On “The Politics of God” Part 1

“The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West,” by Professor Mark Lilla of Coilumbia University is to be published next month but the points he raises therein should have been in mainstream consciousness years ago.

The essay from yesterday’s New York Times begins with “The twilight of the idols has been postponed.” That in itself was enough to grab my attention and hold it — through an eleven page article divided into seven sections. It is a long, long trek for some modern readers (though likely not for regular consumers of the NYTimes) but the points raised therein are so critically important to us in the contemporary West that they bear repeating and examination here, section by section. What is at work in this piece (and thus, in the book as a whole) is nothing less than the horns of the very dilemma upon which western society and humanity as a whole is perched.

I urge you to read the entire article or, if it’s too much at one bite, at least read through each section as we’re examining them.

Section I: “The Will of God Will Prevail.”

Lilla begins with a vivid illustration of the phrase “political theology,” referencing the open letter Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to U.S. President George W. Bush, translated and published just over a year ago. After Ahmadinejad lists Iran’s many grievances against the United States he goes on to frame contemporary politics in the language of divine revelation.

“Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems. . . . Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice and the will of God will prevail over all things.”

Though obviously overstating the case (it’s demonstrable that liberalism and western style democracy have helped manifest some of the brightest ideals of humanity) there is an uncomfortable seed of truth in Ahmedinejad’s statement. Prosecuted at the business end of a gun barrel, there is nothing liberating (same root word) about democracy; in fact, forced upon a society without appropriate cultural contexts democracy becomes little more than a societal ratification of tyrancy and/or religious fascism. One needn’t look for long to find examples of this riddling South America, Africa, and the Middle East.

When a typical westerner reads something like this, he finds it easy to dismiss as an atavism. Safe in our warm homes with good jobs and secure lifestyles, we simply assume that the Ahmedinejads of this world are an abnormality, in the minority, extremists who don’t reflect the mainstream ideas and beliefs of the cultures from which they sprang.

We couldn’t be more wrong. It is a hard and unfortunate truth that the vast majority of persons in this world think exactly like Ahmedinejad. Many of them are right here in the United States of America. Rooted in an assortment of religious fundamentalisms, they truly abhor the inherent liberality in the freedoms we in the west take for granted. Our “modern secular democracies,” secure in the half-truths bequeathed by the Era of Enlightenment, assure us that the bright future promised us doesn’t include anything as primitive as God.

In that sense, they are not the abnormalities in the statistical universe. We are.

In his NY Times essay Professor Lilla states “Understanding this difference is the most urgent intellectual and political task of the present time,” and he’s right.

But: It’s going to require that some group of evolved humans exercise a capacity found reliably in perhaps 2% of the population and that is the ability to suppress one’s ego in order to look at the world through another’s eyes. This isn’t to say that the view thus gained will be the “right” one — the only point to the exercise is to gain an understanding of an opposing religio-cultural point of view, not to reinforce ancient 19th century paradigms about “right” and “wrong.”

Can you even remotely imagine Ahmedinejad engaging in this exercise? Only slightly less laughable is trying to imagine it from George W. Bush.

And yet… and yet. Without leaders who can at least make the attempt, we as a race and our planet are doomed to the mutual destruction our Cold War forebears only narrowly avoided.