Konstanty Gebert - Lecture

Konstanty Gebert: 
Before I will try to answer your question, I would like to engage briefly the basic concept that Professor Bauman laid before us. I know that engaging in a public polemic with Professor Bauman is a particularly sophisticated and perverse form of suicide, but I will attempt that nonetheless. He opened up by describing a situation in which religion and politics seem to impact each other – the question being what is being impacted by what – and then posited that this interaction needs to be explained. But by saying so, Professor Bauman, you seem to assume that a) religion and politics are separate, and b) that their interaction is something that demands an explanation. I would pose exactly the opposite: that religion and politics are, and always have been, part of the same thing, and actually that it is the disassociation between the two, and the relative weakening of the impact of one on the other, that demands an explanation. 

Of course, I do agree with what you said about humiliation being the root factor of the drive for religion, the basic element of humiliation being that we are mortal. So, all this will be over – my dreams, my loves, my hates, my work – this will disappear without a trace, even in the better world you describe, which no longer has global markets or imperialism but no cosmopolitan cities either. Whatever comes, we are still mortal – the ultimate humiliation. Religion is the natural answer to that. What it says, it is: No, trust me, it is not over. This is why the basic way a human being relates to the universe is through religion. This connection may be broken, has been repeatedly broken, but without it, the human world is incomprehensible. 

It is extremely natural for religion to speak of the political. For those of us who are familiar with the “Torah”, which the Christians call the “Old Testament” and which is also a Holy Book for the Muslims, it will come as no surprise that it also contains, for instance, the world’s first ever legislation on strikes and lockouts. This is one of the elements of the law that God gave humans. A very fundamental thing: workers cannot be deprived of their pay – they should be paid each day at nightfall. At the same time, employers have the right to deny workers employment if other workers are better and more willing. These seemingly mundane rules are part of God’s revelation to humanity. Now, it would be incomprehensible to say that although God teaches us about labor law, religion should be kept out of the politics. Religion is an integral part of politics and plays, as any other factor, a fundamentally dual role, either constructive or destructive. 

The problem facing religion today, however, is that each time we see on TV someone, face contorted with hatred, shaking his fist, and hear him abusing somebody else, we may be reasonably certain that this somebody claims to speak in the name of God, and is speaking about other human beings. Usually on Western TV this hateful face will be a Muslim face, but we have seen enough Christian faces and Jewish faces looking exactly the same to know that this is not a specificity of Islam. We are giving God a very bad name, we – people of religion. And therefore, we need to address this horribly destructive element, which is part of the impact that religion has on human life. And we ought honestly address the question of whether religion has brought more good or more evil into human life. 

For somebody who is religious this question is absurd, because we are religious in today’s liquid world by decision. We are free to choose not to be religious. If we are religious, it is because we know empirically, experientially, from the inside, that this works. That religion helps us become, hopefully, better people, helps us confront the humiliation of mortality, gives us guidelines for decent social and political life. So, a person who has religion, needs no convincing about the good of religion. But this does not address the issue of how an honest and unbiased atheist views religion. If his vision is that of a spiteful, hateful contorted face – usually male and bearded, by the way – screaming from the TV screen, abusing somebody else, then I am not surprised that that person says: OK, I won't no part of that. If that's religion include me out. 

The way we who have the faith have been trying to address religiously motivated evil has, in my opinion, been largely characterized by intellectual and spiritual dishonesty. I was reminded of this very strongly at an interfaith conference in Sarajevo two years ago, which was dedicated to dialogue, religion and social responsibility, the usual blah-blah. We had people of different religions speaking there – and all of them said the same thing: It is slanderous, insulting and unacceptable to say that evil can be justified by my religion. This is all distortion, people who commit evil are fanatics, they are extremists. My religion (Islam, Orthodoxy, Catholicism) is the religion of good, and any evil that is supposedly motivated by it, is a distortion of what we teach. I was sitting there, in the heart of the city which I had years ago watched being destroyed also in the name of religion. Part of that destruction have been ordered by some of the very people sitting at the conference and telling us that evil is no part of their religions. That is when I understood where the problem was. 

In each of our three traditions evil is rooted at the core. We see it most clearly in Islam today, because it is the youngest religion of the three. It is today of the age that Christianity had when it engaged in religious wars all over Europe – Christians slaughtering Christians for the greater glory of God. Judaism, which is the oldest religion, had at that age Jews slaughtering Jews in the late Temple period, also for greater glory of God. It would appear that when religions get the age of 14 to 15 centuries, they act out like teenagers do at the age of 14-15, and then grow up – so, there is still hope. 

In the meantime – yes, it is very clear that Islam provides ample grounds for hatred, violence, and evil which stem from the core of the faith. The fatwas, the teachings, the religious justification for slaughtering innocents do come from the core teachings of Islam, just as slaughtering infidels and other Christians in Christianity’s religious wars did come from core teachings of Christianity, and murder of Jews by Jews in the name of God came from the heart of Judaism. Until and unless the three great religions will have the civil courage to address the evil coming from their cores, we will not be able to deal with the issue of religiously motivated evil. 

What happens instead is a kind of conspiracy of silence, in which we, people of religion, justify other people’s evil, expecting this to be returned. The Serbs, the Catholics, and the Muslims at that conference in Sarajevo did not challenge each other. They all said: Oh no, no – our religion has nothing to do with this, knowing, that if I cover up the other guy’s hatred, he also will cover up for me. As a man of religion, I cannot accept this. Because, obviously, and I know it from experience and we know it from observation, just as there is evil at the core of our teachings, an infinity of goodness also resides there. But we are able to relate to that goodness and use it for the good only when we call a spade a spade. The reason why the supposed fanatics, the supposed distorters of the faith are so popular, is that they can quote chapter and verse. If we tell the outside world that religiously motivated evil is a distortion of our religion, we may convince some do-gooders from the other religions. We are not convincing those whom the fanatics already convinced, because the fanatics have religious authorities behind them. 

So, what does this do to us in the contemporary multicultural, multiethnic world? This conspiracy of silence I described in Sarajevo does not prevail only there. I have not seen one interfaith dialogue in Europe in which people would stand up and say: OK, this is where my religion got it wrong, this is where evil has been committed in the name of my religion – not in the name of distortion of fragmentary teachings, but because there is also evil at the core. We do not have the civil courage. I believe that ultimately the answer to the humiliation of mortality is asserting our dignity as beings created in the image of God. But being created as the image of God is not only an instrument for dealing with the humiliation of mortality – it is an obligation, we need to have this civil courage to address the evil that we are doing. We lack it! There is a cosmopolitan do-gooders’ conspiracy of silence in which we say nothing bad about each other, because we want to avoid friction and conflict. Yet we ultimately do not avoid friction and conflict, it is all over the place. But we deprive ourselves of the intellectual tools to understand it, and the moral stance to counter it. 

One of my rabbis always told me that it is extremely important to believe in God, of course. But it is even more important to believe God. Believing in God is a philosophical proposition. Believing God is a moral stance. And then he went on to say: The most important thing, however, is to be sure that God can believe in you. That God can trust you to do the normal, regular decent thing. And when I look at the state of religion in multicultural societies, in societies in general, I am not really sure that God still believes in us. We look like an experiment going wrong. The basic problem of religion today is not that whether we believe in God – it is whether God can still keep believing in us.