18 December 2011
The False Equation: Religion Equals Morality
By Gwynne Dyer
In the United States, where it is almost impossible to get elected unless you profess a strong religious faith, it would have passed completely unnoticed. Not one of the hundred US senators ticks the “No Religion/Atheist/Agnostic” box, for example, although 16 percent of the American population do. But it was quite remarkable in Britain.
Last Friday, in Oxford, Prime Minister David Cameron declared that the United Kingdom is a Christian country “and we should not be afraid to say so.” He was speaking on the 400th anniversary of the King James translation of the Bible, so he had to say something positive about religion – but he went far beyond that.
“The Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today,” he said. “Values and morals we should actively stand up and defend.”
Where to start? The King James Bible was published at the start of a century in which millions of Europeans were killed in religious wars over minor differences of doctrine. Thousands of “witches” were burned at the stake during the 16th century, as were thousands of “heretics”. They have stopped doing that sort of thing in Britain now – but they’ve also stopped reading the Bible. Might there be a connection here?
Besides, what Cameron said is just not true. In last year’s British Social Attitudes Survey, conducted annually by the National Centre for Social Research, only 43 percent of 4,000 British people interviewed said they were Christian, while 51 percent said they had “no religion.” Among young people, some two-thirds are non-believers.
Mind you, the official census numbers from 2001 say that 73 percent of British people identify themselves as “Christian”. However, this is probably due to a leading question on the census form. “What is your religion?” it asks, which seems to assume that you must have one – especially since it follows a section on ethnic origins, and we all have those.
So a lot of people put down Christian just because that is the ancestral religion of their family. Make the question more neutral – “Are you religious? If so, what is your religion?” –and the result would probably be very different. There were attempts to get that more neutral question onto the 2011 census form, but the churches lobbied frantically against it. They are feeling marginalised enough as it is.
Why would David Cameron proclaim the virtues of a Christian Britain that no longer exists? He is no religious fanatic; he describes himself as a “committed” but only “vaguely practising” Christian.
You’d think that if he really believed in a God who scrutinises his every thought and deed, and will condemn him to eternal torture in Hell if he doesn’t meet the standard of behaviour required, he might be a little less vague about it all. But he doesn’t really believe that he needs religion HIMSELF; he thinks it is a necessary instrument of social control for keeping the lower orders in check.
This is a common belief among those who rule, because they confuse morality with religion. If the common folk do not fear some god (any old god will do), social discipline will collapse and the streets will run with blood. Our homes, our children, even our domestic animals will be violated. Thank god for God.
Just listen to Cameron: “The alternative of moral neutrality should not be an option. You can’t fight something with nothing. If we don’t stand for something, we can’t stand against anything.” The “alternative of moral neutrality”? What he means is that there cannot be moral behaviour without religion – so you proles had better go on believing, or we privileged people will be in trouble.
But Cameron already lives in a post-religious country. Half its people say outright that they have no religion, two-thirds of them never attend a religious service, and a mere 8 percent go to church, mosque, synagogue or temple on a weekly basis. Yet the streets are not running with blood.
Indeed, religion may actually be bad for morality. In 2005 Paul Gregory made the case for this in a research paper in the Journal of Religion and Society entitled “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look.”
Sociological gobbledygook, but in a statistical survey of 18 developed democracies, Gregory showed that “In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, (venereal disease), teen pregnancy, and abortion.”
Even within the United States, Gregory reported, “the strongly theistic, anti-evolution South and Midwest” have markedly worse crime rates and social problems than the relatively secular North-East. Of course, the deeply religious areas are also poorer, so it might just be poverty making people behave so badly. On the other hand, maybe religion causes poverty.
Whatever. The point is that David Cameron, and thousands of other politicians, religious leaders and generals in every country, are effectively saying that my children, and those of all the other millions who have no religion, are morally inferior to those who do. It is insulting and untrue.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 6 and 7. (“Mind…it is”)
13 December 2011
Suicide Pact at Durban
By Gwynne Dyer
The Durban climate summit that ended on Sunday has been proclaimed a great success. The chair, South Africa’s International Relations Minister, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, told the delegates: “We have concluded this meeting with (a plan) to save one planet for the future of our children and our grandchildren to come. We have made history.” Don’t be fooled. It was an almost total failure.
This time, the rapidly developing country that put up the greatest resistance to a binding global deal was India. (In 2009 and 2010, it was China.) The chief Indian delegate, Jayanthi Natarajan, held out against any legally enforceable treaty through three long days of non-stop, overtime negotiations. In the end, she agreed that an eventual deal would have “legal force” – but it would not be “legally binding”.
Lawyers get rich arguing over the difference between phrases like these, but that is for the future. The question now is: given what the Indian government already knows, how could it possibly have taken that position?
Three years ago, while I was interviewing the director of a think tank in New Delhi, she suddenly dropped a bomb into the conversation. Her institute had been asked by the World Bank to figure out how much food production India would lose when the average global temperature was two degrees C higher, she said – and the answer was 25 percent.
This study, like similar ones that the Bank commissioned in other major countries, has never been published, presumably because the governments of those countries put huge pressure on the Bank to keep the numbers secret. But the Indian government undoubtedly knows the truth.
A 25 percent loss of food production would be an almost measureless calamity for India. It now produces just enough food to feed its 1.1 billion people. If the population rises by the forecast quarter-billion in the next twenty years, and meanwhile its food production falls by 25 percent due to global warming, half a billion Indians will starve.
India will not be able to buy its way out of the crisis by importing food, because many other countries will be experiencing similar falls in production at the same time, and the price of the limited amount of grain still reaching the international market will be prohibitive. So India should be moving heaven and earth to stop the average global temperature from reaching plus 2 degrees C. But it isn’t.
Like almost every other country, India has signed a declaration that the warming must never exceed two degrees, but in practice the government acts as though it had all the time in the world. Maybe it just can’t visualise a future in which those numbers become the reality. Or maybe it is just too attached to the principle that the “old rich” countries must pay for the damage they have done.
That’s a perfectly reasonable argument in terms of historical justice, for the old rich countries emitted around 80 percent of the greenhouse gases of human origin that are now in the atmosphere. But if only those countries act promptly, then the average global temperature soars through +2 degrees C and Indians start to starve.
Most developed countries do not face similar losses in food production at +2 degrees C, for they are further away from the equator. Their position is merely selfish and short-sighted; India’s is suicidal.
Over the past fifteen years of climate negotiations there has been a steady decline in the seriousness of the response. The Kyoto Protocol in 1997 committed the developed countries to stabilise their emissions and then cut them by an average of six percent by 2012. Developing countries were exempt from any controls, because they were not then emitting very much. And deeper emission cuts would come in a second phase of Kyoto, beginning in 2012.
Based on what we knew then, it was a cautious but rational response. In the meantime, however, developing country emissions have grown so fast that China now produces much more greenhouse gas than the United States. Global emissions are not in decline, as they should be. Last year, they GREW by six percent.
So what was the response at Durban? The 1997 Kyoto targets for the developed countries will be maintained for another five years (with no further cuts), and developing countries will still not accept any legal restraints on their emissions. Then everyone will sign a more ambitious deal (still to be negotiated) by 2015 – and the new targets, whatever they are, will acquire “legal force”, whatever that means, by 2020.
By that time, annual global emissions will probably be at least twice what they were when the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997 – and the +2 degree barrier will probably be visible only in the rear-view mirror. The outcome at Durban could have been even worse – a complete abandonment of the concept of legal obligations to restrict emissions – but it was very, very bad.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 5 and 7. (“This…truth”; and “India…isn’t”)
12 December 2011
Euro Crisis: Barking Up the Wrong Tree
By Gwynne Dyer
One senior European politician said angrily that British Prime Minister David Cameron was “like a man who comes to a wife-swapping party without his wife,” and there was some truth in that. Britain does not even use the euro currency, shared by 17 of the 27 EU members, but Cameron insisted on being part of the discussion in Brussels about how to save it. And in the end, he vetoed the solution that all the others had agreed on.
It was the eighth crisis summit of the European Union’s leaders this year, and it produced the fourth “comprehensive package” of financial measures to deal with the debt crisis. (The other three have already failed.) And if you judged the importance of the meeting by the scale of the uproar when Britain vetoed the EU treaty that was meant to stop the rot, it must have been a very important summit indeed.
But in fact they were all barking up the wrong tree in Brussels: the financial crisis over the euro will roll on, and the collapse of the common EU currency continues to be a real possibility. What the summit actually showed was how divided, distracted and deluded Europe’s leaders still are.
David Cameron went to Brussels knowing that his partners intended to come up with a treaty that would enshrine new financial rules for EU members, in order to reassure the “markets”, who have been demanding higher and higher interest rates to roll over the debts of EU members. He also knew that the nationalistic, “europhobe” faction in his own Conservative Party would never vote for such a treaty. They want out of the EU, not further in.
The only way out of Cameron’s dilemma, therefore, was to make sure that there would not be such a treaty. His stated reason for vetoing it was to avoid more stringent regulation, and possibly taxation, of the London financial markets, but his real reason was naked self-interest: a new treaty would split his own party and probably destroy his government.
His stated reason was nonsense. Any new financial regulations that would affect the London markets would have to be agreed unanimously by the EU countries at a later date; there was no need to veto the treaty if he just wanted to protect the free-wheeling, “casino” aspect of the London markets that had done so much to precipitate the crisis in the first place. Cameron just needed a cover story.
The other EU members feigned great anger at this, but some of them were secretly quite grateful for Cameron’s bad behaviour. They agreed to adopt the same rules anyway, but to do it outside the legal framework of the EU in order to get around the British veto. This had two great advantages: it meant that no referendums would be necessary – and if these new measures failed to reassure the markets, they could all blame Britain.
What were these fabulous new measures? They were all about “balanced budgets” in the eurozone countries, which would face sanctions if they let their budget deficit exceed 3 percent of GDP. They would even have to submit their national budgets to the European Commission, which would have the power to ask that they be revised.
These are exactly the steps that will be needed if the euro is to have a long-term future: it cannot survive if the countries using it do not have a unified fiscal regime. But the markets don’t give a damn about the long-term future of the euro; they just want to know for sure that they will get back the money they lend to eurozone countries, and until they have that assurance they will demand exorbitant interest rates on their loans.
In this context, the decisions taken in Brussels this week are merely a displacement activity. The bigger EU governments are using the crisis as a pretext to force through centralising measures that they have long wanted to impose on the weaker economies. But they are still not doing what the markets want, which is to take responsibility for the weaker countries’ debts.
Can it really be that simple? Can they really be that irresponsible? Yes, and yes again. Tip O’Neill, former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, explained why this sort of thing happens in politics seventy years ago. “All politics is local,” he said, and that is true in spades in Europe today.
It’s not just David Cameron who is putting his local political interests above the interests of a broader European community. So is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who refuses to allow the EU to make a collective commitment to honour the debts of the weaker members.
That’s the only thing that will calm the markets, but Merkel’s voters are fiercely opposed to hard-working, thrifty Germans covering the debts of lazy, spendthrift Greeks and Italians (as many of them would put it), so she will not permit it. And so the euro crisis rolls on interminably.
But don’t worry: interminably is not the same as forever. Sooner or later there will be a real crash, and all these people will be duly punished for their fecklessness. Unfortunately, everybody else in the EU will be punished too.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 2 and 6. (“It was…indeed”; and “His stated…story”)
8 December 2011
Women and the Monotheisms
By Gwynne Dyer
One should not mock the sexual obsessions of Islamic fundamentalists; it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. When a senior academic in Saudi Arabia, Prof. Kamal Subhi, declares in a report for the Shura Council, the kingdom’s legislative assembly, that allowing women to drive would spell the end of virginity in the kingdom, it doesn’t really require further comment. But let’s offer a few comments anyway.
In the report, Prof. Subhi describes sitting in a coffee shop in an unnamed Arab state where “all the women were looking at me. One made a gesture that made it clear that she was available. This is what happens when women are allowed to drive.”
I regret to report that this doesn’t happen to me in coffee shops. In fact, it doesn’t even happen to me in bars, although I am generally reckoned to be the most handsome man of my generation. (The late Jurassic generation.) It doesn’t seem to happen to any of my male friends either, although most of us live in the decadent, post-Christian West, where women drive all the time.
Maybe it’s just that none of us are as amazingly good-looking and sexy as Prof. Subhi, or maybe Arab women are incredibly lascivious and immoral. But it seems more likely that he was just imagining it all, in which case another possible explanation presents itself.
Perhaps he has a mentality so sex-obsessed and so fearful of women that these feverish imaginings seem perfectly normal to him. And they ARE quite normal among Islamic fundamentalists, like the Nour Party in Egypt that demands strict prohibitions against mixed bathing, “fornication”, and the appointment of women to leadership roles – and got a quarter of the votes in last week’s election in Egypt.
But the point is not that Muslims are weird; they are all too normal. All the “Abrahamic” religions, as Muslims call them, have traditionally been sex-obsessed and terrified of women, and the fundamentalists among them still are. Take the increasingly influential and importunate Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews of Israel.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, last week told an audience that included Israel’s deputy prime minister, Dan Meridor, and opposition leader Tzipi Livni that she was shocked by the growing discrimination against Israeli women. She even compared the separate seating for women on some Jerusalem buses to the humiliation of Rosa Parks, the black American woman who made history in 1955 by refusing to give up her bus seat for white passengers.
Clinton also compared the behaviour of some Israeli soldiers who recently walked out on a performance by female singers to the attitude towards women in Iran. But God – at least, the God worshipped by the Haredim – is enraged whenever men listen to women singing, so of course they had to leave. As for Christian fundamentalist attitudes toward women, here’s the Rev. Pat Robertson, one of the most influential US television evangelists:
“The Feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” Not to mention drive cars and hang around in coffee shops making come-hither eyes at ageing academics.
Where does all this weirdness come from? Other societies and other religions have been just as patriarchal and disrespectful of women: it wasn’t much fun being a woman in traditional Hindu, Buddhist or Confucian societies either. But nowhere else was there the same male sexual panic, the profound, ingrained fear of free women that infests all the Middle Eastern monotheisms. Where does that come from?
I started to write this next paragraph three times, and then admitted to myself that I really do not know the answer. It’s clear from the fragments of history that have come down to us from five thousand years ago that there was an intense struggle in the ancient Fertile Crescent between the old female fertility cults and the new male-centred religions, which celebrated war, hierarchy and blind obedience.
The male religions triumphed everywhere: by three and a half thousand years ago, male hierarchies ruled everything, both in the heavens and on the Earth. But why was the struggle so much more intense in the Middle East, and the outcome so much more hostile to women, than in most other places? Dunno.
It doesn’t matter, really. You can’t unpick the history; you have to start from where you are, even if you’d much rather start from somewhere else. And the fact is that people can overcome their history: most Jews, Christians and Muslims today do not have extreme anti-female attitudes. The reason we have a special name for those who still do is evidence enough that they are a minority in the present populations, if you actually needed it.
Fundamentalists are a big minority in countries like the United States, Israel, Egypt and Iran, but a much smaller minority in countries like France, Turkey, and Russia. In some places their numbers are actually growing at the moment, but the long-term trend is sharply down. By today’s standards, ALL Jews, Christians and Muslims were fundamentalists five hundred years ago.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 11 and 12. (“I started…Dunno”)