognitive limitations have not been fully overcome? Of course all categorisation in terms of binaries could be regarded as nostalgia for archaic, masculinist socially-constructed dichotomies but this is worth probing further.

It is now twenty years since the publication of Donna Haraway’s prescient, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ and this is an anniversary worth revisiting (Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York; Routledge, 1991, pp.149-181).

Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments…: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

Re-examined in the retrospect of two decades, Donna Haraway’s declaration of intention deserves modified reiteration: ‘We (I include men) are no longer goddesses or gods; but we are not yet cyborgs’. Haraway was of course (amongst many other things) responding negatively to the emergence of the chthonic Goddess-centred feminism associated with such figures as the late and unforgettable Monika Sjöö who (with Barbara Mor) produced The Great Cosmic Mother: rediscovering the religion of the Earth that appeared in 1987 (New York: Harper and Row), and her viewpoint is essentially optimistic.

Haraway appeared to argue that the dissolution of categories and an unrestrained melding with technology and embracing of cyborg empowerment affords the best future for consciousness emancipated from the limitations of both biological determination and social construction. There are a number of responses to this cyborg feminist utopianism that could be examined. For example, one could argue against such optimism on the basis of the seemingly ineradicable and ongoing primordial significance for some of life-events like pregnancy, birth, inter-human fellowship, and death. This is to my mind a realisation that comes to most people as theory breaks down in the face of experience.

There is, however, a darker threat to Haraway’s cyborg utopianism, and this is represented by the imposition of a growing fusion of ever more sophisticated information technology with social construction driven by the tentacular strategic empowerment of human resources managerialism (HRM), and controlled though the assumption (in the basis of the elimination of trust as an obstructive residuum) of the imposition of total transparency.

This form of strategic empowerment is creating a kind of technological neo-sovietic regime in settings like that of the United Kingdom where the separation of powers has been significantly weakened. Indeed, one of the many reasons why the present writer is a Scottish nationalist is because in the absence of the tensions between Parliaments in Edinburgh and London there would be little left to obstruct the relentless drive towards the centralisation of totalising, ostensibly rational power in the United Kingdom.

Leaving to one side the larger scheme addressed by Haraway, let us for a moment look at the context of any human attachment that exceeds strict utility in a performance culture confronted by dramatic economic crisis and decline. In this setting all attachments and life transitions are a potential liability. In a culture consistently controlled by HRM every life encounter of social atom (i.e. you or me) is with a potential collaborator – a competitor – or an enemy.

Each such encounter is dialectical: the other is a latency composed of both collaborator and competitor/enemy, and all that can therefore take place is a temporary alliance of intention and objectives: this is antagonistic cooperation. In consequence, the embodied human attributes shared by both parties to the encounter have to be subordinated to utility.

For the cognitive elite cadres to which most academics aspire, mutual recognition is first essayed through a mutual sensing and then a sharing of common theoretical postulates; once contact is established, projects can then be co-organised, books edited and written, and new courses promoted.

Personal relationships and even physical affinities may complement this temporary constellation (even a dedicated Kopfarbeiter might on rare occasions resile from meeting performance targets and relapse wearily into copulation or cognate somatic practices) – but the day will surely come sooner rather than later when such bonds must be broken.

The break can be positive when the cognitive elite worker senses that a theory or project has had its time and decides to move on; such separations may, however, be traumatic for others; but the agent who aspires to world class status cannot afford to be sentimental and has to move out into the pond again to look for new partner prospects.

Less positively, the break sometimes comes about when interdisciplinary team members are instructed by an unquestionable authority to cease collaboration, because, for instance, a growing affinity expressed in a nascent cross-unit teaching programme might run counter to strategic organisational objectives such as maximisation of student fee income in one sector as opposed to another.

Strangely, the break can frequently be attended by a brutal ritualisation of separation, for given the growth of somatic and affective bonds, reasons have to be found and blame ascribed. This can be seriously unpleasant and it is of course a complete reversal of ritualisation and ritual undertaken so as (pace Victor and Edith Turner) to promote communio.

This contemporary situation in the HRM-ruled life-world of cognitive elites is paradoxically not wholly dissimilar to the position of slaves in pre-Civil War North America who could not marry not least because such bonds might impede their subhuman status and value to slave owners as a fungible commodity.

Of course, for a cognitive elite the achievement and successful management of the limited but functional conscious awareness of personal commodity status required by HRM is the basis upon which depends maximisation in good times – and bare survival in bad times.

What might be the wider implications of comprehensive adjustment to the post-human condition and reconciling ourselves to becoming the mere conscious substrate, the informed passive receptivity that seeks to acquire and manifest the skill and knowledge bundles that are surrendered to HRM?

One implication is as regards intellectual property: the systemic virtualisation of teaching and learning, and the resource capture by those controlling higher education outlets of the ideas of academic staff through (e.g.) the forfeiture of intellectual ownership and copyright that enhances commodification and impedes mobility because the staff member’s thoughts have in effect been expropriated, and s/he will have lost much of their cultural capital. They will thus enjoy a degraded commodity status: the Kopfarbeiter is not so much slave as serf, tied to the organisation as a dispensable resource.

A question also arises that pertains to teaching and learning: once a cognitive elite has adapted and conformed to the construction, the systematic production of social identities through methods derived from HRM, then what becomes of their relationship with the learners with whom they may still have a residual relationship?

A dilemma emerges here: should a teacher either equip a student with the capacity for informed passivity and the surrender of attributes required by HRM and thus ensure their survival as commodities in the labour market, or perhaps fatefully disempower a student in the labour market by modelling and anticipating critical reflexivity of the kind that risks both teacher and learner becoming unemployable?

In my field research I have often encountered practices that challenge the prescriptions of contemporary consensus reality inasmuch as somatic and psychic risk are of integral importance. Thus, for example, whilst many may have fire-walked, in my experience it nonetheless requires a certain level of inner preparation and confidence before stepping out on to the crunching bed of glowing charcoal. Indeed for some of those broken by their past, such activities set in a ritualised context are genuinely liminal and facilitate the kind of death/birth transitions that bring about human maturation. Teaching and learning may not involve a literal walking on coals but there should be risk and excitement.

In my judgement the systematic ‘professionalisation’ of teaching and learning along lines dictated by managerialism proscribes that dimension of risk and well-managed ordeal essential to the emergence of embodied, responsible, empathic human beings, as opposed to post-human simulacra.

Through self-displacement into the performance of music, both instrumental and song, I find myself in a life-world in which the distinctions between ‘the learning experience’ and actual competence are starkly exposed. This is a cosmos of activity, theory, meanings and activities informed by discipline, ordeal and risk, in which deception is usually futile – and genuine attainment requires much hard work.

It is all very well for Haraway to decry universals, but my point is that seen in Durkheimian terms HRM imposes a ‘Performative Absolute’ and an integrative universal (see my forthcoming paper, ‘Contemplation and the “Performative Absolute”: submission and identity in managerial modernity’ in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion). The Performative Absolute is, however, a dieu cache, the very essence of which is the self-concealment of its totalising power.

In the final analysis the question is this: is our world now so crisis-fraught and complex on all levels that any deviations from centrally-directed ‘best practice’ orchestrated by HRM are inevitable as the price of survival. This then confronts us with the adoption of the ‘Scandinavian’ benign social universal: whatever is not compulsory should be prohibited in the interests of the general social good.

Does technological utopianism, the conquest of the tyrannies of a biological and social construction, stand up as a means of emancipation, or, given the multiple global crises that reflect in ecological and human unsustainability, should we not revisit the kind of territory opened up by Sjöö, Mor and others and look to the recapture of embodied responses to the new totalitarianism that afflicts us?

School Wars of Religion: R.E. in Free Schools

14 Friday Oct 2011

Posted by Bashir S. in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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creationists, Critical Religion, e-bac, free schools, ideologies, Islamists, Melissa Benn, national curriculum, religious education, School Wars

Melissa Benn’s new book, School Wars (Verso, 2011) is an impassioned response to the present Coalition plan to allow control over English primary and secondary education to pass into the hands of interested private bodies, from groups of parents and teachers to faith communities and what Benn calls ‘edu-entrepreneurs’ (School Wars, 190). The present Scottish government seems still to be committed to the existing comprehensive system. But things can change and it is instructive for us in Scotland to reflect on what is happening across the border.

Those who support the new schools say that free schools provide opportunities for children who are failing or falling behind in the existing comprehensive system. Free schools are free – they don’t charge fees – and they are being set up deliberately in areas where there are higher proportions of poorer families. It sounds good and the results, in some cases, are certainly impressive. They are also ‘free’ however, because they are able to determine pretty much as they wish, the criteria for admission, the disciplinary ethos, the nature of the school day and the terms and conditions of those they employ as teachers. They continue to submit students to a regime of independently accredited examinations and there is a tacit agreement that they will respect the breadth and balance of the English national curriculum as it presently exists, but there is no absolute requirement to follow it as is the case in all state schools.

Those, like Benn, who are alarmed by the new schools put their disquiet down to a number of factors; in the first place, to a distrust of the idea that comprehensive education is really failing – or failing as catastrophically as some people like to claim; to a tendency to ignore – beyond accepting its poorer children into free school premises – forms of real, local democratic accountability; to concerns about the lack of investment in planning for school provision where free schools fail or fail to accommodate all children; to worries about a certain narrowness in some free school curricula focussed on basic skills and employability.

In some important ways, however, free schools remain far from free and are subject to rigorous forms of centralised government control. Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education in England, for example, recently told BBC presenter Andrew Marr that the Department for Education had set up a dedicated unit – with links to MI5, no less – to monitor applications for free school status in order to screen out ‘outrageous’ or ideologically unsuitable applicants. In the context of this discussion, rather predictably, such unsuitable ideologies were typified in relation to creationists and radical Islamists.

In this context, the issue of ‘R.E’ in the school curriculum – under some threat from the increasingly popular English Baccalaureate which has so far failed to recognise it as a core humanities subject – is interesting. The term, ‘religion’ has a particular resonance in the context of the school system that admittedly makes it awkward for politicians and policy makers. It continues to carry, for detractors for example, the association of confessional – and compulsory – Christianity, whilst for some of its supporters, it still seems to function as a kind of last ditch defence against moral collapse. Neither of these pictures would accord very closely with the views of most non-denominational English state school teachers of ‘Religion’ or ‘Religious Education’; a subject that has grown in popularity with students at higher levels over the last ten year. This is perhaps because of its relevance at one and the same time to the world of global events encountered via the media, and to the most familiar and intimate of human relationships. Or it may be because of the scope it provides for intellectual challenge and enjoyment or for imaginative engagement across cultural boundaries. Whatever the reasons for this growth in popularity with young people themselves, surprisingly few involved in the public debates about education, seem able – or perhaps, willing – to recognise its real value as an area of the curriculum in which we might give our future adult citizens the tools and experience, genuinely to address the kinds of concerns that Michael Gove seems to feel warrant the deployment, in relation to free schools, of the full force of our intelligence services.

Arguably a better way to defend our children’s class rooms from the kind of extremism that Michael Gove and his colleagues see as so dangerous, would be genuinely to encourage the kind of exchange of ideas and knowledge – characteristic of R.E. syllabi – that will allow young people to explore, without either naivety or unwarranted suspicion, how the world might look from different perspectives and to learn to think critically and with minds open to the possibilities as well as to the limitations and dangers of different political and cultural norms.

But how far – if at all – these kinds of skill-sets or objectives will be championed within the curricula of free schools run by organisations such as the Emmanuel Christian Centre, the Noor Ul Islam Trust, Forest Light Education Plus, E-ACT, the Cooperative Trust, Edison Learning, or Cognita, is, frankly, anybody’s guess.

What kind of ‘minorities’ are the Christians of the Middle East?

05 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by Michael Marten in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Christian, church, clash of civilisations, Critical Religion, Jew, Middle East, Muslim, religion

This is a comment by Dr Harry Hagopian on issues raised in an earlier article by Michael Marten here on the CR blog, and on Ekklesia. Dr Hagopian is an international lawyer, ecumenist and EU political consultant. He also acts as a Middle East and inter-faith advisor to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England & Wales and as Middle East consultant to ACEP (Christians in Politics) in Paris. He is an Ekklesia associate and regular contributor (http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/HarryHagopian). Formerly an Executive Secretary of the Jerusalem Inter-Church Committee and Executive Director of the Middle East Council of Churches, he is now an international fellow, Sorbonne III University, Paris, consultant to the Campaign for Recognition of the Armenian Genocide (UK) and author of The Armenian Church in the Holy Land. Dr Hagopian’s own website is www.epektasis.net. Comments have been turned off for this article.

First and foremost, let me say that it was a pleasure to read the recent feature article by Dr Michael Marten, lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at the University of Stirling and a fellow Ekklesia associate. In fact, reading his piece reminded me of my time both as Assistant General Secretary of the Middle East Council of Churches in Beirut / Cyprus almost a couple of decades ago, and later – more briefly – as Middle East Consultant for Minority Rights Group International in London. Those two mandates might initially appear somewhat incongruous in their focus and objectives, so let me use my experience with both bodies to elaborate on the complex issues involved.

With the Middle East Council of Churches, our ethos was to veer away from any usage of the term ‘minorities’, whether in its religious, ethnic or linguistic connotations. This term was seriously unpopular in ecumenical circles – perhaps even more so now than before – by a large majority of Christians. For those indigenous communities that sprang from the region itself and whose roots predated Islam, they often felt that terms such as ‘minorities’ dispossessed them of their sense of belonging and genuineness as an integral part of the broader fabric of the region.

The term also implied – and still does in some cultural contexts today – that numerical inferiority presupposes an unequal submission to the will of the majority, and that it was (in fact still is in the Middle East and North Africa region today, in the midst of revolutions and popular revolts) reminiscent of an insufferable period of servile dhimmitude and second-class citizenship during Ottoman rule.

It felt almost like someone walking into your own house, throwing you out as owner and taking over not solely because s/he is more powerful but also because s/he has a larger number of family members! The analogy is admittedly self-limiting, but it implies a sense of relative delegitimisation, of powerlessness and vulnerability alike, and ‘minorities’ in the religious, ethnic, linguistic and even cultural senses reject the lack of ‘ownership’ that this term could breed into some psyches.

At Minority Rights Group International, however, the reverse was almost true. The whole ethos and work of this small but skilful NGO – and of many others whether at the UN in Geneva or elsewhere – was the protection of the rights of minorities through a whole raft of international legal instruments. This meant an acknowledgement of this disputatious term so that it would then become possible to deal with it.

In fact, as Patrick Mackelm from the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto queried as far back as 2008, “Why should international human rights law vest members of a minority community, either individually or collectively, with rights that secure a measure of autonomy from the state in which they are located?” But as his argument would proceed, there also exists an alternative account of why minority rights possess international significance, one that trades less on the currency of religion, culture and language and more on the value of international distributive justice.

On this account, international minority rights speak to wrongs that international law itself produces by importing international political reality into a legal order. This tortuous account avoids the normative instabilities of attaching universal value to religious, cultural and linguistic affiliation and challenges instead the international legal order to remedy pathologies of its own making.

In fact, some of those tensions remind me of the revolutions that occurred in Europe since 1989 and reawakened many minority issues that had ostensibly lain dormant during the Soviet era. After all, as Goeff Gilbert from the University of Essex reminded us recently, those issues served as catalysts in formulating the Framework Convention (FCNM) of 1995.

But back to the present Middle Eastern context, though. Here, I am perhaps a bit more familiar with those arguments, perceptions and benchmarks that are prevalent in the sphere of minorities’ existential realities or rights. I dare say that these fears are at times being magnified disproportionately across the board. And so whether in the dealings of the various Christian hierarchs with state institutions and leaders, or else in the osmosis between the older generations of various faith communities, there is one school of thought that says that Christians can best protect their interests ‘under the shadow’ of other, stronger groupings.

After all, if we reel back history, this has been the case with many Christian communities such as the Melkites or Jacobites who sought affiliation and protection with kings and bishops as their statuses became increasingly precarious. Sadly enough, we also witness those same examples in some quarters such as in Syria or Egypt today. But this is also why many Middle Eastern Christians convulse at the idea of being labelled a ‘minority’ and why the contradictions I touched upon between the Middle East Council of Churches and Minority Rights Group International, that appear at first glance to be mutually exclusive, could actually turn into an alliance of purposes. After all, it is perhaps possible to speak of ‘minorities’ – almost teleologically – if that were to avail those communities of the whole spectrum of legal remedies that preserve their rights but still distinguish the definition of this term from its more disparaging, negative, intimidating and unhelpful resonances.

Michael Marten also refers in his piece to a colloquium at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Germany, where Professor Sidney H Griffith’s The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque was mentioned by one of the speakers as a softer alternative to ‘minorities’. I would assume that the speaker was trying to be sensitive to the allergies associated with this term. But interestingly enough, the very title of this book – whilst highly valuable in itself both in terms of its clarity and simplicity – is not straightforwardly accepted by the culture of many Christian communities in the Middle East and North Africa region either.

In fact, much as this book challenges the scholarship on both Islam and Christianity and should therefore be read carefully, its title has lent itself to some divergent interpretations and it seems to me that some non-Arab Christians have not perhaps taken fully on board the subtleties it evokes in local minds. Nonetheless, the book makes many valid points, not least when it helps dismantle the political (and almost apologetic) propensity in interreligious fora these days of referring to Abraham as “our” common forefather. After all, Jews, Christians and Muslims have often differed and even competed on this important figure from Ur (near Nasiriya, not too far from modern-day Baghdad) rather than agreed upon his legacy and the homopolar nature of its inter-faith significance.

Finally, to conclude my fleeting thoughts with a postscript of my own, let me add that I am delighted that Michael will be teaching an under-graduate module on Minorities in the Middle East. Other than the fact that the term might well work as a ‘quick and dirty’ identifier (as he self-depracatingly puts it!), I would also imagine that the module will address the definition and classification of minorities, and perhaps even raise the hugely pertinent point as to whether minority rights belong to the minority or to its individual members. After all, the younger generations of the Middle East and North Africa region might well feel differently from their elders today in view of the different cultural baggage they bring with them into this ongoing discourse.

So while accepting that the term ‘minorities’ might well stay with us, should we perhaps not be a tad more sparing in its definition and usage, in a way that ensures we do not end up colonising the perceptions of the ‘minorities’ themselves?

Christians as ‘minorities’ in the Middle East?

27 Tuesday Sep 2011

Posted by Michael Marten in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Christian, church, clash of civilisations, Critical Religion, Jew, Middle East, Muslim, religion

Many attempts to think about the population groupings in the contemporary Middle East, however that is defined, tend away from terms related to nation-states – a relatively new creation, often on the part of colonial powers – towards other forms of grouping people. Whilst in terms of international relations analyses, thinking about Jordanians, Iraqis, Egyptians and so on might often make sense, there is also a long-standing tradition of political scientists and anthropologists regularly using tribal and other markers in an attempt to discuss circumstances and events.

One of the most common of these descriptors is an apparently religious marker that breaks down populations into ‘Muslims’ and ‘others’, with the ‘others’ often being called, more charitably, ‘the minorities’ of the Middle East. There are many problems with this: primarily that it feeds into binary understandings of the world exemplified by the ‘clash of civilisations‘ model of the world (recently regurgitated in related form by Niall Ferguson, the TV ‘historian’ who has become a rather odious neo-liberal apologist for imperialism), but it also lumps together very different people with different identifiers from an undefined but large area – for example, Berbers in Morocco are a minority, as are Christians in the Gulf, but that does not mean they are connected in a particularly meaningful way. Apart from anything else, these two minorities are based on constructions of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘religion’ respectively, making it extremely problematic to put them together in a generic ‘minorities’ category, especially one that uses another ostensible ‘religion’ identifier as the main demarcation point.

At a recent Christians in the Middle East and KU Eichstätt conference in Germany that I was involved in organising, this was a topic that came up again and again in subtle ways as participants discussed Relations between Christian churches in the Near and Middle East – theological, historical and political-cultural aspects. In his keynote lecture Anthony O’Mahony, from London University’s Heythrop College, argued that we should not be seeing Christians in the contemporary Middle East as minorities. Instead, he suggested using the expression ‘the church in the shadow of the mosque’, which comes from Sidney Griffith’s book with that title. This, O’Mahony felt, communicated something more: after all, from the mid-seventh century for about 400 years, half the world’s Christians lived under Muslim rule, something most contemporary understandings of church history have ignored altogether. Under these circumstances, to talk about Christians as a ‘minority’ represents a truth, but only a partial truth, and the widespread links between different communities – Christian and Muslim – belies the vulnerability that the term ‘minority’ often suggests. Indeed, other speakers confirmed this view in different ways.

Several papers pointed to the links that existed between churches across the region and western institutions. For example, Robert Clines discussed two Jesuits, Giovanni Battista Eliano and Tomasso Raggio, sent to reform Lebanese Maronite practice in 1578; the Catholics being in a minority position vis-à-vis the Greek Orthodox and Muslim populations meant that there was great wariness about how these two conducted themselves and what this said about different communities’ identity and relationships to one another. Within the region, Carsten Walbiner’s contribution discussed the different historiographies of a schism in 1724 between the Greek Orthodox and Greek Melkite churches, and how these divergent understandings even today impact on relations between the two communities and the resultant ideologies that have helped to solidify boundaries between them over time. In contrast, Christine Lindner (one of my co-organisers, together with Heinz-Otto Luthe), discussed contemporary practices around the Feast of St Barbara in communities in northern Lebanon, which is marked by Greek Orthodox and Maronite Christians, as well as Druse and Muslims. My own paper looked at how a group of Scottish missionaries in the early 20th century did their best to ignore the differences between Christian communities altogether, almost creating a category of ‘Middle Easterners’, regardless of whether they were Christian, Muslim or Jew.

What these approaches help with is not just a better understanding of the relationships between the churches as hoped for in the original call for the papers, but they also remind us that there is still much to learn about the individuals and communities who engaged with Muslims and the wider world around them in the past, as well as the present. This also applies beyond the Middle East: for example, it is estimated that 30-40,000 Chaldean Christians from Iraq now live in Australia, and the Patriarch of the Church of the East now resides in Chicago, USA – these changes are just two indicators of the significance of emigration and diaspora for Middle Eastern Christians, and much more research needs to be carried out in this field. The generic term ‘minorities’ does not do justice to the complexity of the relationships involved, nor does it adequately reflect the nuance of the relationships between the communities and the supposed ‘majority’, itself anything but a monolithic and uniform entity.

– – – – –

As a postscript, I should add that in the coming spring I am teaching an undergraduate module that I have titled… ‘Minorities in the Middle East’. Why? In substantial measure it is because despite the objections noted above, in some ways it works as a ‘quick and dirty’ identifier, and I can then, in the first sessions, use the problems with the term to show how difficult and variegated these issues are. Perhaps I can be accused of making a lazy compromise here, but it seems to me that there are times when terms in common use are helpful, provided their usage is conscious and the problems associated with them can be elucidated. I’ll see what the cohort of students make of it all…

Harry Hagopian has written a comment piece on this article here.

Ritual as paradigm – and the making of life

13 Tuesday Sep 2011

Posted by Richard H. Roberts in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Council of All Beings, Critical Religion, Gaia, higher education, John Seed, Karl Barth, music, religious studies, ritual, Roy Rappaport, Timothy Fitzgerald

In his recent blog posting Tim Fitzgerald has offered some highly informed and trenchant observations on my attempt to urge caution upon those who might be perceived by a wider public as engaged in the deconstruction of the term ‘religion’ in ways that verge upon the wholesale destruction of entire dimensions of human experience. I am absorbing and digesting Tim’s comments.

In this posting I would, however, like to focus upon ‘ritual’ as a concept that has recently re-emerged as a key topos in many contexts, one notable example of which is the massive German 9.2m Euro ‘Ritual Dynamics’ project at the University of Heidelberg. I wish to focus upon this concept because I experience an affinity between the highly ambitious claims made for ‘ritual’ by the influential anthropologist Roy Rappaport in his ground-breaking book Ritual, Religion and the Making of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 1989) and my own experience in the course of a decade of intense fieldwork.

My conscious journey into transformational ritual began in 1999 at a ‘Council of All Beings’ led the rain-forest activist John Seed in the north of Scotland. This consisted in a ritualised three day process involving exceptionally deep, indeed primordial regression that then culminated in the first explicit ‘open-ended’ ritual I had ever taken part in. By ‘open ended’ I mean the enactment of the classic ritual structure of preparation, departure to the limen, return and re-aggregation in which the outcome was not predetermined in the same way that the many Eucharists and Lord’s Suppers I have attended as a Christian are focused upon and structured around the symbolic re-enactment of the sacrifice of Christ with a view to the successful programming of the believer.

In the course of the Council of All Beings event I underwent acute disintegration – and then freaked out. In more formal terms I would regard this in Roy Rappaport’s language as an ‘operational’ abreactive rebirth experience that in cognitive terms was experienced and articulated as confrontation by and surrender to the Divine Feminine manifested as Gaia.

The upshot of this experience was the disturbing discovery that I had undergone an inner reversal, a kind of field switch, as though the polarity of my entire being and its energy flows had been reversed. For many years I had climbed the slippery pole of academia as dialectical Barthian theologian holding together by sheer energy and workaholic intensity contradictory tensions between the theological traditions and the versions of modernity I had learned and then taught. I lived in an ocean filled with books, cruising through the world of learning like a wandering basking shark that consumed almost everything of any interest it encountered, both the books – and sometimes people as well. However, I was also, like Calvin – and Carl Gustav Jung’s father – a repressed and driven Freudian, with a hungry and aggressive ego beating down and subordinating libido, and sublimating Eros into the super-ego of what Karl Barth helpfully, if fatefully, calls ‘God the Commander’ (Church Dogmatics, III/4).

With a Protestant identity shattered there was much to learn about ‘getting a life’; this involved growing and expanding the part that had undergone an energy inversion – all the rest has had to be melted down piece by piece through regression and surrender. As reported in a first posting on the Critical Religion web-site, I set out to do this through participant fieldwork in (e.g.) psycho-drama, Celtic spirituality, death-awareness training, trans-organisational shamanism, (neo-)shamanism, fire-walking, dry and wet rebirthing, the initiation practices of the men’s movement, Neo-Tantra, and so on. All such practices present challenges if observation is, as it were, for real and not intellectualised voyeurism – or an entomology directed at human insects. I am fully aware that this does not fit into the strict separation of the emic and etic.

After leaving an archaic role like that of Professor of Divinity at Scotland’s ‘first university’ and taking up a ‘modern’ chair in Religious Studies at Lancaster, I ceased teaching theology completely and developed the research base for a large book on Religion and Social Theory, the material of which I taught at Lancaster, and then recently here in Stirling. A complex conundrum then gradually emerged, part of which became the question I set myself to address at the recent BASR meeting in Durham. As reported in a posting following the BSA Sociology of Religion Group conference in Birmingham at Easter this year, it was apparent that whilst advocates of secularisation and globalisation theory had been engaged in a struggle for subdisciplinary hegemony in the study of religion, it would appear that the proponents of secularisation theory and its variants had won hands down, and the traditionalised life of the sub-discipline had been restored to its normality.

Given this broad context there is a pragmatic question as to how, and to what extent a concept of ritual might be used as an integrative paradigm, a middle rank theory capable of providing a framework for the comprehensive decipherment of the resurgent and highly complex contemporary religio-spiritual field to which Tim Fitzgerald rightly draws attention. This organisation and classification would it seems to me be possible on the basis of developing and then applying the model of ritual that evolves from Arnold Van Gennep through the work of Victor and Edith Turner, and the performance theorist Richard Schechner in, for example, his remarkable essay, ‘The Future of Ritual’ (1993). The basic pattern of preparation, departure, touching the limen, return and re-aggregation can serve as a template in relation to which a myriad processes ranging from small-scale spiritual workshop bricolage to global events such as the ever more elaborate quasi-rituals that attend the openings of the modern Olympic Games or the regular Parliament of the World Religions might be categorised.

There is beyond this pragmatic perspective a far more difficult theoretical question, and this concerns the reception of the claims of a renewed ritual paradigm advanced in magisterial terms by Rappaport in Ritual, Religion and the Making of Humanity. This is a text that divides opinion between definite enthusiasts and those who regard it as an obscure, even obscurantist book. Why should there be this difficulty?

Rappaport’s work is in my view grounded in a hermeneutical circle created on the basis of affinities between the role of relatively unambiguous ritual processes studied in, for example, such classics as his ground-breaking study of the Tsembaga Maring people in Papua New Guinea, Pigs for the Ancestors (1968/1984), and then theorised in the later Ecology, Meaning and Religion (1979), and the essentially modern and self-consciously grand theory of his posthumous masterpiece to which a global readership ought to relate. My contention is that the latter connection fails: most people in modernity have little or no conscious experience analogous to the primordial rituals of initiation, exchange, adaptation and transformation that form one pole within the ellipse underpinning Rappaport’s hermeneutic.

The terminal problem that has confronted me when attempting to write the kind of book I conceived in the outline of Religion and Social Theory: A Critical Introduction is this: on what assumptions or transcendental basis ought such a work be constructed? Should an attempt to map the recomposition of the religio-spiritual field between the putative universality of globalisation processes and the infinite variety of the anthropology specific locales and of the body and consciousness assume the marginality of residual ‘religion’, or inspired by Rappaport, be worked out on the basis that ‘ritual is the basic social act’? But would the latter strategy be possible in the actual absence of the experience of the constitutive power of such ritual on the part of the vast majority of a projected readership? How could such a textbook be regarded as more than a dialectical fantasy informed by the tormented experiential trajectory of one individual?

Unwilling, indeed incapable of expending energy on what would be futile efforts to convince those without the first hand experience of the ritual process that there was plausibility informing Rappaport’s complex theoretical contentions, I now take my leave. For the moment the conundrum defeats me, and so I withdraw from the field until such time as a viable solution occurs to me.

I believe that there is a parallel between the phenomena which departments of Religious Studies purport to study and explain and the theories used in such explanation, and a parallel relationship between music and musicology. I now take my own hint – and leave to work at the music in the hope that the theory will eventually interpret that which has given me renewed life on the margins of a societal reality now in bondage to the market, subjected to omniscient surveillance, and dedicated to the manufacture of humankind in an inflated higher education industry.

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Christians as ‘minorities’ in the Middle East?

Ritual as paradigm – and the making of life