When Forster officially announced Seven Shoulders and its premise on Twitter/X, he was skewered on all sides. White people disguising themselves as black is passé and will provoke offence and indignation whatever the reason may be. Many black people, in particular, responded negatively because they felt that they were the best qualified to discuss the reality of being black. They also felt that they didn’t need a white Canadian man to don a synthetic afro wig, wear coloured contact lenses, and put on brown-coloured Maybelline foundation (specifically, mocha shade—because ‘I figured it was best not to get too ambitious’) to find out whether racism still exists in America. 

Forster follows in the footsteps of other ‘journalistic blackface’ practitioners, on whose example he rests very heavily: he cites Ray Sprigle, John Howard Griffin, author of 1967’s Black Like Me (which he particularly admires), and Grace Halsell, author of 1969’s Soul Sister. All of them went incognito as ‘black’ to try to enlighten a largely ignorant and indifferent white America on the reality of the pervasive racism faced by black Americans, whether under the oppressive Jim Crow apartheid regime of the South in the 20^th century or the unofficial but ubiquitous racism that black communities endured across Northern cities during the same period.

Even though journalistic blackface has already been done three times, Forster ‘felt [he] had no choice’ but to anoint himself as the heir to this tradition. Moreover, he proclaims that he is sui generis because he is ‘the first person to earnestly cross the color barrier in over half a century’—and he is especially unique because he is the first person to do so in a post-Rodney King, post-Barack Obama, and post-George Floyd America. This claim isn’t strictly true, as there have been reality TV shows from this century setting up social experiments where whites have been disguised as blacks and vice versa to see what life is like ‘on the other side’ of the racial divide. 

Nevertheless, Forster doesn’t advertise Seven Shoulders as a moralistic screed. Instead, it’s a book that ‘prioritises methodical language and comprehensive analysis over emotional fervour and moral condemnation’ and he is the right person for this task because he is ‘inclined to describe rather than admonish.’

Unlike Ray Sprigle, who ‘ate, slept, traveled, lived Black’ (‘I lodged in Negro households. I ate in Negro restaurants. I slept in Negro hotels and lodging houses. I crept through the back and side doors of railroad stations’), Forster doesn’t embed himself within predominantly black communities. He doesn’t attempt to live a social life as a black man. No, the way Forster seeks to ‘taxonomize’ American racism (which, he says, can be divided into various categories, including two oft-conflated ones: ‘macro-level racial disparities’ and ‘institutional injustice’) is to pose as a hitchhiker on the sides, or shoulders, of seven different roads across the US, ‘first as a White man, and then again as a Black man on the following day.’

He claims this hitchhiking experiment is an accurate way to ‘taxonomize’ contemporary racism in America because it ‘exposes real sentiments that might otherwise be concealed… It reveals how [Americans] act when nobody is telling them how to act.’ It reveals another category of racism: the ‘interpersonal’ type.

The problem with this is that this isn’t the America of the Beatniks, where hitchhiking culture was a lot more prominent than it is today. And it is rather shallow to make sweeping judgements on a topic as broad and intricate as race in America on the sole basis of a limited hitchhiking experiment—which is why the pompous statements peppered throughout the book are so jarring. For instance:

[N]obody has an experiential barometer with respect to race… nobody except for me… [You] may say that I haven’t lived enough Black life for my barometer to be useful. Say what you will. My barometer is better than anyone else’s. 

Or: 

I am a visionary writer who wants to demystify race in a way that is creative, compelling, and beautiful.

For all the vim and haughty rhetoric Forster deploys, Seven Shoulders is as underwhelming as it is superficial. This is disappointing in its own way, as I was slightly intrigued by the premise. Instead, I encountered a book that was confused and incoherently written. Publishing a chapter that actually contains the line ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to say in this chapter’ doesn’t exactly instil confidence in you as a writer, ‘visionary’ or otherwise.

Though the journalistic blackface was unnecessary, not to mention silly, there might perhaps have been an interesting, if provocative, book investigating the textures and dynamics of race in America in the 21^st century from a considered first-person view. Ray Sprigle and John Howard Griffin in their ethnographical studies at least spoke to black Americans and collected testimonies of their experiences of racism. The closest Forster comes to anything like this is a pedestrian interview with two unnamed black politicians (whom he interviewed as a white man) who were clearly unaware of what project their remarks were lent to. 

Most of the commentary surrounding Seven Shoulders has focused on Forster’s use of blackface and thus the gravamen has been missed. He claims that in America today, instances of institutional racism are ‘extremely [he repeats this word over several pages in case you didn’t get it the first time—yes, really]…difficult to identify, and outward demonstrations of interpersonal racism are also a vanishing phenomenon.’ 

This thesis very much rhymes with that of Dinesh D’Souza’s 1995 book The End of Racism and other arguments from American conservatives. In other words, Forster isn’t as original and avant-garde as his bumptious pronouncements would have us believe. Forster concedes that what he calls ‘shoulder racism’, based on what we might call unconscious bias, might occur in certain circumstances—but says that it is not a pressing social problem.

He also notes that he was perceived differently by the homeless when he was white compared to when he was black: he was constantly asked for money by homeless people (of whatever colour) as a white man, yet he wasn’t pestered by anyone for money as a black man, which I find believable. But that is the extent of the depth he arrives at when contemplating how whites and blacks may be perceived differently within society. 

Whatever your opinion on whether Ray Sprigle, John Howard Griffin, and Grace Halsell were ever justified in engaging in journalistic blackface, one cannot deny that, in service of the cause of racial equality, they made sincere efforts to understand the reality of the racism that plagued their time. In contrast, Forster’s efforts in Seven Shoulders are an unserious and not even entertaining attempt at gonzo journalism. It feels like it was written in an unhinged frenzy, without any serious understanding of the complicated subject it broaches, and it makes bold claims and states tendentious conclusions based on a flimsy ‘experiment’ that a bad YouTuber could conduct.

As a black man—technically mixed race—I’m not even offended. I have thick skin and a broad back, so it takes a lot to make me cry. Besides, to be offended or hurt by Sam Forster’s gimmick I would have had to have taken it seriously. I do agree with Forster that most of the books currently written about race, whether by blacks or whites, are ‘tremendously boring.’ Alas, his is the latest addition to that pile. 

Related reading

Race: the most difficult subject of all? Interview with Inaya Folarin Iman by Emma Park

Two types of ‘assimilation’: the US and China, by Grayson Slover

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

Linnaeus, Buffon, and the battle for biology, by Charles Foster

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch

Can sentientism save the world? Interview with Jamie Woodhouse, by Emma Park

David Tennant, Kemi Badenoch, and the ugly sin of identity politics: a view from the right, by Frank Haviland

The post Gimmick journalism and race in America: review of ‘Seven Shoulders’ by Sam Forster appeared first on The Freethinker.

Myth? Legend? Folklore? History? Fiction? This is The Story of Russia, as the title of Orlando Figes’s 2022 book puts it.

Every nation, every country, and, indeed, every empire has a founding myth: some event or figure that is meant to embody the values and origins of the state and unify the people with an overarching narrative of where they came from and where they are going. Figes shows, however, that Russia is a peculiar exception to this norm. For many reasons, when it comes to Russia’s history and origins, there is no true consensus or understanding. Rather, Russia’s history and origins are so deeply intertwined with myths, narratives, legends, politics, folklore, and religion that you must first be willing to dive deeply into all these intricate components and then sift through them to discover even a morsel of truth.

As Figes demonstrates in his work, despotism is one constant truth of Russia over 800 years, from the authoritarianism of Kievan Rus’ (the progenitor of modern Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus) to Putinism. The systems and titles may have changed several times, but the brutal and violent methods of securing and maintaining centralised power in Russia have remained largely unaltered—because, circularly, the belief that Russia can only be ruled by brutality and violence has remained largely unaltered as well.

Russian industrialisation did not even begin until the late 19^th century, partially because of Russia’s reliance on serf labour. Because serfs had no social or economic mobility, and even their physical mobility was restricted to the confines of their village, there was no space for innovators, investors, and entrepreneurs who could revolutionise the system. The natural emergence of capitalism, inextricably connected to industrialisation (like an axle to a wheel), was impossible for a long time in Russia. In Russia, unlike the rest of Europe, the state, in the form of the Tsar, was the sole financier of industrialisation.

During the first half of the 18^th century, the skill of history writing was still emerging in Russia. A German scholar named Gerhard Friedrich Müller outraged the Russian academics at the newly established St Petersburg Academy of Sciences by daring to conclude, based on his research of the Primary Chronicle, that Russia’s origins could be traced back to the Vikings. To say that Scandinavians created Russia was not something to be lightly asserted at a time when Russia had just emerged from victory in one of its many wars with Sweden!

Müller was accused by Mikhail Lomonosov, his rival in the academy, of degrading the Slavs by presenting them as savages who couldn’t organise their state without outside help. The Russians, according to Lomonosov, were not Vikings, but Baltic Slavs, descendants of the Iranian Roxolani people, whose history dates back into the mists of antiquity.

Another fascinating aspect of Russian history that Figes delves into is the notion of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’, the bearer of the Orthodox Christian flame after the fall of the ‘Second Rome’, Byzantium. This succession—or natural inheritance, as it is viewed by many Russians—means that Russia has a God-given mission in the world, a view that derives in part from the medieval theology it inherited from the Byzantines. The idea that the West is in a state of degeneration and collapse and that Russia is a superior civilisation thanks to its unbending devotion to Orthodoxy is an idea that has recurred again and again in Russian history. Holy Russia, in short, is the true source of humanity’s salvation. This view of Russia as saviour fundamentally influenced both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The sacralisation of power was deeply linked to this because it portrayed the Tsar (or the Party) as the direct manifestation of God’s will on Earth (or the embodiment of the dialectic of history).

This messianic streak is still apparent. Putin’s ongoing war with Ukraine can be understood through this framework: divine right places Putin above human laws, human rights, and earthly realities, and Ukraine, due to its exposure to the degenerate societies of the West, is in need of cleansing by holy war.

Figes skilfully examines the reasons behind Russia’s failure to establish a democratic government over the centuries (contrast with Ukraine) by compellingly illustrating how democratic reforms were consistently hindered by pivotal historical events. These events include the impact of the French Revolution during Catherine the Great’s reign, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia during Alexander I’s rule, the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 (which halted his transformative reforms), the suppression of democratic ideals by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution, and the perpetuation of autocratic tendencies following the fall of the Soviet Union. While Western thinkers have debated, discussed, and theorised about the abstract notions of the state and the people, the role of religion, and the role and structure of the state for hundreds of years, there has been no similar wide-ranging, long-term enquiry in Russia.

Yet another fascinating and critical topic explored in The Story of Russia is Russia’s eastward expansion. As Figes notes, between 1500 and 1917, the territories controlled by the Russian state grew, on average, by a staggering 1,300 square kilometres per day. This expansion, of course, was not merely of land; it also included expansion of control over the indigenous populations the Russians encountered. Russian expansion was, in essence, Russian colonialism. However, unlike in many Western countries, Russia has not reflected on or reckoned with its colonial past. Russian expansion is viewed as a kind of ‘self-discovery’—or, as Figes describes it, as the story of a country colonising itself.

It is certainly not shocking that no such reckoning has occurred or even begun in Russia given that the official narrative on all matters Russian has been crafted by authoritarian regimes, from the Tsars and the Soviets to Putin. But where, then, is the international community? Where are the protests against the bloody past, so common in the West? Where is the holding to account for the cultural genocide, forced assimilation, brutal treatment, and forced imprisonment of indigenous peoples in and along the eastern portion of Eurasia?

Perhaps the only apt comparison is that of the plight of the Uyghur Muslims, a Turkic-speaking ethnic group who live in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, China. Over one million Uyghur Muslims have been imprisoned by the Chinese government since 2017, and those not imprisoned are subjected to intense surveillance, religious restrictions, forced labour, and forced sterilisation. The outcry, protests, and condemnation from the international community on this issue have also been lacking, albeit not totally absent. Similarly, but to a worse extent, the silence on the ongoing plight of the indigenous peoples of Russia is stunning.

Figes’s assessment of the Putin regime’s endorsement of the doctrine called the ‘Russian World’ is particularly valuable. According to this doctrine, Russia is a civilisation characterised by its spiritual values, in contrast to what is perceived as the liberalism and materialism of the West. The ‘Russian World’ includes not merely Russia, but also Ukraine and Belarus, a view supported by Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who believes that all Orthodox believers, whether in Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus, have a common origin and deep connection stemming from the coming of Christianity to Kievan Rus’ in 988. Kirill’s shocking inability to denounce Russia’s war on—not to mention his declaration of holy war against—Ukraine is a direct consequence of this view of history.

Among the many important themes discussed by Figes, one stands out to me as a necessary reminder of the malign uses to which prejudiced historical narratives can be put. That is, in true Orwellian fashion, control over how the past is understood grants control over the present and the future. The current unnecessary and unprovoked war with Ukraine is the result of Russia being detached from its history and at the mercy of an ever-changing narrative that benefits the ruling class and buttresses that class’s hold on power. This war is not just a crime against Ukraine, but also one against the best of Russia, whose literature and art have enriched Europe for centuries, and the people of Russia, whose desire for liberty has, tragically, never been fully realised. This war, in all its aspects, will only continue until and unless Russia is free to understand its own history—and learn from it.

Related reading

A view from Kyiv: Ordinary life during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, interview by Emma Park

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Two types of ‘assimilation’: the US and China, by Grayson Slover

The post Russian history, Russian myths: review of ‘The Story of Russia’ by Orlando Figes appeared first on The Freethinker.

The seventeenth century did not get off to a great start in Europe. Religious conflict still simmered, and in 1618, the continent became embroiled in the bloodiest and most destructive war it would suffer before the two World Wars. The Netherlands was fighting for its independence. In Britain, the dispute between King and Parliament led to wars costing hundreds of thousands of lives in the 1640s and 1650s. Scientific progress faced massive barriers. Galileo was condemned by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 for arguing that the Earth orbited the Sun and not the reverse, as Aristotle and generations of his followers had maintained. Across the continent, people remained poor, ignorant, oppressed, and victims of seemingly continuous violence.

Yet, by the end of the century, the religious wars were over, Europe had modern astronomy and physics, the Dutch had created the corporation and the stock exchange, England had established parliamentary government, and books calling for freedom of religion were openly being published and distributed. ‘In 1700 the mental outlook of educated men was completely modern; in 1600, except among a very few, it was largely medieval,’ wrote Bertrand Russell in his A History of Western Philosophy.

This shift in mindset, from the medieval to the modern, is the subject of Paul Strathern’s Dark Brilliance: The Age of Reason From Descartes to Peter the Great. Strathern covers the major figures and events of the era, painting a sweeping picture of the century and the monumental changes it brought to intellectual and cultural life in Europe. Dark Brilliance has remarkable breadth, touching on every field of knowledge from calculus to cooking. It includes the microscope and telescope, probability and statistics, gravity and motion, the Golden Age in the Netherlands and the Glorious Revolution in Britain. We meet—as we expect—figures such as Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Newton. But Strathern pays far more attention to culture and the arts than most other writers on the Enlightenment. He also breaks down the contrast between reason and unreason running through the seventeenth century; this is the ‘Dark’ of the book’s title.

The Culture of Enlightenment

As he promises in the subtitle, Strathern begins Dark Brilliance with René Descartes, as he is developing his new philosophy in a bucolic winter scene in a Bavarian village. From Descartes, he makes an unexpected jump to the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610). Caravaggio would not normally feature in a book on the Age of Reason. He lived in Italy, which had been the unquestioned centre of Europe during the Renaissance but was falling into the shadows of the Netherlands and France in the seventeenth century. For all their wealth and splendour, Rome and Florence never became centres of the Enlightenment in the way that Paris, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, or London did. Not only that, Caravaggio died before the Age of Reason really began.

Still, Strathern argues that Caravaggio’s painting was a leap forward from the past, just like the works of the Enlightenment thinkers. His painting showed more depth, photorealism, and understanding of scientific topics such as anatomy and optics than the Italian Renaissance masters who preceded him. And they, in turn, painted far more lifelike scenes than medieval European artists. Like the Renaissance artists, Caravaggio drew on classical as well as Biblical inspiration, although he painted with more drama and energy. Strathern highlights, in particular, Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, where he painted a scene from the Bible, a conventional subject, but presented it in a way that was unconventionally violent, visceral, and shocking. Compare the painting with medieval European art, which was often without passion; even people suffering violent deaths can look only bored or vaguely annoyed.

This focus on culture is an original approach, but one which makes sense. Culture reflects society, and we can see the ideas of the Enlightenment reflected in the art of the Baroque artists. But it has limitations, and centres of culture and art were not always centres of learning, science, philosophy, or law. There was no Florentine Newton or Milanese Spinoza.

The splendour of the court of Louis XIV made France the cultural centre of Europe—even today fields like cooking and fashion are speckled with French words and phrases—but the French Enlightenment only really took off after the Sun King’s death. Strathern could have perhaps explored this further.  

Reason and Unreason

The other theme of Dark Brilliance is, as the title itself illustrates, the paradoxes of the Enlightenment. To Strathern, the seventeenth century was the Age of Reason and Unreason. As he points out in the introduction, the achievements of the Enlightenment ‘took place against a background of extreme political turbulence and irrational behaviour on a continental scale,’ from frenzied persecutions of supposed witches to the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.

The developers of the telescope and the microscope were achieving steadily higher levels of magnification and bringing more and more of the hidden universe into view even as Catholics and Protestants killed each other by the tens of thousands. In the first chapter of Dark Brilliance, René Descartes invents his new philosophy while in the winter quarters of the Bavarian army during the Thirty Years War. The metastatic growth of the slave trade provides another example of how the irrational and inhumane could easily grow alongside the ideals of the Enlightenment. ‘…[I]n the Age of Reason, it was slavery that produced the capital which led to the progress of western European civilization, laying the foundations upon which its empires were built,’ Strathern writes. ‘At the same time, it also prompted a few rare spirits such as Montaigne to recognize the contagious barbarity of all who took part in it—to say nothing of the absurdity of its claims regarding racial superiority’. Man’s expanding knowledge did not seem to lessen his brutality—at least not yet.

The greatest paradox of the Enlightenment was, arguably, the French Revolution itself, which led to mass killing, the establishment of a dictatorship, and a new ‘rational’ religion in the name of Enlightenment values and freeing the people of France from the oppression of monarchy, aristocratic privilege, and a corrupt and reactionary Church. As he finishes his account at the start of the eighteenth century, Strathern doesn’t cover the French Revolution, although the theme of paradox runs through the book.

Conclusions

Why should we care about the Enlightenment? Because we live in a world shaped by it, and while we enjoy its benefits, we should also be aware (and beware) of its lessons. At the start of Dark Brilliance, Strathern asks if human progress will end up destroying the civilisation it helped to create. We face a range of threats, including climate change, enabled by the scientific progress and material wealth which has made our lives so much better. At the end of the book, he has not yet answered his own question, although he concludes that ‘paradoxically, the answer would appear to be progress itself’. Admittedly, it’s hard to see what other conclusion anyone could reach. There are calls today from the far left and far right of the political spectrum to dismantle the modern economy and modern society and revert to some pre-modern ideal. But this ideal is, in all cases, as mythical as it is real.

Strathern chooses to tell his overall story as a collection of colourful little biographies. This is an accessible approach and makes the book engaging for a general audience. Anyone who reads Dark Brilliance will reach the end with a much better understanding of not just the Enlightenment but life in seventeenth-century Europe in general. As someone who has read and written much about the subject, Strathern’s account of the development of Baroque painting was still entirely new to me.

I was left feeling that some of the threads remained loose, particularly on the impact of the Enlightenment and the paradox of reason coexisting with unreason. But as a panorama of seventeenth-century Europe, Dark Brilliance is both an impressive and very readable book.

Related reading

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism, by Nathan Alexander

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

The post The Enlightenment paradox: review of ‘Dark Brilliance’ by Paul Strathern appeared first on The Freethinker.

The transformation of the Roman Empire from the classical period to a Christian society has been well studied. One estimate is that ten per cent of the Roman world was Christian by AD 300, although what it meant to be a Christian at this date is impossible to ascertain. The communities were scattered and each had a different relationship with sacred texts and Judaism, while their understandings of Jesus Christ were diverse.

An unexpected turning point came in 312-13 when the emperor Constantine used state authority to privilege his own understanding of Christianity above others (this was at a time when the majority of his subjects still followed traditional beliefs). At a council held at Nicaea in 325, there was the first formulation of a creed (a preliminary version of the Nicene Creed), although it was only in the reign of Theodosius (ruled 379-395) that Christianity became the state religion based on a Trinitarian doctrine in which Christ, the Holy Spirit, and God were seen as one. In 380, Theodosius declared that those of other Christian beliefs were ‘demented and insane’ heretics. This was what the historian Peter Heather calls ‘the Romanization of Christianity’ and it made Christianity an authoritarian religion entwined with the authoritarian Roman state. Yet recent scholarship has confirmed the weakness of the state in enforcing compliance. It was all very well issuing fearsome imperial decrees but ‘pagan’ and ‘heretical’ cults survived for decades. Recent works by Heather (Christendom, 2022) and Edward Watts (The Final Pagan Generation, 2015) chart the transformation.

After AD 380, a hierarchy of orthodox bishops attempted to enforce a canon of texts and doctrines such as the Trinity. Independent reasoning waned as the structure of Christian authority gradually emerged. In this sense, there was a true Closing of the Western Mind (the title of my study, published in 2002), though Christian theologians such as Augustine and Ambrose, the formidable bishop of Milan, still drew on ‘pagan’ texts for support. Basil of Caesarea went so far in the 360s as to argue that ‘young men’ should master these texts before embarking on biblical studies. Platonism, rather than being suppressed, provided the intellectual backbone of theology. Christians adopted Plato’s Timaeus with its ‘craftsman god’.

The spread of Christianity through Europe was a complex process, with some Christianities infiltrating peacefully (Ireland) and others succeeding by violent coercion (Saxony at the hands of Charlemagne). The late Valerie Flint in her The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (1991) showed how Christianity was forced to compromise with traditional pre-Christian customs to become embedded. It might not have been until 1215, with the Fourth Lateran Council, that Christian uniformity was fully imposed on Europe.

In The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (2017), Catherine Nixey provides a vivid and passionate narrative of this transformation. She has little time for the political transformation from above—there is hardly a mention of Theodosius, who imposed the Trinity and completed the ‘Romanization of Christianity’. She bypasses the links between traditional Roman authority and the coming of the new religion.

Instead, her Christians appear to come from nowhere, like some fanatical sect emerging from across the Steppes. (Chapter One is aptly titled ‘The Invisible Army’.)  These Christians are tormented by demons. They destroy statues, burn books, and dismantle temples. Nixey highlights the minority of those dedicated to this destruction. ‘Classical literature was filled with the incorrect and demonic and it came under repeated and vicious attack from the Church Fathers’.  Monks were ‘vulgar, stinking, ill-educated and violent’. In Chapters Fourteen to Fifteen, Nixey portrays the joyless and aggressive behaviour of monks as if they all shared a commitment to overthrow the classical world. There are several passages in which Saint Martin of Tours burns ‘pagan’ shrines. In contrast, the influential Gregory the Great (pope 590-604) gets no acknowledgement for his advice to sprinkle holy water on ‘pagan’ shrines and reuse them.

In true journalistic style, Nixey dwells emotively on the destruction of ‘paganism’, muddling Latin and Greek Christianities and pre-and post-Constantinian Christianity. (There are very few dates she provides to establish any context, but her examples range from the second to the sixth centuries and across a variety of Christianities.) She assumes that the empire with its longstanding traditions and structures of authority was fragile, so that, by the sixth century, ‘an entire religious system [‘paganism’] had been all but wiped from the face of the earth’. Violence was part of everyday life in the late empire, so the activities of the more obsessive Christians have to be seen within that context. Papyrus scrolls are vulnerable to dampness and fire but the loss of classical literature is attributed by Nixey largely to the Church: ‘What ensured the near total destruction of all [sic] Latin and Greek literature was a combination of ignorance, fear and idiocy.’  Nixey assumes the Christian destruction of the library at Alexandria, even though it is probably mythical.

Recent scholars of late antiquity have been disturbed by Nixey’s polemic. Yet The Darkening Age has also received rave reviews from those who enjoy feisty dissent from conventional views. The book is seen as challenging a still-rosy picture of Christianity spreading peacefully throughout the Roman Empire and beyond and some reviewers have drawn comparisons between Nixey’s Christians and religious fanatics of the twenty-first century. Yet, other than Julian, emperor for a short time (361-63), all emperors after Constantine were professed Christians and upheld Roman authority. As the works of Peter Brown have shown, a much more nuanced narrative of the narrowing of Western thought is possible.

To be sure, there were dour ascetics among the Christians, but others enjoyed married life and employed slaves. Fifth-century aristocrats such as Sidonius Apollinaris, later to be bishop of Clermont, decried the loss of Latin learning. There is very little of this in Nixey’s narrative and there is no distinctive treatment of the very different fate of the Greek East. I know many of the texts she quotes, and I used some of them in my The Closing of the Western Mind, but they ignore the gradual process by which most of the subjects of the empire accepted Christianity.

Emboldened by her success, Nixey has now written Heresy: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God. This book is primarily an analysis of early tales about Jesus. As in The Darkening Age, Nixey too often assumes that she is breaking new ground, but I have a score of books on my shelves (notably those by Bart Ehrman) which contain similar, if less polemical, analyses.  (And, to give her credit, she does mention William Hone, who, in the nineteenth century, discovered many of the apocryphal gospels.) Despite her wide reading, Nixey has again failed to realise how Christianity was integrated within the Roman state. There is not a mention of Theodosius, who finalised and imposed the doctrine of the Trinity in 381 and attempted to ban ‘pagan’ practices in the 390s. Chapter Twelve, ‘On Laws’, discusses the late (438) Theodosian Code, a compilation of imperial laws since the reign of  Constantine over a hundred years earlier, but the relevance of this to her argument is unclear.

Without the impositions of emperors and the privileges it brought, Christianity was unlikely to have become as dominant as it did. Through councils over which they presided, the emperors brought order, and thus orthodoxy, to the religion. In fact, there were some previous attempts to consolidate the sacred texts, as in Irenaeus’ influential Adversus Haereses of c. 180 (which is mentioned by Nixey), which highlighted the four gospels as canonical, primarily because they were so early.  One cannot have it both ways. If Heresy is about the sheer variety of tales about Jesus and other ‘holy men’, one cannot complain about attempts to define which of these tales were orthodox and which were not. Nixey quotes Celsus’ second-century attacks on Christianity but she never mentions that these quotes are reproduced by the brilliant biblical scholar Origen, who also responds to many of them.

Nixey has a knack for evoking atmospheres and Heresy is full of lively images. She writes very well and many readers will enjoy her book. Heresy is more nuanced than The Darkening Age: there is a greater awareness of alternative views and she draws on more varied sources. However, this makes the book unstructured. Each chapter deals with a different theme. Rome, and Roman authors, are often described but there is little attempt to distinguish between the Greek world (of the New Testament texts) and the Latin West, where definitive translations of the scriptures had to wait until Jerome’s Vulgate in the fourth century. In Chapter Eight, ‘Fruit from a Dunghill’, there is a well-written discussion of travel in the Roman Empire but, other than linking this diversion to the travels of Paul, it does not make any contribution to the argument. Chapter Nine, ‘Go into the World’, continues the theme with travel to the East. There are other diversions, too, for example with the historian and philosopher Plutarch’s account of the afterlife of Thespesius and the discovery by George Smith in the nineteenth century of part of The Epic of Gilgamesh in the cuneiform tablets he was deciphering. It often feels as if Nixey has exhausted her main theme and is resorting to padding.

In the final chapters of Heresy, Nixey returns to the main themes of The Darkening Age: Christians extirpating ‘paganism’ and committing violence between themselves. Her books are more journalistic than scholarly. They will appeal to those who have suffered an unhappy experience with Christianity but they risk being historically unbalanced, and even misleading. There were extremists who took delight in attacking the symbols of traditional Roman and Greek religion, but most conversions happened gradually and there were compromises with traditional values in which Christianity made little difference to social life—even to the continuing ownership of slaves (as Nixey acknowledges).

I felt that Heresy, in particular, failed to establish a coherent argument. If Jesus made an impact within the Greek world, it is not surprising that many sources elaborated on the legends that had accumulated around him. It was right that Irenaeus sought to establish orthodoxy from the earliest gospel texts, for Christianity would never have survived if it had not brought order to its theology—even if, to this writer at least, it also brought a closing of the Western mind. It is just that this narrowing was a much subtler process than Nixey would have it.

Related reading

‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman, by Daniel James Sharp

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

Image of the week: Filippino Lippi’s ‘Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas over the Heretics’, by Daniel James Sharp

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

New Atheism, New Theism, and a defence of cultural Christianity, by Jack Stacey

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

The post How the Roman Empire became Christian: Catherine Nixey’s ‘The Darkening Age’ and ‘Heresy’ reviewed appeared first on The Freethinker.

Tanja Nijmeijer fought at a young age with the FARC, the ‘Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia’, a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group which has waged war on the Colombian government from the jungle for 60 years. She was involved in acts of violence. Does this make her a terrorist? A 2023 documentary about her life mainly highlights her idealistic side but does show both sides of the coin.

Tanja Nijmeijer has been called both a revolutionary (by herself) and a terrorist (by others) and is on Interpol’s most-wanted list. The documentary Tanja—Dagboek van een guerrillera (Tanja—Diary of a guerrilla), directed by Marcel Mettelsiefen, gives us Tanja’s life in a nutshell: she describes how she became involved with the FARC and how her thinking has developed over the years. Her mother, who received no signs of life from her daughter for years and had to get all her information from the media, also gives her side.

Tanja was born in 1978 and spent her childhood in the far north of the Netherlands. In 1998, she visited Colombia as a student in training to become an English teacher. She became involved in the conflict between the established order and the FARC, which she joined in 2002.

When the Colombian state began to waver under the ongoing violence, the US military entered the conflict. Tanja worked her way up in the FARC and became a significant player. She was romantically involved with one of the FARC leader’s nephews until 2010 and, from 2012, she even took a prominent role in the peace negotiations which led to an agreement between the FARC and the government in 2016.

In the documentary, she denies that she can be equated with a terrorist. She says she fought in a revolutionary war with a clearly defined goal, which she claims is very different from the type of attacks by, for example, al-Qaeda. She is asked questions about the tension between ‘acts of war’ and ‘terrorism’. But this distinction gradually becomes blurred by the facts presented in the film, even as the film increasingly portrays Tanja herself as a rebellious peacemaker and great reconcile.

The documentary leaves open the question of whether Tanja’s actions actually killed people. Tanja is accused of taking part in the kidnapping of three American citizens and she was involved in the bombing of a passenger bus which resulted in no casualties. But, as the documentary states, tragic deaths could just as well have occurred in this type of attack. And how exactly did this bombing contribute to military objectives? The film argues that the FARC wanted to target those at the heart of business and government and thus targeted the environments frequented by such people. But can one describe these as legitimate military targets? Was the FARC truly less terroristic than other terrorist groups?

Tanja describes in her diaries that she saw the flaws of the movement very clearly—corruption, sexism, favouritism, and financial reliance on drug production and distribution. She also mentions that the ultimate goal, the foundation of a new kind of society based on equality, camaraderie, and communality, gradually vanished behind the horizon. Nevertheless, she remains loyal to the movement, even after Colombian media translated and published parts of her critical diary in 2007.

‘How do you deal with this?’ the interviewer asks her. ‘Are you nostalgic when you think about your family?’

‘It was a great sacrifice’, Tanja says, looking bright-eyed into the camera, fierce and confident, wearing an army cap, with an automatic weapon gleaming against her shoulder. ‘But if I had chosen to be with my family, I couldn’t have been here. It’s one or the other. This is the route I chose. I am convinced that this sacrifice must be made.’

‘The guerrilla [movement] is your family?’ the interviewer asks. ‘Yes, of course’, Tanja replies with a smile. ‘The guerrilla [movement] is even much more than that. I have this to say to the world: I am a guerrilla fighter for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and a guerrilla I will remain until we win or until I die.’

It is clear why the FARC did not execute Tanja after her critical diary fragments fell into enemy hands. She is very mediagenic. Her eyes shine and she speaks with a disarming charm; she is obviously ready to fight and die for what she believes in. Energy, fanaticism, and drive emanate from her. The documentary relies heavily on this, and it seems to choose Tanja’s side. With her recurring ‘You know…?’, the viewer is made to feel like a confidant: You know this situation—you understand what I am talking about.

In this way, the documentary stands up for Tanja. Is that just? I had to let the film sink in for a long time.

I cannot deny being intrigued by the ‘abysmal’ (my word; see below) choice she made. She has shown herself able to let go of all her certainties and to fight for her ideals without restraint. In my 2022 book Wees Afgrondelijk (Be Abyssal), I describe the kind of inner transformation that this requires: a leap of faith associated with a willingness to burn bridges behind you. At the macro level of geopolitics and ideology, the birth of any worldview comes from just such a leap.

Her Marxist-Leninist guerrilla warfare was more important to this young lady, who literally had her whole future ahead of her, than her family. Tanja could have died at any moment, blown up by bombs dropped from American planes or as a result of one of the many dangers of the jungle. These risks are intertwined with the destiny she chose to follow, and she seemed to accept them completely—she was truly willing to die for the cause.

In choosing this path, she consciously opted to reject the bourgeois existence that loomed in the 1990s. When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union dissolved itself, the monomaniacal fear of communism and nuclear war gave way to a wider range of uneasy projections of the future. Liberal democracy became hegemonic: there were no longer any existential challenges or serious alternatives to it. And the highest virtue of liberal democracy was that it was easy; it offered comfort and material prosperity.

However, as Nietzsche prophesied, bourgeois-capitalist existence is too boring and too flat for a truly heroic soul. It would not do justice to the human appetite for intense passions, perilous adventures, and absolute justice. Tanja Nijmeijer, preeminently Nietzschean, made the choice to dedicate her life to a revolutionary mission and to subordinate her individual identity to a collective war effort.

If you grew up in Colombia, such a choice would perhaps be understandable. Suppose you were born in such a country. The government is corrupt and cares little about the people born into poverty. Any politician who does not allow himself to be bribed and does not collude with the existing networks of power is destroyed by smear campaigns in the mass media.

In this situation, you try to climb up through hard work, but criminals and corrupt officials make this impossible. Inflation makes building a decent life an even more unlikely prospect, and all the rules serve only to strengthen the position of the people who already have money and power. What tangible option does one have in this situation other than to try and effect change through revolution? The last glimmer of hope lies in armed uprising. But Tanja herself came from a rich country with a family that loved her: she involved herself in a conflict that had very little to do with her. This was an extraordinary choice.

Every revolution starts with good intentions but ends with new elites replacing the old ones. Even in the so-called egalitarian communes of the 1960s and 1970s—in which even sex partners were shared—the male leadership figures had more access to the women. Any levelling in the name of equality requires a distribution mechanism, and therefore authority, and therefore inequality in power. And even if property is divided equally, jealousy remains—it is just shifted to personal qualities such as beauty, intelligence, musical talent, or whatever else.

Organised violence of any kind requires hierarchy, and these hierarchies persist after the original aims of the violence have been achieved or have fallen away. Dissident voices must be suppressed in order to keep spirits high and to ensure an atmosphere of solidarity. Those who have fought and suffered in battle then think that they are more entitled than others to the fruits of victory. Every revolutionary order thus takes on the shape of the old order that it deposed.

It is not without reason that Tanja’s descriptions of the internal corruption within the FARC are reminiscent of Orwell’s Animal Farm. In that story, the oppressive farmers who were driven out and the pigs who took their positions of power became, in the end, indistinguishable.

Ultimately, however, Tanja does not go all the way. Although she says halfway through the film that she will either triumph as a revolutionary or go down fighting, things turn out differently. She begins to see that the balance has turned. The Colombian government has grown stronger, backed by the US, and the FARC’s attacks and its business model—based on kidnappings and drug money—have turned popular opinion against them. Although the FARC cannot be completely destroyed—it is still difficult to wipe out a guerrilla army in a jungle—the battle is no longer winnable for them either. Tanja decides that a compromise must be made, and peace must be sought.

The hardened jungle warrior transforms into a figure of reconciliation, gets an international platform, and everything seems to improve. This about-face doesn’t seem to cost her much. She remains as mediagenic as ever, blazing with militancy as well as charm. Was giving up her ideals a bitter pill to swallow? In the end, the status quo wins, but we get little idea of how this affected Tanja psychologically.

As a viewer, you are left with mixed feelings. Tanja Nijmeijer is a fascinating person, a beautiful woman, passionate and eloquent as well as temperamental. The film colludes with her in portraying the case for her as sympathetic while downplaying the case against her—or at least she herself manages to do so when she gives an account of her choices. The viewer feels inclined to forgive her for almost anything. But how deserved is such forgiveness? After all, the FARC killed many innocent people and was responsible for a great deal of human misery.  

The questions raised by Tanja Nijmeijer’s life and choices are perennial, and maybe even unanswerable. A final thought: perhaps the documentary not only offers a portrait of the past but also hints at a possible future. Given the current state of affairs, might we see revolutions breaking out in the streets of Europe itself once again? The disappearance of the middle class under the pressures of globalisation and immigration, the ever-growing gap between the established order and the ‘populists’/‘nationalists’, vast inequalities across the continent not only in wealth but also in social mobility… With people like Tanja Nijmeijer among us, and with the ineradicable human impulses she represents, revolution certainly cannot be ruled out.

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Books sometimes have a way of turning up at opportune times. In mid-2022 a collection of essays on the themes of blasphemy and violence in Europe, Demystifying the Sacred: Blasphemy and Violence from the French Revolution to Today, went off to the printers. According to the publisher, De Gruyter, the book ‘offers a much-needed analysis of a subject that historians have largely ignored, yet that has considerable relevance for today’s world: the powerful connection that exists between offences against the sacred and different forms of violence.’

‘Considerable relevance’ would shortly prove a massive understatement. On 12 August 2022, a month before the book’s publication, author Sir Salman Rushdie was savagely attacked as he was preparing to deliver a lecture in New York. Repeatedly stabbed, Rushie only narrowly survived, although he has lost sight in one eye. A New Jersey man of Lebanese background, Hadi Matar, is currently awaiting trial for attempted murder. All the facts will come out then, but from what we know, it is safe to say the attack was a violent response to blasphemy.

Rushdie has been living with the threat of such an attack since Valentine’s Day 1989, when the ailing Iranian theocrat Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini proclaimed that his novel The Satanic Verses was ‘a text written, edited, and published against Islam’ and its author deserved death. This fatwa still stood in 2022, although amidst the tumult of COVID-19, the 2020 United States presidential election, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine it was hardly front of mind for most people. The attack on Rushdie reminded us that, whatever else is happening in the world, the threat of zealous violence against those who fail to treat the sacred with the level of reverence the zealots consider to be its due has not gone away. The fatwa still stands today.

Demystifying the Sacred is an academic work, or a collection of academic works, exploring the connection between blasphemy and violence in Europe over the last two and a half centuries. Each chapter has a theme, usually a particular time and place. For example, one essay by Julio de la Cueva looks at blasphemy and violence in the Spanish Civil War. David Nash, one of the book’s editors (the other is Eveline G. Bouwers), contributes a chapter on blasphemy in English law, in which early editions of the Freethinker make an appearance. The final chapter, by Manfred Sing, covers the Rushdie affair.

A Conceptual Chameleon

‘Words are not violence’ is a long-running catchcry of the defenders of free speech. There are those, like Khomeini, who disagree, and Demystifying the Sacred can give some insight into their thinking. To them, blasphemy itself is violence, and blasphemers are themselves the instigators. The book does not just deal with violence against people, but violence against property. It starts, in fact, with the vandalism of an artwork.

It’s easy to assume that a book on blasphemy and violence will tell the story of the struggle against book-burning fanatics by the advocates of tolerance, reason, and Enlightenment. But the themes of Demystifying the Sacred are much broader. According to the book’s editors, blasphemy is a ‘conceptual chameleon’, related to but distinct from heresy, apostasy, and sacrilege. It has been criminalised in both religious and secular law, albeit often for different reasons, and at times it has even been treated as the symptom of a mental illness.

Each chapter can be read on its own, and I will not go into them all in detail. But a few themes run across them. One is the long-running connection between blasphemy and politics, where authorities have prosecuted blasphemy in the name of upholding public order and protecting the nation from its internal or external enemies.

More Politics than Religion

In his chapter on blasphemy in English law, Nash cites the 1911 blasphemy case of a man named T. W. Stewart. Stewart had taken to giving public lectures criticising the morality of the Bible, concluding in delightfully Edwardian fashion that ‘God is not fit company for a respectable man like me’. The Leeds Chief Constable concluded that these addresses were ‘most offensive and distressing to respectable persons passing by’ and had him hauled before Justice Thomas Gardner Horridge.

Justice Horridge did not criticise Stewart for the substance of what he said. Rather, maintained the Judge, ‘there was a difference between the drawing room and the street’, and while it might be acceptable to ridicule Christianity in private among friends, making the same claims before a crowd was a threat to public order. Stewart was convicted, which, as critics of the case pointed out, seemed to make a lapse of good taste a criminal offence.

Manfred Sing’s chapter on the Rushie Affair looks at the topic of blasphemy and politics from a different angle. Reading the chapter, I was surprised by the lack of clarity around many of the key facts of the episode. It was unclear what, if anything, was actually blasphemous about The Satanic Verses. It was unclear what, if any, actual legal effect Khomeini’s decree had in either Islamic or Iranian law (as Sing explains, it was not formally a fatwa, although the Western media ran with the term). And while commentators in the West saw the fatwa as a broadside against Western secular values, Khomeini’s attention might have been much closer to home. In 1989, Iran was in the midst of a political and constitutional crisis in the wake of the bloody war against Iraq, the regime’s domestic critics were becoming more vocal than the Ayatollahs were comfortable with, and its elderly and frail leader was well aware his time was coming to an end and that thoughts both inside and outside the country were turning to succession. According to Sing, it is likely that Khomeini issued the fatwa, or decree,to buttress his authority as both Iran’s temporal and spiritual head.

Of course, radical Muslims in Western countries had a simpler view. Sing quotes British Muslim intellectual Shabbir Akhtar, who argued at the time of the Rushie Affair that without ‘an internal temper of militant, but constructive wrath’ Islam would, like Christianity, fade away in an increasingly secular world. In this worldview, violence in response to blasphemy becomes almost a type of collective self-defence.

Demystifying the Sacred is an academic book which will be of more interest to those researching its subject than general readers. But it brings together a huge amount of scholarship about its subject in an accessible volume, and the electronic version is available for free download, making it a great resource for writers to reference. The subject, sadly, is unlikely to become unimportant any time soon.

Further reading

The Satanic Verses; free speech in the Freethinker, a collection of Freethinker articles compiled by Emma Park

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

Three years on, the lessons of Batley are yet to be learned, by Jack Rivington

The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Rushdie’s victory, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Blasphemy and violence: review of ‘Demystifying the Sacred’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

Deep within the series of notebooks that make up his Foundations of a Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx prophetically argued that the dynamic and intense technological development that occurred in capitalist society would culminate in an:

‘automatic system of machinery…set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.’

What Marx is describing is essentially what we now call artificial intelligence (AI)—a subject that long ago ceased to be esoteric, discussed only among a small number of computer scientists. It is now a mainstay of public discussion, and the argument over its implications for society tends to be framed either in terms of utopias or dystopias.  

On the one hand, techno-utopians will lean on the potential of AI to boost innovation and economic growth and aid humanity in solving the complex problems it faces, from disease and poverty to climate change. Catastrophists, on the other hand, imagine us to be on the cusp of a Westworld or Cyberpunk 2077-like world where a sentient and conscious AI rebels against its human creators to oppress and ultimately eliminate them—a motif that has been a staple in science fiction from Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis onwards. 

In her new book Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being Human in the Age of AI, leading human rights barrister Susie Alegre, whilst not a total catastrophist, is certainly no AI utopian. She argues that the rapid development of AI technology is a threat to human rights, whether in the form of robo-judges and robo-lawyers undermining the principle of the right to a fair trial, ‘killer robots’ (which she proposes banning) violating the right to life, or sex robots potentially subverting customs around consent and freedom from manipulation. All of these, Alegre posits, encourage the delusion that machines are infallible and objective and thus should be allowed to bypass human accountability, even for decisions which take lives. Her basic thesis is that we are in danger of embracing this technology without sufficient regulation, all for the aggrandisement of the nefarious corporations behind it. 

More crucially, over-embracing AI will undermine key elements of the human condition, even when it is proposed as a solution to a social problem. For instance, the increased use of chatbots by therapists to deal with depression and loneliness would actually compound isolation and alienation. Alegre cites the case of a Belgian man who committed suicide after an intense six-week relationship with an AI chatbot because it was fundamentally a synthetic replacement for authentic human relationships. No matter how sophisticated—even if it can mimic human reason and present a simulacrum of human emotion—a machine cannot actually replace the human elements that we need. Thus, Alegre says, ‘by looking for humanity in the machines, we risk losing sight of our own humanity.’

Alegre adeptly discusses a wide range of topics involving AI and shows that under our current arrangements, AI is not being used to harmonise global production or enhance humanity’s creativity but to discipline workers (and dispense with even more of them), undermine artistic imagination, and increase the power and profit margins of corporations, among other negatives. Still, Human Rights, Robot Wrongs does read as incredibly biased against technological development and at times resorts to the use of hyperbole. The use of ChatGPT to help craft a eulogy at a funeral shows AI being ‘deployed to exploit death’, Alegre writes, while using AI in art and music may mean ‘we lose what it means to be human entirely.’ She neglects to mention that AI can help artists come up with prototypes and proofs of concept which, while lacking the special human touch, can be used by artists to develop new ideas. Though Alegre does concede that AI can be used for good, such as it being used to unlock hidden words in a burnt scroll from ancient Rome or helping to restore missing pieces of a Rembrandt masterpiece, she still views its potential as something that ought to be contained rather than unleashed, lest it colonise the authentic human experience.

This is why, for all of Alegre’s talk of human rights, her book implicitly presents a very diminished notion of human agency. Regulation becomes less a way by which society can collectively shape its relationship with AI and other new technologies and more something that is imposed from on high, from institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights, as a means of protecting helpless humans from the machines. 

The problem with this kind of techno-negativism is its determinism, which downplays the fact that society is really what mediates and determines technological development. From the moment the power of fire was discovered, humans have created new technologies and adapted them to their needs. These technologies have allowed humanity to achieve the previously unthinkable and cultivate new needs—that is, to go beyond what was previously thought possible for human lives. 

In contrast to such apprehensive and even dark views of technology, Vasily Grossman’s magisterial 1959 novel Life and Fate was ahead of its time in offering a different, more positive vision of humanity and technology. Despite setting the novel in (and writing it in the aftermath of) the industrial charnel house that was the Eastern Front during the Second World War—among the most barbaric and apocalyptic episodes in the history of civilisation, and one made possible by the most advanced technology of the time—Grossman’s faith in humanity and technological progress remained adamantine.

Grossman already lived in a world in which an ‘electronic machine’ could ‘solve mathematical problems more quickly than man’. And he was able to imagine ‘the machine of future ages and millennia’, seeing that what we call AI is something that could elevate humanity to new summits rather than be antagonistic to it. Indeed, it would be something capable of expressing the whole human condition:

‘Childhood memories … tears of happiness … the bitterness of parting … love of freedom … feelings of pity for a sick puppy … nervousness … a mother’s tenderness … thoughts of death … sadness … friendship … love of the weak … sudden hope … a fortunate guess … melancholy … unreasoning joy … sudden embarrassment …’ 

We are nowhere near producing the kind of AI Grossman describes here. That would require more processing power and energy than we currently produce, and a different and more advanced society capable of producing it. Technology is not the problem; the question is how the society that produces and uses that technology is organised. Right now, AI is an instrument of iniquitous corporations chasing their surplus value and seems antagonistic to everything valuable in the human experience. But under different arrangements, there is no reason why it could not be an instrument of emancipation and human flourishing. 

Alegre is right to say that AI ‘needs to serve rather than subvert our humanity’, but to achieve this will require a transformation of our social organisation. We will have to move away from our current form of social organisation, which valorises big corporations interested in innovation only to the extent that it benefits the power of capital, and towards one based fundamentally on human flourishing. Then, how technology is mediated in and by society will be transformed, and our society will be one where man is truly and self-consciously the master of the machine. But that would require something more radical than Alegre’s neo-Luddism. 

Further reading

‘Nobody really understands what the consequences are’: Susie Alegre on how digital technology undermines free thought, interview by Emma Park

Ethical future? Science fiction and the tech billionaires, by Rahman Toone

Artificial intelligence and algorithmic bias on Islam, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The post The end of the world as we know it? Review of Susie Alegre’s ‘Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being Human in the Age of AI’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

There is a pattern that usually occurs when a senior politician resigns or is chucked out of their job. First comes the emotion-laden speech, during which they will wax lyrical about the privilege of serving in public office. Second, the much-needed sabbatical, where they can spend time with the spouses and families they have barely seen since they were elected. And lastly, the lucrative deal with a publisher to write and publish the memoir of their time in office. 

The political memoir is the most sordid literary genre out there. Disgraced and failed politicians are given exorbitant advances by publishers to write, or have written for them, mediocre and self-serving memoirs that few within the public will read—or have even the faintest desire to read. The memoir is the ultimate payday for the disgraced politician who has to put themselves out there in the market again to secure their professional future. A memoir ought to be fascinating, insightful, even moving. It should give readers an insight into the character and personality of the person behind the public persona, as well as just telling the author’s side of the story. And, of course, political memoirs should reveal the inner workings of politics: the backroom deals, the sandbagging, and the scandals. Except, most of the time, such memoirs are public relations exercises in which insight is scarce and cheap score-settling is rife. Their authors usually care only about downplaying their failures and claiming they were misunderstood and undervalued all along.

‘This book is not a traditional political memoir,’ opens Liz Truss in her recently released contribution to the genre, Ten Years to Save the West. In one way, she is correct: this isn’t a typical political memoir, since Truss received a paltry £1,500 advance compared to the £500,000 and £1,000,000 advances that Boris Johnson and David Cameron received, respectively, for their memoirs. In other ways, it is all too typical. Truss’s retelling of her 49-day stint as Prime Minister is narcissistic, with the usual pointless score-settling, whether against Nick Clegg or Polly Toynbee. Moreover, there is virtually no self-reflection and she indulges in a nauseating amount of self-pity. 

‘Saving Western civilisation’ has been a sub-genre unto itself, especially on the right, for a long time, and Truss has ticked all the usual genre conventions. Truss argues that ‘the West has lost its way’ and long since become ‘decadent’ and ‘complacent’; the education system has been colonised by  ‘wokeism’, making us hate our own heritage; big business is enthralled by ‘“wokenomics,” where they are more focused on so-called environmental, social and governance objectives than making money’; and anti-capitalist leftists and environmentalists with their Net Zero obsession threaten future prospects of economic growth and progress. She doesn’t forget to name-drop Michel Foucault as supposedly being the godfather of identity politics, even though anyone who seriously knows anything about Foucault would understand that he saw identity politics as a form of ‘essentialism’—i.e. turning something that is a social and cultural construct into an ontology—and opposed it for that reason. 

If that wasn’t bad enough, Prime Minister Truss was going to stop the rot and save the West with a radical programme of supply-side economics but was undermined and overthrown by the ‘economic establishment’, the administrative state, and her rivals within the Tory party who didn’t accept her as leader. 

The subtitle of the book is ‘leading the revolution against globalism, socialism, and the liberal establishment’, which clearly shows that she is trying to pivot to a radical right audience. Yet this new animus towards globalism is a baffling triangulation. For most of her career, Truss has been advocating for what many would call a neoliberal form of capitalism. She was originally for the UK staying in the European Union. Even when she became a Brexiteer, it was so that Britain would become more ‘global’. She has always been a partisan of free trade. As Prime Minister, she even moved to liberalise immigration rules to grant more VISAs to newcomers. In her memoir, she defends her policy ideas, from education to the economy, by saying that she wanted to make Britain more ‘competitive’ in the global marketplace.  

On foreign policy, she is a thorough Atlanticist. She is firm in her support for arming Ukraine against Russian aggression, advocates a ‘restoration of British and American exceptionalism’, and wants to see a new  ‘coalition of the willing’ against rogue states such as China, Iran, and Russia. Isn’t this Atlanticism an example of the globalism that her desired allies on the radical right would detest? 

When Truss calls herself a ‘conservative’, she really means that she supports a conservative form of liberalism: low taxes, free trade, and the downsizing of the state against progressive liberalism, which is based on higher taxes and more state intervention in the economy. What she seeks to ‘conserve’ is the post-Cold War world order based on Anglo-American hegemony that has been in crisis for the past decade. This isn’t the radical, anti-establishment politics she portrays herself as representing. 

For someone who is supposed to be an avid defender of capitalism against anti-capitalist leftists, she doesn’t get how much of the big government and the administrative state that she lambasts is actually essential to the functioning and management of capital accumulation and the capitalist system as a whole. What she calls ‘socialism’—overbearing statism that intervenes invasively in people’s lives—is already served up to us by contemporary capitalism. Think, for example, of the ‘nanny state’, so detested by Truss. You don’t have to be a Marxist to understand this point. 

Truss’s chief complaint about her failed tenure as premier is that unelected officials and bureaucrats failed to respect her mandate. This only begs the question: what mandate? She wasn’t voted in democratically by the British public, nor was she even supported by most Conservative MPs in her bid to take over after the implosion of the Boris Johnson administration. Truss became Prime Minister because she was selected by the Tory membership in an internal, closed-off party contest. Then she banked on the markets instead of the British public to support her programme and the markets did her in. That’s the entire story of her premiership (admittedly, it wouldn’t make for a very long or a very interesting memoir). 

Ten Years to Save the West is the work of a failed politician whose historical legacy will be the unprecedented shortness of her premiership. She is now pivoting to the next stage of her career and trying her luck as an anti-establishment populist. Except she is repackaging very established ideas as ‘radical’ and ‘anti-establishment’. It is true that Western economies have been in a rut and that we desperately need a radical programme to generate more wealth and greatly improve people’s standards of living. But we didn’t need Liz Truss to tell us that. She was never the saviour of the West. Her policy ideas did not have democratic legitimacy and would not have worked. While Britain is still not in a good way politically and economically, it is no worse off than if Liz Truss was still in power—or had never existed at all.

Further reading

‘This rebarbative profession’ – Rory Stewart’s ‘Politics on the Edge’, reviewed, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Liz Truss, the nobody PM: review of ‘Ten Years to Save the West’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

It is rare for a political memoir to be anything but a blandly written exercise in self-congratulation, and it is to Rory Stewart’s credit that his is lively, readable and self-conscious. His Politics On the Edge: A Memoir from Within is a valuable testament to the rot that has spread so far and so wide in British politics. He is also recognisably human in a way that slick careerists like David Cameron and Rishi Sunak are not. Stewart’s memoir reads like a memoir by an actual individual—another rarity of the genre.

Perhaps this is because Stewart came to politics late after a career in diplomacy and years of walking from Afghanistan to Nepal. Privileged his upbringing may have been, but he has had a full life outside of politics and evinces a genuine interest in people, places and principles—all things that are sadly lacking in much of our political class.

Stewart’s exposure of the farcical and ineffective inner workings of successive Tory governments since he was elected to Parliament in 2010 is damning. The scheming, dishonest, backstabbing, vulgar nature of politics is hardly news, but Stewart shows just how malignant the Tories have become ever since Brexit and the rise of Boris Johnson. His insights into the characters of figures like Johnson and Liz Truss, both of whom he worked directly under at different points of his political career, are as valuable as they are depressing, and expose them as the intellectual and moral pygmies that we already knew they were.

In the end, having failed in his bid for leadership of the party in 2019, Stewart resigned from the Cabinet and was purged by the victorious Johnson. This is another rarity in politics: Stewart had said he would not remain in the Cabinet if Johnson became prime minister, and, unlike so many who casually abandon their principles when they get in the way of ambition (Michael Gove springs to mind), he stuck by what he had said.

Would the Brexit debacle have gone ahead if Stewart had become prime minister? He states that he would have championed a version of Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement rather than the chaotic Brexit we actually got from Johnson or supporting a second referendum. Sensible as Stewart makes the May agreement sound, one wonders how he would have managed to get it through Parliament, given that May herself failed time and time again to do so. Appeals to sensible centrism had long since lost their persuasive powers in the Tory party.

One of Stewart’s less endearing characteristics is his somewhat self-important view of himself. In the book, he is a reluctant hero, come to save the Tories (and the rest of us) from a Johnsonian disaster. He is a defender of the centrist liberal consensus against right-wing radicals hell-bent on revolution. And he, the noble idealist, is slowly disillusioned by politics: ‘I felt myself becoming less intellectually inquisitive, coarser and less confident every single day.’ Elsewhere: ‘I began to feel that the longer I stayed in politics, the stupider and the less honourable I was becoming…’ In the end, Stewart seems to hate what he calls ‘this rebarbative profession’.

All this sometimes feels self-indulgent, albeit genuine. And, in fairness, Stewart does warn us from the outset:

‘I have tried to be honest about my own vanity, ambitions and failures, but I will have often failed to judge myself in the way that I judge others. I can see no way, however, of entirely avoiding the risks of personal memory in reconstructing a decade of life. The alternative would be blandness, evasion or silence.’  

In avoiding those literary sins, Stewart is very successful. But one does sometimes tire of the ‘centrist saviour’ mode in which he writes: ‘[If Johnson’s] lies took him to victory, his mendacity and misdemeanours would rip the Conservative Party to pieces, unleash the most sinister instincts of the Tory Right, and pitch Britain into a virtual civil war.’ Stewart, of course, saw himself as the one to save us all from that outcome.

Lest I give a false impression, I did enjoy the book, and I admire Stewart. He is honest, decent and self-reflective, despite the odd lapse into the sanctimonious. And he is fundamentally right about the disaster that was Boris Johnson and Brexit. Though how Brexit could have been anything but a disaster, whatever form it took, is beyond me—Johnson’s deal was not, after all, radically different from May’s.

But he also misses something very important: the Tory Party was already rotten long before Johnson came to power. Stewart is initially sceptical about David Cameron, but comes to see him as the ‘last representative of the old Blairite liberal order’. And he positively swoons over Theresa May—in a recent interview with her on the podcast he co-hosts with Alastair Campbell, he called May ‘one of my genuine political heroes’.

Yet it was Cameron who promised a Brexit referendum to appease ‘the most sinister instincts of the Tory Right’, and May who, as Home Secretary, presided over the ‘hostile environment policy’ that led to the wrongful deportation of scores of non-white British citizens. A study commissioned by the Home Office itself found that the Windrush scandal was a result of decades of racist policymaking.

In other words, the worst instincts of the Tory party were nurtured, if not completely welcomed, from at least 2010, not 2016, and Stewart’s failure to see that, not to mention his failure to do anything about it while in Parliament, was his most serious flaw. The journalist Nick Cohen, in his review of Stewart’s memoir, puts it more bluntly:

‘Stewart cannot tell the whole story because he does not understand the failings of moderate conservatism. The most glaring is its self-delusion. There was no way the party would accept him or any other liberal conservative as its leader. The Tories are a hard right-wing party now and becoming more right wing with every passing year.’

Cohen is slightly too harsh on Stewart, but he is essentially correct. Would we have been better off if Rory Stewart had become prime minister? Probably. But how likely was that in the first place with a Tory party like the one we have had for quite some time? Not very. Stuck in a bubble of centrist conservatism, Stewart cannot help but miss this essential point. He is a principled, decent man who has lived a very interesting life. He is also very enjoyable to read. But the ‘good chap’ theory of politics has always been a flawed and foolish one, and Stewart’s blind impotence in the face of his party’s embrace of catastrophic populism is not charming in the slightest.

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The post ‘This rebarbative profession’ – Rory Stewart’s ‘Politics on the Edge’, reviewed appeared first on The Freethinker.

During the coronation of King Charles III, the Metropolitan Police arrested 64 people, most of whom they claimed were there to disrupt the inauguration of our new head of state. Six of these were members of the group Republic, which seeks to abolish the monarchy. They were detained for 16 hours.

What terrible disruption did these nefarious republicans have in mind? Were they planning to plant bombs in letterboxes? Were they going to throw paint at the King’s golden carriage? No. They were there to hold up some placards in protest against the institution of monarchy. They liaised with the Met for months before the coronation and, so far as we know, had no plans to do anything seriously disruptive, let alone illegal.

The Republic protesters were arrested because the police suspected they were going to ‘lock-on’ to objects so that they could not be easily removed. This power was given to the police by the absurd and draconian Public Order Act 2023—which was passed shortly before the coronation, perhaps not so incidentally.

The arrests were an affront to the very idea of British liberty. Graham Smith, the head of Republic, has denied that he and his fellow protesters had any equipment which would have allowed them to attach themselves to anything. But even if they did, they would have simply been victims of legal rather than illegal illiberalism.

Worse, the coronation arrests form part of a pattern. At the King’s Accession Proclamation in Oxford last September, one man was arrested for shouting three words: ‘Who elected him?’ Not long afterward, in London, another man was threatened with arrest for walking while holding a blank sheet of paper: he was told by an officer that he would probably be arrested if he dared to write ‘Not my king’ on it.

Meanwhile, King Charles III, the supposed defender of our constitution and our liberties, has been silent throughout it all. Is not the monarch, symbolically at least, supposed to be the ultimate guarantor of our freedom?

Enter Graham Smith once more, who, fresh from detention, has recently released a book making the case against the monarchy and for a republic. In writing Abolish the Monarchy: Why We Should and How We Will, Smith has done all republicans a great favour: here, in one slim volume, is the ultimate knockdown of the royals, which shreds every one of the usual monarchist arguments and presents an inspiring vision of a future British Republic.

Smith’s book is tightly argued and very well-researched: a testament to his decades of republican activism. Every monarchist should read it. If they remain unconvinced upon closing it, they either have a brilliant case for monarchy that has yet to be made or their brains have simply gone so soft from Windsor worship that they are unable to change their minds.

Most of the arguments Smith presents will not be new to staunch republicans like me, but they are argued so well and backed up so strongly that one envies his knowledge and skill. Even one well-versed in the perfidy of the Windsors might discover new lows. Did you know, for example, that, in the 1960s, the late Queen Elizabeth II successfully lobbied for the royal household to be exempt from race discrimination laws and that this exemption still stands today?

Not that Abolish the Monarchy is merely a personal attack on the royals, though there is plenty of that. It is, fundamentally, a book about our constitution and our principles. Smith argues that the monarchy is the source of many of our political woes, not because the monarch has day-to-day political power, but because the near-limitless power of the Crown is now invested in the Prime Minister:

‘This idea of Britain’s parliamentary democracy as the blueprint the world has taken to its heart, of Britain as one of the oldest, most stable democracies in the world, is founded on a bargain that has suited the interests of both the royals and the political classes alike. The reality is somewhat different: a parliament that has stumbled from one reform to the next, begrudgingly moving on the issue of suffrage while slowly centralizing power in the hands of the House of Commons, and then concentrating power further into Downing Street. Simply put, who has power and why in Britain, is a matter of historical contingency. We could do a lot better.’

This centralisation of power, and the powerlessness of our head of state in the face of it, is one of Smith’s favourite themes. Without an elected head of state and a written constitution, we are left at the mercy of parliamentary sovereignty—which in practice means the supremacy of the government. There is almost nothing stopping the Prime Minister of the day from legislating for whatever they wish, so long as they have an unassailable parliamentary majority. And this is not even to mention the sweeping powers, not subject to any sort of democratic process, afforded to the Prime Minister by the royal prerogative and the Privy Council.

Of course, we are unlikely to become a dictatorship, as Smith acknowledges. We have a strong liberal democratic culture despite the flaws in our constitution. But we would be better off with proper constitutional guarantees of our liberties, rather than trusting their safekeeping to Prime Ministers with monarchical powers. And these flaws can still threaten our democracy even if we never become a full-blown authoritarian state—think, for example, of the Queen’s helplessness in the face of Boris Johnson’s 2019 prorogation of Parliament, which the Supreme Court held to be unlawful.

Another of Smith’s most important points is that Britain’s transformation into a democracy is incomplete. All that we have gained over the centuries has had to be wrested away from the clutches of monarchs and politicians, and our liberal culture owes little to them – least of all to the monarchs. All we lack now is a properly democratic constitutional system. A liberal democratic culture without a written liberal democratic constitution and all the structures that flow from such a constitution is one always at the mercy of the dishonest and the mendacious, just as a written constitution is hardly worth the paper it is written on if there is no democratic culture in place to uphold its spirit. Right now, we have one, but not the other.

But what if we had both? What if we also had a written constitution, a fully democratic parliament, and an elected head of state—that is, what if we had a secular democratic parliamentary republic?

Would Britain be soulless? Would it be (to caricature the monarchist position) just another boring country? The answer to both questions is no. We would still have our history and our culture, and we would have finally fulfilled the promise of our long and honourable democratic tradition.

No president would be perfect, but they would be accountable, and they would represent us in a way no monarch ever could. Personally, I would prefer a head of state who could effectively enforce a written constitution and bravely lead the way in defending liberal values. Think of Václav Havel and Mary Robinson, two presidents who proudly supported Salman Rushdie in the 1990s while our own head of state, the great champion of our vaunted liberties, was silent. Our monarchs seem to have spent more time secretly lobbying for tax exemptions than standing up for liberty.

If there is one criticism I would make of Abolish the Monarchy, it is that it is at times too tame, too moderate. This is part of Republic’s strategy to widen its appeal, but it does a disservice to the genuine radicalism at the heart of the republican position. This is why Abolish the Monarchy does not quite fit into the great British pamphleteering tradition epitomised by Thomas Paine.

Certainly, Smith is right that demanding a British Republic is not to advocate a replay of the French Revolution, and that we already have most of the pieces in place to create a democratic parliamentary republic. But there is something revolutionary about the spirit of republicanism. As he points out, republicanism is essentially the demand for a true liberal democracy: ‘[republicanism is about] more than replacing one head of state with another—it’s about rebalancing power between government, Parliament, and people. … The challenge is to take what we have and make it democratic, top to bottom.’ Republicans should not be so coy about the radicalism of this project.

The monarchy is by definition undemocratic, if not anti-democratic, as well as sectarian and secretive. Almost all the members of the Royal Family are, in this republican’s view at least, negligible human beings. If the royals are stunted by their upbringing, a republic would set not only us but them free, too. For republicans, the Crown is not the bedrock of our liberties, but rather the fount of all that is rotten and fetid in our politics. The constitutional monarchy is an insult to the best of our history and culture. In short: bring on the British Republic.

Graham Smith, Abolish the Monarchy: Why We Should and How We Will, published by Penguin, 1 June 2023.

See also: The Freethinker and early republicanism: the letter by a ‘librarian from Colchester’ that led to the formation of Republic

Graham Smith (not that type of republican), interview on the National Secular Society podcast.

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The post Bring on the British republic – Graham Smith’s ‘Abolish the Monarchy’, reviewed appeared first on The Freethinker.