When my copy of The Spectator arrived earlier this week, my heart sank to see the now rather hackneyed image of a niqabi woman’s eyes staring out from the front cover. “Oh no,” I sighed. “It’s going to be an article against the veil. Again.”However, the piece by John Gray, described by The Spectator as “Britain’s foremost political philosopher” is actually quite good.
The article isn’t available online so we are reproducing it below.
(c) The Spectator (1828) Limited 2007
John Gray, Britain’s foremost political philosopher, says that Ruth Kelly’s new campaign against Islamic extremism is doomed because it exaggerates the scope for cohesion in our fragmented modern world
The only thing that can be known with reasonable certainty about Ruth Kelly’s new programme of engagement with Muslim communities, which the Prime Minister told the House of Commons at last week’s meeting of the liaison committee will tackle Islamist extremism ‘head-on’, is that it will be muddled and ineffective. Nothing the government has done suggests it is ready to examine why extremism is gaining ground. Tony Blair persists in claiming that Britain’s role in the Iraq war has played no part in the process — an assertion that has been repeatedly questioned by intelligence analysts, and which suggests an inability to engage not only with Muslims but also with reality. It is not only the Blair government that is at fault. The political class as a whole has no clear idea of what it wants from Muslim communities. Is it their more active co-operation in combating terrorism? Or are they being told that they must integrate into the British mainstream and embrace some version of liberal values?
Though they are commonly seen as being so closely linked as to be practically equivalent, there is danger in conflating these goals. Pressing Muslims to integrate may actually make the struggle against terrorism more difficult. Britain is not a notably cohesive society and there is no prospect of it becoming one. Rather than trying to secure a consensus on values — even liberal values — we would be better off framing terms that allow us to co-exist in peace.
Public debate about the place of Islam is taking place at a time when the political consensus on multiculturalism has visibly crumbled. There is a steady stream of media reportage whose subtext is that choosing an Islamic form of dress somehow connects with atrocities of the kind that occurred on 7/7. But Islam (like Christianity) is a religion, not a culture, and there is nothing peculiarly Islamic about suicide bombing.
Until the Iraq war, more such bombings were committed by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist–Leninist group of mainly Hindu background that is hostile to religion in all its forms, than by any other organisation.
The Hezbollah campaign against French, American and Israeli targets in Lebanon in the early Eighties included over 40 suicide attacks. Members of secular leftist groups such as the Communist party were responsible for the majority of the bombings. Several were committed by Christians, one of them a female high-school teacher. It is safe to assume she was not looking forward to paradise in the company of a host of virgins.
While terror of the sort that currently threatens us in Britain is Islamist in origin, it is nonsense to suggest that suicide bombing reflects an Islamic culture of martyrdom.
In Britain at the present time, the threat of terror does not come from the millions who quietly practise their faith. It comes from a radicalised minority which has embraced a type of thinking that has more in common with radical Western ideologies such as Leninism and anarchism than with traditional Islamic theology. The most urgent task is to halt the process of radicalisation, and it is here that the current exaggerated revulsion against multiculturalism can be dangerous. If ours is an extremely diverse and in some ways fragmented society, this is not mainly a result of government enforcing multicultural policies — silly as these have often been. It is a consequence of forces that are integral to the way the world now works. Large-scale flows of people and ideas, the impact of the media and continuous cultural innovation have made Britain far more deeply pluralistic than it used to be. This anarchic vitality seems to me to be one of the more attractive aspects of globalisation but, whatever one may feel, it is here to stay. Britain has become home to an unprecedented mixture of styles of life and views of the world. There are fundamentalists of all varieties, large unobtrusive enclaves of traditional life and countless people who take a mix-and-match approach to the diversity of traditions. Why should Muslims be singled out for deviating from a national consensus that is now largely mythical?
There are many who maintain that we need to recover the timeless verities of liberalism. Neoconservatives never cease to rail against the doctrine that cultural difference is an end in itself, and many who are not neoconservatives insist that the current version of liberal values must be applied right across society. For these people, accepting the fact of different ways of life, not all of them liberal, is a type of relativism that undermines the universal value of freedom and disarms us in the fight against terror. The solution is simple: we must enforce human rights. There is a kernel of truth in the idea that a valuable part of the liberal heritage has been lost, but it is not any doctrine of rights that we need to revive. It is something much more prosaic — the old-fashioned practice of tolerance.
In any imaginable society we will have to put up with many things we reject as false or bad. When society is as plural as it is today, nearly everyone will find much in it that is distasteful and even hateful. In these circumstances, the virtue of tolerance is needed more than ever. Yet curiously it has fallen into disrepute and been replaced by a cult of rights, with the result that conflicts of values are now fought out as competing legal claims. The trouble is that serious differences are rarely resolved by such procedures. If people have very different beliefs about the good life, they are likely also to have different views of human rights.
Rights are far from being as easily defined as contemporary liberals like to think, and — as when free expression collides with protection from hate speech — they quite often conflict with one another. Turning moral conflicts into clashes of rights makes them even harder to resolve, for it prevents compromise. The end-result of this sort of legalism can be seen in America, where entrenching a constitutional right to abortion has not stopped doctors who perform it from facing death at the hands of ‘right-to-life’ fundamentalists.
If liberals have given up on toleration in favour of the adjudication of rights, it is probably because history has not turned out as they expected. Most have held to a teleological view of human development, believing that in the long run a society of the sort they wanted would come into being as a byproduct of the free expression of ideas. The actual course of events has come as a terrible shock. Even in societies where expression is most free, there is nothing resembling agreement. Religion — which many contemporary liberals have come to see as an evil — has not disappeared, but grown stronger. There has been no movement towards consensus — liberal or otherwise.
The idea that the practice of toleration leads to a convergence of values seems more and more like whistling in the dark.
This may be the source of the strident, bullying tone many secular liberals adopt when they address religious believers. Their own faith in progress is on the line, and they are afraid of losing their nerve.
The radically plural society we find ourselves in today is not a transitional phase leading to a point, some time in the future, when we will have the same fundamental values. It is the way we can expect to live from now onwards. There may be nothing intrinsically good about this sort of diversity but it is a fact, and teleological liberalism is a poor guide to negotiating the difficulties it brings. Luckily there is another liberal tradition in which the goal of toleration is not agreement, still less truth, but peace. It may sound odd to describe Thomas Hobbes as a liberal, but he had a better grasp of how freedom can be maintained than most of the liberal thinkers who came after him. Hobbes wrote at a time when religious wars were living memories, and understood the destructive potential of faith. Belief may be beyond regulation, but for the sake of public order its expression must be controlled. Here Hobbes agreed with his contemporary Spinoza, an ardent defender of freedom of conscience who never doubted that in the end it must yield to the need for peace.
These early modern thinkers have more to offer than the doctrinaire liberals and secular fundamentalists who make so much noise today. The lesson they teach us, I believe, is that trying to curb differences in belief and lifestyle is a recipe for chronic conflict. While it may seem that social cohesion and the pursuit of peace go together, the insistent demand for integration can be highly divisive. Crowd-pleasing comments by senior politicians that suggest wearing the hijab signals a refusal to join the British mainstream do nothing to create a climate of tolerance. By strengthening Islamist ideologues who claim Muslims are outsiders in Western societies, they speed the process of radicalisation. As things stand, Islamist terror has inflicted much less loss of life and limb in the UK than the IRA did. Unlike the IRA, it may be acquiring a mass base here and in other countries which makes it a more intractable problem. Rather than raking over the ashes of multiculturalism, political leaders should focus on genuine obstacles to peaceful co-existence between Britain’s communities.
This means being ready to shut down organisations that preach hate. The closure of the Jameah Islamiyah school, which was raided last year by police as part of an anti-terror operation, seems to have been for educational rather than security reasons. But it should be part of the terms of peaceful coexistence in this country which schools that teach hatred of Jews or Christians, or which make any religious or ethnic group a potential target of violence, should be put out of business. There can be no question of tolerating such institutions, which threaten the very possibility of peace.
Achieving a modus vivendi with Islam is not going to be easy. Geopolitical events — not least an attack on Iran that would compound the folly of Iraq — could make it almost impossible. But there is no alternative. The attempt to create a liberal monoculture, which many commentators have urged, founders on the fact of diversity. The fantasy of a morally cohesive society has inspired some of the worst types of repression. It is ironic that a panicky reaction against the idea of multiculturalism should have engendered a liberal variant of this dream. The reality is that we cannot hope to share many of our fundamental values. But we can still rub along together, if we can relearn the habit of tolerance.
14 comments ↓
This is a superb piece of thinking. I will quibble with Amir about his title, the author John Gray goes well beyond a call for tolerance.
He traces the origins of “Islamic” terrorism to their western Leninist roots, he highlights to pointlessness of asking Muslims to conform to a consensus that no longer exists.
The article represents a departure from the usually juvenile commentry on Islam by Rod Liddle and Mark Steyn that has recently become the staple of the Spectator.
But most importantly Gray explodes the myth of liberalism; the concept of the necessary progress of western liberal democracies.
I would also like to congratulate you on the quality of this site, the thinking and the analysis. Several academics such as myself secretly read this site. I think it is the best “blog” written in Australia by a considerable margin, Muslim or otherwise.
Thanks for your comments.
The title was simply a truncation of the title given by The Spectator and not my own creation.
However, I disagree that Gray has exploded the “myth of liberalism” in this piece. Rather, he has just clarified that there is an alternative to what he terms ‘teleological liberalism’ (the view that the natural progression of society is towards some sort of ideal or, to borrow from Fukuyama, The End of History) and that is a liberalism which emphasises peaceful coexistence over agreement (whether forced or evolved). This view of archepelagos of culture engaged with one another in an atmosphere of tolerance is entirely consistent with liberal ideas on the nature of society.
I do, however, find slight disagreement with some of what he has written. For example:
He then goes on to cite the raiding of an Islamic school. Whilst I have no issue with the authorities acting against people actively advocating violence or criminality, Gray groups the teaching of “hatred against Jews and Christians” in with this sort of speech. This is something I am somewhat uneasy with because it can be incredibly subjective and is merely exchanging intervention of the state in the name of promoting a particular set of values for intervention of the state in the name of promoting, or rather forcing, people to tolerate one another. I think social pressure is far more effective and imposing a reputational cost on people who preach hatred of Jews and Christians (or Muslims) will do far more to stem these legitimate threats to cohesion than shutting down schools.
Interesting article and comments
I don’t have much to contribute except one point. I’m no fan of the word tolerance, for me it has negative connotations. What is so great about this word, that it is used in every community report and every politician’s speech? Put simply, you tolerate that which you do not like. Synonyms of this word include “patience”, “charity”, “forbearance” and “lenience”, is that the way to perceive our fellow citizens?
To declare that the best we can hope for is tolerance doesn’t inspire much confidence in me.
Well, yes, Basboosa, tolerance is about the best we can manage. After all, muslims are going to have to tolerate the existence of homosexuals, polytheists and others who theoretically they think should be killed in the same society. Equally, homosexuals, polytheists and others are going to have to tolerate in the same society people who think they should be killed. I don’t think any of them are going to get any more enthusiastic about the others than to merely tolerate them.
One of the confusions that arise from seeing ones religion as purely a system of government, is that ones sees others sins as crimes. And invariably it is the sins of others and not ones own.
Thus homosexuality or adultery is seen purely as a crime rather than as also a sin. Homosexuality is not a crime in Australia, and even if it were you are not a judge, there has been no trial or due process, indeed unless you have actually seen them in the act, your belief that a person is a homosexual is purely conjecture. Thus when you see someone who appears to you to be a homosexual and think that therefore they should be killed that betrays an incorrect understanding of ones own role in a non Muslim society. If offending ones private beliefs was enough to warrant execution, there would be few people left alive.
Homosexuality is a grave sin in Islam, as is adultery, but so is charging or paying usury (Indeed it is a graver sin). So if you think that someone who you believe to be a homosexual is worthy of execution, what do you say of the Muslim who knowingly signs a riba contract?
The classical piety of the Salaf was to concentrate on ones own actions and to leave governing of others to those in charge.
Attilla,
I am not talking about the feelings some groups have towards each other in society, no doubt the BNP cant even manage tolerance when it comes to Muslims.
I’m talking about setting the standard amongst policy-makers, community leaders, politicians, writers etc to associate our ideal society with the correct terminology.
To me, it is nothing short of defeatism to aim for tolerance, that would be like going for Bronze in the Olympics.
Amir said:
A few comments:
1. Yes, the distinction between classical liberalism and ‘teleological liberalism’ (which seems to be me to be a very recent and not well thought-out set of ideas) is worth making clear, and is indeed evident in Gray’s piece. Gray’s piece is most definitely, on my reading, a plea for a kind of Millian-inspired liberalism (see On Liberty, for example).
2. That said, even classical liberalism has, I think, a trace of the teleological about it (which is seemingly over-inflated into some kind of Anglocised Hegelian Force of History by Fukuyama-types). One sees it in Mill’s justification for (what amounts to) tolerance of the religious, the irreligious, the true and the false: it is the allowance of their co-existence, side-by-side, as well as their mingling, that moves societies - at a minimum, hopefully, and at a maximum, certainly, in Mill’s mind - closer to the discovery of truth and protection from error, and thereby inexorably toward a happier social state.
3. One could still argue that even allowing for “archepelagos of culture engaged with one another in an atmosphere of tolerance,” this is not necessarily the best of all feasible worlds. For example, should one archepelago be tolerant of another’s self-contained practices of, say, female genital mutilation, ritualistic torture of children, the teaching of racial superiority and hate-speech? One may personally believe that tolerance should extend this far as long as, on a cultural-liberalist basis, it is not imposed, and does not harm, other archepelagos. However, I think it would not be too difficult to acknowledge that it is not a matter that is settled simply and easily on a priori grounds arising merely out of a high-minded political philosophy. This is what concerns me about Gray’s apparent dismissal of any appeal to a rights-based discourse. Throwing out the discussion of certain basic rights for individuals that ‘trump’ certain cultural sensibilities of a self-contained archepelago could perhaps entail (at least theoretically) the ‘toleration’ of all sorts of horrors.
EM, thanks for your, as always, thoughtful comments.
(2) The fundamental difference though is that a Millian liberal believes in the evolution of ideas without necessarily holding any views as to what the summation of this evolution looks like other than that it is somehow ‘better’. A neo-Hegelian, on the other hand, such as Fukuyama-type or a neo-conservative, believes in this evolution only up to a point and they believe that this point has arrived and that it takes a particular form. Whereas the former cannot, with good conscience, coerce others to adopt his point of view because he recognises that even this view may be incomplete or to be proven false with the passage of time, the latter can, with good conscience, feel far more comfortably trying to coerce others to adopt this view.
With regards to (3), the possiiblity of ritual torture or FGM being ‘tolerated’ in the name of some sort of high-minded liberalism, then I think this is tempered by what Mills himself mentioned in On Liberty:
I have seen Millian arguments against abortion, for example, on the grounds that it is an aggression of the mother against an unborn child, so I believe that cruelty to children could still be addressed by the state within a liberal or libertarian framework.
As an aside, a more interesting (and problematic) question arises in the situation where the adult who is being harmed actually agrees with that harm. For example, a grown woman who wants to endure the practice of FGM because she believes it is necessary for her to maintain her status within her particular cultural group or is necessary for her to have hope of marrying within that group. The case could be made (though naturally I find it repulsive) that this is allowed. As Mill said:
However, at the same time, Mill’s utilitarianism would deem that actions are right if they promote happiness with happiness being described, in part, as the absence of pain. In the case of the woman described above, she has traded some pain for what she may, for whatever reason, see as a lasting benefit of sorts.
The BNP can manage toleration of those they dislike most of the time, Basboosa; reluctant toleration under duress from the law, but toleration. That’s why attacks on muslims by BNP members are comparatively rare; society stops them doing what they’d like to do. I also think that belief in and aspiration to an ‘ideal society’ is one of the things which make people less tolerant of other people who behave or believe in a way they wouldn’t want in their ideal society.
Beybers: many muslims do see islam as ‘ a system of government’ as well as a religion and do think that sins should be punished as crimes. Even of those that don’t, I think it’s because it isn’t practical at the moment to punish them as crimes, not because they don’t think they should be punished as crimes, and that when and if a muslim society were established they would kill ’sinners’ as happily as their more out-spoken brethren. The Millean liberal definition of crime and the muslim definition are completely opposed. I suspect that- apart from convenience and susceptibility to the temptation, of course- the reason muslims acquiesce in ‘riba’ and disapprove of homosexual behaviour is because not accepting the consequences of usury is very difficult in a nonmuslim society- it’s the ‘default mode’ and you’ve got to work and think hard and risk unpleasant consequences to avoid it. However, as Butler said, it’s very easy to ‘
compound the sins that they’re inclined to
By damning those that they’ve no mind to.’
Amir and EM: the two varieties of liberalism you refer to do present problems. To take the example of forbidding FGM in chilhood; what about male genital mutilation- circumcision? It isn’t as harmful as FGM, but it is just as unnecessary and just as imposed. The question of where and if society has the right to interfere with other people is debatable, but the difference between islam (and many other religions) and an open society’s attitude is that the first assume they automatically have that right in a proper society, while the liberals assume they do not unless they can show good reason why they should.
Shorter John Gray: You broke it, you buy it.
Why is cultural essentialism any better than teleological liberalism? (I’m not suggesting that you think it’s better, but rather more realistic, I point I agree with).
Furthermore, whilst Gray’s analysis is certainly more thoughtful than the Steynian strawman, it sweeps the various faultlines (the meat and potatoes of your Steyns, Bolts, et al) under the rug, by assuming that the present state of play is how things will remain, and that shifting demographics and the inevitable tension that will follow economic stagnation won’t make the situation any worse.
As someone who is obviously quite sympathetic to classical liberalism, would you advocate a near complete division of cultural spheres of influence? For example, the whole kerfuffle about the MCB school report could be avoided with an increase to private, religious schooling.
Atilla in the west, about which we are having this conversation, Islam is not a system of government, and therefore it must be practised as a private faith.
It isn’t, so why do Western Muslims spend a great deal of time worrying about what might or might not be? It is a low reward intellectual exercise worrying about a future Islamic state, and the actions of people within it and their punishment or not.
BTW I do believe that the fullest expression of Islam is as a society, but I cannot go about my daily life in a western country continually analysing what would happen if so and so did this or that in a Islamic state. That would drive one insane.
I also get the feeling that those who concern themselves with the future Islamic state, miss an opportunity to think about how they conduct themselves in the present.
I am of course not referring to you, but to those HT people, many of whom do not even fulfil the basic sunnah of dress and Adab and salat, whist they are consumed by their longing for an Islamic state where they can punish people energetically.
Thanks for your comments, Steynbrenner.
I think both are unrealistic. I don’t think cultural essentialism can be a reality even within a culturally homogenous society because there are many forces other than internal ones which shape a society and dictate its cultural evolution. In the case of a multicultural and multiconfessional society, it is even less realistic to subscribe to cultural essentialism because, like it or not, cultures will change and will be influenced by others and by their environment. And this applies as equally to the dominant culture as it does to minorities.
I agree to some extent; in that the promotion of tolerance alone is not a universal panacea for all circumstances and situations. There are other issues, particularly economic, that need to be addressed in many of these societies in order for such calls to have a chance of delivering its promised peaceful coexistence. There is, to give an example, no point telling French and French Muslims to be tolerant of one another’s cultural foibles if you are going to keep one of the groups unemployed and disenfranchised through your policies.
In a nutshell, I suppose I advocate that people should have as much freedom to pursue their own interests as possible whilst not impeding the right of others to pursue their own interests. In a cultural context, this would mean that everyone has a right to practice their religion, enjoy their culture and act according to their own moral codes; on the proviso, of course, that by doing so they don’t interfere with the freedom of others to do the same. This means, for example, that I oppose FGM of children, using violence in response to Papal speeches one doesn’t like, or attempting to stop women wearing veils in the street.
As for the MCB report, then I agree that one of the primary reasons why people took issue with it was because it could be cast by some people with an axe to grind as being an attempt to dictate to the British people (i.e. non-Muslims) how they can run their (i.e. state) schools. If the same report had been written about private schools, I doubt people would have been able to get as much mileage out of it.
Hello,
I read Amir’s post with accelerating interest and would like to pose some comments as follows:
- If there is nother particularly Islamic about suicide bombing, the tactic being invented by Tamil Tigers and it being used by other political pressure groups as well, it is sadly an example of Muslims averting the blame elsewhere. I think the discussion would be greatly helped if we got beyond the denial and start accepting responsibility. Why go in the defensive when it is obvious you don’t support martyrdom operations? Is it misplaced Umma solidarity, or what? I’d really like to know.
- What greatly strikes me is the remark that the way of thinking of the radicalised minority has more in common with radical Western ideologies (Maxism, Leninism, communism and the other derivatives) than with Islam. I have just finished a post on my blog in which I make the case that the remnants of these ideologies - of which there are plenty around - have now reinvented themselves as postmoderns: multiculturalists, environmentalists and relativists (and name all the other derivatives). A psychologist, blogging under the alias of Dr Sanity has made a link with these remnants and radical Islam, and what they have in common. It is striking that all favour collectivism as opposed to individualism, are anti-realism and have a socially constructed identity and victimhood.
While tolerance is not to be sneezed at as probably the only realistic option for plurilism to exist, the trouble is, that this has been perverted by relativism. That mechanism works as follows: relativism denies objective truth; instead there is only personal opinion and nobody is ever wrong. There is no wrong. This means that the idea, the posit, the opinion, has become untouchable. In practice this means that the person is attacked, not what he says. This makes a mature debate about issues impossible. Worse, it has undermined tolerance in its original meaning: respecting the person, allowing him a different opinion and discussing the issue. Relativist perversion of tolerance has turned it into indifference at best and a shouting match at worst, while we have lost the chance of real debate and getting to know and respect.
Multiculturalists have made a travesty of pluralism by advocating things that are mutually exclusive. I spend months distracting the oxymora and contradictions, only to find out that postmoderns aren’t remotely interested if their logic pans out or not. Which brings me to the aforementioned: these are the remnants of Marxism, sensing another way to achieve their habitual aim: destruction of Western culture and this where we are back at point zero.
I’m not saying they and radical Islam are one and the same, but they have traits in common and there is certainly amiration, I think.
Just today I see, Dr Pat and myself are not the only ones making the link: here’s another: http://www.signandsight.com/features/1225.html
Would appreciate your views on the matter.
God bless,
Cassandra
http://millennium-notes.blogspot.com/
Thank you for your comments. Much of what yo have discussed has been covered by this site (and i will link to it)
Suicide is Haram in Islam, those who kill themselves are destined for hell, those who kill an innocent civilian are “as if they have killed the whole of humanity”. Amir discusses the point here:
Post modern epistemology is something that annoys us greatly, it is essentially nothing, nihilistic and fashionable.
In the only country which does not have a multicultural policy, has the strongest and most energetic Muslim community, the United States
and here:
As for Islamism’s links with Marxist methodologies, we have previously discussed it here:
Regards
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