Dominic Kirkham discusses what we should respect and what we should not.
Recently I was talking to my neighbour, a Sikh. He had just been in a dispute with another member of the Temple (Gurdwara) Fundraising Committee over the wording of a publicity leaflet on which it was suggested to put some appropriate words of wisdom from the Guru Granth. One of the committee vehemently opposed such a suggestion on the basis that perhaps a leaflet would be dropped on the floor and trodden on, which would lead to the desecration of a text from Holy Scripture. This would constitute an intolerable lack of respect.
Respect is a word increasingly being called upon in the multitudinous discordant discourses that characterise contemporary society. From footballers being racially abused, to ethnic street gangs demanding – in the terminology of Ali G – 'respek', or reporters picking up on Islamophobia or Anti-Semitism, the demand for respect is all pervasive; we even have a political party going by the name. After all, to be disrespectful of difference not only undermines the multicultural civilisation to which we now belong but reopens the door to the inequities of fascism which last century led to unprecedented barbarity. Respect is a word that patrols the frontiers between two states of being – savagery and civilisation.
But it is also something else. The demand for respect has the capacity to close off discussion: an assertion of, 'Keep your hands off my beliefs' – nolle me tangere. It is not only a foil to offensiveness or criticism, but also a powerful counter-thrust. Such was the position my neighbour found himself in. But he was having none of it. For him the purpose of Holy Scripture was to promote positive behaviour and human fellowship – if this was what a particular initiative achieved then that was all that was important. In this I was reminded – from the Christian perspective – of the saying by Jesus that the Sabbath was made for man, not the other way round. The test for respect should be the quality of human interaction it enables, not just the defence of difference.
This wider perspective can easily be lost sight of.
So much so that the eager defence of difference has now become a challenge to social cohesion: the reification of different traditions replacing aspirations of global harmony with a new tribalism. Respect for incompatible, and sometimes unacceptable, practices is common: child marriage or female circumcision, whatever the cultural justification, is this not to be regarded as child abuse? In a highly interactive world the search for personal identity and cultural rootedness is understandable. But, paradoxically, the regressive potentiality of religious difference has been growing in tandem with global modernity for over a century and now acts as a powerful counter tow.
It was in the nineteenth century that whole blocks of humanity began to be consigned to particular ethnicities or races and their beliefs to all inclusive 'isms'. Whereas previously there had been fluidity and ambiguity – a sort of cultural transhumance – imperial centralisation demanded clear boundaries and ordered definitions of people, language and belief. Thus were created whole new entities such as Hindoo-'ism' and Bhooddha-'ism'. In China Sun Yat-sen felt his country needed a morally authoritative religion that could stand tall among other nations so Confucian-'ism' was concocted out of what had been merely collections of disparate precepts, to represent the religious 'essence' of the Chinese people.
Such 'essences' were required to reside in 'entities' with distinguishing structures. To this end the Catholic hierarchy promulgated a code of Canon Law at the beginning of the twentieth century. At just about the same time American Baptists were defining the 'fundamentals' of their beliefs so that people would be in no doubt about what they stood for.
Similarly, in the 1930s, Sikh scholars were defining the fundamental tenets of what was required of Sikhism in the modern world, just as had Islamic scholars of the immensely influential Deoband movement. This formalisation of belief and practice was to reassure the faithful in the face of modernity, replacing whatever former fluidity of beliefs there had been with unambiguous clarity. The world was defining itself by differentiating neighbours – with potentially disastrous consequences.
Reflecting on his experience of Nazism, Martin Niemöller wrote a searing indictment of sectarian isolationism: 'First they came for the Communists and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Communist; then they came for the Socialists and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Socialist, then they came for the Trade Unionists and… then the Jews…then the Catholics… then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.' Even those with whom we may feel we have little in common and with whose beliefs we do not agree still share with us something much more fundamental and important – humanity.
This should be the lodestone of respect.
Those who remember the genial cosmopolitanism of Rabbi Hugo Gryn will also perhaps remember what motivated his outlook. He had grown up in a small Czechoslovakian town where the Jewish community kept itself to itself and took little interest in its neighbours. This only changed when members of the community began to be rounded up and put on railway wagons, never to be seen again. With hindsight he recognised the potentially disastrous consequences of communities cocooned in social isolation, just keeping to their own traditions regardless of their neighbours. His ecumenical outlook was born of the realisation that we cannot afford to live in ignorance of our neighbour; respect demands interaction and a shared sense of humanity. Many other religious leaders of the time, such as Pope John XXIII, realised that things had to be different in the modern world; an openness and reconsideration (aggiornamento) of tradition was needed.
Thus we enter our contemporary world: shaped, on the one hand, by globalisation and increasing interconnectedness, but on the other, by cultural entities defined in counter-distinction to their neighbours by radicalised religion. In this world one phrase which has begun to appear with ominous potency is: 'He seemed to be quite ordinary and then began to become more religious'. Of the Boston bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnov, friends said they seemed like ordinary Americans, 'just like one of us'; similar things were said of the London July bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan; of the 9/11 bomber Zacarias Moussaoui his mother asked, 'How could he be involved in such a thing?… I could understand if he had grown up unhappy or poor. But they had everything.' With all of these something changed, and they began 'to become religious', entering into the hermetically sealed world of the religious traditionalist-cum-fundamentalist, which defines itself against everyone else; where the ties of common humanity are obliterated by sectarian rage.
One of the greatest contemporary cultural challenges is to look again at those great systems of belief to which so many give uncritical allegiance for which they demand unequivocal respect. To look at how they have aggregated to themselves not just noble ideals and principles but totalising demands that control the minutiae of one's life: whilst Jesus was content to proclaim beatitudes, the Catholic hierarchy is more concerned to legislate about what goes on between the bed sheets; whilst the prophets of Israel preached a universal ethic of justice, modern Israelis want fortified settlements on land stolen from their neighbours; if Mohammad was the poet of a sublime vision for humanity, many contemporary mullahs demand blind submission to draconian and misogynistic laws. Though many may be reassured by totally prescribed ways of life, the greatest need is to discriminate between what is culturally relative and what is essential to humanity.
It is the sort of realisation that St Peter came to just before he visited the house of Cornelius, when a dream revealed that the distinction between pure and impure foods – what is permitted (halal) and what is forbidden (haram) – is entirely without merit. Though he later seemed to have reneged on this all too threatening bit of inspiration, it was a step towards a more inclusive vision of humanity. In comparison to such precepts as feeding the starving or doing good to one's enemy, the minutiae of dietary regulation were entirely spurious.
Though hierarchies tend to see the touchstone of orthodoxy in such details of daily living, demanding respectful conformity or, when necessary, providing the grounds for outraged sensibilities, in fact this is more often a cover for control and intolerance.
Without scrutiny and discrimination the world threatens to become a hostile battleground of rites and rituals, fear and ignorance.
This became apparent in the recent sacking of Timbuktu by Islamists. To many the wanton destruction of ancient Islamic texts in the library of this ancient seat of Islamic learning by Islamist religious zealots was bizarre. For such fundamentalists any education, not just Western education, is forbidden ('boko haram' – also the local name of the Islamic fundamentalist movement); for them all learning and all knowledge not circumscribed by a specific text, even all historical memory must be excised. For this reason the Wahhabist government of Saudi Arabia has destroyed many of the ancient sites associated with the origins of Islam: like the iconoclastic Calvinists of the sixteenth century, nothing must be allowed to compromise the incontestable word – sola scriptura – that they, the 'authority', proclaim. This alone deserves respect. When historian Tim Holland tried to delve into the historic background of the prophet Mohammed and the context of the composition of the Koran, he was not only denounced for lack of respect and Western arrogance but took his life in his hands, as others have before him.
Just as romantically inclined nationalists of the nineteenth century fought to resurrect putative histories with revolutionary zeal, so today religiously inspired jihadists fight to resurrect medieval mirages of theocracy and caliphate. The past is always potent.
Strangely, one of the most contentious subjects in modern Israel is archaeology: there is no consensus between those who read the archaeological evidence through the eyes of Biblical belief and those secularists who read the Bible through the evidence of archaeology: to one King David founded Jerusalem earning mythic, eschatological status, to the others he is merely a hill country bandit whose achievements were appropriated from a later apostate king, Omri. For many, mythical history legitimises the modern state, as the demand for respect of belief clashes irreducibly with respect for evidence.
This scenario encapsulates a larger conflict over the understanding of truth. Regardless of belief, reality also demands respect. When Galileo invited his inquisitors to look through his telescope they declined his devilish deception: 'But they move,' he insisted of Jupiter's moons, as he demanded respect for the evidence – to no avail. Today science presents overwhelming evidence that demands respect but which contradicts religious tradition: that species are not created but evolve; that the world is not six thousand years old; that contemporary humans are but one survival of numerous previous human variants; that women are not defective males; that homosexuality is a natural condition, and so on.
Religious beliefs based on previous cultural understandings, which are seen to be deficient because they reject the scientific evidence, have no unequivocal claim to respect, even if they may be tolerated as interesting historical anomalies.
In a recent controversy over this issue of what to tolerate in religion, the prominent atheist Sam Harris went further and insisted that just as some religions are less credible than others, not all are mistaken to the same degree. So Mormonism is less credible than Christianity for, 'It is mathematically true to say that whatever probability one assigns to Jesus returning to Earth to judge the living and the dead, one must assign a lesser probability to his doing so from Jackson County, Missouri.' Similarly, some deserve closer scrutiny because they pose greater threats, for example the core of Jainism is non-violent, even if extreme in some of its practices, whereas Islam has 'a dogmatic commitment to using violence to defend one's faith', which incites extremists to acts of appalling brutality, as in the murder of drummer Lee Rigby. A belief that entails the brutal killing of innocent individuals, such as with the human sacrifice of the historic Aztecs or terrorist attacks by modern Islamists, cannot be tolerated in a modern society, let alone respected.
In all walks of life respect is earned by generosity of spirit and noble behaviour. Religion, as the philosopher AC Grayling recently wrote, is 'the belief system of our remote ancestors who knew little about the universe, and made up stories to explain themselves.' These stories may be venerable and persuasive, they may contain profound insights, but they remain just that, stories. The degree of respect one has for a belief is never without reservations: it cannot be absolute but must vary with its credibility and the degree to which it promotes humanity, as we now understand it. For those who like the certainty of a belief system – an 'ism' – modernity poses a formidable and threatening challenge, for the best we can do to achieve a common standard of humanity is by consensual dialogue – reflection and experimentation based on the totality of contemporary understanding and experience.
This is an ongoing endeavour; always an unfinished work, which is not limited by the past.
Rather, it opens out to a different future, also essential for the renewal of religious belief if it is to become anything other than a fossil of the past. This is a very pragmatic approach, but then this is how ancient wisdom emerged in the first place from the pick-and-mix of human experience – the very thing that is anathema to religious zealots and acolytes of other worlds. In the end it is not religious belief but Life – in all its forms – that is worthy of respect. We respect life and this world because in the end it is all we have.
Dominic Kirkham is an interested follower of the SOF movement who, being now redundant, has more time to think about the issues involved.