Phrontisterion: religious fanaticism

Showing posts with label religious fanaticism. Show all posts

Thursday, April 1, 2021

« Fanaticism »

~by David Aiken~

“…non abbiamo potuto non vedere” (…we could not fail to see)—

Primo Levi (from The Drowned and the Saved)

A fundamental philosophical problem for the 21^st century, which is also perhaps the most ignored, if not deliberately snubbed, question in the history of modern and contemporary philosophy, is the very practical relationship between the democratic state, and religions that strive to define a place for themselves within the confines of the democratic state.

Philosophical reflection on this question is an unmitigated good, because in the composition of the History of democracy, the story will eventually be told, one day, of the war for supremacy between Enlightenment philosophy and totalitarian Theocracy, and of the significant battles and conflicts in that Total War of ideas.

Contemporary battle lines in this ageless war of ideas began to clearly and unquestionably take shape, again, in 2015, as combatants dug into the sandy terrain of ideas and opinions. And the opening salvos were rude and bloody. History to come will not allow us to say that we have not seen.

In the various debates concerning the place and role of religion in the civil society of the 21^st century, Voltaire and his 18^th century is a wonderful starting point. Because Voltaire, as always, takes himself very seriously, mockingly. Which is a breathe of fresh air in the rather stultifying atmosphere of pedants and pundits, journalists, hypocrites, politicians, and other such obscuring critters.

Consider for a second an enormously un-informative interview with Rachid al-Ghannouchi, leader of Tunisia’s Ennahda Party, a moderate Islamist political party, also known as the Renaissance Party. In this interview al-Ghannouchi praises the new Tunisian constitution (passed in January 2014), saying that he does not “regard it as a secular constitution, but as one that unites Islam, democracy and modernity.” Al-Ghannouchi rightly points out that “There are Christian democratic parties in many European countries, such as Germany; elsewhere, there are democratic parties with Buddhist or Hindu backgrounds. Why should there not be Islamic democratic parties?”

Now, as a new-world Hamlet may have said under these circumstances: this, is entirely the question! But the question needs to be turned on its head to come to some semblance of interesting philosophical perspective and democratic truth: Why do Enlightenment nations continue to insist on sharing the covers of civil society with institutions of religion dedicated to anti-Enlightenment values and goals?

Per Voltaire and Jefferson, Enlightenment societies are deliberately and philosophically constructed so as to keep competing ‘powers’ separate in the civic life of the polis. The argument framing the core of Secularism as a sublunary and philosophical ideal, is precisely the guarantee of freedoms in order to prevent “the perversion of power into tyranny.” This, explains Jefferson, is why the role of education in the civil society, but not religion, is especially important:

The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny]”, are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes (Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779. FE 2:221, Papers 2:526).

The religious worldview, the very spirit of religion, is per se authoritarian; it is the incarnation of a totalitarian mindset. The Apostle Paul reminds us in Romans 13 that “all authority is given by god…” Of course it is; and as an anchoring idea, this one means that all religions, or at the very least, all theistic religions, including Christianity, are structurally and formally theocratic, and that they therefore stand in opposition to the wider conception of the liberal democracy. This is axiomatic. The convert is called upon to commit to the total ‘truth’ of the vision, to the dictatorship of ‘The Truth’, then to submit to the authority of the ‘Truth’s’ divine representative. Thus, to turn al-Ghannouchi’s expression back upon himself as the representative of politicized Islam: “If you sow dictatorship, you harvest terrorism.”

In his interview, however, al-Ghannouchi wanders around in an irrational, and even fanatic labyrinth of disingenuous equivocation, and for the greater disinformation of his under-informed reading audience, equivocates between “moderate secularism” and “moderate Islam,” as though secularism is also, by definition, some sort of religious ‘opinion’ or ‘point of view’. And yet precisely the opposite is the case: if the notion of Enlightenment, and consequentially enlightenment democracy, that inspired Voltaire and Jefferson is to survive as a philosophical ideal, then the concept of Secularism as an Enlightenment value must be more fully and forcefully integrated into civil society. Which brings us round full circle back to Voltaire.

The following translation (Phrontisterion 2015), which constitutes the body of this philosophical reflection, is composed of excerpted, and selected juicier bits from Voltaire’s rather lengthy analysis of “Fanaticism,” section II (from Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, tome 7, Dictionnaire philosophique, I, Paris: Furne et Cie, 1847, 562-564.)

If this expression [Fanaticism] is still linked to its original sense, it is surely only by a slender thread.

Fanaticus used to be an honorable title, signifying one who is a servant or benefactor of a temple. […] [But] does the word fanaticus mean in this place [in Cicero’s text], a demented fanatic, a pitiless fanatic, a horrible fanatic, as one uses it today? Or, rather, does it signify pious, consecrator, a man who is religious, a devout supporter of temples? Is this word in Cicero an insult or ironic praise? […]

Today one understands fanaticism as somber and cruel religious folly. It is a sickness of the mind that one catches like smallpox. Meetings and speeches are more often responsible for its transmission than books. Reading a book rarely fires one up; because then reason calms us down again. But when a speaker who is ardent and possessed of a wonderful imagination begins talking to poorer intellects, his eyes are on fire, and this fire gets communicated; his speech intonations and his gestures spark all the nerves in the audience. He shouts: God is watching, sacrifice to Him that which is nothing more than human; fight the battles of the Lord: and we go off and fight.

Fanaticism is to superstition what euphoria is to fever, and what rage is to anger. Whoever has ecstatic trances, and visions, whoever takes his dreams for realities, and his imaginings for prophesies, is a novice fanatic of great promise: he may soon kill for the love of God.

Bartholomew Diaz was a professed fanatic. He had a brother in Nuremberg, Jean Diaz, who was nothing more than a fervent Lutheran, heartily convinced that the Pope is the Antichrist, and that he was marked with the sign of the Beast. Bartholomew, who was even more persuaded that the Pope was God on earth, left Rome in order to convert or to kill his brother: he assassinated him. That was just perfect; but then we also rendered justice for justice to this Diaz.

Polyeucte, who goes regularly to temple, and on a high holy day knocked over and broke the statues and ornaments, is a fanatic less horrible than Diaz, but not less idiot. The assassins of Duke François de Guise, of William of Orange, of King Henry III, and of King Henry IV, and of so many others, were maniacs sick with the same rage as Diaz.

The absolutely best example of fanaticism is that of those bourgeois in Paris who, the night of the Saint-Bartholomew, ran around assassinating, cutting throats, defenestrating, and hacking to bits their neighbors who did not go to Mass. Guyon, Patouillet, Chaudon, Nonotte, and the ex-Jesuit Paulian, are nothing more than street-corner fanatics, wretches nobody pays attention to: but then, on a day like the Saint-Bartholomew, they go and do big things.

There are cold-blooded fanatics, like the judges who condemn to death those whose only crime is not to think like they think. And these judges are all the more guilty, all the more worthy to be execrated by the human species, because, not being carried away by an onset of rabid passion like the Clements, the Chastels, the Ravaillacs, and the Damiens, it would seem like they could still hear the voice of reason.

There is no other remedy to this epidemic infection than the philosophical spirit, which, transmitted from neighbor to neighbor, finally softens men’s manners; and this prevents the onset of the disease. Because as soon as the disease begins to make progress, everyone has to flee and wait until the air is pure again. Laws and religion cannot withstand the plague of the soul. Religion, far from being a salutary sustenance for the soul, becomes poison in infected brains. These wretches continually have in their minds the example of Aod, who assassinated King Eglon; of Judith, who cut off Holophernes’ head while sleeping with him; of Samuel, who hacked King Agag into bits; of the priest, Joad, who assassinated his queen in the stable doorway; etc., etc., etc. They see only these examples, which, while they may have been respectable in Antiquity, are become repulsive in our time. These unfortunates draw their fury from the same religion that condemns them.

Our laws are still largely powerless to stop this rabid onslaught: it is as if you were reading statutory bylaws to a fanatic. These are folks who are persuaded that the holy spirit spurring them on is above our laws, and that their fervor is the only law they should observe.

What does one respond to a man who says to you that he prefers obeying God rather than men, and who, as a result, is sure to win heaven by cutting your throat? Like gangrene, once fanaticism has reached the brain, the infection is almost incurable. I have seen convulsionaires who, all the while speaking of the miracles of Saint Paris, gradually got themselves all worked up: their eyes became enflamed, their whole body started trembling, their faces became disfigured with fury, and they would have killed anyone who would have contradicted them.

Yes, I have seen these convulsionaires; I have seen them foam at the mouth and twist their arms and legs around. They would cry out: “We need blood.” They succeeded in getting their king assassinated by one of his domestics, and finally settled on just going after philosophers.

It is almost always conniving rascals who drive fanatics onwards, and who put the knife in their hands. These rascals are like the Old Man in the Mountain who, according to legend, used to give idiots a foretaste of the joys of paradise, who would promise them an eternity of the pleasures they tasted with him, on the condition that they would go and assassinate everyone that he would indicate to them. There has only ever been one religion in the world that has not been contaminated by fanaticism, and that is the one practiced by educated Chinese. Their sects of philosophers were not only exempt from this plague, but they were in fact the remedy for it; because the result of philosophy is to calm the soul, and fanaticism is incompatible with tranquility of spirit.

If our sainted religion has often been corrupted by this infernal frenzy, we have only the folly of men to blame.

Friday, January 1, 2021

Religion in the Democratic State—Philosophical Non-sense

~by David Aiken~

Remembering back to the dramatic terrorist activity in the Paris of 2015, at least one conclusion of that terrorist news cycle is now at hand: the Charlie Hebdo terrorism trial, which was held this fall 2020 in Paris, from September 2nd to November 10th, has reached its verdict for those implicated, with sentences ranging from four years to life in prison.

In 2015, as if it were just yesterday, Phrontisterion published an essay around a Charlie Hebdo editorial by Riss.

In democratic society the philosophical problem of religions, any and all religions, is really
quite spectacular and deadly serious. The question was perhaps best considered, and articulated to the Anglo-Saxon world, by John Locke in his 1689 text, A Letter Concerning Toleration; and that question remains clear and relevant at the outset of this new year 2021: what to do with religions in societies with a democratically organized mandate?

In a philosophical nutshell: Religions, which are structurally authoritarian by nature, are antithetical, and therefore philosophical hostile, to democratic societies. In theory at least, democratic societies must seek to replace the authoritarian tendencies of human animal society, with a reasoned egalitarianism. This is the very essence of the secular society. This is also the very nut of the difficulty.

§ March 2015: In response to the tragic events of February 7^th at the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

The new century is yet in its adolescence, and in a moment of historical Necessity the rallying cry – “Je suis Charlie” – has been heard in the streets of France. The contemporary translation of a still youngish idea, this cry goes to the heart of the democratic ideal: to unite “free hearts, free foreheads” around the notion, barely more than two centuries old, that men will be happier when allowed to live out their lives in freedom, that liberty and equality will yield a greater harvest of human joy and fulfillment than any form of tyranny, whether of religion or of state. To borrow from Abraham Lincoln’s rhythms—we are now engaged in an historical wager, to test whether Men so conceived and so dedicated in Liberty, can long endure.

The following text is Phrontisterion’s translation of Riss’s Editorial from February 25, 2015 (CH #1179), the first edition of Charlie Hebdo to appear on the newsstands after the slaughter of its editorial staff by religious fundamentalists in Paris on February 7^th.

“For a long time I thought that the worst thing that could happen to a political cartoonist would be to be poisoned, which is what happened to Daumier and Philipon under the reign of the old fool Louis-Philippe. So when Charb, Luz, or myself, young cartoonists, would propose some sketch to satiric newspapers at the beginning of the 1990s, there was nothing to fear, because the benevolent angel of our craft was hovering just above our heads: the sacrosanct Freedom of Expression.

With just our cartoons we were hoping to laugh and to make others laugh; but after several years, and after drawing all the famous celebrities in laughable situations, a question came to our minds: to caricature, to make drawings—at the end of the day what is the purpose of it? After all, a drawing is just a drawing. Just a little scribbled something that tries to be humorous all the while hoping to get someone to think. To laugh and to make one think: this is what makes an ideal caricature! The pleasure of surprising the reader by taking an unusual point of view, by doing a little side-step that obliges the reader to look at things obliquely, from an angle that is unfamiliar, different from mainstream seeing. The exaggeration and the embellishment, which are the much-criticized stock in trade of the political cartoonists at “Charlie Hebdo,” are nothing more than a means of exploring roads less traveled by.

It is perhaps this that the assassins of January 7^th could not tolerate, those who, if truth be told, never really tried to do anything. They just allowed themselves to be coddled by the comforts of a religion that already has all the responses, and that allows one to dispense with thinking and doubting; because doubt is the worst enemy of religion. There can be no more doubting when one has chosen to enter into a newspaper office in order to kill everyone.

The cartoonists and the editors at “Charlie,” on the other hand, spend all their time doubting. About everything, and especially about themselves, their talent, and their inspiration. Which sometimes makes them infuriating. Wolinski wondered after the fire in 2011: “Have we perhaps gone too far?” Only an honest man asks this type of question. Never a killer. Wolinski had the courage to put his his own doubts on display. He chose to make the expression of his vulnerability an art. This is why a cartoonist will never become a killer, and why it is dishonest to make the violence of the assassins comparable to the so-called “provocations” of the cartoonists by proclaiming, “they were asking for it.”

In order to doubt, though, one needs others, all those who do not think like you do. How boring it would be if everyone thought like us! The killers of January 7^th must sure have lived in a sad world… an inflexible world where any head that is out of place gets decapitated, where any discordant voice is cut off. So, imagine, for these of little brain, even just the idea of making pint-sized cartoons about the prophet! These miserable wretches threw away the lives of others in order to forget that they had thrown away their own. As Luz wrote on the front cover of “Charlie,” we should almost forgive them just for being what little they were.

Despite the floods of encouragement and support, it is still right for us to wonder who really has the courage to lead in this battle. Because, frankly, who wants to fight against blasphemy, who wants to defy those who are religious, if it is only to end up being protected by the police 24 hours a day? No one. Everyone came out in support of “Charlie”: “Keep it up, guys! We’re with you!” But how many will dare to draw and to publish blasphemous cartoons? Too few. The crowd has come out in support of “Charlie” like the crowd backs the bull in the ring, because who knows, perhaps one day, exhausted by the banderillas, “Charlie” will also die to the rousing applause of the admiring crowd.

And, behold, precisely at the time when “Charlie” is getting ready to make its appearance again, an almost identical assassination attempt occurs in Copenhagen, with fewer mortalities but the same objectives: to silence those who believe in the liberty of expression and to exterminate the Jews. Those who try to find explanations for the killers, not to say excuses, by blaming the cartoonists for “throwing oil on the fire,” what rationalizations will they find in order to lessen the responsibility of these anti-Semitic murderers? Because the Jews who were the victims in the Hyper Cacher or in Copenhagen did not draw any caricatures of Mohammed; and yet they were assassinated. To accept such violence is already exasperating, but then to have to listen to more or less accommodating pseudo-intellectual speeches, is just intolerable.

The attacks in Paris and Copenhagen are, first and foremost, attacks against a modern conception of the relationship between individuals, against diversity in ideas and among men. For centuries religions fought violently against precisely these values; and one had the impression that the modern world had been able to reason with these retrograde religions and their hegemonic intention to control men and minds. The attacks in Paris and Copenhagen suggest that more time and more blood will yet be necessary before all religions finally accept, for good, this non-negotiable framework of democracy.”

-Riss-

Thursday, September 1, 2016

A Rousing Charlie Hebdo Rendition of ‘A Rose by Any Other Name…’

The psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers identified it as the struggle with the unseasonable spirit of the times (Kampf mit dem Ungeist der Zeit; interview in Die Zeit, 20, February 1958). But in a more literary incarnation it remains the perplexing problem of ‘a rose by any other name….’ The Bard puts this divisive metaphor of the rose & its scent into the mouth of Juliet when she realizes that her Beloved Romeo, whose essential perfume has intoxicated her, has the odious name of Montague—“wherefore art thou Romeo?”

’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;

Thou art thyself though, not a Montague.

[…] O! be some other name:

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet;

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,

Retain that dear perfection which he owes

Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;

And for that name, which is no part of thee,

Take all myself.

Building upon the metaphor: no matter what name we give a thing, the essential perfume of its reality never changes, for good and for ill. Romeo was a delightfully aromatic essence-of-rose, but bore an inauspicious, unrose-like name. However, not every scent is a Romeo, a pleasant fragrance that we may call “but love.” Which is precisely the disturbing problem presently being fanned about on the wings of Politically Correct Speak in the cities and nations of Western Europe. Politically Correct Speak, or Newspeak, as was made abundantly clear in George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, is not interested in expressing truth about things, but rather in mis-naming and mis-taking things, in controlling words first, in order then to control the flow of ideas. It is the specific intent of Politically Correct Speak to create partisan narratives; it is the Will to Lie.

So what happens when our mayors and governors, our various elected officials and their various appointed ‘creatures’, what happens when a society, as a general rule of thumb, refuses to call a thing what it is? What happens when we deliberately fail to call the rose a rose, and instead call the aggressive cancer a summer cold?

A Lesson in Hedging.

Suppose, for example, that a certain, broadly-conceived faction of religiously inspired individuals begins radiating out into the world with their weapons, in order to intimidate through combat, to coerce, to compel, and generally to fill with terror—with the Fear of the Lord, as one might have said in other times—just normal people who may or may not be otherwise interested in that particular religion’s ideas, or doctrines, or cultural attitudes. When our Western societies fail to give ‘the rose’ its proper name, we fail to recognize and therefore to correctly identify an essential reality. So we effectively craft a new, other ‘thing’ in the place of the really real; we mask the real, and ignoring the symbolic (to borrow upon Lacanian phrasing), we invent an imaginary world where we are magically transformed into the guests at the feast of Belshazzar of old. And behold, as in former times, the handwriting shall also appear on our wall: the mene, mene, tekel upharsin that tells us that, by our not-seeing, we must necessarily fail to resolve whatever the real, and very non-magical ‘problems’ are.

This problem of perception, which is at its core hermeneutical, is general in scope. Whether intentional or unintentional, the real is replaced by the imaginary; and yet the ‘real’ does not simply go away, but remains growing like a weed or a cancer under cover of darkness and ignorance. But such changeling phenomena of the mind are commonplace. For example, as enthusiastic devotees of the dogmatic scientism that dominates the modern worldview, we have grown accustomed to speak of ‘addictions’, and have tried every way from Sunday to address the problem of addiction medically, with a view to relieve, to remedy, and to rectify the ill. But more recent thinking in the empirical sciences, which is indeed a thinking and not simply a belief in the epistemological status quo, has begun to resist defining addiction as a ‘disease’, really not an illness at all; and so our previous thinking and argument is beginning to disappear down the rabbit-hole in a flutter and flurry, in order to try to understand the implications of the ‘new’ real that is starting to emerge. Such was the polemic at the heart of a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education

“But even as new insights emerge from both the physical and social sciences, a longstanding argument over whether or not addiction is a disease prevents researchers from identifying effective treatment strategies. The "disease model" remains dominant among medical researchers as well as in the treatment community. But it is not universally embraced, and some researchers think it gets in the way of fresh ideas about how to help people.

"We don’t have very good science yet, […] and a lot of that has to do with issues of conceptualization and politics."”

Cover of CH, January 2016

Now with respect to our above-mentioned illustration of that rubicund faction of religiously exalted and illuminated, weaponized crusaders who are at present radiating out into the world, if our political and national leaders continue to misname this unseasonal ‘malady’, calling it simply fanaticism (instead of religious fanaticism) or simply terrorism (instead of religious terrorism), and qualifying the actions simply as criminal (instead of religious proselytism), then the societies who are being plagued with this unseasonableness will necessarily fall short of developing effective strategies in their attempts to learn how to deal with events in this modern period of unbridled Religion. For the essential element that is being deliberately ignored and therefore over-looked in the naming of this modern rose, is that, at heart, this fanaticism and this terrorism is a movement of the Religious Mind. And yet this movement will not just go away if we ignore it. For the nature of a thing will always eventually make itself known; we need only pay attention to the scent.

There is impediment, however, from the world of Politically Correct Speak. For our aggrieved and suffering societies do not dare to name any particular religion as somehow significant in the rose-like reality of Religious Fanaticism—suppose for the sake of the argument that it were Islam—because this would provoke a hue and cry, and shouts of discrimination, and amalgamation, and profiling would be heard far and near. And of course members and spokespersons of that specifically named religious group, who are perhaps less fanatic and certainly differently weaponized, will take pains to make it clear to All & Sundry that We-the-Secular-People should pedantically avoid confusing and confounding into some sort of homogeneity, and thereby creating the amalgam between, those religious fanatics who are (really, they say,) irreligious, criminal lunatics and terrorists, and true believers who are truthfully and peacefully believers and holders of the true truth of their religion, and therefore truly religious.

Unfortunately, the spirit of the times seems to have remained intellectually unseasonable (ungeistig), and the allure of totalitarianism irresistible. Indeed, it is precisely the out-of-season nature of the magical or religious spirit that constitutes the unbridgeable gap between religious authoritarianism, which is aggressively on the rise and ravenous for new converts, and the Enlightenment foundations of modern Western democracies. In his 1958 interview Jaspers made clear that “Totalitarianism is neither communism, nor fascism, nor Nazism, but has occurred in and through all of these configurations. The terrible threat for the future of mankind, which is universal, is Mass Order, which is a function of the age and divorced from any particular politic whose existence is determined by principles grounded in notions of nation, history, constitution, and rules-of-law. (...) Totalitarianism is like a ghost that drinks the blood of the living and thereby becomes real, while the victims, like a mass of living corpses, continue on with their existence.”

[“Der Totalitarismus ist nicht Kommunismus, nicht Faschismus, nicht Nationalsozialismus, sondern ist in allen diesen Gestalten aufgetreten. Er ist universal die furchtbare Drohung der Zukunft der Menschheit in der Massenordnung. Er ist ein Phänomen des Zeitalters, losgelöst von aller jener Politik, die durch Prinzipien nationalen, geschichtlichen, verfassungsmäßig-rechtsstaatlichen Daseins bestimmt ist. (...) Der Totalitarismus ist wie ein Gespenst, das das Blut der Lebenden trinkt und dadurch wirklich wird, während die Opfer als eine Masse lebender Leichname ihr Dasein fortsetzen.”]

Jaspers reminds us insightfully that the Spirit of Totalitarianism precedes its myriad translations into historical happenstance, one form of which has undeniably been Religion in all of its various permutations. Leaving the history of the question aside for the nonce, it is more pertinent to our immediate historical moment, and so to our purpose here, to note that the Religious Mind has ever been the viper nourishing in the bosom of Enlightenment; and the viper has now turned to strike a blow for its long-awaited emancipation from enlightened Reason and its return homeward in the direction of its obscurantist heritage.

At the philosophical birthing of enlightened democracies, which we may quite arbitrarily date at 1689 with the English publication of John Locke’s Letter concerning Toleration, he reasons that there needs to be a place for the Religious Mind in the non-religious, non-theocratic state—the secular state. Hence, already with the birth of the democratic ideal the obscurantism of the Religious Mind was accepted into the bosom of enlightened secularism. The Religious Mind must obviously be permitted to continue to thrive, privately, in the secular state, argues Locke, but any notion of Religion playing an authoritative role in the public arenas of that state is to be absolutely curtailed. Locke argues for the comprehensive separation of church authority from civil authority because a civil magistrate is not qualified, either by his civil office and or by his competencies, to make meaningful distinctions between competing religious authorities with competing claims. For example, what possible criteria are there for validating in civil society one religious denomination as worthy of tax exempt status, and yet for refusing this status to another denomination? In civil society, what makes one body of doctrine a religion, but a different and perhaps competing body of doctrine a cult? And in what way is the American IRS (tax service) educationally or intellectually qualified to make such distinctions?

In the present historical moment, it is for exactly this reason that it is impossible not to conclude that the vast number of commentators and interlocutors on this question of religious fanaticism and religious terrorism are talking indefensible, irrational nonsense. We are compelled to say to all of those who pretend, either from inside the religious context or external observers of the phenomenon, that it is somehow possible or meaningful not to amalgamate religious fanatics with co-religionists of lukewarm or indifferent commitment—Stuff & Nonsense.

Here, for example, one reads the oft-repeated claim, which is not even disguised as a justification, but simply delivered up as de facto statement of historical truth, that “the attacks [in Paris’ Bataclan theatre] were not related in any way to Islam.” And here an essayist seems not to recognize what John Locke already clearly understood in 1689, which is to say, the indefensible irrationality behind the litany: “One cannot say it enough: Islamism, no matter how moderate it is, is not Islam, but a theocratic and neo-fascist deviant of Islam.” Such sterile and incompetent claims and assertions are certainly not logical argument, because they contain neither elements of logic nor of argument, but neither are they meaningful forms of reasoning in civil society. The realm of philosophy remains inviolate in this present atmosphere of non-Thought and non-Argument. Locke’s 17^th century reasoning, on the other hand, was sufficiently persuasive for the framers of the American Constitution to separate the interests of State from the interests of Religion in the young American republic. And his Thinking remains relevant for us today.

The following are Phrontisterion translations of two of Riss’ editorials from late summer 2016 editions of Charlie Hebdo. In these editorials Riss develops in his own inimitable style a line of reasoning that is as old as Enlightenment itself.

A Prayer for Miscreants

Editorial: Riss

20 July 2016 / Charlie Hebdo N^o 1252 / 3

From this issue of CH

What can one really say after Nice? In the year 2015 the French discovered Islamic terrorism. We shall not repeat here the different commentaries that have pummeled us since January 2015, like “They will not make us change of way of life,” “They want to destroy our insouciance,” “Their type of Islam is not true Islam,” “These acts are being committed by the mentally unstable.” If we were a bit more cynical, we would add: etc., etc.

After each terrorist attack, we ask ourselves about the ultimate role of Religion. But then, just as soon as the notion of Religion is evoked, the specialists show up in the various television studios, affirming that the killer was not a practicing Muslim, or even that he was crazy and that Religion had nothing to do with his action. Just like for the soldier Ryan (TN: Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan), we move heaven and earth to get Religion out of the difficult position that it finds itself in just because of one mindless dumbsh#t. And even if it should turn out that the killer was radicalized quite quickly, the specialists will respond that this is not sufficient to make him a true believer and that his crime therefore cannot be blamed on Religion. Keep moving along; there is nothing to see here!

And yet the history of religions is chock full of quick conversions. “Paris is certainly worth a mass,” used to say the very Protestant Henry IV just before converting to Catholicism for political gain. So why should paradise not be worth a truck going 90 km an hour on the Promenade des Anglais on one July 14^th evening? Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in one night just before the battle on Milvius bridge, which he won by slaughtering hundreds of his enemies without the help of refrigerator trucks. As for Paul of Tarsus, prosecutor of the Christians, he converted all at once on the road to Damascus, and became from one day to the next Saint Paul, illuminated Christian. These high-speed conversions never shocked anyone; and they have even been repeatedly recounted for us and marveled at for centuries. So why is it that an inhabitant of Nice would not have the right to convert to Islam in a couple of days? There are a lot of them in History, sad-sacks suddenly converted to a religion in order to give meaning to their pathetic destinies. The case of the killer in Nice is not in the least bit something new.

What strikes us when we look at these types of crimes, is that they are committed like they were prayers. Prayer does not need lots of trappings. Immense cathedrals, sumptuous mosques, or thousand-year old synagogues are not absolutely necessary for prayer to take place. It is enough just to believe, and with some Psalms and verses at the ready, one can pray at the North Pole, in the desert, or on the summit of Mount Everest. Faith does not have material needs; faith has only spiritual needs.

It is the same with these terrorist acts. It is not necessary to master really complicated weapons, nor war-time techniques learned in Syria or Iraq. A modest knife, such as in Magnanville, or a common truck will do the trick, like a simple rug oriented toward Mecca, a little Bible in the pocket, or a rolled-up Torah are sufficient for prayer. These people kill like they pray, and they only need a direct connection to God and a handsome new refrigerated truck rented two days earlier to make it happen.

The police forces and the military will never be able to stop these attacks if they focus too much on the technique; because there are no machines that permit one to delve into souls and minds. It is impossible to know what an individual is hiding in the deep recesses of his consciousness, which he dissimulates even from those closest to him. Like deliberate failures or [Freudian] slips that might happen to reveal something that is slumbering in the unconscious, these terrorist acts surface unexpectedly and cannot be anticipated. It is this that gives us the impression that they are committed by crazy people.

No police force, no army will ever be able to control this. They can act only and uniquely upon visible things, expressed in conversations transmitted by portable phones or computers. But they cannot act upon the invisible things of the mind. The ways of the Lord are mysterious, goes the saying, and therefore it is difficult for the police to verify their identity. It is the mystery of Religion that gives to religions all their force, and, if a religion drifts too far afield from its mystery, and begins clothing itself with the rationalism that is required by our modern societies, that religion becomes weak and loses its strength. Mysticism is fundamentally anti-democratic, because it is incompatible with the balance of powers and the critical spirit that constitute the foundations of democracy.

So, what remains for us to do in order to protect ourselves from mysticism? Some additional barriers across the Promenade des Anglais, an app on our smartphones called “Attack Alert,” and additional national guard reserves. It is our turn to have faith.

Summer Reform

Editorial: Riss

10 August 2016 / Charlie Hebdo N^o 1255 / 3

Front page comic

What an odd idea—to want to reform Islam! It is the new trend ever since the attack in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray. After the assassination of an ecclesiastic from a religion other than Islam by a killer who claims to represent Islam, the home front is in a panic. Muslims are in a panic, because they are afraid that they will become targets of violence. Catholics are in a panic, because they are afraid of a religious war. Politicians are in a panic, because they already know that their security measures have reached their limits.

And then—why reform Islam? We have been told repeatedly, for months, that the attacks are committed by those who are deranged. But if this were true, it is not Islam that should be reformed, but the psychiatric hospitals, because they have been unable to identify these crazed killers and have not been able to provide effective treatment. Curiously, fifteen days after the attack no one is framing the story anymore in terms of ‘deranged’. Fifteen days later, everyone is talking about Islam.

If anyone knows how to reform a religion, in three weeks if possible, just before the start of classes, that would be really helpful. Like class dunces who do not do a stitch of work for the entire academic year, and who think they can make it all up in the week prior to the final exams, it is only now that ‘they’ acknowledge the existence of tensions between Islam and our democracy: more and more fundamentalists, more and more veils, more and more beards, more and more mosques that smell of fire and brimstone. ‘They’ wanted to pacify us by pretending that the attacks were a psychiatric problem. ‘They’ already wanted to pacify us in the same way by affirming that the problem with Islam was not Islam, but secularism [laïcité]. There are the intellectuals, if we can call them that, who continue to tell us that it is secularism [laïcité] that needs to be reformed. Every type of manipulation has been attempted by the charlatans of Islamophobia, as Charb used to call them, in an attempt to keep Islam from being criticized and Muslims from having to question their religion.

Because someone is not exempt from asking questions about the faith just because he is a believer. Quite the opposite. Catholics questioned their faith with Vatican II, which did not make them bad Catholics. If Muslims would do the same, it would not make them bad Muslims. To raise questions about Islam and Muslims is not to stigmatize them; it is the very least one can do when it is a matter of bringing into the public arena questions that are of concern to everyone.

In a small city in the suburbs where I was doing a news story, ‘they’ explained under what conditions the new mosque had been built. The site had been chosen by local Muslim authorities, and they were adamant that the mosque should be situated right next to the train station. Strange location for a mosque. The spokesman explained to me that this location would permit them to observe which Muslims, when returning home from work, would go straight home without going to the mosque. With their place of worship only fifty meters from the station, they no longer had any excuse for not going there. Local politicians were not shocked by this demand, and accepted it without flinching.

To reform Islam would first consist in reforming our locally elected politicians. They believed that Muslims were like any other group, like farmers or hunters. That all you needed was to be buddies with them and to satisfy their demands in order to get their vote in the next elections. And because these local politicians know nothing about Islam, they were persuaded by the spiel of those Muslims who are the most militant, which is to say, by the claptrap of those who are the least progressive, because they were convinced that this would be good for their reelection and for social peace. Result: France is on the verge of civil war.

The massive annual street markets and sidewalk sales that take place in Lille each summer, an event that dates from the Middle Ages and has only ever been interrupted by the Nazi occupation, was just canceled out of fear of attacks by Islamic fundamentalists. One less secular [laïque] festival. On the other hand, even though a priest has just been assassinated, who would dare cancel for security reasons a religious event like the processions of August 15 [NT: The Assumption of Mary]? Likewise, who would dare forbid for security reasons the Muslim Tradeshow or the Muslim Fair, which are annual events.

How is one to reform Islam? When we see the speed with which those who are secular [laïcs] have already reformed their way of life by adapting themselves to fundamentalist terror, while Muslims have not begun even the slightest bit of work on themselves, we begin to see that the question has perhaps already been answered.

Phrontisterion

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