Not in God's Name (24 page)

Since the views of human beings are not the same, [the builders of Babel] were concerned that no one should have a contrary opinion. They therefore took care that no one be allowed to leave their city, and those who expressed contrary views were condemned to death by fire, as they sought to do to Abraham. Their ‘shared words’ became a stumbling-block because they resolved to kill anyone who did not think as they did.
¹²

Berlin sees Babel as the first totalitarian state. The ‘shared words’ of its builders were a denial of the diversity of human opinion. Dissent was forbidden. Those who expressed it were threatened by death. Utopian-sectarian communities pride themselves on their unity, but it is secured at too high a price: hostility to those who do not share their views.

Berlin died before the Russian Revolution, but he anticipated its failure. His critique precisely echoes Aristotle’s – and more recently Karl Popper’s
¹³
– of Plato’s
Republic
. Plato had argued that ‘It is best for the whole state to be as unified as possible.’ Aristotle disagreed: ‘We ought not to attain this greatest unity
even if we could, for it would be the destruction of the state.’
¹⁴
The degree of unity aspired to in the total society is incompatible with human freedom and the right to disagree. Politics should be the mediation, not the suppression, of conflict.

To be sure, there is a profound difference between the Greek and Judaic views of politics. The Athenians and Spartans had a civic ethic.
¹⁵
For them, the highest good was to serve the polis, respecting its laws, participating in its debates, being willing to fight and if need be die for its sake.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
, ‘It is pleasant and proper to die for one’s country.’

The Hebrew Bible, by contrast, is a sustained critique of politics. The prophets denounced the corruption of rulers. God told Samuel that in their desire for a king, the people were rejecting God himself.
¹⁶
In one of the key sentences of the Bible, Gideon, invited by the people to become their king, says, ‘I will not rule over you, nor will my son rule over you. The Lord will rule over you’ (Judg. 8:23).

It is not accidental that the book of Exodus with its political themes – slavery, liberation, tyranny, freedom – is preceded by Genesis with its tales of family life, nor that the book of Ruth with its non-political message of love and loyalty is the historical prelude to the political books of Samuel and Kings. The function of these works is to emphasise
the primacy of the personal over the political
. The polis is not the
summum bonum
, the highest good. In Judaism the state exists to serve the individual; the individual does not exist to serve the state. This is anything but a cliché: it is a rejection at the most fundamental level of Hellenistic ethics. The state is a necessary evil. As Tom Paine put it in
Common Sense
(1776), ‘Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.’
¹⁷
The Hebrew Bible is an intensely political document, but it never loses sight of the limits of politics and the risk that those limits may be transgressed.

That, paradoxically, is
the religious significance of liberal democracy
. Western democracy is not Athenian democracy. It is
a rare phenomenon in political history because of its modesty, its sense of limits, its self-restraint. The liberal democratic state does not aspire to be the embodiment of the good, the beautiful and the true. It merely seeks to keep the peace between contending factions. It is procedural rather than substantive. It makes no claim to represent the totality of life. It knows, with Oliver Goldsmith, ‘How small, of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.’
¹⁸
In the eloquent words of Michael Novak:

In a genuine pluralistic society, there is no one sacred canopy.
By intention
there is not. At its spiritual core, there is an empty shrine. That shrine is left empty in the knowledge that no one word, image, or symbol is worthy of what all seek there. Its emptiness, therefore, represents the transcendence which is approached by free consciences from a virtually infinite number of directions.
¹⁹

That is what makes liberal democracy, however odd this sounds, the best way of instantiating the values of Abrahamic monotheism. It does not invite citizens to worship the polis, nor does it see civic virtue as the only virtue. It recognises (unlike Jean-Jacques Rousseau
²⁰
) that politics is not a religion nor a substitute for one. The two are inherently different activities. Religion seeks truth, politics deals in power. Religion aims at unity, liberal democracy is about the mediation of conflict and respect for diversity. Religion refuses to compromise, politics is the art of compromise. Religion aspires to the ideal, politics lives in the real, the less-than-ideal. Religion is about the truths that do not change, politics is about the challenges that constantly change. Harold Wilson said, ‘A week is a long time in politics.’ The book of Psalms says, ‘A thousand years are in your sight as yesterday when it is gone’ (Ps. 90:4). Religion inhabits the pure mountain air of eternity, politics the bustle of the here-and-now.

More important still is what liberal democratic politics
achieves. It
makes space for difference
. It recognises that within a complex society there are many divergent views, traditions and moral systems. It makes no claim to know which is true. All it seeks to do is ensure that those who have differing views are able to live peaceably and graciously together, recognising that none of us has the right to impose our views on others. Coerced agreement is not consent, said the Jewish sages.
²¹
Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s, said Jesus (Matt. 22:21). There is no compulsion in religion, says the Qur’an (2:256). Democratic politics has no higher aspiration than to allow individuals freedom to pursue the right as they see the right, with this proviso only, that they extend the same right to others. It seeks the maximum possible liberty compatible with an equal liberty for all.

That is what makes Abrahamic monotheism different from the religions that preceded it. In the ancient world, the pharaohs of Egypt, like the kings of Mesopotamian city states, combined temporal and ecclesiastical power. They were both head of state and head of the religion of the state. They claimed to be, and were seen as being, god made manifest or the child of the gods or the chief intercessor with the gods. They presided over religious rites. But the religion of Abraham was born in a
protest against
this very phenomenon. Eric Voegelin put it precisely:

The world of politics is essentially polytheistic in the sense that every centre of power, however small and insignificant it may be, has a tendency to posit itself as an absolute entity in the world, regardless of the simultaneous existence of other centres which deem themselves equally absolute.
²²

Polytheism, with its vision of multiple forces and perennial conflict, is compatible with the sacralisation of politics. Monotheism is not.

Of course, religious history was rarely that simple. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all acquired political power in one form
or another. In the biblical age Israel became a kingdom, soon splitting in two. Christianity and Islam both became imperial powers. Eventually, though, there comes a point of crisis when the religion encounters massive change, and an argument develops within the faith itself. Do we respond to change by change? Do we preserve institutions as they are? Do we return to the core message of the faith?

The argument itself is not the problem. Its resolution is. Having grown accustomed to power, religious leaders become used to getting their way by force. This time, however, there is more than one group claiming to act in the name of religion: the
same
religion. Force meets force, and the result is the religious equivalent of civil war, with all the bitterness of war and all the uncompromising passion of religion. That is what happened to Judaism in the first century, Christianity in the seventeenth, and Islam today. That is when religion discovers that power has different rules from those that apply in the life of the spirit. Either that, or it destroys itself.

The most disastrous form of politics associated with the Abrahamic faiths is
apocalyptic
politics, the politics of the end of days. Apocalypse comes late to the religion of Abraham, possibly from the same source – Zoroastrianism – as did the dualism we explored in
chapter 3
. It differs fundamentally from classical prophecy. The prophet thought in terms of normal history. Though there may be setbacks and defeats, the people of God, living by the law and love of God, will eventually find that righteousness is rewarded and evil brings about its own defeat. The prophet is the voice of hope.

Apocalypse, by contrast, is the voice of despair. Normal history has failed to bring about the long-awaited redemption. Evil, far from being an instinct within us that we can conquer, is an independent force, the work of Satan. The universe is framed by the
conflict between God and his enemies, and is moving towards a final confrontation that will shake the world to its foundations. The reign of God will be restored, evil will be vanquished, and history with all its vicissitudes and disappointments will come to an end.

This is the vision that appears in the Hebrew Bible in the book of Daniel. It reappears in several intertestamental works (1 Enoch, 2 Esdras and others) excluded from the biblical canon. As we saw in
chapter 3
, it was a feature of the Qumran sect, and its classic expression in the New Testament is the book of Revelation. Today it figures centrally in the worldview of ISIS, which views itself as the prime mover of a process that will end in a cosmic battle between the armies of Islam and those of the Crusaders (‘Rome’). The first significant battle will be in Dabiq, Northern Syria – so important is this to the thinking of ISIS that it chose
Dabiq
as the title of its official online journal. The Caliphate will then expand, conquering vast territories including Istanbul. A false messiah known as Dajjal will appear, inflicting heavy casualties on the Caliphate’s army, until the final battle, and with it the global triumph of Islam, in Jerusalem.
²³

Apocalypse is what happens to prophecy when it loses hope, and to politics when it loses patience. Apocalyptic politics is the strange phenomenon of a revolutionary movement whose gaze is firmly fixed on the past. It arises at times of destabilising change, and speaks to those who feel unjustly left behind. Millenarian sects flourished within Judaism in the late Second Temple period, as they did in Christian Europe in the late Middle Ages: the Ranters, Flagellants, Hussites, Anabaptists and others.
²⁴
At times of social and religious ferment, they spread like contagion. They hold particular attraction for those who feel alienated, estranged,

Wandering between two worlds, one dead

The other powerless to be born.
²⁵

The phenomenon takes secular forms as well. The thinkers of the French and Russian revolutions thought in terms of what the late J.L. Talmon called ‘political messianism’ or ‘totalitarian democracy’.
²⁶
There are two ways of applying the Exodus narrative to politics. One (‘exodus politics’) understands that the journey is long and fraught with setbacks. Change in the human heart takes time and is the work of many generations. The other (‘messianic politics’) believes that the destination is close and God is beckoning. ‘Hence the readiness of messianic militants to welcome, even to initiate, the terrors that proceed the last days,’ writes Michael Walzer; ‘hence the strange politics of
the worse, the better
; and hence the will to sin, to risk any crime for the sake of the end.’
²⁷

Apocalyptic politics is the search for revolution without transformation, change without the slow process of education. It uses power in place of persuasion, daggers instead of debate. It simplifies the issue of truth to the most elemental choice: agree or die. It is the longing for the end of time in the midst of time, the search for redemption now. That is why it suspends the normal rules that restrain people from murdering the innocent. Talmon’s conclusion (and remember that he is speaking about secular creeds) is so powerful that it deserves quotation at length:

The most important lesson to be drawn from this enquiry is the incompatibility of the idea of an all-embracing and all-solving creed with liberty. The two ideals correspond to the two instincts most deeply embedded in human nature, the yearning for salvation and the love of freedom. To attempt to satisfy both at the same time is bound to result, if not in unmitigated tyranny and serfdom, at least in the monumental hypocrisy and self-deception which are the concomitants of totalitarian democracy. This is the curse on Salvationist creeds: to be born out of the noblest impulses of man, and to degenerate into weapons of tyranny. An exclusive creed cannot admit opposition. It is bound
to feel itself surrounded by innumerable enemies. Its believers can never settle down to a normal existence. From this sense of peril arise their continual demands for the protection of orthodoxy by recourse to terror.
²⁸

Apocalyptic politics always fails, because you cannot create eternity in the midst of time, or unity without dissent. It is like Samson in the temple of the Philistines, bringing down the building on his enemies but destroying himself in the process.

Religion is at its best when it relies on strength of argument and example. It is at its worst when it seeks to impose truth by force
. We can trace how this idea was taken up by four different traditions. The first was the great Islamic thinker Ibn Roshd, otherwise known as Averroës (1126–98), who wrote distinguished commentaries on the works of Aristotle. One of the distinguished rabbis of the sixteenth century, Rabbi Judah Loewe of Prague (Maharal, 1525–1609), cites him in one of his own works. Averroës had argued that you should always, when presenting a philosophical argument, cite the views of your opponents. Failure to do so is an implicit acknowledgement of the weakness of your own case. R. Loewe adds: