The Great Partnership

by Jonathan Sacks

  Dualism resolves cognitive dissonance by saying, in effect, ‘It wasn’t us, and it wasn’t God, so it must be Them,’ whoever the ‘Them’ happen to be. It turns penitential cultures into blame cultures, externalising evil and projecting it on a scapegoat, thereby redefining the faithful as victims. We, our nation or our people, are the victim of someone else’s crime. Since there is little or no overt evidence of this, it follows that the children of Satan must be masters of disguise, practitioners of sorcery or more modern dark arts. From there it is a short step to seeing them as subhuman (for the Nazis, Jews were ‘vermin, lice’; for the Hutus of Rwanda, the Tutsi were inyenzi, ‘cockroaches’). They can then be killed without compunction. There is a straight line from dualism to demonisation to dehumanisation to genocide.

  Dualism is the single most effective doctrine in persuading good people to do evil things. Those who have written most compellingly of hate, among them Aaron Beck, Frank Baumeister, Vamik Volkan and Mark Juergensmeyer, remind us that no one who does evil believes he or she is doing evil.20 Those who commit mass murder see themselves as defending their people, avenging their humiliation, ridding the world of a pestilence and helping to establish the victory of truth, racial, political or religious. If attempted genocides did not have at least tacit popular support, they could not be committed. Dualism has the power to turn murder into a moral act. This is the logic of altruistic evil, and it is always potentially genocidal.

  The most powerful antidote to dualism is monotheism, best defined in a verse in Isaiah (45:7): ‘I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster [ra, literally ‘evil’]; I, the Lord, do all these things.’ By refusing to split light and dark, good and evil, into separate forces or entities, monotheism forces us to wrestle with the ambiguities of our own character, the necessity for moral choice and the inescapability of personal responsibility. Dualism relieves us of all these burdens. It is the supreme betrayal of monotheism.

  Messianic Politics

  The third danger is the politics of the end of days. Abrahamic monotheism, I have argued, lives in the cognitive dissonance between the world that is and the world that ought to be. Normally this gap is bridged by daily acts of altruism, the ‘redemption of small steps’. This is exodus politics, the long, slow journey across the wilderness to redemption an act at a time, a day at a time. But sometimes the gap seems so large that it leads believers to hope for and expect a sudden denouement, a miraculous transformation of history, ‘the world turned upside down’. This is the logic of the apocalypse, or messianic politics, that appears late in the Hebrew Bible in the book of Daniel, and in the New Testament in the book of Revelation.

  One form of messianic politics took the form of the millenarian movements, people like the Ranters, the Hussites and the Levellers, studied by Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium.21 Cohn poses the question: Why did these movements arise, and to whom did they speak? Those particularly drawn to ‘emotionally charged phantasies of a final, apocalyptic struggle’ are, says Cohn, ‘the populations of certain technologically backward societies which are not only overpopulated and desperately poor but also are involved in a problematic transition to the modern world, and are correspondingly dislocated and disoriented’.22 The chief instigators are often ‘certain politically marginal elements in technologically advanced societies – chiefly young or unemployed workers and a small minority of intellectuals and students’. The charismatic leaders who set such movements in motion offer their followers:

  Not simply a chance to improve their lot and escape from pressing anxieties – it was also, and above all, the prospect of carrying out a divinely ordained mission of stupendous, unique importance. This phantasy performed a real function for them, both as an escape from their isolated and atomized condition and as an emotional compensation for their abject status; so it quickly came to enthrall them in their turn. And what emerged then was a new group – a restlessly dynamic and utterly ruthless group which, obsessed by the apocalyptic phantasy and filled with the conviction of its own infallibility, set itself infinitely above the rest of humanity and recognized no claims save that of its supposed mission. And finally this group might – though it did not always – succeed in imposing its leadership on the great mass of the disoriented, the perplexed and the frightened.23

  Ironically, given its religious origins, messianic politics has appeared in the modern world more often in secular guise, in the form of both the French and Russian revolutions. Both aimed at the complete reformation of society, both had moral or redemptive purposes, both were intended as a systematic overthrow of the previous order, and both were expected to initiate a lasting utopia. Both embraced terror. As Michael Walzer puts it, ‘If messianism outlives religious faith, it still inhabits the apocalyptic framework that faith established. Hence the readiness of messianic militants to welcome, even to initiate, the terrors that precede the Last Days; and hence the strange politics of the worse, the better; and hence the will to sin, to risk any crime, for the sake of the End.’24

  Messianic politics leads inevitably to disaster. It cannot do otherwise. For it is the attempt to bring the end of time within time, redemption to the as-yet-unredeemed human situation, to create utopia in real space and time.

  Within Judaism it led to two disastrous rebellions against Rome, the Great Rebellion in 66 CE, and the Bar Kochba Rebellion sixty-six years later. The result of these two confrontations was the destruction of the Second Temple, the razing of Jerusalem and, according to the Roman historian Dio, 580,000 deaths. Prior to the Holocaust it was the greatest human catastrophe in Jewish history, and it led to an exile that lasted almost two thousand years. Thereafter, the efforts of the rabbis were directed to depoliticising Judaism and neutralising as far as possible the messianic idea.

  The Lure of Power

  The fourth danger is power. Politics and religion do not mix. They are inherently different activities. Religion seeks salvation, politics seeks power. Religion aims at unity, politics lives with diversity. Religion refuses to compromise, politics depends on compromise. Religion aspires to the ideal, politics lives in the real, the less-than-ideal. Religion is about the truths that do not change, politics is about the challenges that constantly change. Harold Wilson said, ‘A week is a long time in politics.’ The book of Psalms says, ‘A thousand years are in your sight as yesterday when it is gone’ (Psalm 90:4). When religion becomes political or politics becomes religious, the result is disastrous to religion and politics alike.

  At the outset, as I have argued, Abrahamic monotheism involved the secularisation of power. In the pagan world the two were inevitably intertwined. The ruler was both head of state and head of the religion. He was either a demigod, or a child of the gods, or the chief intercessor with the gods. The Hebrew Bible secularised power, first by ascribing all ultimate authority to God. Human power was therefore delegated power, and it had moral limits. The people were entitled to rebel against tyrannical kings, a point that led eventually to both the English and American revolutions.

  Second, power itself was divided by separating kingship from priesthood. Third, it was kept in check by the institution of the prophet who was mandated by God to criticise the corruption that power inevitably brings. The first Christians were non-political in a different way. They focused on the kingdom of heaven, not that of Earth. But there came a time when both Judaism and Christianity yielded to temptation. In Judaism the Hasmonean monarchs combined kingship with high priesthood. In Christianity the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century turned a religious sect into an imperial power.

  In both religions it took historic calamity to restore the separation. In Judaism this came in the first century when internal factionalism fatally weakened the people in their struggle with Rome. Particularly chilling is the scene Josephus draws of Jerusalem under siege. The Jews were heavily outnumbered. There were 25,000 within the city, facing Titus’ well-equipped and disciplined army of 60,000 soldiers. They m
ight have held out, were it not that they too were split: the Zealots under Elazar ben Simon, an extremist faction led by Simon ben Giora, and a third force of Idumeans and others under John of Giscala. Josephus tells us that for much of the time these groups were more intent on attacking one another than the enemy outside the walls. They killed each other’s men, destroyed one another’s food supplies, and engaged in what Josephus calls ‘incessant, suicidal strife’. At one point in his narrative he breaks off to lament, ‘Unhappy city! What have you suffered from the Romans to compare with this?’25

  As we noted above, the failed rebellion against Rome, together with its disastrous sequel, the Bar Kochba Rebellion (132–5 CE), left Jewish life in ruins. The institutions around which Israelite and Jewish life were organised in the days of the Bible had gone. There was now no compact nation, no sovereignty, no collective home. The age of priests, prophets and kings had gone. The Temple and its sacrifices were no more. In their place came a faith built around home, synagogue and school, that could be taken anywhere. Not until the rise of antisemitism throughout Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century were Jews to organise themselves politically again.26 Yet, despite their dispersion, Jews and Judaism survived. They had made the fateful discovery that a religion can survive without power.

  Sixteen centuries later, Christians made the same discovery. In 1517 the young priest Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, setting in motion one of the great upheavals of European history. The Reformation created far-reaching changes in the political map of Europe, challenging the authority and power of Rome. For more than a century, Europe became a battleground, most savagely in the Thirty Years War, brought to an end by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This was to have large consequences for Western culture.

  The seventeenth century was, for Europe, the birth of the modern. It witnessed the rise of science (Bacon, Galileo, Newton), a new mode of philosophy (Descartes) and a new approach to politics (Hobbes, Locke). What they had in common was a search for basic principles that did not rest on religious foundations. Christianity, which had hitherto been spacious enough to encompass the Renaissance, could no longer be relied on, for how could it resolve disputes when it itself was the greatest single source of dispute? As Abraham Lincoln put it later, during the American Civil War, ‘Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.’27 If two professing Christians, one Protestant, the other Catholic, could not resolve their disagreements without anathemas, excommunications and violence, then religion could not become the basis of a sustainable social order.

  The secularisation of Europe happened not because people lost faith in God (not until Hegel and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century did anyone use the phrase ‘the death of God’), but because people lost faith in the ability of religious believers to live peaceably together. More gradually, but also more extensively, Western Christianity had to learn what Jews had been forced to discover in the first century: how to survive without power.

  The similarity of these two processes, so far apart in time, suggests the following hypotheses. First, no religion relinquishes power voluntarily. Second, the combination of religion and power leads to internal factionalism, the splitting of the faith into multiple strands, movements, denominations and sects. Third, at some point the adherents of a faith find themselves murdering their own fellow believers. Fourth, it is only this that leads the wise to realise that this cannot be the will of God. The Crusades – Christians against Muslims – did not provoke believers to abandon power, nor did the loss of the First Temple – Jews against Babylonians. It took the spectacle of Jew against Jew, Christian against Christian, to bring about the change. You do not learn to disbelieve in power when you are fighting an enemy, even when you lose. You do when you find yourself using it against the members of your own people, your own broadly defined creed.

  Eventually people rediscover the founding insight of Abrahamic monotheism, that truth and power have nothing to do with one another. Truth cannot be proved by power. You cannot force people to be saved. Coerced agreement is not consent, said the rabbis.28 Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s, said Jesus (Matthew 22:21). There is no compulsion in religion, says the Koran (2:256).

  Power is to be used not to impose truth, but to preserve peace. The religious significance of liberal democracy is precisely that it secularises power. It does not invite citizens to worship the state, nor does it see civic virtue as the only virtue. It recognises that politics is neither a religion nor a substitute for one. Liberal democratic politics makes space for difference. It recognises that within a complex society there are many divergent views, traditions and moral systems. It makes no claim to know which is true. All it seeks to do is ensure that those who have differing views are able to live peaceably and graciously together, recognising that none of us has the right to impose our views on others. Democratic politics has no higher aspiration than to allow individuals freedom to pursue the right as they see the right, with this proviso only, that they extend the same right to others, seeking the maximum possible liberty compatible with an equal liberty for all. Democratic politics is a religious achievement because it secularises power.

  Single Vision

  There is one last danger that applies to religious and secular alike. It was summed up by Isaiah Berlin:

  Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth … and that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: & need restraining or suppressing.29

  The belief that ‘there is one and only one true answer to the central questions which have agonised mankind’ – which he attributes to Robespierre, Hitler and Stalin as well as the Crusaders – has been responsible for ‘oceans of blood’. There is, says Berlin, only one antidote: ‘Compromising with people with whom you don’t sympathise or altogether understand is indispensable to any decent society.’30

  Today, this fault is as likely to be found among the new atheists as among religious fundamentalists. They do indeed often take the view that those who differ from them are ‘not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad, and need restraining or suppressing’.31 Their inability to understand that, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, that there is more than one cognitive frame through which we understand and engage with reality, makes them not merely wrong but dangerously so.

  The Hebrew Bible is constantly setting before us more than one perspective, never more pronouncedly so than the way it sets before us, at the very beginning, two completely different accounts of creation, one from a cosmological perspective, the other from a human one.

  It is not incidental that Homo sapiens has been gifted with a bicameral brain that allows us to experience the world in two fundamentally different ways, as subject and object, ‘I’ and ‘Me’, capable of standing both within and outside our subjective experience. In that fact lies our moral and intellectual freedom, our ability to mix emotion and reflection, our capacity for both love and justice, attachment and detachment, in short, our humanity. It is this that the reductivist – the scientist who denies the integrity of spirituality, or the religious individual who denies the findings of science – fails to understand. This is what William Blake meant when he prayed, ‘May God us keep, from single vision and Newton’s sleep.’

  The folly of the new atheists is typified by the remark of Sam Harris that the real danger lies in the religious moderates. They, he says, are the ones to give religion a good name; they are the people who lend credibility to the incredible. Religious moderation distracts us from the one truth of which he is unshakably convinced, namely that ‘the very ideal of religious tolerance … is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss’.32 The new atheism thus combines dualism (the scientific children of light versus the reli
gious children of darkness), talk of apocalypse (‘the abyss’) and the belief that its adherents are ‘in sole possession of the truth’, Isaiah Berlin’s definition of a fanatic.

  The result of the banishment of religious moderates would be the squaring up of two sets of extremists, radical secularists on the one hand, religious radicals on the other, each convinced that their opponents are irredeemable, that there is only one perspective on reality and only one saving truth. The inevitable outcome is a kulturkampf, a war of cultures. You need to be completely ignorant of history to believe that any good can come of such a confrontation, when ‘the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity’.

  We need a strong, vigorous, challenging dialogue between religion and science on the massive problems confronting humanity in the unprecedentedly dangerous twenty-first century.33 Each needs the other if it is to avoid hubris and intellectual imperialism. Bad things happen when religion ceases to hold itself answerable to empirical reality, when it creates devastation and cruelty on Earth for the sake of salvation in heaven. And bad things happen when science declares itself the last word on the human condition and engages in social or bio-engineering, treating humans as objects rather than as subjects, and substituting cause and effect for reflection, will and choice.

  People learn. They realise that time and circumstance can lead them to drift from their founding principles and highest ideals, and they institute movements of teshuvah, metanoia, return. Jews learned from the bitter experience of factionalism that led to two defeats at the hands of Rome, and focused less on political power and military revolt than on the life of the spirit: on study, prayer and acts of kindness.