What makes a real community?

1. What makes a real community, a real Sangha? 

Christ by John Everett Millais

In the Pasadika Sutta in the Pali Cannon the Buddha expresses his pleasure that his disciples are proficient in the true Dharma, and that among the sangha there are experienced, trained and skilled teachers who are liberated and able to proclaim the Dharma and refute wrong ways, that there are middle ranking disciples who are experienced and trained, that there are novices and lay followers, that there are males and females, celibate and non-celibate. In this way the perfect life flourishes. It is clear from this passage that Buddha drew huge satisfaction from the existence of this community that he had brought together. This was his boast. He had created a wholesome community; one in which there would not be major quarrelling or trouble and which had a capacity to be of benefit to people far and wide. We would be mistaken to think that the Buddhist path is something just for individuals or that the Buddha would have been satisfied with a situation where each individual had their practice that they got on with in their own way in their own space. He certainly did tailor his injunctions to the needs and temperament of individuals, but the life that he led them toward was one in which there was a whole and wholesome community with all its constituent parts playing their respective roles, each complementing the others.

—Dharmavidya

The word "community" is on everyone's lips, but the reality is that we are living in a vast marketplace, where everyone is a consumer, but no one is a neighbor. Every day we are bombarded with goods gone ballistic and services turned sadistic. Even in the best of neighborhoods, we are afraid to go out at night. Is it any wonder that, when we go home at night, we try to draw the night about us like a cocoon? How to form a community, then, is not a rhetorical question. It is the most urgent issue before us... There is a new wind blowing in the world, and it whispers to us that the time for community has come. We are frightened by this wind, for sometimes its whisper becomes a scream. The wind can be as loud as a hurricane and as penetrating as a tornado. We run for shelter to what used to be our communities, only to find that the rooms that once kept us safe are now only walls that keep us apart from each other. We keep looking for the larger world. We want the larger world to take us in, and keep us warm, and make us safe. We want the world to be our community. We want it to be real. Well, why not? It is not too much to ask, really. We are learning how to overcome our own fears and how to find our own faiths. We are learning how to listen to each other. This is the only way to build community, and this is where we start.

—Sally Clay

[Nationalism] is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members... yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion... This fraternity... makes it possible... for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings."

—Benedict Anderson

2. What's lacking in an "imagined community"?

Published originally on Buddhist Travellers in 2012.

UN Earth Summit (12 year old Severn Suzuki)

A video of the five-minute talk by 12-year old Severn Suzuki that put the adults to shame, from the UN Earth Summit 1992 in Rio de Janeiro.

Video Transcript

Hello, I’m Severn Suzuki speaking for E.C.O. – The Environmental Children’s Organisation.

We are a group of twelve and thirteen-year-olds from Canada trying to make a difference: Vanessa Suttie, Morgan Geisler, Michelle Quigg and me. We've raised all the money to come here ourselves, to come five thousand miles to tell you adults you must change your ways. Coming here today, I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future.

Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations to come.

I am here to speak on behalf of the starving children around the world whose cries go unheard.

I am here to speak for the countless animals dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go.

I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the holes in the ozone. I am afraid to breathe the air because I don’t know what chemicals are in it.

I used to go fishing in Vancouver, my home, with my dad, until just a few years ago, we found the fish full of cancers. And now we hear of animals and plants going extinct every day – vanishing forever.

In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterfilies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.

Did you have to worry of things when you were my age?

All this is happening before our eyes and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions. I’m only a child and I don’t have all the solutions, but I want you to realise, neither do you!

You don’t know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer.

You don’t know how to bring the salmon back up a dead stream.

You don’t know how to bring back an animal now extinct.

And you can’t bring back the forests that once grew where there is now a desert.

If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!

Here, you may be delegates of your governments, business people, organisers, reporters or politicians – but really you are mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles – and all of you are somebody’s child.

I’m only a child yet I know we are all part of a family, five billion strong, in fact, 30 million species strong – borders and governments will never change that.

I’m only a child yet I know we are all in this together and should act as one single world towards one single goal.

In my anger, I am not blind, and in my fear, I am not afraid of telling the world how I feel.

In my country, we make so much waste, we buy and throw away, buy and throw away, buy and throw away and yet northern countries will not share with the needy. Even when we have more than enough, we are afraid to share. We are afraid to let go of some of our wealth.

In Canada, we live the privileged life, with plenty of food, water and shelter – we have watches, bicycles, computers and television sets. The list could go on.

Two days ago here in Brazil, we were shocked when we spent some time with some children living on the streets. This is what one child told us: “I wish I was rich and if I were, I would give all the street children food, clothes, medicines, shelter and love and affection.”

If a child on the streets who has nothing, is willing to share, why are we who have everything still so greedy?

I can’t stop thinking that these are children my own age, that it makes a tremendous difference where you are born, that I could be one of those children living in the Favellas of Rio; I could be a child starving in Somalia; or a victim of war in the Middle East or a beggar in India.

I am only a child yet I know if all the money spent on war was spent on finding environmental answers, ending poverty, and finding treaties, what a wonderful place this earth would be!

At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us how to behave in the world. You teach us:
– not to fight with others,
– to work things out,
– to respect others,
– to clean up our mess,
– not to hurt other creatures,
– to share, not be greedy.

Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do?

Do not forget why you’re attending these conferences, who you’re doing this for – we are your own children. You are deciding what kind of world we are growing up in. Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying “everyting’s going to be alright” , “it’s not the end of the world” and “we’re doing the best we can”.

But I don’t think you can say that to us anymore. Are we even on your list of priorities? My father always says “You are what you do, not what you say.”

Well, what you do makes me cry at night. You grown-ups say you love us. But I challenge you, please, make your actions reflect your words. Thank you.

This was shared originally on Buddhist Travellers in 2010.

Keeler's Three Worlds & the Sacred Tree of Life

The ideas here are inspired by a talk I went to by Ahmed Paul Keeler, but my questions and conclusions might be quite different.

Medieval Christianity revered its saints and its sacred artefacts, built society around religious authority and buildings, and went on crusades to spread its faith and teach obedience. The Enlightenment brought the dawn of reason and doubt which revered heroes and philosophers, wiping away the sacred and in its place revived the dead civilisations of Greece and Rome, building society around concepts and ideals and the ghosts of history, colonising the world in the name of civilising it, teaching progress and achievement. Modernity reveres celebrity and money, builds society around democracy and corporations and through debt and war makes the world depend on the market, teaching free-trade, growth and the translation of everything human into a market value. On the bright side, these three represent morality, reason and efficiency through which the world is fed — spiritually, mentally and bodily. But what each lacks is an open-heartedness and in certain moments of history, each projected outwards their dark side, rejecting some aspect of humanity (the magical, the black; the primitive, the tribal; the poor, the natural) with devastating consequences (burning witches, slavery, colonisation, genocide, exploitation, environmental destruction).

Traditionalism reveres order and a return to sacred life and community. It values the living memory of language, calligraphy, music, folklore, culture, celebration and prayer. However, just because something has always been done a certain way is surely no reason to perpetuate it and stifle change? By contrast, post-modernism reveres freedom and self-expression and individuality. However, might this not involve the opposite risk of an unconditional acceptance of a chaotic present? Instead of seeing traditionalism and post-modernism as opposite choices, is it not possible for us to imagine a beautiful synthesis? Order within chaos, freedom within community, the light of the sacred within self expression?

Maxfield Parrish
Garden of Allah (1918)

The tree of life and the tree of tradition are the same tree. It has roots that go deep and wide, as well as leaves that reach for the light and whose breath is the scent of the wind. The roots nourish the leaves, the leaves nourish the roots. In everything a balance: it need not mean a choice nor a restriction. 

Gustav Klimt
The Tree of Life (1905) [detail]

Perhaps all this is just ideas and concepts, but if we seriously care about the world, then should we not think about it? Isn't thinking a proof of love? Despite the limitations of our thinking, it might lead us one day to a deeper understanding.

Rousseau's “Social Contract”

From the famous opening line: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” we deduce three things: Rousseau loves paradoxes, he loves freedom, and he is nostalgic for the freedom man enjoyed before he became a member of society.

The second line: “Many a one believes himself the master of others, and yet he is a greater slave than they.” Another paradox! Rousseau is reminiscent of the Chinese sage Lao-Tzu and perhaps he was even inspired by the philosophy of the Tao. The emperor who thinks he has power over everything is in fact the slave of everything, like a rat on a treadmill running desperately just to keep still. But why a greater slave? Perhaps because the oppressed know they are enslaved. Society’s bonds are part of their everyday experience. The oppressor by contrast may not realize it.

The third line: “How has this change come about? I do not know.” Rousseau first defines what his purpose is not before going on to say what it is. It is not genealogy. That task will be taken up a century later by Nietzsche in his “Genealogy of Morals”.

The fourth line: “What can render it legitimate? I believe that I can settle this question.” Thus ends the first paragraph of Rousseau’s “Social Contract”. His purpose is what makes society legitimate despite the loss of freedom it entails. As he writes in the final paragraph of the whole work, it is to “lay down the principles of political right and attempt to establish the State on its foundations” and he concludes by saying that though he might have originally contemplated discussing external relations between one people and another: “law of nations, commerce, right of war and conquests, public rights, alliances, negotiations, treaties etc.”, these were beyond his limited scope. This is interesting in light of Nietzsche’s answer to how the social relation came about as being a consequence of external imposition in the first place. Nevertheless, Rousseau’s subject as we said is not speculative history nor external relations, but the current legitimacy of forms of authority internal to a society.

The structure of Rousseau’s work, like his first paragraph, is four-fold, and while seemingly disorganized conceals a hidden structure noted by Hilail Gildin. Following the introductory chapter to book one, the first four chapters concern false views of political authority, whilst the remaining four chapters establish its true foundations. The first six chapters of book two treat the sovereign as the source of law, the remaining six the legislator as its creator. The first nine chapters of book three discuss the institution of government, and the remaining nine how government might be prevented from usurping sovereign authority. The first four chapters of book four concern assemblies of the people, and the next four concern other public institutions besides the popular assemblies.

We focus primarily on the first book. What makes a moral obligation legitimate? Moral obligations are not secured out of prudence as might be the case in a state of nature under threat of force. By definition, legitimacy is not based on force. Nor is it custom based on psychological contentment because “man born in slavery” might not know better, “loving servitude as the companions of Ulysses loved their brutishness”. Turned into pigs by Circe, they lost the desire to be changed back. Nor is it ordained by God, because of the unknowability of divine will, and loss of faith in any authority who might claim to know it better. Nor is it grounded in nature because its truth or falsehood, though not dependent merely on contentment, does rely on consent. What we are left with is legitimacy as a secular concept based on something more than psychological contentment or natural law, as a covenant. Since it cannot be to God, it must be between men.

Any covenant alienates the individual will either partially or wholly, and either to a part or to the whole of society. This gives four possible kinds of covenant. He rejects any kind of total alienation of the will to some person or group of people because “to deprive your will of all freedom is to deprive your actions of all morality”. Without personal accountability, any talk of legitimacy is vacuous. A master-slave relation can never be legitimate even if voluntary. Slavery, far from terminating a state of nature, intensifies it: the covenant is only as valid as the force that enforces it. Hobbes’ convention to Leviathan fails on this count. Even partial alienation to a person or government is a paradox because it alienates to a legitimate authority that part of one’s will for which one is no longer morally accountable. So any alienation must be to a whole. The original aggregate of individuals can only consent to be governed if they become a whole, a people, a unity.

Rousseau also rejects the possibility of partial alienation to the whole. This appears a rejection of inalienable rights beyond the purview of society. One reason he gives is because of the impossibility of managing conflicts when these rights conflict and so the inevitable breakdown of such a society into either anarchy or tyranny. The covenant must completely alienate the rights of each member to the community as a whole. Since the covenant is by consent, any member may always withdraw from it in exchange for the restoration of their natural rights, but doing so means withdrawing from the possibility of making any moral claim, for example if they think society’s punishment is unfair.

Thus Rousseau conceives of the social contract: a contract of association between all members of a society which simultaneously generates both a moral community and sovereignty. Each individual has a dual role both as active participant in the sovereign process and perfectly obedient to its law. This law is legislated by the sovereign body of all people according to the general will and executed by the government they appoint. But what is the general will? The risk is that it becomes merely the will of a majority. Rousseau attempts to preclude this, as well as the usurpation of sovereign legislative power of the people by its government. Following John Noone, we may enunciate some of the terms of Rousseau’s social contract (scattered throughout his work):

1) All citizens have a voice in the popular assembly, none may lawfully be excluded. (§1.6; §2.2; §4.1)
2) Sovereignty is inalienable and indivisible. (§2,1; §2.2) The assembly cannot bind itself, much less future generations. This precludes legislation in perpetuity. (§1.7)
3) Except for the original contract which is unanimous, the majority will is binding, the necessary size of majority subject to legislation. (§4.2)
4) The assembly of all citizens is a permanent assembly that meets regularly at arranged times, elects magistrates and appoints or dismisses government according to the general will. (§3.13; §3.18)
5) The life and property of all members of society are subject to the sovereign body and its laws. (§1.9; §2.5)
6) Legislation is limited to areas of common concern. Any proposed legislation must first be voted on to determine if it is a common concern, and secondly if it is a common good. (§2.4)
7) Only those laws are binding that are universal and impersonal, not singling out a person or group for special treatment, favourable or unfavourable. (§2.6)
8) Citizens are to vote not according to personal desires, but on the basis of their estimation of the common good. (§4.2)
9) Sovereignty may be suspended in an emergency, but for a very limited time period.
10) A civil creed that includes tolerance of all faiths not subversive to peace. (§4.8)
11) Goals according to a pre-existing general will that all the members of society commit to.
          etc.

In particular, note that the social contract is not a contract between the people and their government. This is a popular misunderstanding. Rousseau was especially critical of contract theories of government because they alienate the individual will to but a part of society (government) which he had already rejected (except for very limited time periods in case of emergency). Rousseau conceives of legislative authority remaining always with the people, so that government could be dismissed at any time if that were the general will.

In contrast to Locke who believed in the inalienability of property rights, and that any contract needed moral agents to begin with, Rousseau’s social contract is what makes its members moral citizens in the first place “substituting justice for instinct as the guide to conduct”. Duty becomes meaningful for the first time, so also legitimacy. On the face of it, this seems like the grossest nonsense, because it precludes morality and duty as conceived by reason, conscience or natural law. We will see however that the morality of the covenant arising from Rousseau’s social contract aims for something different, something encompassing and empowering individual and natural morality. In Buddhist terms, the social contract is the foundation for the moral being (Buddha), the moral law (Dhamma) and the moral community (Sangha), but the latter is deemed essential for the first two to find expression. There is something quite insightful in seeing these three as inter-dependent, yet by making moral law dependent on the community, what if the community is wrong? Are there not moral ideas or feelings that transcend time and space? Rousseau, following Locke, rejects innate ideas but not innate feelings. He writes in “Emile” that God has given him “conscience that I may love the right, reason that I may perceive it, and freedom that I may choose it”. Reason is not a sufficient source of moral obligation, so man must be endowed with the affective capacity of conscience to feel obliged, but he must also be motivated. This is the role the social contract plays. It is the motivation of reciprocal obligation which Rousseau seems to believe is necessary for the moral sentiment to bear fruit, that gives man “freedom” to do good.

John Noone’s explanation of what Rousseau means by freedom goes some way towards deciphering both the idea of a contract giving freedom, and also the kind of morality (that of the covenant) that occupies Rousseau. There are three kinds of freedom for Rousseau: natural freedom, political freedom and freedom to act from one’s own conscience. The social contract clearly restrains natural freedom, and leaves conscientious freedom alone, that is freedom to do good from individual conscience, independent of any obligation. However, it enforces political freedom. The idea of obliging freedom seems paradoxical. But political freedom is based on equality. Law must regulate everyone equally, universally and impersonally, and not lead to inequality. Thus Rousseau’s idea of obliging political freedom should be understood as obliging equality, so people are free to act according to their reason and conscience without being disadvantaged for doing so. Put this way, morality is strictly political morality, a duty to fellow citizens that reciprocates a corresponding duty of others to oneself. To recall Rousseau’s noble aim:

To find a form of association which defends and protects the person and goods of each associate with all the common force, and by which each uniting with all yet obeys only himself and remains as free as before. (§1.6)

Freedom is the cornerstone of Rousseau’s philosophy, but freedom in harmony with the general will. If not, then it would harm others’ freedom. Does the social contract succeed in its noble objective? In theory, Rousseau thinks so, but in practice he requires a wise legislator, like the prophets of old under the guise of divine authority and even then the course of history never did run smooth. Rousseau does recognize this — he is a pragmatic realist.

Though his philosophy is not historically or empirically sound and though dogged with speculation, there is behind the seeming disorder a certain coherence. Whether the social contract that emerges is workable we leave to human imagination, but is it even theoretically viable? One criticism that comes to mind is that it seems to subordinate morality for its own sake to morality for the sake of the community. Another is that while procedurally sound, the commitment to substantial content in the form of the civic creed and social goals risks betraying something of the freedom for society to define these for themselves. A third is that morality emerging from community runs the risk of being restrictive to that community so community identity could come to be defined negatively in terms of other communities. In truth, community is a nested concept of family, tribe, city, country, even religion, but it is one kind of community which Rousseau believes must take precedence to avoid conflicting loyalties. One possible remedy to all these criticisms is a combination of Kantian autonomy of the individual will that chooses its communitarian commitments and a theological idea of regarding the covenant to any one of these communities not as end in itself, but as a means of training the will to subservience to divine will under the universal community of all beings.

While Aristotle and the medieval scholastics had extolled the virtue of a pre-existing natural law (Dhamma), Rousseau is the philosopher of the community (Sangha) and Kant would later favour the autonomy of the sovereign being (Buddha). Each tries to improve on their predecessor, but in reality Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha are all necessary and all inter-dependent. In the perfection of one, the other two will also come into fruition. For example, the participants of Rousseau’s social contract will need to be autonomous judges of morality in order to elect officials and make decisions while the wise legislator will need to bear consideration on what are the underlying natural virtues of their particular society in order to create suitable laws. However, in the face of widespread social inequality, Rousseau’s emphasis on communal solidarity as his starting point seems well-placed. For all those passionate about freedom and equality, his “Social Contract” will continue to be a source of inspiration.

Islamic Law & The Modern State (Wael Hallaq)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Religion & Philosophy
Tagline:	An Islamic State is a contradiction in terms

This is one of those rare books that changes the way you see the world, so long as you can forgive its occasionally unnecessarily adversarial style, in particular its unfair dismissal of all things Kantian in the Western philosophical tradition, but as a starting point for self-reflection and critical enquiry, it is perfect. The events of 2014 re-enforce how the desire for self-independence of peoples has been translated in modern international society into the desire for the State. This expresses itself in diplomatic initiatives as in Scotland and Catalunya, but can also  degenerate into violent resistance as in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine. The State is a site of decolonisation and self-determination, but also a source of potential sectarianism and civil war, especially when the mechanisms of the state do not represent and care for the peoples under its dominion.

The Israel-Palestine problem has often been framed as requiring a two-state or a one-state solution, but reflecting on Hallaq’s book, we see that perhaps the state itself is the problem in limiting our imagination of what a harmonious world should look like. The Jewish people needed a refuge after the horrors of the Second World War, and the state offers such a refuge, but for whom and against what? It was part of the solution to a problem that it had itself created in its extreme form in the Nazi state. How else to protect a people from the oppression of other states, but to create a state oneself? There are no easy answers. The State is the gold standard and only symbol in contemporary society of a people’s emancipation. Nevertheless, it is interesting to join Hallaq in tracing back the intellectual history within an Islamic context of what the state has come to stand in the place of, and how it has failed by comparison. And indeed, what we might discover is relevant in a non-Islamic context also.

Photo: “Man praying in Morocco”  —Umbreen Hafeez

Introduction:

Until the early 19th century and for twelve centuries before then, the moral law of Islam had successfully regulated customary law and local practices across the Muslim world, from North Africa to India. Beginning in the 19th century, it was structurally dismantled by colonial powers and lost its autonomy to the modern state. Nevertheless, it still remains a source of religious and moral authority, a spiritual source of moral ends, procedural laws and “technologies” for caring for the self. Islamic law is no longer the living breathing entity it once was, and what remains of it are distillations in special cases or appropriations to legitimize the modern state’s own structural violence. Semerjian’s “Off the Straight Path” tells how Islamic law was never as harsh in its punishments as it stipulated in theory, and as it is reputed to be. Judges were encouraged to be forgiving, finding loopholes to justify lesser sentences. For example, adultery met with a fine, while prostitutes were at worst expelled from the community.

Modern Islamic thinkers and scholars take the modern state for granted as a timeless phenomenon, but the state is a false idol of our times. Hallaq claims it is incompatible with the bottom-up nature of Islamic governance, and indeed with any reintegration of morality within modernity. Morality he claims has been displaced by the paradigm of the Enlightenment. Despite its internal multiplicity, despite its rebels in Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Marx and Herder, what Enlightenment thinkers shared was the assumption of a critical rational morality, secular, humanist and binding universally on all civilizations. To say this is the Enlightenment paradigm is not to say that there were not exceptions. Indeed, a paradigm shift occurs when the subversive discourses become the new norm. In drawing on pre-modern Islamic thought, just as modernity draws on the Enlightenment, Hallaq believes that we can engage with what is truly important, namely morality as end in itself, and not politics or law which have replaced it, not to mention economic growth, as a standard of human flourishing.

Islamic law rested on a concept of jihad (striving) toward the accomplishment of a moral end (the Arabic word is much misunderstood in late modernity with its political usage that I choose not to use it, just as the word Sharia for Islamic law has become symptomatic today with barbaric punishments when British colonial administrators had once criticized it on the contrary for being “too lenient”). In this striving for a moral resource from an earlier age, Hallaq defends himself against the charge of nostalgia. In the first place, this project is no different from an archaeology of ancient Greek and Roman thought with which Islam too has a shared heritage. The project is not one of revival of institutions, but of ideas. Any claim that we cannot learn from others is either one of self-diminution (that we are incapable of transcending the narrow self) or of hubris (that we have come too far already). Secondly, whilst Islamic law is defunct, its “five pillars” and their consequences are still preserved in the spiritual memory of all Muslims. Thirdly, disenchantment with modernity is not an Islamic concern, but a shared and distinctly modern, even postmodern, concern. It transcends both religious faith and the modern paradigm. Fourthly, and most importantly, any charge of nostalgia is closely allied with an ideology of progress, which dogmatically adheres to current ideas of truth, claiming to “know better” and in so doing ignores profound existential and moral questions regarding underlying causes, unwitting assumptions, as well as the ephemerality of the present moment that one day will also be history.

The Modern State:

Despite vast differences in theories of the state (Weber’s bureaucratic, Kelsen’s legal, Schmitt’s political, Marx’s economic, Gramsci’s hegemonic, Foucault’s cultural and so on), all these are merely differences of perspective. Despite also vast discrepancies in the actual content of the modern State, ranging from the communist Soviet Union to the democracies of Sweden and the United States, its essential characteristics are shared form-properties: (1) a historical product of a particular culture at a particular time, (2) its metaphysics of sovereignty, (3) its legislative monopoly and monopoly over law and violence, (4) its bureaucratic machinery, and (5) its cultural hegemony and production of the national subject.

(1) All things are historically specific, but the state defined in terms of territorial boundaries is concretely so. Through a scientific process of self-observation beginning in the early eighteenth century, the European state conceived of itself as universal and timeless and subject to scientific analysis. This analysis of content presupposed a prior metaphysics of existence. (2) The concepts of statehood are secular translations of Christian theological ones. The omnipotent God becomes the omnipotent sovereign, but the structures remain the same. Sovereignty presupposes not only a state, but also the shared imagination of a nation by its people. It exists for its own sake, an end for which the individual may even be sacrificed. This false idol is made explicit by Hobbes’ Leviathan. (3) Sovereign will gives birth to sovereign law and violence to realize that will. (4) The administrative order is a necessary extension of the legal order, and the image is of the blind lady of justice. Bureaucracy does indeed prioritize equality, but it also conceals structural inequalities and creates top-down pyramid structures of power controlling every aspect of life. It intrudes into the private sphere and fosters community, but on its own terms, the community of the state. (5) The internal strength and coherence of any state depends not only on organizing society, but also penetrating it culturally to form national identity. Should any of these five form properties change, the state would necessarily be a very different concept. But these five are also very closely intertwined, so any change in one would necessarily also entail a significant change in all.

I agree with Hallaq that the modern state identifies society’s interest with national interest. However, this identification is not purely ideological, but also representational. It is less an idol than an ideal of coherence, a tool bringing people together in the pursuit of moral ends. The belief in the state even to the point of sacrifice is a belief that the state is protecting morality and so worth fighting for. In so far as this ideal fails, the state is indeed weak, and falls into disrepute. Hallaq is right to warn that the state can become an ideology, continuing to exert its will when no longer serving its intended function. However, since it is constructed on human belief, it can also fail in its moral ends as a mere consequence of people no longer believing in it. When people lose confidence, are no longer willing to put the good of society before personal interest or are too cowardly to fight for an ideal in which they have lost faith (be it the nation or another kind of spiritual community), the result is the breakdown of society, and susceptibility to both internal and external corruption, criminal elements, and even military power. Hallaq is of course right that the state should not be an end in itself, and most Europeans do recognize that. Europe’s history testifies to the dangers of nationalism.

I would like to suggest the possibility that the modern state is not of European origin at all. The bureaucracy of the Chinese state comprising its emperor and civil service were over a thousand years old before the corresponding British institutions were even born, and perhaps even inspired them. The rise of the state in Europe follows the discovery of China. The birth of capitalism attributed to Adam Smith built upon the ideas of the French physiocrats who were in turn heavily influenced by the Chinese. Like the Chinese, they valued agriculture above all, identified society with the human body, compared money in the state to the circulation of blood round this body, from which they deduced the importance of exchange and saw the need for a general will to regulate this body’s well-being. For Rousseau, this general will arose through respect for the state, love for one’s fellow citizens and equality under the law. The correlative of the frontier which limits the state externally is the absence of internal limit of the “police” state (governing subjects, regulating economic activity, production, and the price of goods). The compensating mechanism for this absence of limit is law and political economy, or what Foucault termed the rise of “governmentality” in 18th century Europe. This Tang dynasty poem by Du Fu from 8th century China, inspired by sources even earlier, brilliantly encapsulates one aspect of “governmentality”, namely the skilful and appropriate use of force. It is not far-fetched to imagine the modern state and its law to be a translation of Chinese ideas into an Enlightenment context.

Ballad of the Frontier (Du Fu)

If you draw the bow, draw the strongest.

Choosing arrows, take the longest.

To down the man, aim for the horse.

Confronting bandits, aim for the chief.

Killing, let there be a limit,

And to each land, its own bounds.

If you can repel invaders,

What use in killing, maiming more?

To conclude with an even crazier thought, while the British imposed a Chinese-looking bureaucracy on India (and its other colonies, including Victorian England itself in the 19th century), it used a more Ottoman or Indian-looking extra-territorial law of the sultan to control (through treaties of tax and trade) China and other countries which it never formally colonized. There is something almost paradoxical and unnatural that this should have functioned with any degree of success. On one level it did, yet at a deeper level this also perhaps explains why the experience of European colonialism is said to have been traumatic in ways that even centuries of despotism or pre-modern colonial movements were not.

Separation of Powers:

There is an ideal in Western democracies enunciated by Montesquieu of a separation of powers to ward off the dangers of authoritarianism. In practice there is only a loose separation of functions (legislative passing law, executive and administrative enacting it, and judicial interpreting it), with power resting absolutely with the elected legislative body to indicate how law should be applied and interpreted. As the body supposed to represent the general will of the people, and accountable to them, it seems right that this should be so, and indeed breakdowns of democracy have always been allied with a ceding of legislative power to a presidential or military executive ruling by decree without consultation or to a judiciary forming an anti-state within the state.

Islamic governance also achieved a separation of powers with ultimate authority in the legislature, but by very different means and it is interesting to explore how it did things differently. First, there was no such thing as an “Islamic state”, but an Umma (Community). Muslim territories were known as Dar al-Islam, and non-Muslim as Dar al-Harb. The Community did not possess sovereignty, nor autonomous political or legal will. Sovereignty lay with God alone, and decision-making was by consensus, but restricted by general moral principles beyond the Community’s control. Care for the poor for example was their right, as all members of the Community were equal, and all wealth belonged to God. Islamic law was a bottom-up system of governance, and the power of the executive (the sultan) was limited, derivative and compared to the modern state relatively marginal. The sultan had little influence over the local culture and legal system. Analogous for example to native White Cap Chiefs in African customary law, they were not owners of territory, but holders on trust.

Meanwhile, the jurists of Islam lived with and by the values of the common social world, representing especially the lower and middle social strata of which they were mostly part. They were advocates of the disadvantaged to the higher reaches of power, and represented for the masses the ideals of piety, rectitude and fine education as “heirs of the Prophet”. As well as playing a pedagogical role, two particular legal functions were that of the mufti (legal specialist)  and the qadi (judge). The mufti was the legislative authority who issued legal answers to abstract questions he was asked to address. Consultation was free, so accessible to all. With time, these answers were brought together and systematized both in memory and in writing as “law books”. Legal opinions, called fatwas, though non-binding, were routinely upheld and applied in the courts. A judge in Cairo might even send a letter to a mufti in Muslim Spain or Syria. Because legal knowledge was widespread, social underdogs knew their rights before appealing to the courts, so won the great majority of their cases when they were plaintiffs. They could also ask for an opinion which then dissuaded them from proceeding to court, opting instead for informal mediation. The Muslim court could not make up its own law, its ultimate reference neither the executive nor itself but the authority of the mufti.

The qadi was a member of the community who, for a small and affordable fee, was expected to apply the law to judge cases and resolve disputes. He was not required to have the same expert legal knowledge as the muftis or author-jurists. The language of the court was the common language, so understandable to all. Unlike a jury member today, the qadi’s scope of consideration was not limited by a superior power (they might for example address underlying causes to a dispute), they were expected to be intimately familiar with the local customs and ways of life of the community they served, and their decisions were final. As well as passing judgments in court, they also oversaw public works and endowments to the poor and helped arbitrate in non-legal family disputes. Though chosen by rulers, qadis held their positions only a few years in parallel with existing employment, so they could not be so easily pressured or corrupted.

The law applied by the qadis was the result of a centuries-long hermeneutical project. However, it was also legally pluralistic, with different legal schools developing very different legal opinions. Each jurist could exercise ijtihad (creative reasoning) to arrive at the best guess of what the law should be. This chimes with Lauterpacht’s optimistic vision of the lawyer as a Herculean gap-filler applying law for law’s sake, law assumed a priori to be logically coherent. But contrary to modern law, it was stable only in form while being remarkably flexible in both place and time depending on social and popular interests and concerns. On the one hand, only God knows the truth. On the other hand, it was an established maxim that every mujtahid (jurist conducting ijtihad) is correct!

The sultan possessed no real sovereignty, and without the bureaucratic machinery of the modern state was unable to penetrate society. The sultan could appoint judges and raise taxes so long as he protected life, property, and communal harmony (a sacred concept in Islam), his executive authority (the final decades of the Mamluk’s rule being an exception) restricted to protecting against disorder, including any reported misconduct by government servants or by the qadis. The system was based on an ethic of moral accountability of the individual, seen as indispensable for political legitimacy (corporations didn’t exist) and the well-being of society and dynasty. Qadis, muftis and tax collectors sat in governors’ assemblies, acting as intermediaries representing their communities’ interests. There were even times when the rulers of Islamic lands were non-Muslims, yet local Islamic values, customs and language remained.

Perhaps one reason why Islamic law persisted for twelve centuries was because of local homogeneity despite differences between localities. Rawls’ conception of a “well-ordered society” is one in which (i) everyone accepts (and knows everyone else accepts) the same principles of justice, (ii) social and political institutions are respected for satisfying these principles and work in harmony, and (iii) citizens comply with these principles and institutions. However, once local homogeneity is lost, and established principles are no longer accepted as obviously true, then the risk of arbitrariness becomes a problem, and a central presiding authority is inevitably needed to maintain predictability of the law. Islamic law in its time was a model of the separation of powers with legislative power residing with the private unpaid scholars within society, who through the mouthpiece of Islamic law represented the poor, protected their interests, and acted as intermediary to the politically powerful. However, that age has passed, and the future will need new ideas, with lost consensus locally reconstructed.

The Legal, the Political, and the Moral:

Hallaq next addresses the distinction in the Western history of ideas between the “is” and the “ought”, between positive law and morality. For Christian as well as Islamic theology, there was only morality. For Bentham, Nietzsche and Schmitt, there is only positive law. Law that once expressed a moral ideal or utopia has for some modern thinkers become entirely political, regulating a conflicting mass of private interests and dividing the world into friend and foe. Hallaq blames the possibility of such moral evacuation of law on the creation of the is/ought distinction in the first place.

He derides Kant in particular for his categorical imperative as well as much of Western philosophy in a strident tone uncharacteristic of the rest of the book. Kant’s imperative is not without its problems: it dictates one ought to act in such a way as one would wish to be a universal law. It is the duty of the moral subject to unite the “ought” and the “is”. Kant was a deeply moral man. If Germany had been a Muslim society, Kant would be a mufti, and his categorical imperative a fatwa which would have been widely respected and applied by the qadis in making their judgments. If Hallaq cannot respect Kant as a mufti of his age, how can the reader respect Hallaq as a mufti of our own age, and if not Hallaq, then who? This only goes to emphasize how the age of the mufti has passed.

Let us criticize ideas, but not people or traditions (unless done in good humour). Instead of polluting the wells of our mutual intellectual heritages, we should be asking, “what is wrong?” and “how to purify it?”. Islamic fatwas would be equally susceptible to critique, though this does not serve Hallaq’s purpose to recover a subjugated source and balance out against Western prejudice. Nevertheless, the dangers of Schmittian distinctions exist in Islamic law also: for example between Muslim lands, and non-Muslim; between the Muslim citizen and the “slave soldier” who had no choice but to fight; between the law as written and as applied by the qadi who used ijtihad and forgiveness; and even in the Quran itself between the prescribed forms of violence which say one thing (legal), but “better to forgive for God is all-merciful, all- compassionate” (moral). Hallaq’s very own argument takes on a friend/foe characteristic in pitting Enlightenment and Islamic law as enemies, instead of as in the rest of his book as merely incompatible ideas in need of new thinkers to find the best from both and reject what rightly should be rejected from both.

The identification of “is” and “ought” is reflected also in ancient language. For example in Pali, the language of the Buddha, the word “dhamma” means nature itself, the law of nature, the duty that must be performed according to that law of nature, and the fruits or benefits that arise from the performance of that duty. No distinctions are made between these four. However, once these divisions are made which Kant was trying to heal, no doubt unsuccessfully, there is no going back unless we can have faith in a kind of wisdom that transcends personal opinions. The contradiction between “only God knows the truth”, and “every mujtahid is correct” is no longer acceptable. Since God’s truth is inaccessible, Kant’s injunction is both demanding and inspiring: every person must become a moral subject and mujtahid in their own right! However, Kant falls short on an egalitarian ideal because those whom Kant deems incapable are not afforded equal dignity in his moral system.

Some Concluding Thoughts:

Whenever a society’s homogeneity of belief breaks down, some amount of positive construction is surely needed, which then needs to be mythologized. There follows an age of disenchantment and the cycle repeats. Enlightenment values of reason, progress and the state should perhaps be seen as temporary mediators to any breakdown of consensus, to try to help build it up again. What Hallaq warns is that they can also be divisive and a source of civil strife.

One important part of the cure is what Hallaq calls “technologies of the self” that build up the moral subject from the inside out instead of the outside in. The term, borrowed from Foucault, means techniques of self-transformation for the sake of “happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality”, in short a positive kind of self-discipline, founded less on rationality (self-knowledge) and more on love (care of the self). These techniques of self-mastery and virtue are universally known and ingrained in the pre-modern mind, but also easy to forget, so it is worthwhile to continuously remind ourselves of and practice them. They contrast with the biopolitics that engenders the docility and utility of the subject through systems of surveillance, education and healthcare, operating not from the volition of the subject, but from a political will located outside it, whereby the state constitutes itself as a problem-solving machine in the service of the people, the child a site of institutionalization, and in which the patriarchy of the family is replaced by that of the state. The crisis of the family and disintegration of the social fabric (which Durkheim termed anomie) seem to coincide with the emergence of the modern state that problematises the individual. In the place of religious, tribal and familial identities, we see on the one hand the emergence of nationalism and on the other the rise in consumerism and narcissism of the modern subject who rejects his or her own problematisation, yet does so in ways that are socially sanctioned and unwittingly encouraged. So what are the technologies that might liberate us?

In Islam, they are built upon the five pillars: (1) the faith in one God and in His Messenger, (2) prayer, (3) alms-giving, (4) pilgrimage and (5) fasting. While Rousseau concludes his “Social Contract” with a discussion of religion, Islamic social tracts always began with religion, and in particular the five pillars. As discussed previously, law and morality could not be separated. Through the five pillars (as well as ritual purification), practiced with niyya (intention), the Muslim comes closer to God and trains the heart to be compassionate and to do good. I cannot do justice here to Hallaq’s beautiful explanations, but suffice to say that each of these pillars and their performative acts carry a deeper mysticism and meaning, accomplished not out of obligation but with willingness and pleasure. They engender an inner peacefulness of the nafs (soul, or consciousness).

Ultimately, the risk of breakdown of the state is just as much a problem of the state as its continuing existence, so I do not read Hallaq’s book as anti-state, but as a thorough dismantling of the ideology of the state. As with any negative project, we need a positive vision. Hallaq’s vision is a re-centreing of society on the moral. What of the enlightenment ideal that if the moral is not discovered for oneself, with one’s own heart, then it is externally imposed and so replicates patterns of domination that regulate the individual externally as if he or she were a child from birth till death? Does this Kantian ethics of autonomy stand in contradiction to Hallaq’s autonomous morality? I don’t believe so, but Hallaq’s misgivings run deep. Citing Gray from “Enlightenment’s Wake” (1995):

“The most fundamental Western commitment, the humanist conception of humankind as a privileged site of truth, which is expressed in Socratic enquiry and in Christian revelation, and which re-emerges in secular and naturalistic form in the Enlightenment project of human self-emancipation through the growth of knowledge, must be given up…It is in reaching a new relationship with our natural environment…in which human subjectivity is not taken to be the measure of all things, that a turn… can be accomplished…dwelling together on earth in peace.”

But what else is there apart from subjective experience and revelation? Is that not the meaning of enlightenment — the turn must come from within. I believe so anyway.

Race and Beyond Race (The Scramble for Africa)

It is well known that in the final years of the 19th century there was a “scramble for Africa” by all the main European powers. It was a scramble for control over precious resources and a scramble for land for the expansion of European population. Britain sought to build a railway north to south from Cairo to Cape Town, while France had similar ambitions East to West. Where the European powers intersected, there was inevitably conflict. Even where they didn’t intersect, there was oppression of native African peoples under the fragile mask of a “civilizing mission”, laid bare for example in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (1899) which epitomised how any good intentions of colonizers could degrade into the most wretched inhumanity. 

In the same year (1899), Harry Johnston, a British explorer, botanist, linguist, colonial administrator & historian included the above map of what the civilizing mission might mean for the future of Africa, to conclude his historical survey “A History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien Races”. The map was drawn by the legendary map-maker John George Bartholomew & his company, but Bartholomew himself bemoaned that the maps he created did not necessarily reflect the views of him or his company. It was Harry Johnston who commissioned it. Michel Foucault in his essay “What is an Author?” and Barthes in “Death of the Author” warn against over-emphasis on authorship — Johnston’s book and the above map could be said to be a product of their time, and just as much a consequence of its imagined readers as of its author. They must be seen within their historical context, and they also shed light on that context. Despite this proviso, it is worth noting that Johnston was an idealist and a moderate of his age. He worked alongside blacks in his colonial administration to the chagrin of some of his colleagues. In 1890, he had campaigned for a multi-cultural Africa of “blacks, whites and yellows”. But it seems the latter was only out of pragmatism. What we see in this map is a roadmap for the expansion and formalisation of colonialism. Even if Johnston’s ideal had once been for a rainbow Africa, this map represents a mindset of apartheid with its naked objectification of the continent into three zones of decreasing desirability for the “European” and a fourth zone of undesirability. Here is the map’s colour key:

Colonizability of Africa

The pink: Healthy colonizable Africa, where European races may be expected to become in time the prevailing type, where essentially European states may be formed.

The yellow: Fairly healthy Africa; but where unfavorable conditions of soil or water supply, or the prior establishment of warlike or enlightened native races or other causes, may effectually prevent European colonization.

The gray: Unhealthy but exploitable Africa; impossible for European colonization but for the most part of the great commercial value and inhabited by fairly docile, governable races; the Africa of the trader and planter and of despotic European control

The brown: Extremely unhealthy Africa

Getting past the fact that the Sahara is apparently “fairly healthy”, we find African peoples categorized as docile, warlike or even enlightened, but what they all share is that they are not European. Civilization is equated with European civilization. Yet all the main wars of the period would be between supposedly civilized Europeans in their scramble for territorial control. In the Boer wars (1899-1902), thousands of women & children of Dutch and African origins were put in concentration camps to exert pressure on their fathers to stop fighting against the British or to divert them to protect their own families. This was an ominous precursor to the genocides of the 20th century.

Much has changed in the last hundred years, but the colonial attitude of “control” remains, and among some people of “race”. This is a stark & chilling reminder of its consequences. We must be able to see through those who think in these terms, but the experience of colonialism has unfortunately taught the once colonized to think in these terms also. Looking deeper into Johnston’s reasoning in his book, and its subtle changes in emphasis by the 1913 edition, it is easy to see why.

Johnston cites overwhelmingly difficult “factors opposed to the substitution of a large European population for the present owners of the soil” (p. 279), and though excluding this from the 1913 edition, he still refers to his ideas as a “compromise”. It brings the word into disrepute! It was certainly not a compromise with the native black population who had no say in these machinations, and it could only mean a compromise with the wish for such a complete displacement. There were other interesting changes to the later edition. He toned down “despotic European control” of central Africa in the map’s key to “European supervision and control”, also replacing “despotic” in the text with the milder “autocratic”. He also added warnings against “gross oppression” lest this inflame a blazing rebellion uniting people of all colours and cultural differences against the white man, though he also explained why he thought this unlikely (see next paragraph). Finally, he added some remarks extolling the white’s superior looks and intelligence, envisaging the future of Africa to lie with “a dark-skinned race but with a white man’s features and a white man’s brain”. While wanting to avoid bloodshed and brutality unlike some of his contemporaries, what he reveals is the obsession with race of that period as well as a Malthusian predilection for predicting and engineering possible futures that would suit the “European”. The black population is slowly displaced to less favorable climates, and he even admits this rude form of apartheid could be cast aside two or three hundred years from now if pressures of population force it.

Saddest of all though is his observation “the negro has no idea of racial affinity” (p. 283) which makes any black rebellion difficult, “if not impossible”. In other words, he confirms that the colonizers thought in terms of race, and colonialism taught racism to those who had no concept of race. Now, the West prides itself on non-discrimination, but it is the experience of colonialism that introduced some parts of the world to discrimination in the first place. Johnston describes the natives throughout as “inferior races”. It is only natural then that one of the prescriptions against colonization and slavery in the 20th century would be the emergence of a black identity, a sense of common cause, that helped ultimately to reclaim native rights over colonized lands, secure equal rights in the Americas and end apartheid in South Africa.

Colonialism was facilitated by a certain idea of racial superiority. Now, in the West any ideology of race is largely discredited, especially after the European genocide, but that this ideology was not limited to fascism is largely forgotten. Those who were colonized have not forgotten, and in the face of oppression, ideas of racial and religious unity were powerful defence mechanisms. They provided cultural solidarity between oppressed peoples who might not otherwise have identified with each other. However, these same ideas also exclude and cause conflict, because that is what they were designed to do, to exclude the colonizer! It’s important that any sense of belonging conditioned by history is not maintained for the sake of history but continues to support present struggles and needs. The truly enlightened must see through those who think in terms of colour and control but also see beyond these differences. It’s all very well for us in the West to preach non-discrimination, setting aside creed and colour, but there is a great shame we did not do this ourselves historically. And the least we can do is to see beyond such differences now.

Acknowledgment: Thanks to @CartoArchive for directing me to the source of the above “Colonizability of Africa Map”: Harry Johnston’s “A History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien Races” (1899). I’ve also cited alterations in the later 1913 edition.

Disenchantment: Weber's Postscript to Modernity

Weber is a great proponent of the importance of beliefs and ideas, and more generally of culture, in shaping our history. What is the culture of modernity? It is impersonal and utilitarian: the pursuit of pre-given ends which are taken to be self-evident. Reason, instead of founding our values, is used instrumentally to maximize, accumulate and attain pre-given values. That is to say that reason is not allowed to ask the right questions, but is devoted solely to actions and answers. This process, legitimized by a philosophy of progress, is increasingly specialized and institutionalized, but the ideal never seems to live up to its imagined promise and the results never satisfy. In the face of existential crisis of “what is the purpose of success?”, the advice is “check your bank account!”. Money becomes the substitute that man has created for his unattainable desire.

The fruition of this ideal of efficiency in politics is the bureaucratic state whose perfection is order. In the name of order, the state imposes a whole tapestry of rights, rules, duties, and in short expert knowledge, so as to make itself militarily strong and financially wealthy whilst also theoretically proffering the aim of maximizing health, wealth, education and well-being of those whom it regards as its citizens. The result of this seemingly admirable pursuit of excellence is that ultimate meanings are lost. Values are reduced to calculation and become disenchanted, or to use Nietzsche’s term devalued. Weber agrees with Nietzsche that the highest values devalue themselves. His response is resigned resistance: “what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parcelling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life?” The bureaucratic way of life is supreme because it is disciplined and reliable, and so predictable and efficient. It saves time and money, but it can never answer the question: “How best to use the time and money that we save?”

While the founding premise of capitalism is that greed is an irresistible facet of human nature, the capitalist promise is basically enjoyment. The imperative is to enjoy the surplus and so sustain the system, or at least to take satisfaction from the expectation of enjoyment. This expectation continues to circulate freely as our investment in the financial system, as well as in the legal system that founds it, whilst always susceptible to the risk of withering away through calamity, taxes or simply inflation. But this enjoyment is not an ultimate value! It can only be cashed in by consumption, and the socially acceptable forms of consumption, while incredibly diverse, are also highly regulated. Our ends, like society’s values, have become pre-given. Capitalist man has been tricked into being a consumer instead of a creator, and even when he creates, he creates to consume.

By calling this phenomenon disenchantment, Weber expresses the loss in ultimate values as a loss of magic. Prehistoric religion involved a magical and direct manipulation of forces of nature. In stark contrast to the logical formal rationality of modern bureaucracy, Weber characterizes the forms of leadership of earlier ages as either charismatic (based on the ruler’s exceptional qualities) or traditional (based on the sanctity of custom). These become supplanted by a universal ethic, an impersonal manipulation of economic, political and intellectual concepts. It is a paradox that it is the systematic methodical character of worldly asceticism (the Calvinist belief of work as a way to God, the Protestant calling to engage in the world) which propel industrialization, rule of law and scientific progress. It is the same practice of instrumental-rationality that necessitates all three, leaving no room for value-rationality that asks why. Ironically, these processes also create institutions which destabilize the religious ethic that birthed them. Religion in response becomes other-worldly, and increasingly irrational. It is no longer the holistic source of our ultimate values.

Capitalism, like democracy and science, obeys its own formal logic of production, accumulation and exchange and no longer requires any form of spiritual legitimation. It disenchants the ultimate values that once founded it and engenders their demise. But not only is religion disenchanted, but so are the proliferation of new values created: such as efficiency, discipline and truth, all to be pursued now for their own sake. They bring about bad conscience because of the impossibility of attaining their perfection, and also because of an inevitable and irresolvable conflict between them. It is no longer a polytheistic charismatic or traditional struggle between gods, as in ancient Greece, but an impersonal struggle of concepts. Caught in the cross-fire of ideologies, man has become a means to an end, and Mother Earth also, when of course she should be end within ourselves.

A good example of one such struggle is Polanyi’s dichotomy between traditional morality and free-market capitalism. Not only is it impossible to commit to both, but commitment to one leads to the decadence or decline of the other which will ultimately undermine both. But perhaps this need not be cause for pessimism if we can find an appropriate balance between the two, and one way of achieving this, suggested by Nancy Fraser, is by mediation through a third: the value sphere of emancipation. While historically emancipation has been allied with free-market capitalism in breaking down class structures, there may also be times when emancipation must ally itself with traditional morality to ward off the anti-liberal effects of consumerism. But perhaps Weber's main point is that no value sphere can sit in judgment on all the rest, as religion once did.

Could reason not replace religion? Weber writes: “The intellect like all cultural values has created an aristocracy based on the possession of rational culture and independent of all personal ethical qualities of man. The aristocracy of intellect is hence an unbrotherly aristocracy.” It is without hate, but also without love. Nevertheless, unlike postmodernism which reacts against the rational ideal, Weber still stands by it. He sees man as facing a tragic responsibility to make a stand between competing value spheres needing to take individual initiative out of an inner conviction. As in Plato’s Phaedrus, reason for Weber is a pharmakon: both a poison and a cure. Unlike Durkheim, he does not go so far as to accept the idea that science can be used to found our values, for example by measures of health and well-being; these can only ever be relative to our current understanding of what it means for man to be healthy and fulfilled. Many of the greatest artists, poets and scientists in history were imperfect examples of what we might imagine as human well-being. To use the metaphor of evolution as a spiralling walk up a mountain path, there will be times at a peak when we may see a higher peak in view, but whether we realize it or not, a stepping-down is necessary for us to ever reach it. Though science cannot found our values, it can nevertheless help us analyse, clarify and understand them. But as in our aesthetics or our jurisprudence, what we lack is an outside view. This is because aesthetics, like jurisprudence represses at the outset its own presuppositions: the question of whether there should be works of art, or law.

How to reconcile man’s inner conviction with his tragic responsibility? Weber’s answer is that we must ground ultimate values in our own person: with passion, responsibility, and sincere and proportionate perspective. It is true that reason which was supposed to set us free from personality and prejudice paradoxically works counter to individual autonomy and freedom. But this is only because the individual has been robbed of the self-legislative authority to found values in himself. Whereas once there was a single holistic value sphere in spiritual authority, now there is a separation into the separate often competing value spheres of the religious, economic, political, intellectual, aesthetic and erotic. Moreover, each of these spheres has become increasingly normative, making man the object of rational calculation. In asking the right questions (Foucault), or in the play of puzzling over things (Baudrillard), or in the seemingly irrational spheres of art and eros, or in mystical self-knowledge, perhaps we may find the magical enchantment which can set us free. The critical, puzzling mind, the beauteous eye, the passionate heart, the dancing spirit — all serve to re-enchant the world, to free ourselves from old spells and let us cast our own magic.

The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. 
—G. H. Hardy

We are not meant to be perfect; we are meant to be whole. 
—Jane Fonda

The possible is often reached only by striving to attain the impossible that lies beyond it. 
—Max Weber

Photo: 'Maths Department at Dusk' —okei

The Opening of the Koran

Islam is sadly misunderstood today, by many Muslims as well as non-Muslims alike.

For one thing, the Muslim holy book, the Koran, teaches unity of all peoples and religions under an all-powerful and compassionate God. It repeatedly criticizes the idea that only some of God’s people are eligible for his grace. Dante in the 14th century did not know this and in his imagination he consigns the Muslim prophet to one of the deepest levels of his Inferno for the crime of divisiveness. Yet today, Muslims do little to eradicate this continuing prejudice when they themselves often define their religion in terms of difference. The Koran’s message on the other hand is clear: “All good do-ers have no fear.”

The other terrible mis-understanding is the association of Islam with pre-Islamic tribal customs that celebrated violence and also objectified women. Islam, on the other hand, saw these customs as rooted in the “nafs”, the base emotions of the human heart such as greed and lust. The Koran gives specific guidance, for example of prayer, charity and fasting, as well as prescriptions for correct behaviour whose express purpose is to avoid conflict. Where violence is advocated it is in self-defence of people and their religion within a context at the time of severe persecution and existential threat. Moreover, for every verse that advocates responding in kind, there is another adjacent to it stressing that peaceful resolution would always be better.  The focus throughout is to promote the well-being of all people, to work hard to do good, to purify the heart of its “nafs” and, by surrendering the ignorant mind, to find peace with God.

Yet today, Islam is often misrepresented in terms of cultural practices and superstitions it sought to overcome. Often the behaviour of Muslims themselves does little to eliminate this perception. Early Islam was acutely aware of outlawing persecution, sparing enemies in war and forbidding pillage of land and wealth because they themselves had been persecuted.  It also protected women’s rights far beyond the West at the same time, and this too an acute priority as the prophet Muhammed, peace be upon him, had no sons surviving into adulthood. The history of early Islam is full of prominent women. But the old patriarchy died hard, and if anything it made a comeback in the centuries following the prophet. That this is so is no more the fault of Islam (so clear in praising forgiveness and advancing women's rights) as the errors of the West and the rise of nationalism were the fault of Christianity (so trenchant against pride and greed).

Finally, there is a more subtle problem for Islam today of literalism. Those Muslims who advocate a return to a law and way of life as laid down by the prescriptions and guidance of the Koran, often do so neglecting the context and purpose of the Koran’s message. It bears repeating that this message is to promote the well-being of others and to find peace with God. If any prescriptions do not fulfill this, or are mis-used to judge and persecute people, then they go against this message. All punishment and all mercy is with God.

The following is a very loose rendering of the first surah “The Opening” which opens the Koran and is read at the beginning of every prayer. The verses that follow are from the beginning of the long second surah entitled “The Cow” (referring to the Biblical story of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt). They fail to capture the poetry of the original Arabic, yet hopefully they can give a flavour of Islam’s teaching.

1. The Opening

In the name of God,

The Merciful, The Compassionate,

Guide us on the straight path,

The path of those you have blessed.

Lord of all Being & non-Being,

All-merciful, all-compassionate,

Save us on the Day

Of Being’s disarray.

All praise belongs to God,

Thee alone we serve and pray.

May we not incur your wrath,

Nor be led astray.

2. The Cow

In the name of God,

The Merciful, The Compassionate,

Alif, Lam, Mim,

Trust the guidance of the Book,

Perform the prayer,

Believe in the Unseen.

As you are guided,

So were those before you

Prospering hereafter.

It boots not to warn

Those whose hearts and ears and eyes

God has set a seal.

As for those pretenders

Who corrupt the land

And feign belief,

They deceive themselves,

In their hearts a sickness,

For which God makes them suffer.

He who hears God’s guidance

And trades it for error

Is like a man at night

In the raging storm

Void of light

Except when lightning strikes.

Reverent and grateful,

Serve God who made thee,

Earth’s couch and Heaven’s dome,

And out of heaven,

Water, and from flowing streams,

Gardens of ripe fruit.

Hold none God’s equal,

And should you doubt this covenant,

Find a line to match it!

Encourage the faithful,

Do good, and

Forever dwell content.

Children of Israel,

Remember my blessing!

Fulfill my covenant

And I shall fulfill thine

And hold me in awe,

Do not disbelieve it!

Sell not my signs,

And take care not to exchange

Truth with vanity,

Nor conceal the truth

Nor bid others be pious

Forgetting yourself.

We made a compact

With the children of Israel

To serve none save God,

Be good to parents

Near kinsmen, and orphans,

And to the needy.

Be upright in speech,

Perform the prayer,

And pay the alms,

We made a compact—

Do not shed blood, nor expel

A party of you from their homes.

Conspire not

In sin and enmity.

Do you free the slave,

But then expel him,

Believing the Book in part

But disbelieving in part?

We gave Moses the Book,

And sent Messengers after,

And gave Jesus

Son of Mary

Clear signs confirming him

With the Holy Spirit.

If they believe

God’s grace is theirs alone,

Say: “I long for death,

Surrendering to God’s will”

But such men cannot say it,

For they cling to life.

Whatever verse we abrogate

Or cast into oblivion

In its wake we bring

Better or alike.

Don’t you know

God is all-powerful!

God singles out for Mercy

Whom he will,

Bounty abounding.

Should they say, “Only us!”,

Say, “Produce your proof!”

Nay, all good-doers have no fear.

Perform the prayer, pay the alms,

What good you do shall

Foreward to your soul’s account.

You shall find it with God,

Assuredly,

God sees all you do.