Beyond belief

Justin Cartwright on religion's vain quest for the meaning of life

Near the end of his life, Isaiah Berlin wrote these words to a correspondent who had asked the great imponderable:



What preoccupied Berlin as a philosopher and historian of ideas was the very prevalent belief that somehow life is other than the one we live. "Things are what they are," he was fond of saying, paraphrasing Bishop Joseph Butler, "why should we wish to deceive ourselves?" He regarded the essentially religious belief that we could forgo our freedom now for some future society - Marxism was his particular bugbear - as ludicrous and against all the tenets of common sense. Freedom was, in his view, the freedom to conduct our own lives in our own way with as little interference as possible. He had no time at all for the idea that we are living with a false consciousness, which needs to be changed either by the religiously or the ideologically enlightened. In an age when fascism and communism were battling for the soul of Europe, he saw that they were essentially the same thing, offering a sort of heaven for those who gave up their personal freedom.

He had even less patience with the idea that life is politics. Instead, he acknowledged that people could have conflicting aims, and he concluded that politics was not the end of life, but the unavoidable activity to resolve these aims. This is the liberal way for which Britain has - rightly - been highly regarded. It is not some wishy-washy alternative to a more active set of beliefs, but the starting point of a liberal and secular society. It pre-supposes a rejection of explanations that involve miraculous events, and unprovable explanations of existence and death. As a comfort or as a delusion or as a moral guide, these views are unexceptionable in a modern society, but when they assume a higher authority they have no value at all.

When South Africa was struggling to achieve a resolution after apartheid, neither side was, at that stage, truly committed to democracy. The ANC was at heart centralist, and the outgoing Nationalists wanted separate provisions for whites. In the end, the ANC and the National Party could only agree on a liberal democratic constitution; the unassailable logic of a liberal democratic constitution had prevailed. It is the very fact that a liberal democracy is not prescriptive, but values the processes above the ideology, which has stood the test of time.


There is absolutely no reason for the Church of England to be represented in the House of Lords nor for the Queen to be the Defender of Faith, (or - fatuously - faiths), nor is there any reason to take the Muslim Parliament or the Board of Deputies seriously if they claim to have special knowledge. Their role, like every other group's in the country, should be to lobby and persuade. We must eliminate any suggestion of a religious agenda: I have no doubt that a substantial proportion of Muslims in this country believes that western society is anti-Muslim and that the Iraq war was directed against their religion. Not so long ago I interviewed the head of Palestinian Broadcasting and asked him why his television station glorified suicide bombing. His reply was interesting, perhaps even frightening: the TV station had to reflect all strands of Palestinian thought. It may be incomprehensible to true believers, but a secular state does not pursue religious crusades, even if US president George W Bush sometimes appears to believe that he has a divine sanction.

So the measures the government is taking against mullahs and against religious incitement seem to me to be misguided. By pandering to the credulous while cracking down on "extremists", we are trying to maintain the fiction that we are semi-religious in a harmless, Hobbity sort of fashion. Interestingly, Berlin, while himself absolutely against any "vaporous clouds of nonsense" as guiding principles for society, believed that religions lost their meaning when they compromised their beliefs. Muslims - and indeed any other religious group - should be treated in a secular fashion: if they stray into crime, that is what it is, crime, nothing else. We should make it absolutely clear that there are no special political or religious crimes, and we should make it clear that we do not tacitly promote religion in government or in schools. What we have to promote above all else is the liberal society, and this is best done by observing scrupulously the principles of that society.

And that demands that we acknowledge that religion is, at base, nonsense. The sooner we eliminate the idea that life has "some cosmic, all-embracing libretto", the better.