Violence and Recent Events here in Canada

Like most Canadians, I was moved, transfixed and altered to some degree by the events in Ottawa.  I was affected too by the death of Patrice Vincent in Québec, but in that case it was the historian who reacted, alas, not my affective human self.  But that death was what did get me thinking about violence and the nature of war and the relationship of religion to violent acts.  These were inchoate thoughts, mulled over in spare moments until the attack in Ottawa.

I wondered at first if these two were the actions of random mentally unstable individuals, but that seemed unlikely, given their personal histories and recent conversions to that perversion of Islam personified presently in ISIS/ISIL. As much as commentators as diverse as a neighbour and the radio host John Moore, or those wild individuals who post anonymously on the net might like to assign these actions to random violence perpetrated by individuals with no meaning beyond that, I cannot agree.

At this point in my ongoing internal analysis I have some tentative conclusions, and I stress they are carefully tentative.

First:  there is enough evidence to understand that a certain type of individual, citizens of this country,  is attracted to the ideology of radical Islam.  They are particularly attracted to ISIS/ISIL because of that groups skilful use of social media, in videos particularly. From sketchy media reports, these individuals, who come from English-speaking western countries (though they may also come from other western countries; I simply do not know this one way or the other), are usually young males. Most of them seem to be the sort of young male who has been in trouble in petty ways with the law - drugs, assaults, small crimes, regardless of their upbringing.  But another group are reported as being stable, friendly, popular and 'ordinary' individuals who changed fairly rapidly.  But virtually all of them are young men.

Second:  Even where the label, 'mentally unbalanced' can justifiably be applied as perhaps in the two recent incidents, their unbalanced violent rage was pointed at targets symbolic of western civilization in a deliberate fashion by social media produced by ISIS/ISIL.  These individuals may well have killed, but they would have lashed out at some other target that offended their mental states, rather than the military and parliament.

At this moment in time, I rate arguments that this violence is fundamentally random as specious.  As I wrote on my Facebook page this is a new sort of warfare, that uses social media to inspire unpredictable violent acts that in former circumstances would have been unreachable by combatants half a world away from us.

We have here two conflicting ideals of human civilization.  On the one hand the form developed over the past thousand years or so in what is loosely called 'the West'. Historians happily debate the roots, but Christian ideals of the intrinsic worth of each individual are part of that mix.  This idealization of the individual person grew slowly over a thousand or more years, given large boosts in the Renaissance, the Reformation, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the gradual expansion of democracy, and the wild explosion of individualism that is the marque of the present day. It is a messy civilization, where corporate interests of businesses, governments, schools and so on conflict and swirl around with individual desires for expression, all loosely held together in a constantly evolving ferment. Part of this ferment is religion - in this case, religion adopted by and more importantly, adapted by, individual desires. In this bubbling cauldron, we have individuals choosing to change their religion, reject religion entirely, accept wholly the traditional beliefs of one faith, or choose which bits and pieces to accept or reject.  An observer from far above would see a unity of individualism held together by social chewing gum and tape, but constantly disassembled and reassembled.

Opposed to this, is an ideal for human civilization that demands a unity of faith, of purpose, of political organization.  This is an old ideal.  'Western' civilization observed it when that concept called 'Christendom' still prevailed.  Islam observed it when there was a single Caliphate in the first centuries of that religion.  The ideal of a holistic society composed of believers who integrated civil and religious under a single successor of the Prophet ('Caliph' being the anglicized word for 'kalifah' or 'successor') or Caliph.  This was a unitary idea for society, where others were tolerated only where they stayed to themselves and paid special taxes, and was tolerant in that situation.  This new 'caliphate' self-declared, has perverted this original idea and sets about killing those who do not adhere to its dictates. Mercy was a central teaching of Muhammed, and these 'successors' have decided to abandon his central teachings in this regard.

I doubt these two ideals for civilization can exist together in the same space.  They can of course, tolerate each other so long as they live in separate geographical locations and restrain attempts to convert one another to their ideals.  But the world is never so neatly organized and separated.  Few people in the broader Islamic world wish for the sort of place promulgated by ISIS/ISIL or the Taliban when they controlled Afghanistan. They may well prefer a more corporate and holistic society than obtains in our very untidy 'western' world, but they do not at all like the harsh nonsense of the radicals.  We in the 'western' world often pine for a more holistic and unitary world, often imagined as existing in some past golden age.

What then, does this have to say about the relationship of religion to violence?  It says that violence is not intrinsic to religion, but a tool sometimes used for the promotion of an ideology.  If Christianity is one of the roots of 'western' society's veneration of the individual, then violence is and has been used to promote an individualistic view of the proper ordering of human affairs, that arose in a Christian incubator.   If Islam is a religion that is one of the roots of the ideal of a unitary society, then violence has also been the tool of that view.  At this point in history, ISIS/ISIL is using violence in a very direct fashion to recreate the Caliphate in Syria and Iraq.   I suspect the long term goal is to conquer Saudi Arabia and controll thereby Mecca and Medina and truly recreate the ancient Caliphate. They quite rightly see the 'western' world with its Christian roots in individualism as the enemy and chief threat and impediment to their goals.  They don't, I think, really care about directly attacking within 'western' countries like Canada, but are concerned to  create a little disruption here by influencing the sorts of young men I mentioned above, in aid of their ultimate cause.

Thoughts on this War

I watched the opening of parliament on TV today here in Canada.  I witnessed a rare unity of parliament, where partisan differences were put to one side.  The Prime Minister did not give a Churchillian speech.  Rather he spoke in the manner ordinary Canadians would express themselves. He spoke from the heart as a Canadian and as a parliamentarian. After his words, greeted with applause by all Members, he rose and walked to shake the hand of the Sergeant-at-arms, Kevin Vickers in thanks and then handshakes and hugs with Justin Trudeau, the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Thomas Mulcair the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Canada and leader of the New Democratic Party.  These actions, as far as I could tell from the body language were genuine on the part of both Prime Minister and his opponents. Parliament on this day rose to its height as the chief organ of democracy in this country. We all owe to the unflappability of Kevin Vickers the fact that our democracy functioned today. From reports of his character, Mr. Vickers is a kind and gentle man with a grave demeanour, but one of those individuals who does what needs to be done, who rises to whatever the occasion demands. Thank God for that.

We are in a war now.  I am convinced of that. They say that armies are always preparing for the last war.  Yesterday in Ottawa and a few days ago in St. Jean-sur-Richelieu in Québec we saw the new face of war.  Yes, traditional bloody battles on land, sea and air will continue.  But this new face of war happens at home and in attacks from individuals or small groups who are not connected by lines of command, but through propaganda found on the internet.  This war is not a war of countries making formal declarations and putting their armed forces into the field until one side or all sides win or lose.  

This war is a war of two ways of life.  On our part, we wish for a world where people can live with friends and family  and work and play in proper measure.  On the other part, is a world of harsh dogma, where rules are set and all must live by those strict rules or die. Some here think that by bowing out of direct combat we are isolated from this.  We are not.  The ideologues hate us and will kill us when they can even if we buried all our weapons, along with our heads, in the sand.  This is not a war of religion. I teach the history of religions at the university level and know how rare purely religious wars have been, and have a good understanding of the role that religion sometimes does play in warfare.  But this is not a war of Christianity vs. Islam, or the secular West vs. the religious Islamic world.  It is a war of us - those who are atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druids - whatever your belief, who believe that living in peace with family and friends is a higher good than strict adherence to one set of rules for existence - a war of us against those who want to enforce their view of life onto the world through violence and terror.  In the Middle East where a traditional war is raging, the ISIS or ISIL group is battling both Sunni and Shia Muslims and Christians and soon Jews.  They are a polyglot group of haters who battle ethnic groups that do not share their hideous ideology. 

Our role here in Canada is to do as parliament did so magnificently today, to continue on loving our families and friends, and working at our tasks and enjoying our play, and eschewing hate.  

After Atheism

Recently I listened carefully to a series of podcasts taken from CBC Radio's Ideas broadcast.  I think it was originally produced in 2012, but the podcasts came to my attention only recently.  I selected one of these for students of two of my history of religion online courses, one at the University of Guelph and the other at the related institution, the University of Guelph/Humber.

I presented the third podcast because it deals with the very nature of religion, of society and of the relationship between the two.  The producer, David Cayley interviews William Cavanaugh a theologian at DePaul University in Chicago. The interview centres around two books of his, one called The Migrations of the Holy (2011), and the other, The Myth of Religious Violence (2009). Generally (and this is a very general statement!), Cavanaugh advances the idea that the new nation-state became and usurped the object of worship from faith in the early modern era.  He thinks that 'religion' became both a tool of the new form called the nation-state and a scapegoat for violence from which the State claimed to protect citizens.  In reality this was a cover for violence which as is usual in history was a product of greed, honour, the desire for expansion and so on.  Later, the state began to find religion less useful and privatization occurred.

I am not sure yet what to think of his ideas, except of course, most wars were not primarily religious, though sometimes religion was a factor or used by those promoting war, and only rarely was religion a prime factor. This is a reasonable stance for any serious student of history to take.  Cavanaugh is farther out on a limb when he discusses the role of religion today - citing examples such as the Papacy's opposition to war in Iraq. He sees 'religion' as having a role in a faith an a political sense.

I need to think a lot more about this before coming even to preliminary ideas.

Dying and Henry

A blog post about my old dog dying may seem inappropriate or irrelevant to some in this space, but not to me... and this is my blog, after all, and my dog, Henry.

My old chocolate lab has a severe kidney malfunction that is causing him to die, slowly.  He is ten years old and thus old in dog terms, but  as usually labrador retrievers live to 12 or so years, a bit early for this.  With all my other pets, I have taken them in to be euthanized when they were in evident distress.  Henry is not; he is just slowly shutting down.  I decided therefore to keep him at home either to die in peace in his own place, or if he does begin to experience severe discomfort, then to take him.  I went today and bought a sedative for him should I have to do so as I do not to want him to suffer the stress all animals do with visits to the Vet.

This has got me thinking about animals and the afterlife.  Some years ago I read a newspaper report of some theological opinion from a Jesuit theologian in Rome that animals do not have souls and will not be in Heaven.  Seems to me that for some, Heaven wouldn't be Heaven if there were any of those pesky animals in place - just people sitting around on clouds thinking deep thoughts.  For others, such as myself, this would be closer to Hell than Heaven.  None of us know, of course, if Heaven will be as described when we were young children, or if it will be some place of amorphous joy.  I rather hope some version of my childhood view is true than some place where nebulous souls float around meditating.

This too, reminds me of my grandfather's death.  He, unlike virtually everybody today in the West, died at home.  Not , alas, his home and indeed after a number of years of sad debility and thus in a very hard and unpleasant fashion.  But he did not die in a cold, efficient institution. He died in his own bed, while under the care of his wife and my mother - women then as now, shouldered the bulk of caregiving.  I was six years old, and I recall while the adults were buzzing and whispering, I slipped into his room because I was curious.  I had seen my grandfather in his bed, unable to move, or feed himself or talk, only able to make inarticulate roaring noises when he was frustrated.  I fear he was normal inside and going slowly mad within the prison of his stroke disabled body.  When I walked into the room this time,  it was utterly silent, unlike the subdued excitement in the rest of the house. Although only six, I knew instantly what death was.  There was a deep absence that I intuitively understood.  That wonderful old phrase I was yet to learn described the mood of that room perfectly:  'the peace which passeth all understanding".

I was taught as a Christian to see death as a passing to a better place.  Perhaps Heaven is peace.

An update:  Henry's distress became evident the day after I wrote this post.  RIP Henry the Dog

My Definition of Religion (whatever that is)

A belief and hope that there is ultimate meaning.

I listened carefully to Richard Dawkins when he debated the Archbishop of Canterbury. In this debate,  to Prof. Dawkins, existence - the universe - was a giant accident initially, pure chance.   Development  has been a chain of accident combined with cause and effect since that beginning.  

Religion - any religion - all religions, on the other hand,  whether they are atheist like Buddhism, or philosophies like Confucianism, or monotheistic like the Abrahamic faiths, or polytheistic, all reject chaos and assert there is an essential order beyond any seeming chaos. They may disagree on the nature of this essential meaning; they may disagree on the proper behaviour of individual humans; they may disagree on the structural aspect,  but they all start with ultimate meaning. So, religion is also to put it in its negative sense, the rejection of a philosophy or a science that posits chaos as the foundational element of existence.

I would add to this that my wording 'ultimate meaning' is reminiscent of the theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich's definition from the middle of the 20th century which used the term:  'ultimate concern'.  My definition above was thought out over the vast period of time of six minutes, but was the culmination of 50 years of thinking about religion and probably Prof. Tillich's thoughts lurked somewhere in that hard drive I carry around on my shoulders. But I think it is different.  I will let those of you who read these words decide.  

A Postscript:

Intellectual ramblings about the nature of religion are what I call thinking about a Philosopher's God.  My thinking about religion as an academic has centred around the religion of ordinary people, believed and practiced in their daily lives, rather than high octane definitions of a purely intellectual sort.  Yet, I do  not at present see any conflict between my broad definition (now there's an oxymoron!) of religion.  One can believe and pray and function as a religious person while assenting to and enjoying an intellectual approach.

Liberal Islam

I have just listened to a Humanitas lecture by Prof. Abdou Filali Ansary where he suggests some very interesting things about Islam today.  I had to follow his lecture in bits and pieces as having a full hour uninterrupted is a rarity for me, and if I can find a free hour in the future I will hide somewhere and listen again. He makes important points, not heard much today in the roar of radical Islam that fills the western media, and dare I say, the Islamic media also. 

He begins by looking not so much at European reactions to Islam, but at Muslim visitors to Europe as long ago as the 16th century.  He begins there as this talk carefully circumambulates modernity. Modernity is, of course,  a very slippery term when you dig below the surface, but is useful as clearly something changed in European, and today’s child of Europe, the West with the advent of ‘modernity’.  Prof. Ansary does mention here and there in his talk western perceptions of Islam, but what interests him more are Islamic reactions to modernity and therefore the West.  He details the reactions of some Muslim visitors to Europe as modernity takes hold and notes their surprise at the profound changes in world view  and mentalité that are intrinsic to modernity.  

He goes on to speak about the nature of modernity in the Islamic world.  Where in the West, the enchanted world (to borrow from Charles Taylor) is replaced gradually by a scientific outlook, which reaches its climax with the birth of social sciences in the late 19th century, in the Islamic world modernity means something quite different.  Modernity there is a search and movement to restore ‘normative’ Islam. Muslim intellectuals, many affected by the primacy of logic, reason and the use of observed social evidence see an Islam that had departed from the pure teachings of the Prophet and the ‘golden age’ of the Rashidun.  They see an Islam that had syncretically melded Islam with local cultural practices and beliefs, a mongrel and hybrid form, not pure. 

Syncretism is a term that is under attack and often rejected these days, but I have yet to find a workable replacement for what it signifies.  In the university course I teach on Religion and Society in the modern western world, I have students consider such things as Tequitqui in the former Aztec lands, or the very individual case of an Oji-Cree Anglican priest active in his northern Ontario parish in the 1950s, 60s and 70s who also functioned as a traditional medicine man. Of course his Anglican bishop knew nothing of his parallel track job, but there it was.  This fact of syncretism, whether it can be defined as a melding of beliefs and local cultural practices, or an acceptance in some locales of parallel belief systems existed also for any other religion that spread beyond its original socio-cultural setting.  

Modernity then, for Islam, was not the rejection of religion as in the West, and its replacement by the secular religion of Science (I use the term religion here stressing its etymological roots as a social apparatus that provides a common worldview for a society, that is in functional rather than substantive terms). Modernity for Islam was a move by intellectuals and activists (often the same persons) to restore a normative Islam and scale away the syncretic accretions attendant on expansion over the centuries.  The way this is happening dominates the media:  ISIS currently in the news with its claim to restore the Caliphate; the Muslim Brotherhood, a much older organization battling within Egypt; Wahabbism the first of these, still  in control in Saudi Arabia. 
Abdou Filali Ansary is none of these.  He points to a different path to Muslim modernity, one little noticed, but perhaps needing to be so noticed.

He refers to this path as Liberal Islam.  It is found in  a handful of individual scholars who reject the traditional approach to the Qur’an, which is to regard it as a set of discrete laws, where each Surah is sealed off from the other and applied to modern situations.  These thinkers argue that true Islam resides in the spirit, the holistic spirit of Islam that should guide Muslims in the modern world. Ansary is not hopeful that this will happen, as the purveyors of apologetics - the conservative and traditional interpreters of Islam, control education in the Muslim world and each new generation of teachers is trained in the same system.  Also he notes that they use language that appeals to the masses, either to fight against despots in the Islamic world, or to fight against the West. The Liberal Muslim intellectuals do not translate their ideas in such a way as to appeal to the  masses. 

A good place to start an exploration of Liberal Islam can be found in this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Islam-Between-Message-Translation-Thinkers/dp/0748639675

and here:

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo3644204.html

50 Years

50 years ago I wrote my first essay, and my first exploration into the nature of religion. I was 13 years old and was in Grade 8 at a school that contained grades 1 through 8. It was a semi-rural school board  outside Windsor, Ontario and did not have the money to establish 'middle schools' or 'senior public schools'.  I was approaching the end of two years of a hellish experience of being an outsider and bullied by the other denizens of this place.  But there were two points of light for me then.  One was my confirmation in the Anglican Church of Canada, and the other was a teacher at this school.

This teacher, Norton Mansfield was also the school principal (Head Teacher to Brits).  He was a tall, spare Englishman with a loud (when needed) and precise (always) voice and manner of speaking.  The year before we all had heard his loud form as that was a year with a coterie of violent and angry young boys in the school. Corporal punishment was normal then, but only in extreme cases and only administered by the Principal, which in this instance he did so and with gusto.   Anyway, I was a bit nervous as I entered Grade 8 as my teacher - this school still placed all students into a single room with a single teacher for the academic year by grade - had been the second in command for discipline.  The teacher,  George Hinch, turned out to be a wonderfully kind and gentle man.   Norton Mansfield was the same.  But, what mattered here was Mr. Mansfield's love of the English language.  He taught us English literature every Tuesday morning from 9 to noon.  From him I learned of  my own passion for writing. Writing is two things to me:  it is thinking in an organized and permanent fashion and it is  also and now mostly for me, a feeling/experiencing in a way to communicate either ideas or feelings. We read poetry, a novel, short stories and essays under Mr. Mansfield's tutelage and he made them live and breathe for me.  I was a reader already, but he opened new worlds of creativity and profound thought in my heart and in my mind.

Because of him I wrote this first essay.  Its genesis was in my local Anglican parish church.  After confirmation at age 13 that winter,  I began to attend church services rather than Sunday School.  This was St. Matthew's Anglican church in South Windsor.  As I sat in the pew with my family, I began to argue mentally with the sermon. Many times I wanted to jump up and shout NO, WHAT ABOUT .... X or Y.....

As this was rather frowned upon, I began writing passionately after my family came home from church.  I had a desk and I had a pad of yellow, lined paper and a pencil in my bedroom. While my mother made 'our Sunday egg' as she called it (eggs in those days made me mildly nauseous, but I was always a good son, or at least I was rarely caught). I would sit for the half hour or so until called up to eat lunch,  furiously writing my essay on the relationship between religion and society, for such it was.  I focussed my 13 year old mind on science and religion.  I came to the conclusion that as science advanced, religion would decline.  I have seen this opinion again many times in student discussions in the university courses I teach in the History of Religions, especially the one that focusses on religion and society.  My wiser (I hope) and more mature (less likely) self has mostly rejected this early conclusion as clearly religion is not going anywhere, though its form and practice are altering profoundly.

The next year I entered High School in Grade 9 (for my American friends, we do not use the terms 'freshman, or junior or senior and so on, but the grade you are in - and for my British friends, although we used American 'grade' terminology the Ontario High School system was modelled on the British 'forms' - High School went either to 12 - 5th form for those not going on to university, or Grade 13 - 6th form for those going to university).  I polished and worked on my essay, but was in an agony of wanting someone else to read it.  I did not want to show it to my parents as they had the habit of finding anything I did worthy of great praise, whether it was worthy or not.  That Fall I had made a friendship of sorts with another student, whose elder brother was the school genius and also President of the Student Council. My friend and I used to do homework together in a spare room - much of that time was spent fooling around, but we did some work.  I knew also that my friend often had his brother help him with his homework.  So I hatched the plan of slipping my pencil written document 'accidentally' into my friend's homework at a time when I knew he was going to get help from his brother.

This happened on a Friday and I waited over the weekend hoping, wondering.  On Monday, we met as usual in this room and my friend looked rather oddly at me, as though he had never seen me before.  He pulled out my essay and handed it back and said, 'This got mixed up with my homework. 'My brother read it while helping me and said "This would get an A grade in Grade 13".  I had my answer. I was a writer and a thinker from that time on in my life.  This was the Fall of 1964, 50 years ago.