The below is a
Bread and Roses TV interview broadcast via New
Channel TV on 20 May 2014:
Maryam Namazie: What
is secularism and what is the value of secularism for
both believers and non-believers?
AC Grayling: Firstly
let me say it's a great pleasure to be with you as I'm a
big admirer of what you do. Secularism has to be
distinguished from atheism and from other isms, like for
example, humanism, which are naturally associated with
it.
Most people who are atheists are probably likely to be
secularists, but there are religious secularists as
well, because secularism is a view about the place of
religion - the religious voice, the religious
organisations - in the public square, as this impacts
for example, public policy matters. And the idea behind
secularism is that the public square of society should
be neutral with respect to all the different belief
systems or to no belief systems. That what people
believe in their private lives and in their religious
commitments is not relevant to the public debate other
than as a special interest point of view.
I think it is a very important point that religious
organisations and movements should recognise themselves
as interest groups, lobby groups: they have a point of
view, of course they want to put their point of view in
public debate, but they should take their turn in the
queue with everybody else - other NGOs, political
parties, pressure groups, lobby groups - whereas of
course for historical reasons, in many societies,
religion has a massively inflated presence in the public
square. It is given charitable status, it is given a
seat at the top table, and is heard first by people in
positions of temporal power and that, I think, is where
things have gone so wrong in our world.
Maryam Namazie: On
the issues of neutrality, some might say that the very
fact that a secularist state demands that religion stays
out of the public space, means that it is not really
neutral, because it's giving a sort of negative
viewpoint on religion. That it's not a good thing to be
in the public space.
AC Grayling: It certainly is a view which has been of
course developed from the enlightenment thinking, about
how individuals living together in a society can best
flourish. So in that sense it is a positive view about
allowing all sorts of different viewpoints, all sorts of
different beliefs, and no beliefs, to coexist peacefully
side by side. Not privileging any one of them, and not
therefore coercing others, either to believe or not
believe. So in that sense it is a positive view. But the
heart of it, the essence of it is neutrality with
respect to these different viewpoints. That is, you
allow people to have a belief and to practice that
belief, providing it does not impact negatively on other
people. But also, and very, very importantly, it allows
people who have no religious commitment - who are
atheists, who are agnostics, who don't belong to a
church or a religious movement - to live without the
coercion or pressure, or a social 'bad odour', that used
to be the case, and in some societies remains the case.
Maryam Namazie: You
mention the fact that there can be believers who are
secularists but can religion, can Islam, be compatible
with secularism?
AC Grayling: Well
this is a very interesting question about Islam because
it would seem to be in the very nature of Islam that a
secular society is impossible because Islam pervades
every aspect of life. It is not just a religion; it is a
social end and is in many ways a political philosophy as
well. Of course nowadays people use the term Islamism to
mean political Islam. But Islam is so all embracing. It
permeates the lives and thoughts of people from the very
earliest memories of their lives, all the way up through
their education, and the presence of the religion’s
demand on, or offer to, people is there every few hours
when the muezzin cries from the mosque. So it's very
hard even to imagine a translation of the English word
'secularism' into Farsi or Arabic, which doesn't have a
negative connotation.
The origin of secularism in Christian countries is a
very interesting one. It was actually the church that
first asked for separation of church and state, of
belief from temporal matters, because they didn't want
the state interfering in its business. Of course, it
wanted to continue to interfere in the states business,
so it was only a one-way change of relationship. But the
idea of secularism started with the religious. And took
many centuries actually before it was adopted by the
genuinely secular wing of society, who said yes, we
would like to be able to do science, education, discuss
public policy matters, talk about the diversity and
plurality in society and how we address it and satisfy
all the competing needs in society, without having the
distorting effect of a single religious outlook and that
really is something that perhaps from the eighteenth
century has been operative in western societies.
Maryam Namazie: One
of the things that we sometimes hear is that a
theocracy, or an Islamic state, is just, it's fair, and
it's needed for a moral society. The Islamic regime of
Iran or Islamists will often say that a secular society
is an immoral one.
AC Grayling: Well it's a very tendentious thing to say;
I mean, it's a party political view on the part of
people who want, in a theocratic society, everybody to
toe the line. It's sort of demonstrably a false view
this, because a claim that there is a one size fits all
answer to how people should live, what they should
believe, how they should think, how they should behave.
This completely ignores the great diversity and
difference, the variety that there is in human nature,
and human interests and needs.
People sometimes talk about what's called the golden
rule in some cultures: do to others as you would have
them do to you. But that makes you the standard for
every one of the 7 billion people on the planet, which
is an absurd view to take. But if you really are going
to be a good neighbour to your fellows in society, you
should be thoughtful about the differences in their
individuality. And recognise that a society is a plural
domain. In fact the very concept of pluralism is, I
think, an uncomfortable one for Muslim thinkers because
the homogeneity of society, the fact that everybody
believes together, that it's just one big group with a
shared outlook, is of the very essence of what an
Islamic society should be like.
Maryam Namazie: Some
will say that secularism calls for religion being a
private matter and Islam isn't a private matter. It's a
public matter. Secularism, they would say, violates the
right to religion.
AC Grayling: Well,
the key thing is that Islam regards itself as a public
religion. Interestingly this keeps alive something that
pre-existed the rise both of Christianity and of Islam,
because religion in the classical world was not a
private matter; it was a public matter. What Islam has
done is to combine the idea of the private aspect of it,
your personal responsibility to Allah, but at the same
time regard it as something which completely unifies and
homogenises society; makes everyone march in the same
direction and at the same pace. So, it's an interesting
hybrid of the most ancient forms of religion, and the
new young religious outlook, which is represented by the
Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition.
My response is to say that the demand that the beliefs
and practices of the religion are a public matter, that
it’s a public duty of each individual member of a
society to be observant of the religion, to follow its
code, its practices - even what you eat and what you
wear, and women covering their hair - that this is a
demand which very fundamentally violates the individual
rights of people to self determination, to liberty of
conscience, to choices about how they are going live and
what they are going to believe. And it closes down so
many human opportunities, so many human possibilities,
that if everybody has to think just one way, believe and
practice just one way, it’s going to shut out an
enormous range of possibilities on the horizon of human
life.
Maryam Namazie: So
you wouldn't agree with the idea that secularism is a
western concept?
AC Grayling:
Secularism is not a western concept actually, because,
you look at India, there are very ancient and deep
atheist traditions of thought, which imply therefore
that society should be a non-religious domain. If you
look at China, now here's a tremendous generalisation
about one sixth of humanity, but the Chinese can be very
superstitious people, but they are not a religious
people. They've never had a God, a deity who issues
commands and so on. They talk about the concept of 'Tian'
- of heaven and the way of heaven - but that's a bit
like the stoic philosophers of ancient times who talked
about the logos, the principal of things. So very large
numbers of human beings have never had an idea that
there is a god who is like an emperor or a king in the
sky, who issues orders and everybody's got to obey. And
as a result, of course, by default, the view about the
nature of society is a secularist view - not given that
name, maybe, but in functional terms, that's what it
implies. So it isn't an exclusively western idea but as
we think and discuss about secularism now, it is of
course an idea which is being given a great deal of
impetus by the European enlightenment of the eighteenth
century. So in that sense the idea was revived and was
given more 'juice' if you like, by the debates in the
enlightenment. And it has therefore been a very potent
idea in the development of western societies. The growth
of science, the technological developments, the building
of institutions of law and democracy have all been
associated with the secularist impulse that we get from
the early modern period.
Maryam Namazie:
Would you agree with those (I would think you wouldn’t)
who say that as a result of the religious "revival"
(they call it) that we're living in a post-secular age,
that secularism is no longer relevant?
AC Grayling: No, I don't think that, because I have a
very different analysis about what is happening in the
world with respect to religion. I think that in the last
decade, or couple of decades anywhere in the western
world, the pressure on religion and religious
organisations that comes from the decline of religious
observance, because there is a steep and increasing
decline of religious commitment in the west. And this
makes the people who have a zealous religious commitment
anxious. So they raise the volume. They raise the
activism. And it makes it look as though there's more
religion, but actually there's just more noise from an
increasingly smaller group of people. It's a bit like if
you corner an animal in a room, it will make a big
noise, where it would have been more peaceful before. So
actually the appearance of religious revivalism is a
symptom of religious decline. And the empirical data
supports this analysis, because you look - even at the
United States of America, which is thought to be a very
religious country because of its Protestant Calvinistic
origins in the seventeenth century, in fact, the Pew
Centre polling data over the last 30 years has shown an
increasingly steep decline in religious commitment. They
have a - on their polling data - they have a box, which
says 'none', so the people who tick this are known as "nones".
You know, a bit like the nuns in church (that's quite
funny). And the increase especially among the under 35s
is very significant. And organisations in America, the
American Atheist Association (the AAA), the American
Humanist Association, the Secular Society in America,
the Skeptic Society, they are all of them growing very
fast and becoming much more vocal.
Maryam Namazie:
You're seeing that in the Middle East and North Africa
as well - the rise of secularist and modern movements.
AC Grayling: Well
this is a remarkable and a very welcome thing because of
course and a point I'd like to expand on in a moment is
that freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, freedom
of enquiry, these are absolutely fundamental human
freedoms which are so important for the health of
society and the health of humanity’s future that the
liberation of the human mind from ancient superstitions
and ancient religions, the liberation of children from
indoctrination into religious views, which are either
very difficult to get out of or which imprison them for
the rest of their lives (in a certain view), these are
crucial matters. This is why in this age of ours, where
everybody's able to talk to everybody through a means of
electronic media, this aspect of the conversation about
our future, the future of humanity, is key. It seems to
me that we're in a little bottleneck period now. And a
last major player in this is Islam, and in particular,
Islamism - that aspect of Islam which is perhaps
nervous, frightened, feels threatened by the
globalisation of western styles of secularism and you
can imagine and you can even indeed sympathise with a
very sincere Muslim father who's worried about what his
daughters will do, and you can see the anxiety. But
maybe it’s his sons who are going to take some action,
kick back at a way of living and looking at the world
which they find inimical to them and which they find
very threatening. So this makes us enter a little
bottleneck - a dangerous period - where the people that
have these deep commitments and who have become very
angry, and anger sometimes turns into violence, and they
do terrible things - they commit murder because they are
afraid that other people do not share their beliefs.
That's the passage of time we are going through. And we
see societies, as in Iran for example, struggling. From
outside Iran, when people look at what is happening
there, this is an educated, mature society; many people
there who would love to have the freedom to develop and
to flourish, who are attracted by these ideas, these
ideas are not western ideas, these are human ideas, they
are ideas about human flourishing. And yet there's a
regime and there's a powerful, influential group of
people in the society who want to stop that. For people
from outside, it has the feeling of the sixteenth and
seventeenth century in Europe, when something very
similar happened. And you do get people saying, and
perhaps it's not a helpful thing to say, but you do get
people drawing parallels. I'm talking about a stage of
historical development. Personally I hope that's not
true, because if it were true, then it's going to take
another 300 years, and however long you and I live,
Maryam, we're not going to get there.
Maryam Namazie: It's
not going to take that long, I hope and I'm sure.
AC Grayling: I
really, really hope not.
Maryam Namazie:
You've argued that secularism is a human right. Why?
AC Grayling: It is,
without any question, a human right for people to be
free of coercion, indoctrination, proselytization, of
being obliged to act, dress, live and believe in ways
that other people want to impose upon them.
Sometimes people say "oh well, so you're a secularist,
you want to impose secularism on other people". And this
is a very false argument; the secularist argument is
“think what you like and believe what you like, but you
have a duty to others not to harm them by your choices."
That's a very simple statement, but it's a very deep
statement and a very important point. In fact it was
made by John Stuart Mill back in the nineteenth century
in his wonderful essay “On Liberty”, where he talked not
only about the danger of political totalitarianism, but
of social and attitudinal totalitarianism, and the kind
of imposition on people’s lives that come from belief
systems where very zealous, very eager people want to
force you to live in the way that they choose. It's a
key fact about moralists, and religious zealots, that
they say: “I think this, therefore you must do that”.
And that of course, you can see from just that example,
it's a human right to be free from the pointed finger,
and other people saying "you've got to live according to
my beliefs and my choices". So, there should be, in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights more emphasis
placed on the thing that says liberty of belief and
religious practice and conscience or none. And the
“none” part should be taken very seriously. Because even
in a society like the English society (I don't mean the
UK society) no school child is free of religious
instruction, of religious practice, of prayers or hymns,
or whatever it might be in schools. There are very few
schools there where this is neutral. And you have to as
a parent (as I've done with my own children) get an
opt-out from these religious observances. It is so much
like a great big oil tanker in the ocean to try and turn
around people’s views. Liberate the mind; free people.
Let them choose for themselves. In a matter as
important, or as unimportant as religion, let the people
decide for themselves when they have the facts. Don't
indoctrinate children! That seems to me to be a form of
abuse, in fact, I will use that word, and it's a strong
word, but it does seem to me to be a form of abuse.
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