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| http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/opinion/12zizek.html
The New York Times March 12, 2006 Op-Ed Contributor
Defenders of the Faith By SLAVOJ ZIZEK London FOR centuries, we have
been told that without religion we are no more than
egotistic animals fighting for our share, our only morality
that of a pack of wolves; only religion, it is said, can elevate us
to a higher spiritual level. Today, when religion is emerging as
the wellspring of murderous violence around the world, assurances
that Christian or Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists are only abusing
and perverting the noble spiritual messages of their creeds ring increasingly
hollow. What about restoring the dignity of atheism,
one of Europe's greatest legacies and perhaps our only chance for
peace? More than a century ago, in "The Brothers Karamazov" and
other works, Dostoyevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral
nihilism, arguing in essence that if God doesn't exist, then everything
is permitted. The French philosopher André Glucksmann even
applied Dostoyevsky's critique of godless nihilism to 9/11, as the
title of his book, "Dostoyevsky in
Manhattan," suggests. This argument
couldn't have been more wrong: the lesson
of today's terrorism is that if God exists, then everything, including
blowing up thousands of innocent bystanders, is permitted — at least
to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, since, clearly,
a direct link to God justifies the violation of any merely human constraints
and considerations. In short, fundamentalists
have become no different than the "godless" Stalinist Communists,
to whom everything was permitted since they perceived themselves as
direct instruments of their divinity, the Historical Necessity of
Progress Toward Communism. During the Seventh Crusade,
led by St. Louis, Yves le Breton reported how he once encountered
an old woman who wandered down the street with a dish full of fire
in her right hand and a bowl full of water in her left hand. Asked
why she carried the two bowls, she answered that with the fire she
would burn up Paradise until nothing remained of it, and with the
water she would put out the fires of Hell until nothing remained of
them: "Because I want no one to do
good in order to receive the reward of Paradise, or from fear of Hell;
but solely out of love for God." Today, this properly Christian ethical
stance survives mostly in atheism. Fundamentalists do
what they perceive as good deeds in order to fulfill God's will and
to earn salvation; atheists do them simply because it is the right
thing to do. Is this also not our most elementary experience
of morality? When I do a good deed, I do so not with an eye toward
gaining God's favor; I do it because if I did not, I could not look
at myself in the mirror. A moral deed is by definition its own reward.
David Hume, a believer, made this point in a very poignant way, when
he wrote that the only way to show true respect for God is to act
morally while ignoring God's existence. Two years ago, Europeans were
debating whether the preamble of the European Constitution should
mention Christianity as a key component of the European legacy. As
usual, a compromise was worked out, a reference in general terms to
the "religious inheritance" of Europe. But where was modern Europe's
most precious legacy, that of atheism? What makes
modern Europe unique is that it is the first and only civilization
in which atheism is a fully legitimate option, not an obstacle to
any public post. Atheism is a European legacy
worth fighting for, not least because it creates a safe public space
for believers. Consider the debate that raged in Ljubljana,
the capital of Slovenia, my home country, as the constitutional controversy
simmered: should Muslims (mostly immigrant workers from the old Yugoslav
republics) be allowed to build a mosque? While conservatives opposed
the mosque for cultural, political and even architectural reasons,
the liberal weekly journal Mladina was consistently outspoken in its
support for the mosque, in keeping with its concern for the rights
of those from other former Yugoslav republics. Not surprisingly,
given its liberal attitudes, Mladina was also one of the few Slovenian
publications to reprint the infamous caricatures of Muhammad. And,
conversely, those who displayed the greatest "understanding" for the
violent Muslim protests those cartoons caused were also the ones who
regularly expressed their concern for the fate of Christianity in
Europe. These weird alliances confront Europe's Muslims with a difficult
choice: the only political force that does not reduce them to second-class
citizens and allows them the space to express their religious identity
are the "godless" atheist liberals, while those closest to their religious
social practice, their Christian mirror-image, are their greatest
political enemies. The paradox is that Muslims' only real allies are
not those who first published the caricatures for shock value, but
those who, in support of the ideal of freedom of expression, reprinted
them. While a true atheist has no need to boost his own stance by
provoking believers with blasphemy, he also refuses to reduce the
problem of the Muhammad caricatures to one of respect for other's
beliefs. Respect for other's beliefs as the highest value can mean
only one of two things: either we treat the other in a patronizing
way and avoid hurting him in order not to ruin his illusions, or we
adopt the relativist stance of multiple "regimes of truth," disqualifying
as violent imposition any clear insistence on truth. What, however,
about submitting Islam — together with all other religions — to a
respectful, but for that reason no less ruthless, critical analysis?
This, and only this, is the way to show a true respect for Muslims:
to treat them as serious
adults responsible for their beliefs. Slavoj Zizek,
the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities,
is the author, most recently, of "The Parallax View." * Copyright
2006 | The New York Times |
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