Ziauddin Sardar

Abstract

All that was ‘normal’ has now evaporated; we have entered postnormal times, the in between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have not yet emerged, and nothing really makes sense. To have any notion of a viable future, we must grasp the significance of this period of transition which is characterized by three c’s: complexity, chaos and contradictions. These forces propel and sustain postnormal times leading to uncertainty and different types of ignorance that make decision-making problematic and increase risks to individuals, society and the planet. Postnormal times demands, this paper argues, that we abandon the ideas of ‘control and management’, and rethink the cherished notions of progress, modernization and efficiency. The way forward must be based on virtues of humility, modesty and accountability, the indispensible requirement of living with uncertainty, complexity and ignorance. We will have to imagine ourselves out of postnormal times and into a new age of normalcy—with an ethical compass and a broad spectrum of imaginations from the rich diversity of human cultures.

It never rains but it pours, says the proverb. And it has been pouring a lot in recent times. If the multiple threats from climate change were not enough to give us sleepless nights, we are now in the grip of one of the worst recessions in history. Overnight, banks collapsed like houses of cards, giant insurance companies buckled, household names began to disappear from the high street. Our government had to pump in an astounding £1.3 trillion in guarantees and quantitatively ease our financial system just to keep it ticking. Before we had time to draw breath, a pandemic of swine flu threatened to engulf the globe. Lurking behind all this is the energy crisis, dwindling natural resources—such as oil (possibly) and fish (definitely), the continued threat of nuclear proliferation, and the ever present menace of terrorism. Not to mention the pensions crisis, the crisis of gang violence and knife killings on our streets, and the crisis facing the ‘Mother of all Parliaments’. We hate the bankers, distrust our politicians and worry constantly about the security of our jobs, safety of our children and the blight of our communities. Nothing is definite, truly guaranteed, or totally safe.

Welcome to postnormal times. It’s a time when little out there can be trusted or gives us confidence. The espiritu del tiempo, the spirit of our age, is characterised by uncertainty, rapid change, realignment of power, upheaval and chaotic behaviour. We live in an in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have yet to be born, and very few things seem to make sense. Ours is a transitional age, a time without the confidence that we can return to any past we have known and with no confidence in any path to a desirable, attainable or sustainable future. It is a time when all choices seem perilous, likely to lead to ruin, if not entirely over the edge of the abyss. In our time it is possible to dream all dreams of visionary futures but almost impossible to believe we have the capability or commitment to make any of them a reality. We live in a state of flux beset by indecision: what is for the best, which is worse? We are disempowered by the risks, cowed into timidity by fear of the choices we might be inclined or persuaded to contemplate.

In the normal scheme of things, we know where we stand. The winters are cold and the summers are hot, the seasons flow–spring forward, fall back like clockwork–in a natural cycle. The economy grows steadily, at rates varying from sluggishly to dramatic, but guaranteeing a reliable general increase in prosperity and security. Markets work, warts and all, they regulate prices and we have confidence and trust in our financial institutions. Politicians, never the most trustworthy of breeds, acknowledge, and by and large adhere to, accepted principles of behaviour as they legislate effectively to order the affairs of society. When we are faced with a new disease or danger, science and medicine come galloping to our rescue. A global balance of power, with all its imperfections, maintains a semblance of peaceable law and order; tin pot dictators, fearing the consequences of their actions, know where to draw the line. We live in coherent and cohesive communities, safe in the knowledge that the futures of our children are secure.

In normal times, when things go wrong, as they so often have, we know what to do. We identify and isolate the problem and apply our physical and intellectual resources to come up with a viable answer. The solid foundations and proven theories of our disciplines, from economics and political science to biological and natural sciences, guide us towards a potential solution. The weight and sheer power of intellectual, academic and political orthodoxy ensures that we successfully ride the tiger of change.

Little of this now holds true. Much of what we have taken as normal, conventional and orthodox just does not work anymore. Indeed, normality itself is revealed to be the root of all our ills. Take the current economic crisis, for example. This provides ample evidence that the old business model on which we have relied for centuries is bust. Not only has free market capitalism become dangerously obsolete but the branch of economics, which provided theoretical justification for this edifice is also intellectually bankrupt [1]. Economic man, the intellectual construct underpinning the edifice, a species once vaunted for his rationality, is extinct [2]. Markets propelled only by the profit motive have become ungovernable, predicated only on personal greed and unconscionable accumulation of unimaginable private wealth concentrated in few hands. Competition and the free flow of capital around the liberalised, deregulated globe is a revolving tale of beggar my neighbor to produce ever cheaper consumer goods that leave more and more ‘rust belt’ communities as de-industrialised wastelands while the realignment of global trade imbalances increases volatility and mutual distrust within and between nations [3].

The world itself is now a far more uncertain place than it was during the second half of the twentieth century. It is not just that our own political system, based on self-regulation and comradely rules of gentlemen’s clubs, is irreparably broken; the more politicians legislate, reform and amend the less significant and effective laws seem in achieving or delivering appreciable social benefit the more unintended and undesired consequences appear. The global geopolitical landscape is also changing rapidly. There is hardly a country where politicians, of whatever persuasion, are either trusted or respected. Even the regular cycles of our weather cannot be trusted anymore—thanks to global warming, with its attendant rises in temperatures and sea levels, changing ocean composition and transformed ecosystems.

‘The first decade of the 21st century has been a series of wake up calls’, says an advertisement for IBM. ‘These are system crises—from security, to climate, to food and water, to energy, to financial markets and more’ [4]. What is unique about these crises is that they have occurred simultaneously: ‘we have never seen any era when we have been hit by all these multiple crisis at the one time’, says UN General Secretary, Ban Ki-moon [5]. It is not just that things are going wrong; they are going wrong spectacularly, on a global scale, and in multiple and concurrent ways. We thus find ourselves in a situation that is far from normal; and have entered the domain of the postnormal.

The concept of ‘postnormal’ was first introduced by Ravetz, the celebrated British philosopher of science, and the Argentinean mathematician Funtowicz [6].Working on the mathematics of risk, they noticed that the old image of science, where empirical data led to true conclusions and scientific reasoning led to correct policies, was no longer plausible [6].

There was a great deal of uncertainty in scientific work, which together with changes to funding, commercialisation, social concerns about developments in science and the complex issues of safety, all meant that science was no longer functioning in the ‘normal’ way. ‘Whenever there is a policy issue involving science’, wrote Ravetz and Funtowicz, ‘we discover that facts are uncertain, complexity is the norm, values are in dispute, stakes are high, decisions are urgent and there is a real danger of man-made risks running out of control’ [7]. They described the emerging developments as ‘postnormal science’, which has now become an established field of inquiry.

Much of what Ravetz and Funtowicz said about science in the 1990s is now equally true about other disciplines—indeed, society as a whole. Everything from economics to international relations, markets to products in local shops, politics to dissent has become postnormal. There are very good reasons for this state of affairs. All of them are related to three c’s: complexity, chaos and contradictions—the forces that shape and propel postnormal times. It is important for us to understand these forces to negotiate a viable way forward.

1. Complexity

Let us take the first of the three ‘c’s’. Almost everything we have to deal with nowadays is complex. There is nothing simple about fixing the economy, or securing our energy supplies or even doing something about the floods that seem to plague Britain every other year. One reason for this is that we are small, and some would argue not that significant part, of a globalised world. To ‘fix’ things here in Britain we also need to do something about them in other countries as well as on the global level. For example, to guarantee our energy supplies we need to pay attention to both local and international issues. The local would mean providing energy at reasonable cost to consumers and avoiding involuntary interruptions of supply by accidents or malicious disruption. International issues would include ensuring that our foreign policy is not too antagonistic towards those on whom we rely for our energy supplies, as well as avoiding energy dependence on a small subset of nations. But this is only half the equation. We also need to take action on carbon emissions, promote energy efficiency, accelerate deployment of low carbon technologies, and ensure that energy markets remain reasonably competitive and are not disruptively manipulated by speculators. Bringing all these different elements of our energy security into a coherent policy is far from easy. Complexity is a natural by-product of the fact that most of our problems have a global scale.

Moreover, globalisation enhances complexity not simply by making us interdependent but also by increasing our interconnections. In a globalised world, everything is connected to everything else. Nothing exists or happens in isolation. Take, for example, the recent emergence of swine flu. It is not simply a health and medical problem. It is also a problem of intensive farming. It is probably not a coincidence that the epicentre of the outbreak, the Mexican town of La Gloria, is only five miles from a giant industrial pig complex, owned by the world’s largest pig producer, Smithfield Foods. But, of course, Smithfield Foods would not be mass producing cheap factory-farmed meat if consumers were not happily gobbling it up. So swine flu is also a problem one of the consequences of what, and how, we eat at the price and availability consumers demand—ever cheaper, more abundant and available all year round irrespective of seasonality. Moreover, it would have remained localised if holiday makers and travelling businessmen were not jet setting around the globe. In fact, a localized endemic became a pandemic thanks to the speed with which we travel to different parts of the globe. Once the pandemic spread, it also became a problem of health education. Hence the advertisements on television telling us to cover our mouths when we sneeze and the sudden emergence of antiseptic handwashing gel in public places.

If this was not enough, there is yet another trend that makes things even more complex. In postnormal times, things change rapidly and often happen simultaneously. Notice how, for example, the global economy was transformed during the single weekend of 13–14 September 2008. The US government, struggling with the weakness and instability across its financial sector, found the collective task was monumental. The complex interconnections between banks and financial institutions did not admit of limited and piecemeal solutions. After saving one bank, denying a rescue to Lehman Brothers, precipitated a ripple effect of general collapse. American banks were failing at the same time and for the same reasons as banks in Britain and elsewhere. Once one bank actually fell, closing its doors for business, the collapse of the financial sector was both global and simultaneous.

Things are also happening simultaneously in the geopolitical landscape. American power is shrinking as China takes on the mantle of a new superpower, as India flexes its economic muscle, as Brazil emerges, as Russia regains its confidence, as Japan’s influence declines, as Europe consolidates its experiment in shared sovereignty, as non-state actors (from multinationals to Al-Qaeda) grow in power and influence, as relative wealth and power moves from West to East [8].When so many changes occur at once and multiple developments and patterns come together, we find the emerging complexity hard to comprehend; and almost impossible to cope with.

The nature of the problem we face is ably spelled out by Australian philosopher Paul Cilliers. ‘To fully understand a complex system’, he writes, ‘we need to understand it in all its complexity. Furthermore, because complex systems are open systems, we need to understand the system’s complete environment before we can understand the system, and, of course, the environment is complex in itself. There is no human way of doing this. The knowledge we have of complex systems is based on the models we make of these systems, but in order to function as models–and not merely as repetition of the system–they have to reduce the complexity of the system. This means that some aspects of the system are always left out of consideration. The problem is compounded by the fact that that which is left out, interacts with the rest of the system in a non-linear way and we can therefore not predict what the effects of our reduction of the complexity will be, especially not as the system and its environment develops and transforms in time’ [9].

So complexity, which has as much impact on physics and biology as on ecology, economics, security and international relations, teaches us an important lesson: the notions of control and certainty are becoming obsolete. There is no single model of behaviour, mode of thought, or method that can provide an answer to all our interconnected, complex ills. The ‘free market’ is as much a mirage as the suggestion that science or liberal secularism will rescue us from the current impasse. The world has long been a complex place, always interconnected. The era of globalisation we are living through, however, differs in scale, depth of interconnections and immediacy of consequences and reactions. In our time we no longer have the luxury of time to reflect, to observe and respond to undesired outcomes, to debate and manage with some semblance of order. The simple recognition of the fact that all our problems are intrinsically complex teaches us the old-fashioned and much neglected value: humility.

2. Chaos

Complexity is a precursor to, and a necessary condition for the second of our three ‘c’s: chaos. Postnormal times exist in an epoch of chaos, where acceleration is the norm, predictability is rare, and small changes can lead to big consequences [10]. Chaotic behaviour is not an uncommon phenomenon; it has always existed in our weather patterns. But it is rather unusual to see civilisations, whole societies or indeed the entire inhabitants of the globe, behaving according to the dictates of chaos theory.

The main reason is the changed nature, scope and functioning of networks. We are more connected and interconnected than any other time in history. The entire globe is a network criss-crossed by networks of individuals, groups, communities, institutions constantly connected to each other by e-mails, e-lists, internet newsgroups, mobile phones, text, video conferencing, blogs, twitter, facebook, myspace, interactive digital television and 24-h news broadcasts. There is hardly aplace in the world where we can be alone. The mobile phone in your pocket tells those who want to know exactly where you are and enables you to communicate with any one at any time (almost) anywhere. More and more, communication is becoming instant, all encompassing, and ever present. Indeed, it seems that nowadays we do not communicate to live; but live to communicate.

Of course, it is not just the individual who is constantly connected. All the major institutions in society are now networked. The global economy is totally digitised, so now it’s not the traders but computer programmes, designed to react instantaneously, which actually do the trading. Power grids, utilities, transport, and even the institutions of governance are all networked. There is nothing out there of any significance that is not connected to one network or another—which means that the notion of ‘national security’ takes on a whole new dimension [11].

Since everything is linked up and networked with everything else, a break down anywhere has a knock on effect, unsettling other parts of the network, even bringing down the whole network. Moreover, the potential for positive feedback, for things to multiply rapidly and dangerously in geometric progression, is enormous. This is where those small, insignificant, initial conditions come in: they can trigger major upheavals, even a small change can lead to collapse with accelerating speed. A computer virus, a strike, a single resignation, can set off a chain reaction that can bring a nation or the whole world to a grinding halt. Just think how many competing companies, regulatory bodies, health and safety institutions, government ministries and passenger groups make up the entire British railway network, all with different interests, competing plans, and differing remedies. A minor hiccup at one particular point of the network–leaves on a track, for example–has a knock on and sometimes multiplying effect on the whole network, not to mention the long-suffering commuters.

The most visible example of chaotic behaviour is provided by the stockmarkets. A network of computers links them all into a single, global market. Investments, capital transfers, share dealings happen in the blink of an eye by electronic signals. There is constant feedback from all parts of the global economic system. Small changes matter. Ups and downs trigger reactions. The computer programmes that trigger the trades respond to numbers, irrespective of cause.
Discretionary power is bled out of the system in favour of instant, inevitable reaction, even when this is entirely counterproductive. We do not always know which small change is significant, exactly what local conditions far away made it happen, or where it will lead. Market sentiment, influenced by the buy or sell computer generated orders, responds and can quickly multiply small changes into a serious economic crisis. From the perspective of chaos, the current economic meltdownwas an accident justwaiting to happen—and had been predicted bymany experts in various fields. J.K.Galbraith, the veteran economist who cut his teeth on the Great Depression and New Deal, had been warning for more than a decade before his death in 2006 that the economic bubble would inevitably burst [12]. Books charting historic economic bubbles, the tulip variety in the seventeenth century and South Sea of the eighteenth century, became fashionable coded warnings available in bookstores.

Chaotic behaviour in the social and cultural sphere is a bit more difficult to discern. We had an inkling of chaotic behaviour during the 2004 orange revolution in Ukraine, the 2005 cedar revolution in the Lebanon, and more recently in the attempted green revolution in Iran. When demonstrators start to behave as a network and create positive feedback through the use of the web and mobile phones, they swell their numbers rapidly and acquire a self-perpetuating momentum.

The most vivid example in Britain of how social networks can turn an ordinary situation into a chaotic one is in the petrol protests of September 2000. These protests started as a simple, unorganised demonstration. But every protesting trucker was talking through his mobile, or sending e-mail or text massages to every other trucker. Instant communication turned a series of protests into an interconnected network, with positive feedback. Thus, the same small group of truckers were able to move quickly and easily from one depot to the next and were able to stop lorries leaving depots. This is spontaneous selforganisation in action. Like the weather, the trucker’s protest looked the same from all perspectives—both the government and the public saw it as a collective, impulsive, disordered event, not to be taken too seriously. But as the protest took chaotic proportions, it nearly brought Britain to a halt.

Thanks to mobile phones, e-mails, blogs, tweets and 24-h news media, we are constantly in the know. We are thus primed to react instantly, equipped with the means to set off new patterns of chain reactions. The more communications technology expands to make communication easier, faster, instant and reflexive—the more we are likely to cause self-organised panics and live life at the edge of chaos. Self-organised panics, like self-organising popular revolutions, are increasingly potential phenomena that cannot be predicted. They are a perennial possibility on the horizon of anticipation to be factored into avolatile and destabilise social landscape. They engineer, influence and alter the processes and calculations of governance and decision-making, though whether they bring to the fore issues that are vital, marginal, purely sectional and self-interested or even trivial and therefore justify or produce substantive change is an entirely different matter.

Like complexity, chaos too has a fundamental lesson to teach us: individual and social responsibility and accountability are all paramount for our collective survival. The actions of any individual or group, from unscrupulous politicians to a neglectful social worker, can cause serious instability and upheaval. On the other hand, individualism, the notion that an individual can fulfil himself and do anything he or she wishes, is a recipe for catastrophe. The cult of individualism exists in the context of an environment of power and hierarchies, of complex interconnected networks and disproportion.

Individualism empowers the powerful, those most adept at utilising the levers of power and can deliver power to selfselecting groups. There is no necessity or inevitable rule that such individual empowerment will be inclusive, extensive and equitably distributed or dedicated to collective benefit. Notice that it took the actions of relatively small numbers of greedy bankers to bring down the economy of the whole world. An even smaller bunch of 9/11 terrorists triggered a chain reaction that led to the ascendance of neo-conservative ideology in the US and Europe, changed the course of Iraqi, Afghani and Pakistani history, redefined the notion of security, revealed the limits of American power, and galvanised mass protests and dissent throughout the world, not to mention the millions who have been killed, maimed or been made homeless. In postnormal times, the world can really be laid to waste by the actions of a few toxic individuals.

3. Contradictions

A complex, networked world, with countless competing interests and ideologies, designs and desires, behaving chaotically, can do little more than throw up contradictions—the third of our three ‘c’s. It is the natural product of numerous antagonistic social and cultural networks jostling for dominance. After all, as Newton pointed out, every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction. ‘Contradictions also point to the fact that everything, every policy, has a cost’, says Ravetz who celebrated his 80th birthday in June 2009. ‘No matter how we may perceive progress, how beneficial we may think it is, it always has detrimental side effects. There is no achievement of good without some production of evil’ [13]. And contradictions can come in various verities: they can be complimentary, where the opposed forces are kept in dynamic equilibrium; or destructive, where the struggle leads to collapse; or creative, where the contradiction is resolved by transformation.

In postnormal times, there are two contradictions that need our particular attention.
The first concerns change. It is now fashionable to argue that we are going through unprecedented change. Things have\always changed but they have not changed with the accelerating pace we are witnessing nowadays. Take, for example, information technology, which doubles its power, as measured in price, performance and bandwidth capacity, every year. In 25 years, it would have multiplied by a factor of a billion as we move from transistors to more powerful technologies such as nanotechnology or molecular computing. Similarly, our capacity to sequence genetic data has doubled every year. While it took 15 years to sequence HIV, the SARS virus was sequenced in a matter of 31 days. So it is not just that change is rapid but the actual rate of change is itself changing—exponential acceleration has now become the norm.

Yet, vast segments of the planet and swathes of our social life are quasi-static. The structure of British society, with its class privileges, and in-built bias towards Eton and Oxbridge, has not changed for centuries. Britain’s newly created Supreme Court is composed of law Lords only two of whom, representatives from Scotland and Northern Ireland, were not educated at Oxbridge colleges. Grinding poverty in Africa is as bad as colonial times—if not for many, worse. The distribution of wealth within nations is as skewed towards the elite as it has always been [14]. Indeed, the dynamic of disproportion is itself increasing. The period after World War II saw rising economic standards coupled with wider distribution of wealth producing more equitable societies, most particularly in the developed, industrialised nations. Since the 1980s not only has wealth distribution reverted to nineteenth century patterns it has continued an exponential progress beyond those norms.

The differential between the remuneration of the CEO of a company and the generality of the employees is now commonly greater by a factor of 3–400 times. More of the wealth of countries like Britain and the USA is concentrated in the hands of the top 1% than is owned by 90% of the rest of the population put together. In a world of superabundant food, around 850 million still go to bed hungry every night [15]. Although women tend to be the main producers of food in the developing world, more than 60 per cent of the world’s hungry are females. Wars and violent conflict are as present as ever. The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.

The second contradiction concerns knowledge. While our knowledge has increased, and is increasing, by leaps and bounds in almost all spheres, we also seem to be more ignorant than ever. Notice how limited is our knowledge of other cultures—Islam, for example; or the indigenous cultures of Latin America; or the super diversity of India or China. The increase in xenophobia across the world is not only alarming but an indication of deep ignorance. While we are bombarded with information on almost all and every subject, we have very limited capability to actually discern what is important and what is trivial.

Moreover, postnormal times have added extra dimensions to our ignorance. Many contemporary problems have an inbuilt uncertainty that can only be resolved sometime in the future. Take the swine flu virus. We do not know precisely how this virus will mutate in the near future. This is something we cannot know till the virus actually mutates—and it can mutate in a number of forms and a number of ways. The same can be said for food that has been genetically modified. We cannot be absolutely sure if such food is completely safe until it has gone through the food chain and become part of our daily diet.

These are things we can only discover 10, 20 years from now. The same can be said about nanotechnology and the many consumer products that use nano-materials from skin creams to disinfectants. Only through their sustained use over a period of time will we discover their true second and third order side effects. Until such time we have to live with the risks and our ignorance.

Given that we cannot isolate interconnected problems and solve them in neat packages, we find that whatever solutions we produce there are always those extra bits that are not solved and cannot be solved. Often we are not even aware of the unsolved bits of the problem until either it emerges in a different form or it is too late. The crisis in the car industry is a good example. Much of our efforts have been directed towards rescuing car manufactures such as GM, Vauxhall and LDV. It is a crucial part of the manufacturing sector, a vital part in our economy, and thousands of jobs depend on them. We know that exhaust fumes play a major part in global warming and cheap petrol is fast disappearing so we demand that car manufacturers switch production to electric cars or hybrid vehicles. But in attempting to solve the problems of car manufacturers, economy, employment, the environment and natural resources, we overlook a vital component of the interconnected problems: the car itself. After all how many cars can we physically put on the planet? What could replace the car as a viable mode of transport in the future? What would a world without cars look like? As Kingsley Dennis and John Urry show in their brilliant study, After the Car [16],we just do not know because this dimension of the problem is totally excluded from our view; to discover the alternatives we have to think the unthinkable, and ask questions that are overshadowed by our ignorance. On the whole, we remain ignorant of alternatives and the chance of gaining new knowledge is lost. Ignorance is not soluble by means of ordinary research; we therefore have no notion of its existence.

So we are faced with a triple whammy of ignorance—or ignorance-cubed: the ignorance of our ignorance, the in-built ignorance of the potential risks of recent developments, and the ignorance generated from information overload. Unlike ordinary ignorance, which is a void to be filled by research and knowledge, dealing with ignorance3 requires radically new ways of thinking.

Contradictions may be paradoxical but they perform a very useful function. They provide us with a perspective which prevents oversimplified analysis of problems or situations. We are forced to consider clashing trends, viewpoints, facts, hypothesis, and theories and realise that the world is not amenable to naive one-dimensional solutions. (Though this is by no means a foregone conclusion. The most succinct statement of the propositions of ignorance-cubed was produced by former American secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, who articulated the condition without ever altering the one-dimensional, remorseless course of the policy he first thought of [17].) Both complexity and contradictions suggest that any given problem has multiple dimensions; and that no particular partial view can encompass the whole. It follows that a given problem does not necessarily have a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer. Indeed, in postnormal times Aristotelian logic is part of the problem and not the answer. To get a better understanding of the problem we need to consider that the answers could include both (good and bad) as well as neither (good or bad). Such four-fold logic enables us to think in multiples and thus get a better grip on complex problems with contradictory tensions. And the best way of thinking in multiples is through dialogue and discussion. Most non-western philosophies are based on and adept at such ways of thinking—we could, if we would, gain a great deal from taking such traditions seriously. Even a very basic understanding of a problem requires a dialogue on its various dimensions, involving a whole range of perspectives and interests including those of experts, lay, adults as well as children, people of different social and cultural backgrounds, different ethical notions, and even consideration of the needs of nonhuman species. Contradictions may not be resolved through debate and discussion, but they can certainly be managed and negotiated through consensual dialogue.

4. Uncertainty

When contradictions, complexity and chaos combine with accelerating change the only definite outcome is uncertainty. In normal times, uncertainties are small and manageable. But in postnormal times, uncertainty takes centre stage [18]. Since everything is interconnected, complex and chaotic, and changing rapidly, nothing can actually be described with any certainty. Old-fashioned predictions, on which our economy and policy relies so much, have no value in situations of rapid, abrupt and unknown change. The Treasury’s growth forecast for the next 6 months will immediately be contradicted by the Bank of England; while a number of prestigious think tanks will produce different and contradictory forecasts from their studies. They are all wrong and right, both and neither. We need to grapple with the uncertainties inherent in these forecasts to make any sense of them. Uncertainty may be the only thing of which we can be sure, but it is not a comfortable, nor as yet a politically or socially acceptable, basis on which to debate real hard choices.

In any given policy issue, there are a host of uncertainties that we have to grapple with. Consider the case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), a disease that affected the brains of cows, which arose in the UK in the 1980s and is now known to have been caused by intensive agriculture and unnatural feeding practices (grass-eating cattle being fed with the remains of sheep and cows). As the epidemic spread, scientific advisers had to juggle the uncertainties of its ultimate economic cost, the price for control by mass slaughtering, and the unlikely but still conceivable possibility of its spreading to humans. Even after cats had caught the disease in 1990, there was still uncertainty about its danger to humans. By 1996, when a human form of the disease was confirmed, there was a brief general panic, and the nation settled down to wait and see whether there would be isolated tragedies or a mass horror. By February 2009, 164 people had died in Britain by contracting the human form of BSE known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Uncertainties become severe in almost any planning activity. For example, after the 2008 floods in Britain, planners had to assess the future possibility of floods in the same areas, the prospects of conflicts between areas (preventing flooding upstream can increase the threat downstream), threats to property values and businesses, and face the problems of insurance and liability for past and future damage. Each component of the problem had in-built uncertainties that had to be grappled with.

On a global scale, uncertainties represent both enormous opportunities and risks. By gambling on the outcome of uncertainties, certain institutions, such as hedge funds and currency manipulators, can make gigantic profits. In postnormal times, individuals acting at a global level can acquire astronomical riches at an astonishing pace. Notice the sudden increase in billionaires in recent times. In his book Superclass [19], Rothkopf, a scholar at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has estimated that just over 6000 people have become enormously rich over the last two decades. These people, mostly in business and finance, have ‘vastly more power than any other group on the planet’. This new superclass is self-made and like all self-made plutocrats of bygone eras attaches itself to the established power hierarchies generated by inherited wealth and privilege. The effect is to increase the distortions and disproportion inherent in the social order. But this new superclassis distinctive in being ‘globally oriented, globally dependent, globally active’, it exists beyond national loyalties and commitments which can be used and changed as strategic devices to further enhance their prosperity. Their wealth is generated largely by being members of networks and playing on global uncertainties.

While the opportunities are limited to a few, the risks are shared by the rest of the planet. Economic prosperity for the few means financial and ecological disasters for the many. In a postnormal society, uncertainty and risks, real and perceived, becomes a dominant feature of everyday life for the planet’s population. In poor societies, new and emerging risks become life and death issues, and lead to the collapse of existing institutions and life support systems. The impact of climate change, for example, is much more dramatic on the developing countries. According to a new report by the Global Humanitarian Forum, global warming is now causing 300,000 deaths a year and is directly affecting 300 million people in the least developed countries [20]. Over half of the world’s poor are vulnerable and some 500 million are at extreme risk from weather related disasters that bring hunger, disease, poverty and lost livelihood.

The combination of ignorance and uncertainty, as well as a tendency to chaotic behaviour, contradictory analysis and the complex issues of safety and risks—all this means that our current options for ‘business as usual’ are now dangerously obsolete. In postnormal times, conventional modes of thinking and behaving are nothing more than an invitation to impending catastrophe. Some of the notions that underpin western, capitalist society, such as, ‘progress is essential’, ‘modernisation is good’, and ‘efficiencies are necessary’, are well passed their ‘sell by’ date.

5. Progress, modernisation, efficiency

Take the idea of progress based on continuous and perpetual economic growth. There is a natural limit to how far we can grow: the finite boundaries of our planet and the limits of our resources. But it is precisely unchecked linear progress and accelerating growth that has brought us to the edge of chaos—further linear progress, with attendant monumental global risks, would tip us over the precipice. We need to move from the notion of progress to the idea of steady-state. Trees, for example, do not continue to grow after they have reached their natural heights—to do so would mean self-destruction. Many archaeological studies suggest this fate has befallen human societies before: ancient civilisations which grew beyond the capacity of the ecological, technological, technological political and social carrying capacities precipitating catastrophe and collapse [21]. To assume that our economies will continue to grow at an accelerating pace would be the height of folly. There is nothing new in the idea of limits to growth: it is the old Malthusian proposition which was confounded in the 19th century by industrialisation and an agricultural revolution—not to mention the distorting and determining powers of colonial domination. The seminal report Limits to Growth, produced by the Club of Rome in the 1960s made the entire concept part of our consciousness [22]. Yet the report’s publication has been followed by the greatest expansion in human history of consumer affluence with its attendant profligate use of natural resources in generating ever more disposable, easily replaceable and annually upgraded gadgetry and resource consuming lifestyles [23]. And now some of the most populous nations on earth, not unnaturally, perceive the possibility of grasping hold of their place in this consumerist nirvana. Their quest, founded on the proposition of lifting billions of their people out of poverty, is unanswerable as an ethical and humane proposition. Yet the aspiration, however unquestionably ethical and sound, poses enormous dilemmas for everyone. What has been taken as normality simply cannot cope.

Modernisation too has now become a toxic notion. Witness just what the so-called modernisation of the NHS in Britain has achieved: the more it is modernised the less effective it becomes. The more you network an institution like the NHS, the more complex and chaotic it becomes, more contradictions and ignorance come to the fore, the more prone to risks and failure it becomes. These risks are inherent, they are generated solely by modern institutions; and they strike these very modern institutions as a boomerang, before engulfing the rest of us. Moreover, to modernise is to deprive an institution of social function and conscience. The basis of modernisation has been bureaucratisation and as the classical formulation of Max Weber pointed out bureaucracy is intentionally by design faceless, impersonal in the sense of being impartial, treating everyone by the same routine procedures. At one level it works for fairness and equity. However, the faceless, impersonal, remorseless aspects of bureaucracy, as commentators from Kafka [24] to Bauman [25] have pointed out, can defy humanity, reason and logic and work as effectively for pure evil as for the common good. Those who work in a bureaucracy follow procedure, follow the rules without a sense of personal responsibility and are forbidden to exercise discretion in the face of human realities as they present themselves. They neither own nor direct the course of the institutions. Those served by bureaucratic institutions equally feel alienated and powerless before the over-weaning might of a faceless behemoth. The more we modernise bureaucratic institutions the more dissatisfied, alienated, disempowered and angry people become.

Modern institutions, such as banks and corporations, are highly networked organisational structures that have no morality and feel no remorse. Their function is to maximize profit by a process of reduction, by accumulating more and more power and resources, which is exactly what they do by taking more and more risks in an environment of ignorance, uncertainty and chaos. India had 130,000 different varieties of rice before its agriculture was modernised in 1970s; after modernisation, Indian varieties of rice had been reduced to only 3000. Modernisation reduces diversity, bureaucracy by definition offers a one size fits all set of regulations. When a bureaucracy seeks to moderate itself to encompass the complex diversity of human circumstance it becomes more remote, more intractable, less transparent, comprehensible or adaptable.

Modernisation and bureaucracy turn everything into a value neutral, heartless routine which sponsors and facilitates selfish business, and increases risks for everyone. Given that modern institutions are the cause of the problem, they cannot be part of the solution.

Much the same can be said about efficiency, a concept closely associated with modernisation. The suggestion that we should, individuals and institutions, become more and more efficient, and use all our resources more efficiently, has now become absurd. There is a natural limit to how efficient anything, including the NHS, can be. Bureaucracy is the agent of efficiency, working by reductive choice and ever increased levels of management that fail to generate more effective control.

Paradoxically, there is something intrinsic in the notion of efficiency that actually produces inefficiency. We can see this most vividly in terms of traffic on a motorway. To reduce congestion on a two-lane motorway we build two new lanes. But a four lane motorway does not reduce traffic—it increases it. So we build six-lanes. But the traffic rises again. Eight-lanes and the traffic continues to rise. So we develop more energy-efficient cars. But car owners increase their leisure driving; as the performance of the car improves, the number of miles driven increases.

The simple observation that an increase in the efficiency of using a resource leads to an increased use of that resource is known as the ‘Jevons paradox’. First described by William Stanley Jevons in 1865 in relation to coal, it has been recently used to show that drives for efficiencies in numerous areas, such as fossil fuels, makes matters worse rather than better. In The Myth of Resource Efficiency: The Jevons Paradox [26], Polimeni et al. provide numerous examples from economics and ecology to technology and environment. The increase in efficiency in food production in India, for example, did not solve the problem of hunger—it made it worse (not least by reducing seed varieties). Fridges have become more efficient but also bigger. The promotion of energy efficiency at the micro-level–households and individual consumers–increases energy consumption at the macro level of society as a whole. What this means is that we cannot rely on future technological innovations to help us reduce consumption of resources, and thus somehow usher in a more sustainable world. Efficiency increases complexity and chaotic behaviour; and can lead to all kinds of unforeseen disasters.

Liberal free market deregulated capitalism, the acme of supposed normal times, has become postnormal, a recipe for calamity. The system itself is now the problem we must negotiate our way out of. It has generated institutions, forms and practises which are contradictory, complex beyond any real prospect of effective management and control. It stimulated wants and desires which cannot be fulfilled, except for the few. It produces aspirations for individual freedoms which mask the endurance, at ever higher levels of consumption, of disproportion in power that entrenches enduring hierarchical structures. The middle class, once in the western world the prime beneficiaries of the system, are now being squeezed and seeing their living standards drop while the enduring comparative and absolute poverty of the underclass endures. Clearly, progress, modernisation and efficiency have now become redundant if not dangerously obsolete terms.

6. Virtues

We need to negotiate our way towards new normal times. The problem, however, is that the space, time and willingness to engage in coherent debate has become scarcer, the more complex, contradictory and chaotic things have become. Liberal democracy and its historic forms of organisation–from voter turnout to membership of political parties–engage fewer and fewer citizens. Spontaneous self-organising activism, such as global anti-capitalist protests, while attractive, is self-selecting.

Its membership and agenda is often transitory. Such movements can dissipate as quickly as they spring into life without their activism necessarily being transformative. Spontaneous and reactive they can come and go without creating any new and lasting political structures or changing those that already exist. Moreover, self-organising networks and movements can as easily be motivated by panic, fear and xenophobia, a recipe for populist mobilisation and fascist activism, as demand for social justice. So the self-organising networks provide no guarantees: there is no natural law that states that activism will, should or ought to be, dedicated solely to the common good. Nor is there any rule that they should take a balanced view and think through the risks and benefits of their agenda. Indeed it is in the nature of many of the self-organising networks that have emerged to confound the times by offering simplistic, single issue, one-dimensional prescriptions and thereby increase the toxicity, animosity and dissatisfaction of society as a whole.

To negotiate our way out of postnormal existence we have to learn how to negotiate, how to translate aspiration into transformation. How do we organise, listen and sensibly engage everyone in a discourse of doing for mutual benefit?
The moral to be drawn from the characteristics of postnormal times are age-old virtues: humility, modesty and accountability. We must begin by appreciating that in many respects, we do not know, and we cannot know, how our safety as individuals, societies and species will be compromised. The suggestion that things can be totally ‘controlled’ and ‘managed’ has no meaning where problems do not have ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers but require multiple perspectives simply for us to grasp their true dimension [27].

Humility, modesty and accountability are not added extras but indispensable virtues, essential requirements of living with uncertainty and complexity. As we can never eliminate uncertainty and have total control of any situation, our claims must by definition be humble. Similarly, we can never have complete knowledge of a complex system; it will always be tentative and provisional. We have to acknowledge the ignorance attendant on everything we think we know. So we have to be modest about the claims we make about such knowledge. The failure to acknowledge the uncertainty and complexity of certain situations is not only a technical error, as Cilliers notes, but also an ethical one [9].
Indeed, it is ethics, and only ethics, that can guide us out of the postnormal impasse.

A new normality negotiated within the conditions of postnormal times must be rooted in ethical debate if it is to operate the necessary virtues. Ethics are neither remote nor impersonal; they can apply as readily to the personal as the global. It is their ability to transcend scale which makes them such priorities for conceptualising a new normality. Ethics can provide the guiding principles for a unifying sense of direction at all levels of organisation by anchoring the virtues–humility, modestyand accountability–we need to ensure take centre stage. The discourse we need must clarify what ethical principles we are accountable to, which must be upheld in the choices we make, with all the humility and modesty we apply to our understanding of our problems, searching for solutions with all the uncertainties, and hence risks and imperfections, we accept as routine elements in our affairs.

The ethical response to our postnormal dilemmas is by no means easy; and for many may sound like a return to old fashioned values rooted in religious beliefs. In which case it would be worthwhile remembering that modernity, the bedrock of normality, was itself in many ways a belief system. Modernisation, progress, bureaucracy, science and all the disciplines of modern knowledge emerged complete with a rich sustaining mythology whose most basis tenet was the delusional notion that they were value neutral, universal and inherently good. We have arrived at the postnormal in part by allowing this way of thinking to convince us the systems we constructed would inevitably, invariably in and of themselves answer all the needs for human betterment. In short, that essentially we had made ethics redundant.We have lived to learn that this is no longer a tenable proposition. Logic and rationality, the virtues of modernity, alone will not secure the changes we need to make in our lifestyle to meet the challenges of postnormal times. Ethical accountability that emphasises both values and virtues must come to the aid of logic and reason. Without an overriding sense of ethical responsibility it is hard to imagine convincing the rich and powerful to become more modest in their demands and lifestyle, more humble, indeed ready to temper the profligacy of their lifestyles and the disproportionate use of limited global resources this requires.

There is one other important point that needs to be made. Every social, cultural, political, philosophical and religious outlook known to humanity needs to relearn how to engage with its own ethical precepts. And this brings us to the other elephant in the room, in fact more of a monstrous woolly mammoth. Value neutral universals embedded in systems of knowledge, progress, modernisation and bureaucratisation were supposed to enable us to transcend the intractable problems of the diversity of belief. The different formulations of belief, each with their particularities and constraints, each making exclusive claims to possess the only right answers, were seen as barriers to expansive critical inquiry and therefore restraints on human advancement. In one sense the nexus of secular modernity has done its job—it has landed the entire globe in the same dilemma: the postnormal dispensation. The ethical debate and accountability we need to create has to transcend the limitations of both tradition and modernity. It must begin with accepting the postnormal axiom that there is no monopoly on truth and therefore no guarantee of possessing the means to find answers to all questions. To accept that there are no right and wrong answers does not mean we abandon the search for truth or solutions but it does entirely change the process and kind of objectives we set for our endeavours. When there are no right or wrong answers everyone, every perspective, has a contribution to make, anyone is as likely as another to have some part of a potential solution. Instead of returning to old exclusivities and determinisms we make the transition to a new kind of adaptability and flexibility in which every perspective and worldview participates in seeking solutions to our collective problems. Indeed, we are not looking for one answer, the answer to everything. Taking uncertainty, risk and ignorance seriously, embracing humility and modesty as essential attributes of our approach to the search for appropriate answers, enables us to uncover alternatives. It becomes possible to have shared objectives which are realised in different and locally appropriate ways and understand common shared principles through difference.

We cannot wipe the slate clean and begin again. The road to a new normality begins with all the complexity and contradictions of our messy reality. Accountability begins with taking responsibility for what we know and cherish, which comes wrapped in all the diversity of our cultures, histories and beliefs. What we have to add to this is an ethical clarity, a state of mind which acknowledges we are all beset by ignorance and none of us, no one tradition or outlook, has all the right answers.

A new normality cannot look for simplistic universals. It has to negotiate through and with the multiple and diverse formulations of all the universalist outlooks that exist. It has to engage with the complexity of humanity as much as it considers the complexity of the global environment we share in such different ways. Only ethical clarity about the responsibilities of being human, in each and every distinct worldview, can edge us towards the better understanding that allows us to provide the simultaneous translation, the seeing common principle through difference, which will make for effective global negotiation. In postnormal conditions, flexibility, adaptation and sensitivity to markedly different initial conditions require that we develop our ethical acuity to increase the diversity of our response. We are not looking for one solution but many alternatives which create positive feedback and momentum for common principles. Such an approach demands new thinking, effort and participation by everyone.

7. Imagination

The most important ingredients for coping with postnormal times, as Cilliers suggests and I would argue, are imagination and creativity. Why? Because we have no other way of dealing with complexity, contradictions and chaos. Imagination is the main tool, indeed I would suggest the only tool, which takes us from simple reasoned analysis to higher synthesis. While imagination is intangible, it creates and shapes our reality; while a mental tool, it affects our behaviour and expectations. We will have to imagine our way out of the postnormal times. The kind of futures we imagine beyond postnormal times would depend on the quality of our imagination. Given that our imagination is embedded and limited to our own culture, we will have to unleash a broad spectrum of imaginations from the rich diversity of human cultures and multiple ways of imagining alternatives to conventional, orthodox ways of being and doing.

To a very large extent our current impasse represents a failure of imagination. Or rather, subservience of imagination to orthodoxy. History, said Khaldun [28], the fourteenth century historian and sociologist, moves in cycles. Toynbee [29], the twentieth century historian of civilisations, concurred. Neither of them pointed out that the cyclic momentum of history actually preserves orthodoxy. Once the pain and suffering is over, and things appear to swing back to normalcy, the straitjacket of orthodoxy returns society to conformity. Notice how quickly the financial markets have returned to bad old ways: the recession is nearly over, green shoots are appearing in many locations, and, we are told, we can return to business as usual, shaken but unstirred. Of course, we will learn from our mistakes and the future will be better and more prosperous.

This is a dangerous illusion. The easy slide back into the security and conformity of the past all too often means we are creating the conditions to repeat historic mistakes. Conventional thought and market driven consumerist ways of being, as Jackson shows so vividly in Prosperity Without Growth [30] and Britain’s Sustainable Development Commission has consistently argued, have now become so pathological and so toxic that the ext crisis, the next economic meltdown, the next pandemic, the next effect from global warming, would really spell the end of civilisation as we know it. We have to imagine better ways. We all need a clearer, stronger ethical compass, one we can never again be content to be tucked away in an attic drawer while we rest content with the complacent self-congratulation that the system will take care of us, itself, as well as the fragile and finite earthly home on which we all depend.

The postnormal world is a world of disproportion. Disproportionate distributions of power, wealth, resources and the effective demand to command the use of these resources are matched only by the disproportionate power our knowledge and techniques have given us to destroy the environment on which our affluence depends. We have become convinced the past is a different place, no longer able to comment upon the power and sophistication of our lives today and the complexity of the world we now inhabit. If we cannot learn the lessons of history we need another source for the imagination to conceive of more sustainable and attainable futures. We need not only imagination but an ethical imagination that can acknowledge the uncertainty and risks we face and work through complexity and diversity cherishing the virtues we are most in need of: humility, modesty and accountability. It is our best hope of taking responsibility for the choices we will have to make to ensure we can arrive at our imagined futures with our humanity and our planet in tact.

References

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RaisingAwareness/HumanImpactReport/tabid/180/Default.aspx.
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[25] Z. Bauman, Modernity and Holocaust, Polity, Oxford, 1991.
[26] J.M. Polimeni, K. Mayumi, M. Giampietro, B. Alcott, The Myth of Resource Efficiency: The Jevons Paradox, Earthscan, London, 2009.
[27] S. Chan, The End of Certainty, Zed, London, 2009.
[28] I. Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1967 (original, circa 1380).
[29] A. Toynbee, A Study of History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1934.
[30] T. Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, Earthscan, London, 2009.

The Idea of Justice, By Amartya Sen

Reviewed by Ziauddin Sardar

Take three kids and a flute. Anne says the flute should be given to her because she is the only one who knows how to play it. Bob says the flute should be handed to him as he is so poor he has no toys to play with. Carla says the flute is hers because it is the fruit of her own labour. How do we decide between these three legitimate claims?

There are no institutional arrangements that can help us resolve this dispute in a universally accepted just manner. Conceptions of what constitutes a “just society”, argues the Nobel Prize-winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen in this majestic book, will not help us decide who should have the flute. A one-dimensional notion of reason is not much help either, for it does not provide us with a feasible method of arriving at a choice.

What really enables us to resolve the dispute between the three children is the value we attach to the pursuit of human fulfilment, removal of poverty, and the entitlement to enjoy the products of one’s own labour.

Who gets the flute depends on your philosophy of justice. Bob, the poorest, will have the immediate support of the economic egalitarian. The libertarian would opt for Carla. The utilitarian hedonist will bicker a bit but will eventually settle for Anne because she will get the maximum pleasure, as she can actually play the instrument. While all three decisions are based on rational arguments and correct within their own perspective, they lead to totally different resolutions.

Thus justice is not a monolithic ideal but a pluralistic notion with many dimensions. Yet Western philosophers have seen justice largely in singular, utopian terms. Hobbes, Locke and Kant, for example, wove their notions of justice around an imaginary “social contract” between the citizens and the state. A “just society” is produced through perfectly just state institutions and social arrangements and the right behaviour of the citizens.

Sen identifies two serious problems with this “arrangement focussed” approach. First, there is no reasoned agreement on the nature of a “just society”. Second, how would we actually recognise a “just society” if we saw one? Without some framework of comparison it is not possible to identify the ideal we need to pursue.

Furthermore, this approach is of no help in resolving basic issues of injustice. How would you reason, for example, that slavery was an intolerable injustice in a framework that concerned itself with right institutions and right behaviour? How would we ensure that well-established and cheaply producible drugs were available to the poor patients of Aids in developing countries? When faced with stark injustice, the contractual approach turns out to be both redundant and unfeasible.

Much of Sen’s criticism is directed towards the liberal philosopher John Rawls, whose 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, has acquired the status of a classic. Sen’s gentle and polite deconstruction of Rawls shows him to be rather shallow and irrelevant. Rawls’s approach, based on specific institutions that firmly anchor society, demand a single, explicit resolution to the principle of justice. Stalin had similar ideas.

Rawls is not just authoritarian but also elitist and Eurocentric. Just as Mill had excluded “the backward nations”, women and children from his Essay on Liberty, Rawls openly acknowledges that the world’s poor have no place in his theory of justice. Indeed, the very “idea of global justice” is dismissed by Rawls and his cohorts as totally irrelevant. Moreover, the kind of “reasonable person” needed to produce a just society is found only in democratic, Western societies.

Given the limitations of Rawls’s theory of justice, why has he been turned into a demi-god? Sen does not tackle this question. But a viable answer is provided by the classical Muslim philosopher al-Razi, who declared that “the acquisition of knowledge and the practice of justice” go hand in hand. Justice acquires meaning and relevance, al-Razi argued, within socially conscious epistemologies. The opposite is equally true.

Theories of justice that exclude, by definition, the poor or issues of global injustices only perpetuate injustice. The main function of Rawls’s theory of justice, it seems, is to maintain the status quo, where injustice is not just simply a part of the system, but the system itself. That’s exactly why he is force-fed to students of social sciences.

Sen’s alternative is a realisation-focused approach to justice which concentrates on the real behaviour of people and its actual outcomes. Taking a cue from “social choice theory”, he wants us to focus on removing injustices on which we can all rationally agree. There is nothing we can do about people dying of starvation beyond anyone’s control. But we can choose to do something about injustices that emerge from a conscious “design of those wanting to bring about that outcome”.

I see two problems with this. The “we” who choose must include those who consciously perpetuate injustice in the first place – ruthless corporations, hedge-fund managers and the like. Moreover, design need not be conscious. It can, for example, be unconsciously intrinsic in the theory itself.

Indeed, theory does sometimes serve as an instrument of injustice. Think of free-market capitalism, along with its theoretical underpinnings, including the mathematical modelling of sub-prime derivatives, where huge profits for the few are produced from the misery of others. To do something about the injustices perpetuated by the dominant model of economy, we need to tackle the tyranny of the discipline of economics itself.

Reading The Idea of Justice is like attending a master class in practical reasoning. You can’t help noticing you are engaging with a great, deeply pluralistic, mind. There were times, however, when I felt a bit unfulfilled. For example, we are temptingly informed that classical Sanskrit has two words for justice: niti, organisational propriety and behavioural correctness; and nyaya, which stands for realised justice. In the Indian context, the role of the institutions, rules and organisations have to be assessed in the broader and more inclusive perspective of the world as it actually emerges. We are also told of Mughal Emperor Akbar’s idea that justice should be based on rational endeavour. But this is not elaborated. I also wanted to see some comparatively material on Islamic, Chinese and Latin American ideas on justice.

But these quibbles apart, this is a monumental work. “When people across the world agitate to get more global justice”, Sen writes, “they are not clamouring for some kind of ‘minimal humanitarianism”‘. They are sensible enough to know that a “perfectly just” world is a utopian dream. All they want is “the elimination of some outrageously unjust arrangement to enhance global justice”.

The Independent, Friday 21 August, 2009

exhibition, the natural beauty of the scenery is spoiled by a road that runs right through the valley. But there is more in the photograph than meets the eye. The road is also a border; it divides two warring states, Azerbaijan and Armenia. One on side of the road, there is ‘home’. On the other side, ‘displacement’.

But what is ‘home’? Is it something more than just an address, just the building where we reside, just the valley that is ‘ours’, just the country where we were born and live? We speak of ‘home is where the heart is’, of making ‘a house a home’. What precisely do we mean? And where exactly is the heart of Europe, our continental home? In exploring the associations of such commonplace expressions we begin to wrestle with what is displaced by dislocation and what is invested in making relocation a new home. We live in a world where displacement and relocation are part and parcel of the experience of more and more people. Are we all becoming homeless persons or is the drive to make our living space home too strong? And what are the implications for society when fewer and fewer people are rooted to the soil of their origins? If we live in a country dominated by displaced homes what becomes of the sense of community and cohesion and how are we to bind people together in shared concerns? In short, how do we ‘live together’, we who come from so many diverse nations of this continent and elsewhere, who occupy this space called ‘Europe’?

Home is our beginning, a place of origin, the starting point of an identity. Yet place of birth does not necessarily equate with ‘home’. Home is the place where the people we are related to by birth reside, and that is much more than an accident of birth. Home is a place of belonging but much more than belonging to a physical location. And yet the place itself, the spot of the map – that valley – where we begin our terrestrial existence is not a matter of indifference. Place of birth and home are complex distinctions within the shifting patterns of complicated lives and displaced homes. How complex? Think of an example such as Rudyard Kipling. Born in India where he lived for his first five years, educated in England and then returning to India, where his parents still resided, he worked as journalist for a mere seven years before returning to England never again to visit India. Kipling’s place of birth was no incidental fact of his life. India was the bedrock on which his reputation as a writer is established, an identification inseparable from his creative output and achievement. And yet, never was there a more English Englishman, a man whose identity was more shaped by a historic sense of Englishness, which became the subject of his later literary output. Kipling belongs to India in a most particular way, and despite it all Kipling was never in any recognisable sense Indian. He is quintessentially displaced in the public mind, if not his own. Displaced too are all those people passing through ‘EU citizens’ and ‘OTHERS’ channels at various European airports.  They too are quintessentially Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Bulgarian, Turkey, et cetera; and their identity is also shaped by their historic experience. But unlike Kipling, they can, and some will, become the citizens of their displaced homes elsewhere in Europe. And like Kipling, they are unlikely to abandon the sense of their original ‘home’ even when they have settled at ‘home away from home’.

The associations of home are all about origin and identity, beginning and belonging that are lasting, enduring through generations. It is an attachment to place that is emotive but consists of far more than love of landscape, ecology and habitat. Home is the receptacle of history, a formation of life and living within a culture that is itself shaped by a particular land, the people who have lived on that land and how they have refined their way of life. Home is the comfort of normality, the place where we learn and develop our normative ideas of what it is to be human to be part of the associations of human existence: family, neighbourhood, community, clan, tribe, nation, Europe. Home is the hook attaching us to past, present and future. Home is the concept through which we identify ourselves and relate our individuality to people beyond ourselves. If this had not been true in the past, for the generations that went before our existence, it is almost impossible to imagine how the sociability of homo sapiens, the social animal, could exist.

The world does not begin afresh for each new generation. We are born and grow in a family that is our home. But the very nature of our family life is shaped by home grown identities that are cultural and historical. Culture is the sum total of our learned behaviour. Culture is expressed through the language we learn, the habits and customs we acquire. Culture fashions our history and is simultaneously the birthright and legacy we inherit. The historic experience of our culture shapes our outlook on the events of today and our aspirations and vision of the future. Part of the essence of cultural identity is a common mind, a shared repository of ideas.

There is a sense in which the concept of home denies that humanity was ever a wanderer. Home is about stasis, the isolation and exclusiveness of an identity that belongs only to defined and bounded group of people born, raised and spending their lives in one place, one culture as one people entire and of themselves. And yet it is unlikely any such people exist anywhere on this earth, or have ever so existed for time out of mind. The reality is human history is tale of displaced homes, of human movement of mutual influence and diffusion created by the simple fact people have never stayed still. Humanity has been a wandering, moving, shifting and changing entity throughout history. Yet that is not the image of history we cherish. Our concept of home eradicates much of the reality that was and is human life. Home is an excluding idea, an idea of place and belonging that divides and differentiates us from them.

And yet it need not be so. Home can be and is the positive and negative pole by which we navigate the best and worst of human identity. At best, home inculcates a sense of identity so secure it has place and space to recognise, respect and extend toleration to everyone, but especially people who do not share our identity. At worst, home is the sense of identity that makes us suspicious, fearful and innately antithetical to anyone who is not just like us. And home is the continuum between these alternate poles of being.

The yearning for home is, not surprisingly, encrusted with ideas of sacredness, a spiritual attachment to place, to people and to history that can elevate human understanding of self and others, or be distorted into hatred of others. The monotheistic religions all teach and encourage the sacredness of home. Ultimately, they teach it is God who is humanity’s true home, and our homing instinct and its cultural expressions are the reflections and signs that lead or should lead to a better appreciation of the divine. Yet, down the ages such expansive ideas that should inspire toleration of others has been resolved into the dictates of God on my side – but not on anyone else’s. This is, of course, equally true of other notions such as ‘my nation right or wrong’, or ‘my territory, my place’ that has no place for others of different faith, culture and ethnicity. Displacement of the meaning of home can be as pernicious a condition as physical displacement from a terrestrial home. But displacement can also be enticed with false promises of rewards – with devastating consequences, as illustrated by Dana Popa’s photographs: a lonely, young female figure, framed by a claustrophobic room that is her prison, looks out of a window covered with a blind, a baby (abandoned?) isolated on a bed, an abandoned wife clutches her baby in a kitchen come sitting room. These are the victims of a new slave trade, the trade in sex trafficking that now plagues Europe. Displacement can be a shroud behind which unspeakable acts of inhumanity are committed.

Our sense of home, of belonging, may be where we all begin but the imperatives of making a living or the consequence of events can have a great bearing on where we actually spend the rest of our days. We live in world shaped as much by displacement as it has been identified with homes. The suitcase in the ‘memory suitcase’ series by Yuval Yairi represents our perennial condition. A suitcase stuffed with memories of home in hand, we go out in search for employment, education, or a better life or simply for a more peaceful place. New opportunities, new discoveries, ecological changes wrought by nature or human activity, shifts of power and disagreements within and between cultures, peoples and nations that are the rumours of wars and effects of wars, have all made displacement a permanent feature of human existence. By choice and the exigencies of circumstance people have always been on the move from home in search of a new home. Displacement has constructed human history as much as the sense of home and the identity it fixes within people.

How do people cope with displacement? How shall we count the innumerable ways in which it works on people and their sense of identity? How do displaced people survive? Piruza Khalapyan’s photograph show us how an African migrant settled down to a multicultural life. When the dust settles, the displaced make a home just like the rest of us.

At best, displacement is the positive agent of constructive change, the introduction of impetus and ideas that enables new developments to emerge. Displacement can bring in it wake the gradual diffusion from which synthesis can be fashioned. People taking new industries, new technologies and ideas to the place where they settle have founded new developments, promoted the well being and enrichment of the places where they settled. Synthesis can be seamless, it can look and feel like the inevitable development of what was and forget what it owes to what has been introduced from outside, brought in by displacement. At worst, displacement can produce the penetrative oppression of one people overwriting the existence, identity and home of another. The colonial imperialist imperative has been at work down the millennia of human history. Indeed archaeologists long conceived of human history as total eradication of one group of people by displaced incomers. Displacement is defined by the sense of home the traveller and settler takes with them, the scale and numbers in which they move and how they set about the business of remaking their displaced homes wherever they come to rest.

Home and displacement are architects that between them have made human history and continue to construct the world in which we live. Yet we harbour very different attitudes to these concepts. What is warm, consoling and comforting about home is vaunted while we look with disfavour on the rupture and challenges that always accompany displacement. How can displaced persons fit into a new location, a new culture, a new nation? They make their adjustment by and through the sense of home they bring with them. It is the human impulse to make a house a home that travels with the displaced. Home is so embedded in our sense of self that the most natural consequence of displacement is to seek out, reconstruct in a new place, elements of familiarity and recreate the means to perform the customs and rituals of one’s cultural identity in a new land. The history of the world is replete with positive and negative examples of how the homing instinct has operated in the process of relocation.

So it is incumbent on us to remember that the history of the European peoples begins with the recreation of displaced homes. The Franks, Huns, Alans, Goths the peoples who became the Europeans all were displaced out of Asia in historic times and through relocation and synthesis fashioned modern national identities, even as they overwrote, included or superseded earlier identities home grown in Europe. European history also demonstrates how rapidly displaced homes become the only home of relocated peoples. Jutes, Angles and Saxons  made their way as displaced people from Northern Europe to Britain and there founded a new identity, a new home grown sense of being Anglo Saxon. Other groups from Northern Europe settled in France to become Normans. When the Norman William the Conqueror sallied across the English Channel two identities, from common stock, forged in displaced homes came into direct conflict – and together have fused into the history of Britain.

European nations know a great deal about displaced homes. The modern history of the world has been shaped by the displaced home Europeans carved out for themselves across the globe. The colonial mindset, the ex-patriot way of life, is an archetype of the displaced home. Colonists took their culture and way of life with them and recreated it, as well as they could and such amendments as were acceptable to them, wherever they went. The history of Europe has many negative lessons of what can be wrought by displaced homes, of the tensions and injustices that can be created in the power relations produced by the displacement and relocation of people. And yet, examined in a different light Europe has a wealth of experience on which to draw to find the positive, accommodating and creative possibilities of displaced homes being built within its bounds.

Home tugs at all our heart strings that make us human. Yet, if the tug of home is also an intimation of the divine in each and everyone of us then it is a call to something much greater and beyond ourselves. We have the choice to look and think of home in ways that enable cohesion, acceptance, mutual respect, toleration and synthesis between the multiple or plural ideas of home that exist in today’s Europe. The mass movement of people across the new and extended European Community as the beginning a new, diverse and more innovative ideas of what it means to be European today.

We also face the challenge of withstanding the growing sense of displacement that is consequence of an ever more mobile population. More and more people are faced with the task of making private displaced homes for themselves in faceless cities where all sense of neighbourhood and community has evaporated. After a working life of engagement in place and community more and more people across Europe opt for private dreams of a good life in displaced homes by the sea or in the countryside and end their days without the comforts of family and community around them.

We have much to consider when we think of home. What being at home or in a displaced home actually means is not self evident and given. It is a consciousness, moral challenge we have to construct. We have to choose whether and how we will make Europe home for all who live and come to live here. This is what this exhibition points towards. How we choose will define the future of Europe.

From Close to Home, British Council, London, 2008

The greatest creation of the dominant narrative has been marginality, the condition of Otherness. The historic product of this narrative device is the Others: all those people, from different cultures, civilisations, ethnicities and class, whose antecedents, experience, ideas, sentiments, beliefs and aspirations are not contained in the one, overarching dominant tale of how we got to the 21st century.

I write as the perpetual Other. But I understand the condition of Otherness differently: neither a demon nor a victim, but certainly difficult because I fulfil no one’s expectations, not even those of my own faith and culture.

I am not a guru or a Master. I am not going to ask you to follow me. That would be a folly on both our parts. I am not a preacher. God knows how I dislike them. I offer no self-help manuals. If you need a manual to learn how to dress, or have a relationship or how to compete, then you are beyond help. I am not very pious either – pieties are for those who want to advertise their devotions.

I am not even very nice. Nice people no longer accept that racism is acceptable; nice people believe in open minded ideas like democracy which (apparently) means everyone having the right to make their own decisions about the kind of society in which they live; nice people believe everyone should have the same human rights; nice people believe hunger, disease and poverty should not deform our world which is very good at creating affluence and through science and technology bringing the promise of unlimited new horizons to all people. But I live in the real world. I know nice people can hide their prejudices in ‘discourses’ and academic pretentions. I know nice people are happy to impose democracy on others, or deny democracy to others when it suites them, or use democracy to perpetuate a ‘free’ market economy that gives even more obscene bonuses to bankers and reduce the poor to even worse state of deprivation. I know nice people can brush aside human rights when it suites their purpose. Nice people are very nice – but not very clever.

I will, however, argue with you and challenge your assumptions. And ask you to appreciate that there are many things out there that are complex wholes, that must be allowed to be themselves in the round, and that you can only really get to know and experience if you accept them on their own terms. There are Other ways of being and relating, Other ways of doing, thinking and organising which may lead to an Other kind of sensitive, sustainable and fulfilling modernity.  In short: there are Other ways of being human. I would invite you to rethink what you think you know, to experience the world and its history in a different way and hopefully to discover we have been sold damn lies, half truths, deliberate inventions and truths that are strangely fictional. And that’s a fact.

Things change. But my work is all about changing things.  ”

- The Independent

‘A remarkable author’

- Nature

‘A formidable critic’

- Muslim World Book Review

‘One of the finest intellectuals on the planet’.

- The Herald

‘A major prophet of our time: his insight and wit always offer new perspective on ordinary things’.

- Resurgence

‘In Islamic context, but perhaps in any context, his achievement is startling in its range, boldness, scepticism and, above all, sheer quantity’.

- New Statesman

‘A leading Muslim scholar and writer, Sardar’s body of work is testament to a lifetime’s restless need for intellectual inquiry and critique…Armed with a sharp wit… and an intuitive grasp of when to move in for the intellectual kill, the sceptical Sardar takes on all-comers, no matter which side of the fence they stand. He thrives in the lion’s den’

- Sydney Morning Herald

‘We must search for the answers to the questions he asks if we are to challenge and change the status quo’.

-  Socialist Future

‘It would be difficult to think of anyone else who combines the virtues of scholarship, journalism and activism in such equal measure’.

- British Journal for the History of Science

‘There is a two-word answer to the charge that Muslims who remain serious about faith have failed to engage with the science, culture and politics of the contemporary world. The words are “Ziauddin Sardar”’.

The Independent

Gardens, by the very fact that they are gardens, consist of a plethora of different plants. There are all variety of hurdy perennials that flower year after year. There are the annuals and the biennials that have to be planted in season. There are plants that  provide various colours of foliage, or hedges and borders, or climb up fences, or play architectural roles. There are fruit trees, trees that provide fragrant and colourful flowers and trees that fix the soil and provide shade. There are the grasses so essential for the lawns. And what would a garden be without the proverbial birds and the bees? And those warms and insects that both enrich the soil and require some form of pest control. The thing about a garden is that all this truly monumental variety of life exists in symbiosis: nourishing each other and ensuring the overall survival of the garden. Of course, the garden has to be tended: the weeds have to be cleared, plants have to be pruned, we have to make sure that nothing grows so much that it ends up suffocating and endangering other plants.

So, I desire a future where all the vast and varied ways of being human, all the plethora of different cultures, past, present and the future, exists in symbiosis as though the globe was a well-tended garden. In essence, it is a vision of a globe of pluralistic identities. But the kind of identities I seek, or rather envision, has little to do with identity as we have conventionally understood the term.

Philosophically, the concept of identity, as Amartya Sen has pointed out, is based on two basic assumptions. First, the presumption that we must have a single – or at least principal and dominant – identity. Second, the supposition that we discover our identity. The first assumption is plainly wrong: not only do we exist with multiple identities but often invoke different identities in different contexts. So: ‘the same person can be of Indian origin, a Muslim, a French citizen, a US resident, a woman, a poet, a vegetarian, an anthropologist, a university professor, a Christian, an angler, and an avid believer in extra-terrestrial life and of the propensity of alien creatures to ride around the universe in smartly designed UFOs. Each of these collectives, to all of which this person belongs, gives him or her a particular identity, which are variously important in different contexts’ (1). The second assumption is just as erroneous. We discover our identity, the argument goes, from the community we belong to: it is through the relationships within a community that we discover our identity. This argument suggests that we have no role in choosing our identities. But even though the constraints of community and traditions are always there, reason and choice too have a role to play. The point is not that we can chose any identity at random; but ‘whether we do have choices over alternative identities or combination of identities, and perhaps more importantly, substantial freedom on what priority to give to the various identities that we may simultaneously have’ (2).

It is because we have a problem with pluralistic identities that we are in the midst of a global epidemic of identity crisis. Most of us do not know who or what we really are. Some of us have impossibly romanticised notions of what we should be. We desperately cling on to an imagined ‘heritage’, subscribe to the preservation of an unchanging ‘tradition’, and are ready to kill and be killed to save some ‘essence’ of our idealised identity. Many of us have altogether abandoned the very idea of a having a fixed identity: we change our identities with as much ease as we change our jackets. All of us are suffering from a disease that is slowly but surely eating us from the inside.

The symptoms are everywhere. In Northern Ireland, men in balaclavas are not just ‘scum’, they think of themselves as either Ireland’s or Ulster’s ‘finest’ and will unite in violence for the sake of the difference. Britain seems perpetually in limbo not knowing whether to become more American or more European. For much of the 20^th century, American identity, and its foreign policy, was shaped in opposition to a ‘communist bloc’. In a post-Cold war world, America has to create imaginary villains (‘Muslim terrorists’, rouge states such as bankrupt and starving ‘North Korea’, ‘the Chinese menace’) in an inane attempt to resolve its predicament of self-identity. The collapse of the Soviet Union has produced a plethora of new artificial, national feuding identities, pitting Azerbaijanis against Armenians, Chechnyans against Russians, Kazakhstanis of one kind against Kazakhstanis of another. The Balkans has just gone through one of the most brutal balkanisation of identities in all its history. In the Muslim world, traditionalists and modernists have been engaged in battles over what constitutes true Islamic identity for decades (3). The very idea of being ‘White’ has now become so problematic that ‘Whiteness’ is studied as an academic discipline in its own right.

In short, identity is being contested everywhere. That is why the politics of identity has become one of the dominant themes of postmodern time.

To ‘know thyself’, as Socrates put it, is both a fundamental human urge and a basic question in philosophy. Having some idea of who or what we are helps us to determine how we ought to live and conduct our daily affairs. A little self-knowledge also provides us with a little coherence in our metaphysical and moral outlooks. But in a rapidly globalising world, it is almost impossible to have even a modicum of self- knowledge. All those things that provided us with a sense of confidence in ourselves – such as nation states with homogenous populations, well-established local communities, unquestioned allegiance to history and unchanging tradition – have evaporated. The sources of our identity have been rendered meaningless.

Consider, for example, the territory called ‘England’. It is not the sole preserve of  ‘the English’ anymore: the population now is much more heterogeneous, with ‘Englishness’ (however, it is defined) as only one segment in a multi-ethnic society. Moreover, the history and tradition that are associated with this ‘Englishness’ – the Empire, House of Lords, fox hunting, the national anthem – are either questionable or meaningless to the vast majority of new-English who now live in England. Worse: this Englishness becomes quite insignificant when it is seen in relation to a new European identity which itself is an amalgam of countless other cultural identities. Not surprisingly, ‘the English’ feel threatened.

While the concrete foundations of identity are cracking away everywhere, the shifting context adds another layer of perplexity. Identity is a label, a toolkit, a compass bearing. It permits us to find not only ourselves but discern similarity and/or difference in everyone else. When the foundations of our identity crack we lose not only the sense of who we are but essential elements of how we connect to all other identities. All labels become confusing, multiple and problematic.

Think of the rather common label: ‘black’. It has no global connotation; there is no universal black identity. Being black has different meaning and significance in different places. In New York, being black is a mark of difference in contrast to the whites, the Italian, the Irish, the Hispanics and a symbol of being cool. In Nigeria, it is not important whether you are black or white but whether you are Yoruba rather than Hausa; and the only way you can be cool is to be totally westernised. In Jeddah, nothing is cool, and what really matters is not whether you are black or brown but whether you are a member of the royal family. In Cape Town, to be black is, almost by definition, to be confused: once excluded, now technically empowered, a dominant group in the rainbow, but still practically marginalised by the history that created and continues to operate practical exclusion. So, from the perspective of identity, context redefines meaning and we end up not talking about the same colour at all.

In addition, the very notions and ideas we use to describe our identities are changing radically. What does it mean, for example, to be a ‘mother’ in a world where in vitro fertilisation and surrogate motherhood is rapidly becoming common? What happens to conventional ideas of parenthood in the case of the French baby ‘constructed’ from the egg of a 62-year-old woman, sperm from her brother, and ‘incubated’ in a surrogate mother? What does it mean to be a ‘wife’ in a homosexual marriage? Or ‘old’ when you have rebuilt a 65-year-old body through plastic surgery and look like a young starlet?

Thus, identity has become a perilous notion. It is not, if it ever was, monolithic and static; but multiple and ever changing. And the most fundamental change is this: all those other categories through which we in the West defined and measured ourselves – the ‘evil Orientals’, the ‘fanatic Muslims’, the ‘inferior races of the colonies’, the immigrants, the refugees, the gypsies – are now an integral part of ourselves. It is not just that they are ‘here’ but their ideas, concepts, lifestyles, food, clothes now play a central part in shaping ‘us’ and ‘our society’. We thus have no yardstick to measure our difference and define ourselves.

Descartes could say with some confidence, ‘I think, therefore I am’ because his thought had already defined the Other, the darker side of himself, through which he could confirm his own civilised and thoughtful existence. Today, our thought has to be directed toward a more frightening question: how much of the Other is actually located within me? The quest for identity is essentially an attempt to answer this question. And it is the fear of the answer that transforms, in the words of Amin Maalouf, the Lebanese-French novelist, ‘a perfectly permissible aspiration’ into ‘an instrument of war’ (4). This transformation occurs through some basic associations.

The first of these is the conventional association of identity with power and territory. Identity always conferred power, defined the essential character distinctive to its own territory, and familiarised people with the proper means of domesticity, living comfortably within the homeland. But an all powerful identity is like an all-powerful tree in the garden: it sucks the life out of all other plants. When power is skewed in this manner, it is not possible to exist in symbiosis. Take the case of America, which began as a declaration of identity: a new world emptied of meaningful past and ready for migrants who would build an identity based on the power of a new territory. But the very definition of American identity provided power and privilege for those who were conceived as the insiders. The term ‘ethnicity’ has its roots in the American provenance where, apart from the European immigrants, all other immigrants are defined as ethnics. As Dipankar Gupta notes, ethnicity ‘connotes, above all else, the signification of the primordially constituted “Other” as an “outsider”’ (5). The distinction is between hyphenated Americans – Italian, German, Polish, Irish, Russian – and ethnicity. American identity offers the hyphenated Americans the ideal American Dream of inclusion and opportunity. Thus, only hyphenated Americans have ever made it to the White House.

But ethnicity is very different: blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans are ethnics, problematic and different kinds of Americans. Ethnics make excellent domestic servants, a significantly different thing from domesticity. Ethnicity is the politically correct term for race, for a hierarchy within American identity and for the power of definition that is exclusive to white America. Asian too are ethnics. Chinese Americans had their identity neatly stereotyped in the works of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Japanese Americans were the only people interned as real ‘enemies within’ during the Second World War, an unthinkable reaction to German, Italian or any other quisling state Americans.

In British identity, power and territory are expressed in hierarchies of race and class. It is a little too glib to argue that British identity had the luxury of seeing race as external, the definition of difference beyond it shores. But the exercise of power that created an Empire on which the sun never set, a notion of class that defined and shaped modernity and was not a stranger anywhere in the world, are essential attributes of what it is to be British (6). Without it the British could not be simultaneously xenophobic, internationalist and parochial: the sort of people who go on Spanish holidays to eat fish and chips and drink warm bitter ale. British identity is based on an assumption of authority that makes the world a familiar place, a proper theatre in which to continue being British. It also produced its own internationalist perspective: Britain has had its share of ‘old India hands’, ‘Africa men and women’ – urbane, cosmopolitans who know Johnny Foreigners better than they know themselves.

The problem with identity as power and control over territory is what happens when power wanes. Johnny Foreigner is now within, ethnics are demanding the American Dream. Power has been debunked, denounced and vilified. Does all that that identifies the Self go down the plughole with it? How can we be comfortable with accepting the identity of villains? Which leads us to the second association: to exclude the unsavoury foreigners from our identity we have to anchor it in romanticised history and frozen tradition.

Collective identity is based on the selective processes of memory. Let me illustrate how this process work, and how the creation of identity can lead to conflict, by dwelling on the notion of British identity. British identity was (is?) the acknowledgement of a common past. Sharing and having been shaped by this common past is what makes the British different from all other identities. The trouble is history is a deliberate human creation, itself another wilful act of power, artificially constructed to support an artificial identity. Europe engineered a cultural identity based on a common descent from the supposed traditions of ancient Greece and Rome and two thousand years of Christianity. British history books always began with the arrival of the Romans. So British history begins by submerging, barbarising and differentiating itself from Celtic history. Celt and Welsh are words whose linguistic roots, one Greek the other Saxon, mean stranger. The history of Britain, as written in the age of devolution, records not a common shared past but continuous contest and conflict within British isles. Whatever Britain is, it is the creation of dominance by kings and barons and upwardly mobile yeoman who practiced colonialism at home, and after perfecting the technique, moved abroad.

It was Oliver Cromwell who noted that Britain had its ‘Indians’ at home in what he called the ‘dark corners of Britain.’ He referred, of course, to the residual Celtic corners. It makes perfect sense that Margaret Thatcher, whom I always regarded as Oliver Cromwell in drag, should propose the solution to the Ulster problem as relocating Catholics to Ireland. It was Cromwell’s policy: if they will not reform, be educated and submit, then they have no place within the identity, history and society that is Britain. That no one seriously proposes sending the Union Jack waving Ulstermen back to where they came from, or removing the Union from them, itself suggests a strong allegiance to a constructed history, the history of irreconcilable difference. As Orangemen so often say, marching with fife and drum to intimidate and demonstrate their dominance is their culture. In an age of the politics of identity, culture has its rights. But how far can you defend the rights of a culture whose only reason for being is to retain dominance?

It really is quite dumbfounding how much of Britishness, and by association Englishness, is based on fabricated history. Consider the whole notion of Anglo-Saxon Britain. Winston Churchill and Rudyard Kipling were devotees of Anglo Saxon history for a reason. It enabled them to avoid how genuinely European British history has always been. Norman kings hardly ever spent time in Britain, spoke French rather than English, and were most concerned with dominating Europe from their French possessions. Of course, the Saxon bit of the Anglo Saxon has its own problems. After the Welsh Tudors, and Scots Stuarts, a brief quasi native interlude, German monarchs were bussed in to reign over Britishness that was to be marked by Englishness alone, and that wanted nothing to do with Europe.

The selectivity of historic memory is part of its inventiveness. History always seeks ancient roots, the better to justify its innovations. Ancient Anglo Saxon liberties were purposefully invented on a number of occasions to fashion the Mother of Parliaments. This foundational institution was not a true popular democratic institution until 1929, the first election based on universal adult suffrage. The statue of Oliver Cromwell quite properly stands outside Parliament. His insistence that ancient Anglo Saxon liberties rested on property owning was the novel twist that secured class hierarchy, made the Restoration of monarchy easy, and enabled manufactured history to continue its work. The pomp and ceremony of the British monarchy was a late Victorian invention. The Royal Family as the model for the normative family, an ideal for a nation, is a post Edwardian invention, Victoria’s son Edward hardly being a suitable candidate for model husband and father. And so it goes on.

Thus, the notions of race and class are intrinsic to the self-definition of the English. Without the idea of race there is little left for English identity to hold on to: only being a disadvantaged minority within Britain, the complete inversion of received history. What works well for youthful addicts of street culture does not suit the aspirations of new English identity, and that’s why the appeal to the barricades, sending them back, locking them up has to be made.

As recently as 1940,George Orwell could state that ‘when you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing different air’. Identity as difference is less easy to define in a world already awash with globalisation whose most notable feature is rampant Americanisation. Where is the British sandwich? Surely that defined the difference of being here. But McDonalds, Starbucks, pizza parlours, doner kebab, chicken tikka marsala, the rise of ciabatta and the pret a manger syndrome have transmuted the familiar air of England in wafts of everyone else’s fragrant confections.

These culinary metaphors have become basic to redefining British identity. The new culinary repertoire are not so much a smorgasbord as alternative choices. Does Britain embrace the global Americanisation of the high street, the merchandised model of individualism, the free market identity of buying into who you want to be in terms of dress, sex and politics? Or is Britain as European as ciabatta and its passion for fine wine? Are the British the kind of people who opt for a common European history of struggle for public ownership and secure, quality public services? In facing that choice, Britain has to discover how and in what way the spiced diversity of real curry, as opposed to an invented dish to suit only white tastes, fits into the feast of identities. And, these questions are not just rhetorical: they have a real import in terms of policy. Should Britain align itself with America or look more towards Europe is a question that dominates British politics – some would even argue that it is tearing the nation apart.

Much the same can be said about other problematic identities. Like Britain, Islam too has used selective memory in shaping an identity for itself that is posed against a demonised West. And, just like the Muslims, fundamentalist Hindus too have constructed a romanticised past to shape a Nationalist Hindu identity (7). In both cases, the fabrication of monolithic identities has led to conflict and death. The desire to be pure, unpolluted and authentic often leads to construction of identities that are totalitarian in the content and destructive in their nature.

So we arrive at the third association: the negotiation of identity between the alternate poles of desire and death. As American scholar Cornel West has suggested, we construct our identities from the building blocks of our basic desires: desire for recognition, quest for visibility, the sense of being acknowledged, a deep desire for association (8). It is longing to belong. All these desires are expressed by symbols – pomp and ceremony, marches, festivals, national monuments and anthems, cricket and football teams, etc. But in a world where symbols are all we are, all we have, holding on to these symbols becomes a matter of life and death. It is for the glorification of these symbols that the bloody tale of national history is written and enacted in nationalists’ campaigns everywhere around the world.

Identity not only invokes the desire to be different, it also summons the desire to express similarity. Indeed, there can be no difference without similarity. But similarity is always seen as the opposite pole of difference, as appeals to making everyone the same. It is often posed as ‘our’ similarity against ‘their’ difference. Once the doctrine of similarity was the underlying principle of the communist ethos, now it has become essential to the internationalist-libertarian-individualist doctrine that underpins globalisation. ‘Workers of the World Unite’ has been replaced by ‘Liberal Capitalism is the Only Way’. Such championing of similarity can become war on those who fight to maintain their difference. Similarity in such contests becomes an ethos to die for.

In coming to terms with the contemporary crisis of identity, we need to transcend certain apparent contradictions. To reject the demonisation of difference does not require the abandonment of difference. The desire for similarity is not the same thing as the aspiration for homogeneity. Traditions and customs that do not change cease to be traditions and customs and are transformed into instruments of oppression. Identity has historic anchors but is not fixed to a limited, unchanging set of traditional signs and historic symbols. Identity is not what we buy, or what we choose, or what we impose on others; rather, it is something from which we learn how to live, discover what is worth buying, and appreciate what it is to be different. Just as the flora and fauna in a garden learns to live with each other.

What we need is to recover our confidence in identity as the product of various and diverse traditions. We need to recognise that any identity is the means to synthesise similarity through difference and to see difference as discrete means of expressing basic similarity. We need to move away from the politics of contested identities that heighten artificial differences towards acceptance of the plasticity and possibilities of identities that focus on our common humanity. Living identity, as opposed to the fossilised to die for variety, is always in a constant flux. It is an ever changing balance, the balance of similarities and differences as a way of locating what it is that makes life worth living and what connects us with the rest of the changing world. The challenge of shaping Other futures is to transcend difference and thereby enable it to fulfil its real purpose – to provide variety and diversity in a world that cannot exist with it.

This then is my vision of the future. A world of variety and diversity where we are at ease with our identity, know our Selves, and through knowing ourselves come to see beauty and goodness in Others who are not like us. A fragrant world with all the colour and multiplicity of a garden.

But, of course, it is more than possible that instead of moving towards my garden of identities, we could go forward to a totally different future. An alternative scenario is reflected in the title of Francis Fukuyama’s book: Our Posthuman Future (9). Here, human identity per se evaporates and genetic engineering, cloning and neuropharmacology lead us to a future of identities manufactured in the laboratory. Eugenics will ensure that we are all much stronger, smarter and resistant to disease and death. Xeno-transplants will guarantee replacement parts for our failing bits of biology. Scientists would isolate biochemicals in an egg and transfer them directly to the skin cell – doing away with the idea and need of the human embryo altogether. So, our sense of ourselves, and how we interact as social and cultural beings, will be fundamentally altered. Identity will acquire a new meaning – or rather meaninglessness as we will all be fashioned in a homogeneous way by standardized technology. There are obvious problems with this scenario. As soon as biotechnology solves one problems, it creates a myriad of others. As Fukuyama acknowledges, it could at best lead to a new class of people – those who could afford the technology – and create a whole new underclass of ordinary mortals; at worse it could lead to a Brave New World that Aldous Huxley warned us about. My point is that a post human, bio-technology based future is simply a continuation of the Enlightenment project of progress through instrumental science. One source of Truth, and one Civilisation, continues in its trajectory – the human garden becomes an embodiment of a single, all-powerful identity.

There is another scenario that is worth considering. Globalisation may continue on its present course unimpeded for the next two or three decades (10). That would not only mean that the world is dominated and controlled by a single nation – for globalisation is only another name for Americanisation – but also the cultural space for difference would be totally eroded. In other worlds, the world will be awash with a single culture and its products, and difference as such would cease to exist. Diversity as we know it would disappear and cultures trying to retain some semblance of identity and originality would be in perpetual conflict with America. Puritanism and fundamentalism would stalk the earth on one hand, and America’s arrogance will take cosmological proportion on the other. This scenario too leads us to a desolate panorama with a single identity.

To undermine these two undesirable scenarios, we need to abandon the idea that a single truth can be imposed on a plural globe. Just as a garden does not function on the basis of a single species, so the single Truth of western civilisation as well as  creeds and ideologies that are based on exclusivist notions of truth and seek redemption by imposing this truth on all others, cannot lead us to viable, sustainable future. Both America and the great monotheistic religions of the world must transcend their historic goal of claiming exclusivist notions of Truth just as science must learn to see itself as only one – and not the – manifestation of reality. The Platonic idea that truth is same for everyone has no place in my future garden of humanities. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues in The Dignity of Difference (11) this notion of truth sets up false oppositions. If all truth is the same for everyone at all times, then if I am right, you must be wrong. And, if I really care for truth, I must convert you to my view. We must move forward from the old recipe that ‘truth is supremely important, and therefore all persons must live by a single truth’ to the new formula that ‘truth is supremely important, and therefore every man and women must be allowed to live according to how they see the truth’. Ultimately, my notion of pluralistic identities comes down to how we all see the truth differently, according to our historic experiences and perspectives, and how we all live the truth in our lives, as individuals and communities, in our uniquely different and cultural ways of being human.

So, I open my eyes and go out to transform the world as I find it into the future world that I desire. A world where more than one of way of being human is not only the norm but is considered essential for the very survival of our species. This is the world as a garden. And you and I, and all of us, urgently need to cultivate our future garden of humanities.

References

1. Amartya Sen, ‘The Predicament of Identity’ Biblio March-April 2001 48-50, p49.

2. Ibid., p49.

3. Ahmad S Moussalli, Moderate and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Quest for Modernity, Legitimacy and the Islamic State, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 1999.

4. Amin Maalouf, On Identity, Harvell Press, London, 2000.

5. Dipankar Gupta, The Context of Ethnicity: Sikh Identity in Comparative Perspective, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1996.

6. R Colls, Identity of England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002.

7. Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Myths, Berg, Oxford, 2001; and Ashis Nandy, Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion, Hurst & Co, London, 2002.

8. Cornel West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America, Routledge, London, 1994.

9. Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future, Profile Books, London, 2001.

10. Ziauddin Sardar, The A to Z of Postmodern Life, Vision, London, 2002.

11. Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, Continuum, London, 2002.

]]> http://ziauddinsardar.com/2011/02/a-garden-of-identities-multiple-selves-and-other-futures/feed/ 0 http://ziauddinsardar.com/2011/02/the-erasure-of-islam/ http://ziauddinsardar.com/2011/02/the-erasure-of-islam/#comments Fri, 04 Feb 2011 18:57:14 +0000 Ziauddin Sardar http://ziauddinsardar.com/?p=173

One cannot have a revolt on behalf of reason in Islam because reason is central to its worldview: reason is the other side of revelation and the Qur’an presents both as ‘signs of God’. A Muslim society cannot function without either.

Ziauddin Sardar on the shadow cast over Islamic culture by the Enlightenment.

What Enlightenment? It may have been good for Europe, but for the rest of the world in general, and Islam in particularly, the Enlightenment was a disaster. Despite their stand for freedom and liberty, reason and liberal thought, Enlightenment thinkers saw the non-West as irrational and inferior, morally decadent and fit only for colonisation. This legacy is not only with us but is positively thriving in the guise of neo-conservative thought, dogmatic secularism and scientism.

For key Enlightenment thinkers, such as Voltaire, de Montesquieu, Volney and Pascal, Europe occupied a special place: it was to be the destiny of humanity, construed as Western man. They worked hard to provide a rational justification for colonisation. They rationalised the medieval images, anxieties and fear of Islam and its Prophet – so evident in the sections devoted the Muhammad in Pascal’s Pensees – and presented it as evidence for the innate inferiority of Islam. They deliberately suppressed the Muslim contribution to science and learning and severed all intellectual links between Islam and Europe. Their Eurocentricism thus further locked Islam into an exclusive confrontation with the West, which continues to this day.

For thirteen and fourteenth century thinkers of Christendom, such as Roger Bacon and John Wycliff, Islam was simply a pagan, enemy Empire. To their credit, the Enlightenment thinkers saw Islam as a civilisation. But it was a civilisation grounded in a backward society and inferior political institutions and religious beliefs at its core.  In Mohammad and Fanaticism, Voltaire denounced Islam in harsh and hostile terms. Later, in the Essai sur les moeurs, he was a little more restrained, but the judgement did not change. He still saw Islam as an embodiment of fanaticism, antihumanism, irrationalism and the violent will to power. But despite this, Muslims did have a few positive aspects. They could move towards greater tolerance thanks largely to Islam’s loose sexual standards, which made it akin to a natural religion. While Jesus was good, Christians had become intolerant. But Muslims were tolerant despite their evil Prophet. Positive development in one case, negative in another. This is how Voltaire reconciled his deep seated prejudices of Islam and Muslims with reason.

For all their sabre rattling against religion, Enlightenment thinkers saw Christianity as the standard of civilised behaviour and norm of all religion. In effect, they further naturalised the natural law theory of medieval Christianity which had always been both vague in the sense of never precisely defined yet highly specific in being a universalising of Christian norms as the standard for human behaviour. Islam remained the antithesis to Christianity. Thus, in Les Ruines, Volney announced that ‘Mohammad succeeded in building a political and theological empire at the expense of those of Moses and Jesus’ vicars’. Or, in the scene where he has an imam speaking about ‘the law of Mohammad’, ‘God has established Mohammad as his minister on earth; he has handed over the world to him to subdue with the sabre those who refuse to believe in his law’. Volney described Muhammad as the ‘apostle of a merciful God who preaches nothing but murder and carnage’, the spirit of intolerance and exclusiveness that ‘shocks every notion of justice’. While Christianity might be irrational, Volney declared that it was gentle and compassionate but Islam had a contempt for science – a truly bizarre claim since Volney himself, and all his fellow Enlightenment thinkers, learnt most their science and philosophy from such names as al-Frabi, Ibn Sina and ibn Rushd.

While the Enlightenment may have been concerned with reason, its champions were not too worried about truth when it came to Islam. They not only shamelessly plagiarised philosophy, science and learning from Islam, but the very hallmark of Enlightenment, liberal humanism, has its origins in Islam. It is based on the adab movement of classical Islam, which was concerned with the etiquette of being human. Islam developed a sophisticated system of teaching law and humanism that involved not just institutions such as the university, with its faculties of law, theology, medicine and natural philosophy, but also an elaborate method of instruction including work-study courses, a curriculum that included grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, medicine, and moral philosophy, and mechanisms for the formation of a humanist culture such as academic associations, literary circles, clubs and other coteries that sustain intellectuals and the literati. The adab literature and institutions were, in fact, what enlightenment was all about in Islam. One cannot have a revolt on behalf of reason in Islam because reason is central to its worldview: reason is the other side of revelation and the Qur’an presents both as ‘signs of God’. A Muslim society cannot function without either. While Muslims can hardly be exonerated for the decline of reason and learning in Muslim civilisation, it was colonialism that as deliberate policy destroyed adab culture in Muslim societies.

But Enlightenment Europe swallowed the adab system, including text books, en masse. However, since it was a product of an inferior culture and civilisation its origins had to be shrouded. Thus, classical Arabic had to be replaced with another classical language, Latin. This was followed by a systematic expunging of all traces of the influence of Islamic thought on Europe. From the days of Voltaire right up to 1980, thanks largely to the efforts of Enlightenment scholars, it was a general western axiom that Islam had produced nothing of worth in philosophy, science and learning.
The Enlightenment legacy that Islam and Europe have nothing in common, that Islam is only a darker shadow of the West, that liberal secularism is the destiny of all human cultures, is much in evidence in our newspapers and television, literature and scholarship, as well as in our politics and foreign policies. It is the bedrock of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ hypothesis, Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilisation’ thesis, and the neo-conservative ‘Project for the New American Century’. Voltaire’s Bastards, to use the title of John Ralston Saul brilliant 1992 book, are busy rationalizing torture, military interventions, western supremacy and demonising Islam and Muslims. The Enlightenment may have been big on reason but it was, as Saul shows so convincingly, bereft of both meaning and morality.
Forgive me if I don’t stand up and salute the Enlightenment.

From TPM: The Philosophers’ Magazine
Issue 42 3rd Quarter 2008

Black Skin, White Masks by Franz Fanon, Pluto, London, 2008
http://www.plutobooks.com/main.pl

I think it would be good if certain thing were said: Fanon and the Epidemiology of Oppression

(Direct quotations from Black Skin, White Masks are set in italics)

The opening gambit of Black Skin, White Masks ushers us towards an imminent experience: the explosion will not happen today. But a type of explosion is about to unfold in the text in front of us, in the motivations it seeks, in the different world it envisages and aims to create. We are presented with a series of statements, maxims if you like, both obvious and not so obvious: I do not come with timeless truths; fervour is the weapon of choice of the impotent; the black man wants to be white, the white man slaves to reach a human level. We are left with little doubt we are confronting a great deal of anger. The resentment takes us to a particular place: a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, where black is not a man, and mankind is digging into its own flesh to find meaning.

But this not simply a historic landscape, although Black Skin, White Masks is a historic text, firmly located in time and place. Fanon’s anger has a strong contemporary echo. It is the silent scream of all those who toil in abject poverty simply to exist in the hinterlands and vast conurbations of Africa. It is the resentment of all those marginalised and firmly located on the fringes in Asia and Latin America. It is the bitterness of those demonstrating against the Empire, the superiority complex of the neo-conservative ideology, and the banality of the ‘War on Terror’. It is the anger of all whose cultures, knowledge systems and ways of being that are ridiculed, demonised, declared inferior and irrational, and, in some cases, eliminated. This is not just any anger. It is the universal fury against oppression in general, and the perpetual domination of the Western civilisation in particular.

This anger is not a spontaneous phenomenon. It is no gut reaction, or some recently discovered passion for justice and equity. Rather, it is an anger borne out of grinding experience, painfully long self analysis, and even longer thought and reflection. As such, it is a guarded anger, directed at a specific, long term desire. The desire itself is grounded in self-consciousness: when it encounters resistance from the other, self-consciousness undergoes the experience of desire – the first milestone on the road that leads to dignity. Black Skin, White Masks offers a very particular definition of dignity. Dignity is not located in seeking equality with the white man and his civilisation: it is not about assuming the attitudes of the master who has allowed his slaves to eat at his table. It is about being oneself with all the multiplicities, systems and contradictions of one’s own ways of being, doing and knowing. It is about being true to one’s Self. Black Skin, White Masks charts the author’s own journey of discovering his dignity through an interrogation of his own Self – a journey that will not be unfamiliar to all those who have been forced to endure western civilisation.

1. I was born in the Antilles

Frantz Omar Fanon, born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, in the French colony of Martinique, was a complex figure, with multiple selves. He was, as he tells us, from Antilles but he ended his life thinking of himself as an Algerian. His parents belonged to the middle class community of the island: father a descendant of slaves, mother of mixed French parenthood. In Fort-de-France, he studied at Lycée Schoelcher, where one of his teachers was poet and writer Aimé César. Cesar’s passionate denouncement of colonial racism had a major influence on the impressionable Fanon. As a young dissident, he agitated against the Vichy regime in the Antilles and travelled to Dominica to support the French resistance in the Caribbean. Soon afterwards, he found himself in France where he joined the resistance against the occupying forces of Nazi Germany. While serving in the military, Fanon experienced racism on a daily basis. In France, he noticed that French women avoided black soldiers who were sacrificing their lives to liberate them. He was wounded; and was awarded Croix de Guerre for bravery during his service in the Free French forces.

After the War, Fanon won a scholarship to study medicine and psychiatry in Lyon.
While still a student he met José Dublé, a Frenchwoman who shared his convictions against racism and colonialism. The couple married in 1952, had one son, and stayed together for the rest of their lives. Fanon also began to use psychoanalysis to study the effects of racism on individuals, particularly its impact on the self-perception of blacks themselves. During the 1950’s metropolitan France was a centre of revolutionary philosophy and a magnet for writers, thinkers and activists from Africa. Fanon imbibed the ideas of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre; and became friends with Octave Mannoni, French psychoanalyst and author of Psychology of Colonization. As a young man searching for his own identity in a racist society, Fanon identified with the African freedom fighters who came to France seeking allies against European colonialism. He began to define a new black identity; and became actively involved in the anti-colonialist struggle. So when, in 1953, he was offered a job as head of the psychiatric department of Bilda-Joinville Hospital in Algiers he jumped at the opportunity.

Fanon arrived in Algeria just as the colony was on the verge of a full blown, violent struggle against the French. He was appalled by the racist treatment of Algerians and the disparity he witnessed between the living standards of the European colonisers and the indigenous Arab population. He developed a close rapport with the Algerian poor and used group therapy to help, as well study, his patients. There was intellectual ferment too. A major event of 1954 was the publication of Vacation de l’Islam by the Algerian social philosopher Malek Bennabi. Published to synchronize with the outbreak of the Algerian revolution, Vacation de l’Islam presented the radical concept of ‘colonisibilite’: the historical process through which Algeria, and other Muslim countries, declined culturally and intellectual to a stage where colonialism becomes a ‘historical necessity’.  Bennabi, who like Fanon spent most of his life struggling against French racism, distinguished between ‘a country simply conquered and occupied and a colonised country’ [1]. The later had lost its own cultural bearings and internalised the idea of the inherent superiority of the colonising culture. Fanon and Bennabi never met; but it is difficult to imagine their work did not fertilise each other’s thought.

The French response to the 1954 Algerian revolt was brutal, involving torture, killing, physical abuse and barbaric repression. For two years Fanon secretly supported the revolutionaries. Then, in 1956, he resigned his post and openly joined the National Liberation Front (FLN). He moved to Tunis, where he worked for Manouba Clinic and Neuropsychiatric Center and founded the radical magazine Moudjahid (from Jihad, meaning freedom fighter). Soon he acquired a reputation as a leading ideologue of the Algerian revolution. He received many death threats from the French and their sympathisers – which only served to strengthen his resolve. By now, Fanon identified himself as an Algerian. He travelled throughout Africa speaking on behalf of the NLF; and even served as an ambassador to Ghana on behalf of the provisional government of Algeria.

Fanon did not live to see Algeria acquire full independence. While still in Ghana he was diagnosed with leukaemia. He went first to the Soviet Union for treatment; and later to the United States. He died in Washington on 6th December 6, 1961.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Fanon was hailed as a revolutionary writer, a hero of the Third World and anti-colonial movement. He wrote his most influential book, The Wretched of the Earth, just before his death. Published in 1961, with a preface by Sartre, it became a key text for radical students and served as an inspiration for the Black Power Movement in the United States. While its endorsement of violence is problematic, The Wretched of the Earth offers one of the most penetrating analyses of the social psychology of colonialism. But Fanon’s celebrity collapsed almost as quickly as the Berlin Wall and he was even forgotten in Algeria which he claimed as his own. Conservative writers have reacted against his views on violence and leftist intellectuals have dismissed his revolutionary statements as outdated and naïve. But the arrival of postcolonial studies in the 1990 heralded a new interest in Fanon. Today, Fanon waits to be rediscovered by a new generation burning with a desire for change – the very emotion that motivated Fanon to set sail from Martinique.
2. The architecture of this book is rooted in the temporal

Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks when he was 27. Published in 1952, it was his first and perhaps most enduring book. And it was ignored. Its significance was recognised only after the death of the author, particularly after the publication of the English translation a decade and a half later in 1967. It was a year when anti-war campaigning was at its height; and student strikes and protests, that began at Columbia University, New York, started to spread like wildfire across the United States and Europe. Martin Luther King was leading the civil rights movement and was to be assassinated a year later. Advocates of black power were criticising attempts to assimilate and integrate black people. The book caught the imagination of all who argued for and promoted the idea of black consciousness. It became the bible of radical students, in Paris and London, outraged at the exploitation of the Third World.

Black Skin, White Masks was the first book to investigate the psychology of colonialism. It examines how colonialism is internalised by the colonised, how an inferiority complex is inculcated, and how, through the mechanism of racism, black people end up emulating their oppressors. It is due to the sensitivities of Fanon, says Ashis Nandy, that ‘we know something about the interpersonal patterns which constituted the colonial situation, particularly in Africa’ [2]. Fanon began a process of psychoanalytic deconstruction that was developed further first by Nandy in The Intimate Enemy and then by Ngugi wa Thiong in Decolonising the Mind (1986). Other theorists of colonial subjectivity have followed in their footsteps.

Fanon writes from the perspective of a colonised subject. He is a subject with a direct experience of racism who has developed a natural and intense hatred of racism. When it comes to experience, this is no ordinary subject: already the author has fought for the resistance in the Caribbean and France, has been wounded near the Swiss border, and received a citation for courage. He has a professional interest in psychoanalysis and speaks of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Gustav Jung without much distinction. He is going to offer us a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem, he says. But we can be sure that this is not a therapy session. Fanon is no armchair philosopher or academic theorist. He has a more urgent and pressing thing on his mind: liberation.

There is an urgency to Black Skin, White Masks that bursts from its pages. The text is full of discontinuities, changes in style, merging of genres, dramatic movement from analysis to pronouncements, switches from objective scientific discussion to deep subjectivity, transfers from theory to journalism, complex use of extended metaphors, and, not least, a number of apparent contradictions. As a genuine, and dare I say ‘old fashioned’ polymath, Fanon is not afraid to use any and all the tools and methods at his disposal: Marxism, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, medical dissection, and good old aphorisms. And he is just as happy to subvert them – a livid subversion that some would see as contradiction. But above all the text has an immediacy that engages and stirs us. We can feel a soul in turmoil, hear a voice that speaks directly to us, and see the injustices described being lived in front of our eyes. This is most evident in the chapter on ‘The Fact of Blackness’. Here, Fanon breaks out of all convention and simply lets his stream of consciousness wash on to the paper. All this whiteness that burns me. I sit down at the fire and became aware of my uniform. I had not seen it. It is indeed ugly. I stop there, for who can tell me what beauty is? This directness, this simmering anger, makes us uncomfortable because ‘civilised society’ does not like uncomfortable truths and naked honesty. But this is exactly what makes Black Skin, White Masks such a powerful and lasting indictment of western civilisation.

There is little point, I think, in accusing Fanon of sexism and gender bias. It is indeed true, as Bart Moore-Gilbert suggests, that Black Skin, White Masks ‘discriminates pointedly between the experiences of men and women of colour’ [3]. But who used gender neutral language in the 1950s? And yes, Fanon can be used both to attack and defend European humanism. That’s because European humanism does have a few redeeming features along with its totalising tendencies. He is critical of European universalism yet uses the discourse of psychoanalysis to reveal the emotional anomalies responsible for the resulting complexes because one can distance oneself from certain varieties of universalism and get closer to certain other notions of universal thought and values. Fanon is a contextual thinker and embraces that which makes most sense to him in the context of his dilemmas.

When reading Black Skin, White Masks one ought to keep the time and circumstances in which it was written firmly in mind. This is a dynamic text written in the heat of an intense, and often bloody, liberation struggle. It emerged from a life-and-death struggle, an individual as well as a collective struggle, concerned with the survival of the body as well as the survival of the soul. The struggle is concerned as much with freedom from colonialism as with liberation from the suffocating embrace of Europe, and the pretentions of its civilisation to be the universal destiny of all humanity. The text changes and unfolds itself as the experiences of the author transform and change him, as he suffocates, gaps, twists, struggles, and turns his back on the degradation of those who would make man a mere mechanism. For Fanon, the struggle is nothing less than an attempt to survive, to breathe the air of liberty.

We need to see the context. But we also need to lift our perceptions to see its global message. For we all desire what Fanon wants.

3. What does the black man want?

At first sight, Fanon is rather hard on the ‘black man’. He is supposed to be a good nigger who even lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell. But Fanon’s anger is directed not towards the ‘black man’ but the proposition that he is required not only to be black but he must be black in relation to the white man. It is the internalisation, or rather as Fanon calls it epidermalization, of this inferiority that concerns him. When the black man comes into contact with the white world he goes through an experience of sensitization. His ego collapses. His self-esteem evaporates. He ceases to be a self-motivated person. The entire purpose of his behaviour is to emulate the white man, to become like him, and thus hope to be accepted as a man. It is the dynamic of inferiority that concerns Fanon; and which ultimately he wishes to eliminate. This is the declared intention of his study: to enable the man of colour to understand…the psychological elements that can alienate his fellow Negro.

Whiteness, Fanon asserts, has become a symbol of purity, of Justice, Truth, Virginity. It defines what it means to be civilised, modern and human. That is why the Negro knows nothing of the cost of freedom; when he has fought for Liberty and Justice… these were always white liberty and white justice; that is, values secreted by his masters. Blackness represents the diametrical opposite: in the collective unconsciousness, it stands for ugliness, sin, darkness, immorality. Even the dictionary definition of white means clean and pure. We can find, in Roget’s Thesaurus, over 134 synonyms for whiteness, most with positive connotations. In contrast, Roget’s Thesaurus tells us black means dirty, prohibited and funereal. It provides 120 synonyms for black and blackness, none with positive connotation. This is why a white lie is excusable; and black lie is all that is wicked and evil. Evolution itself moves from black to white. Indeed, even the Merciful God is white, with a bushy beard and bright pink cheeks. The conclusion: One is white as one is rich, as one is beautiful, as one is intelligent. And the corollary: he is Negro who is immoral. To become moral in this scheme of the universe, Fanon tells us, it is necessary to cease being a Negro, cease being true to history and himself.

But Fanon’s anger is not directed simply at the black man who wants to turn his race white. He is equally dismissive of the man who adores the Negro: he is as ‘sick’ as the man who abominates him. The idealised Negro is equally a construction of the white man. He represents the flip side of the Enlightenment: he is constructed not as a real person with real history but an image. The idealised Negro, the noble savage, is the product of utopian thinkers, such as Sir Thomas Moore, who comes from ‘No place’ and is in the end ‘No person’. This Negro was born out of the need of European humanism to rescue itself from its moral purgatory and project itself, and displace, the original inhabitants of Latin American and the Caribbean. Not surprisingly, Fanon does not look on lovers of Negros with favour.

Liberation begins by recognising these constructions for what they are. The first impulse at the arrival of awareness is self-loathing: as I begin to recognise that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. Here, Fanon is articulating a common feeling. If all you represent – your history, your culture, your very self – is nothing but ugly, naïve and wicked, then it is not surprising that you do not see yourself in a kindly manner. But this neurotic situation is not the route to emancipation. There is only one solution: to raise above the absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal.

So the first thing that the black man wants is to say no. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom. And, above all, no to those who attempt to build a definition of him.

While it is understandable, Fanon asserts, that the first action of the black man is a reaction, it is necessary to go beyond. But the next step brings us face to face with a dilemma. Should the black man define himself in reaction to the white man thus confirming the white man as a measure of all things? Or should one strive unremittingly for a concrete and ever new understanding of man? Where is the true mode of resistance actually located? How should the black man speak for himself?

4. To speak means …above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilisation

The black man speaks with a European language. He becomes proportionately whiter in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language; or indeed, any western language, nowadays most particularly English. So, almost immediately, the back man is presented with a problem: how to posit a ‘black self’ in a language and discourse in which blackness itself is at best a figure of absence, or worse a total reversion? The problem, however, is not limited simply to the use of language. When a black man arrives in France it is not only the language that changes him. He is changed also because it is from France that he received his knowledge of Mostesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, but also because France gave him his physicians, his department head, his innumerable little functionaries. At issue is thus not just language but also the civilisation of the white man.

Fanon uses ‘white’ as a generic term for European civilisation and its representatives.
In contrast, ‘black’ refers to the non-West in general. The question then becomes: can the non-West develop its own self-definition by using the tools and instruments of western civilisation? In human sciences, Fanon detects a problem: they have their own drama. They have emerged from a particular cultural milieu and reflect the concerns and prejudices of that culture and worldview. If western civilisation and culture are responsible for colonial racism, and Europe itself has a racist structure, then we should not be too surprised to find this racism reflected in the discourses of knowledge that emanate from this civilisation and that they work to ensure that structural dominance is maintained. The seeds of inferiority of the non-West are already laid in the first chapter of history that the others have compiled for me, the foundation of cannibalism has been made eminently plain in order that I may not lose sight of it. But western history not only writes cannibalism in the very chromosomes of the non-West, it also writes off the history of the non-West. History, both History of the West and History as perceived by the West, is transformed into a mighty river into which all Other histories flow and merge as mere minor and irrelevant tributaries. What Fanon detects in human sciences applies equally to social sciences. Anthropology was developed specifically to described, manage and contain the black man. Political science places white man at the apex and is deeply Eurocentric. Science and Empire went hand in hand: the consequent racial economy of science, where its benefits accrue primarily to the rich developed nations and its negative consequences are suffered largely by the developing countries, are patently plain. What Fanon says about the comics of the 1950s, the magazines are put together by white men for little white men, with their white heroes and evil black villains, works just as effectively in the way disciplines are taught, discourses are promoted, and knowledge is advanced. In all these areas there is a constellation of postulates, a series of propositions that slowly and subtly… work their way into one’s mind and shape one’s view of the world. All these disciplines and discourses are the products of a culture which sees itself hierarchically at the top of the ladder of civilisation; they postulate all that the world contains and all that the world has produced and produces, is by and for the white man. This is why it is taken as an a priori give that the white man is the predestined master of this world.

But the dominance of western culture, and its globalisation through this dominance, should not be confused with universalism. Just because a particular discipline or a discourse is accepted or practised throughout the world, it does not mean that discipline or discourse is universally valid and applicable to all societies. After all, as I have written elsewhere [4], burgers and coke are eaten and drunk throughout the world but one would hardly classify them as universally embraced, healthy and acceptable food: what the presence of burgers and coke in every city and town in the world demonstrate is not their universality but the power and dominance of the culture that produced them. The same logic applies to disciplines and discourses. When Fanon talks of universalism he is not talking of the alleged universalism of Western dominance which is a product of European history, emerges from western discourses, or is the gift of liberal humanists of the Enlightenment. His thinking lies elsewhere.

So what does Fanon means when he wants to transcend his ethnic perspectives and affiliation and wage his anti-colonial struggle in the name of universal human values? What are we to make of the fact that he also sometimes roundly denounces this universalism? Some post-colonial theorists have seen this as two different varieties of Fanon. Nicolas Harrison, for example, suggests the way to reconcile ‘these two distinct strains within Fanon’s writing, which is at times anti-universal and at times pro-universal (and anti-pseudo-universal) is to relativize/historicize them in terms of personal history and the changes in opinion that his experienced produced. Another would be to treat his varied claims as a writer’s rhetorical and/or strategic gestures, and to consider their efficacy in mobilizing opinion, generating solidarity, etc.’ [5]. But Fanon is not anti-universal per se – he is only anti a particular kind of universalism, one based on the notion of superiority which projects that superiority as a universal discourse. His stated purpose in examining (western) universalism is clear: I hope by analysing it to destroy it. There are not two contradictory but one single, unified position here. Moreover, Fanon is not concerned at all with postmodern ambiguity; it could hardly be so given the devastating dominance of the coloniser he experienced firsthand. For him, the nuances in the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised are irrelevant given the fact that the coloniser is totally deaf to the political condition of the colonised and what the colonised has to say.

Fanon’s idea of universalism is based on the notions of dignity, equality and equity: on a concrete and ever new understanding of man. It is a universalism that does not exist as yet, it cannot emerge from the dominant discourse, and it cannot be seen as a grand narrative that privileges a particular culture and its representatives. It is the universalism we need to struggle for and build. That is why Fanon is not content simply with knowledge and criticism. He wants man – and here he does mean man as the universal person – to be actional. Having thought, we must prepare to act. Our prime task as humans, he assert, is to preserve in all our relationship the respect for the basic values that constitute a human world. The world is not human. Don’t believe that appeals to reason or to respect for human dignity can alter reality, Fanon asserts. If you want a different reality, a different world, you have to change the one you have.

5. What matters is not to know the world but to change it

Fanon was not a postmodern theorist. His ideas emerged in the crucible of colonial experience, were put into practice, and used to aid the anti-colonial struggle. Indeed, by the time Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks, he had already fought for the French resistance in the Caribbean and against the Germans in France. He had lived in a racist society and felt its dark side; he spoke with knowledge and experience. He is thus quite different from most post-colonial writers. But can we see him as the intellectual father of postcolonial studies? As  Jenny Sharpe notes, Fanon and other anti-colonial writers, such as C L R James, Aime Cesaire, Amilcar Cabral, Ngugi wa Thiong and Albert Memmi, ‘were geographically and historically removed from the institutional development of postcolonial studies. Unlike the literature of decolonisation, which was bound up with Third World national liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, postcolonial studies is primarily a First World academic discourse of the eighties and nineties’ [6]. Fanon did not have the luxury for theorising for the sake of theorising. And unlike many postcolonial texts, Black Skin, White Masks is not a technical manual of theory full of esoteric – but ultimately futile – jargon. Rather, it is a text full of passion, argument, analysis and anecdotes. Fanon wants to show that action does not follow automatically from understanding or theorising. Action requires aspiration and desire. That’s what he seeks to communicate; that’s what he tries to promote.

A great deal has changed since Fanon’s time. But the underlying structures of oppression and injustice remain the same. Empire shaped the current national identity of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. And Empire continues to play a key role in the psychological makeup, political and cultural outlook of Africa and Asia. The old European empires have been replaced by a new Empire, a hyperpower that wants to rule and mould the world in its own image. Its ‘war on terror’ has become a licence to flout every international law and notion of human rights. Racism, both in its most blatant and incipient forms, is the foundation of Fortress Europe – as is so evident in the re-emergence of the extreme right in Germany and Holland, France and Belgium, as well as Scandinavia, and the discourse of refugees, immigrants, asylum seekers and the Muslim population of Europe. Direct colonial rule may have disappeared; but colonialism, in its many disguises as cultural, economic, political and knowledge-based oppression, lives on.

So Fanon’s voice is as important and relevant today as it was during the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, in many respects it is even more so. For Fanon, the nature and mode of operation of oppression is irrelevant. It is utopian to try to ascertain in what ways one kind of inhuman behaviour differs from another kind of inhuman behaviour. The inhumanity of today is not different from the inhumanity of yesteryears for all sources of exploitation resemble one another; they are all applied against the same ‘object’: man. We need to do much more, Fanon insists, than simply be aware of this reality: we need to take continuous action to transform and transcend this reality.

As a critique of the West, Black Skin, White Masks has few equals. But its true value is as a clarion call against complacency. Fanon warns us to be perpetually on guard against the European unconscious where the most shameful desires lie dormant; against modern society where life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt, and which spells death; against the idea of progress where everyone climbs up towards whiteness and light and is engulfed by a single, monolithic notion of what it means to be human. And, most of all, he warns us to be vigilant to the constant and perpetual refashioning of hate: hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognised guilt complexes. Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behaviour; in a sense, he has to become hate.

This message is as fresh today as when it was written. Fanon was far, far ahead of his time. This is why he is disliked by some. This is why he is misunderstood by others. This is exactly why you should know him and listen to what he says. And if you recognise yourself in his words, then like him, I say, you have made a step forward.

Notes

1. Malek Bennabi, Islam in History and Society, Islamic Research Institute, Islamabad, 1987, p53.

2. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, OUP, Delhi, 1983, p30.

3. Bart Moore-Gilbert,  Postcolonial Theory, Verso, London, 1997, p145.

4. For a more detailed discussion of this see my essay ‘Beyond development: an Islamic perspective’ in Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures: A Ziauddin Sardar Reader, edited by Sohail Inayatullah and Gail Boxwell, Pluto Press, London, 2003; and Vinay Lal, Empire of Knowledge, London, Pluto Press, 2002.

5. Nicolas Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism, Polity, Oxford, 2003, p158.

6. Jenny Sharpe, ‘US Multiculturalism’, in Postcolonial Studies edited by Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000, p114.

31st Corbishley Memorial Lecture, London – 27th November 2008
(written text of the lecture prepared by Professor Sardar)

Ladies and gentlemen, I feel honoured to be invited to deliver this year’s Corbishley Lecture. I must begin by taking issue with my assigned subject. Far from talking or shouting, it seems to me organised religion is in retreat in Britain’s public space, reduced to a muffled whisper if not exactly a dying whimper. This may seem a strange judgement from a member of a faith most associated in the public mind with bangs! However, I am clear in my own mind that bomb o grams of perverted faith are political acts. They are political acts of desperation which testify to the failure of the Muslim mainstream to join a relevant conversation of faiths. In this Muslims are part of a more general collective failure whose result is the marginalisation of the true purpose and activity of religion in the public domain of British society. As people of all faiths conjointly and alike none of us are succeeding in raising our voices to talk and educate the public sufficiently or appropriately in the meaning of our faiths. The void this creates is only too evident. As the entire world was seduced by the ethics of ‘Greed is Good’ where was our duty of care? Were we talking, indeed shouting, of camels and the eyes of needles? Or, as I would say, shouting about the need to purify wealth by delivery of social justice and real resources to the poor. As the globalised economy reaps what has been sown where are our voices demanding that the first priority is the option for the poor and detailing what in conscience must be done to protect the least of those in dire straits? We have a great deal we ought to be shouting about – but we are not even whispering because we have no secure handhold on the public domain. We have ceded our place, and that is a common predicament for all religions, all people of faith here and now in Britain.

My concern then is with the mainstream, not extremism. I believe the most secure route to eradication of the seduction of the extreme is ministering to the God shaped void in the daily lives of the mass of the population. Our task is to become relevant to the issues, concerns and circumstances of the society in which we co-exist, asserting the need for an acknowledged role for faith, whatever that faith maybe, in the public life of our society. This challenge raises its own questions. What part in the activity of the faithful, or even the mildly interested, should religion fulfil in public life? What does society gain, what has society lost by the retreat of religion from public life? What can and should religion contribute to the life of society? Are the religious a reliable, safe pair of hands to be entrusted with a role in public life? In what ways can and should the religious and various faith communities contribute to public life in Britain? Of course, we also have to confront the elephant in the room. How can religion occupy a place in the public space of a multi-faith and genuinely multi-cultural society? If our only answer to the last question is, in effect, to throw in the towel and agree to remain as quiet as church mice for fear of something worse, then we the religious are the architects of our absence in the public space.

As people of faith we have much to talk about together. We live together at a time when our social fabric is unravelling and unprepared to confront the hardships that await us. Generations have grown up knowing only ever expanding material horizons. These generations have been abandoned to the untender mercilessness of a system of values which equates human worth with what material goods we have and display. We live in a consumer culture where personal identity is shaped by the advertising glitz that gives a lifestyle profile to the brand names of the products, goods and services one selects and owns. The xyz alphabet of the me generations must now face hard choices not only of economic recession but of saving the planet from our history of extravagance, finding solutions for the obscenity of entrenched national and global poverty and inequality that blights the lives and confounds the hopes and opportunities of billions at home as well as abroad. Then there is an abundance of moral and ethical conundrums we have accumulated through the exponential growth in our knowledge and ability to manipulate the processes of the life of humans, animals, plants and the very substance of our planet. With knowledge we have amassed accompanying ignorance not least of how to reason in conscience with the difference between what can be done and what should or ought to be done, whether our power to know and to do is applied for true betterment of the human condition or contributes to debasing our humane capacities and indeed could even end by making us less human. It is not merely nurturing the development of and concern for conscience which is the proper duty of religion. Our religions are in many ways the last bastions of the language and terms in which to reason with and think through the dilemmas that become ever more common in our daily lives. What do generations bred to endless possibilities know of sacrifice, endurance, acceptance, self denial, duty of care and prudential considerations? These are our issues. It is our responsibility to present them as positive contributions to sustainable humanity so that those who have no religious formation are not conned by the ethos of the marketplace or left with the erroneous impression that all we have to offer them are joyless ‘thou shalt nots’.  We cannot leave unchallenged the dominant philosophy of our time that all life amounts to is individual and personal satisfaction, the fulfilment of self. We have to offer alternatives to all whose journeys of personal indulgence leave them asking ‘is that all there is?’

Before considering the complex challenges we, as people of faith, face I want to begin with some commonplace details. According to all measures British society still considers this to be a Christian country. True, church attendance has been in long gradual decline. Yet a majority of British people consider themselves Christian irrespective of whether they participate in formal organised acts of worship or not. Of the 92% of British people who answered the voluntary religious affiliation question on the 2001 census nearly three quarters (72%) declared themselves to be Christian as opposed to 16% who stated they had no religion. The no religion category included atheists, agnostics, heathens and self proclaimed Jedi.  And I would make the point that the general presumption that minority non Christian religions fare better in maintaining the affiliation, attendance and practise of their adherents, is a generosity too far. The truth requires unpicking the distinction between cultural identity, faithful practise and informed educated participation in the fellowship of an interpretive community. The distinction is a complicated manoeuvre, but one which would reveal a situation comparable to that among the generality of the Christian population. There are comparable numbers of what might be termed latent Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists as there are latent, or should that be residual, Christians. To presume that all those who self identify as believers know the meaning and potential of what they claim to believe in is, we should all accept, a gross overstatement.

My point, however, is that the figures for self identification with religion endure while the public acknowledgement of religion gets further and further marginalised. When I was a lad the Sunday morning television programmes for Asians – all geared to encouraging us, especially women,  to learn English – were always followed by a televised act of Christian worship, which I understand were allocated proportionally among the various denominations over the course of each year. The Radio Times reserved two front covers per year, one of which was invariably Easter, for religious imagery and plugging religious programmes. Radio 4 broadcast a daily act of worship to all permutations of band widths or frequencies and audiences. As I understand it, according to the original charter of the BBC there were only three persons who had to be employed by the corporation and one of them was the head of religious programmes! Good Friday saw a reserved place for a televised act of observance between noon and 3pm. It reflected the fact that I can even remember a time when banks closed between noon and 3pm on Good Friday. Christmas stamps used to reflect the nativity story, rather than Santa appearing to poo down a chimney. Television schedules gave prominence on Christmas Day itself to acts of worship and a number of programmes with explicit religious themes. These are just a few of the signs and symbols that occur to me whose disappearance represents the retreat of religious observance from the public space. They are harbingers and consequences of a general shift in the temper of society.

The process which gradually but ineffably has carried religious observance to the margins is a product of radical secularisation. A great deal of the spiritual, over the course of centuries, was transferred to temporal control without noticeable effect on public acknowledgement of the importance of organised religion. But for some time now we have passed the point of critical mass. Secularisation has become synonymous with something quite distinct: secularism. Secularism is an organised philosophy even when not an outright ideology. It has claimed the centre ground because it has persuaded many of its superior ability to serve the real needs of society. Allegedly, it is the neutral, dispassionate and disinterested outlook which alone is capable of maintaining a peaceful conversation between all the competing voices, factions, interest groups, ideas and ideologies contending in the public space of an increasingly complex and heterogeneous society. What fits secularism for a dominant role is its trademark: doubt, perpetual doubt that debunks, over turns and interrogates all grand narratives claiming to explain the human condition. The clear implication of secularism is that conviction, convincement of almost any kind, is the product of a closed, unreasoning and potentially irrational, not to say fanatical, mind and hence by implication bad and most certainly a limited and inferior outlook.
The consequence is a severe God problem in society. God has become the great unmentionable. For the faithful, God is an absolute reality, whether found through mystery and clouds of unknowing or revealed in lucid clarity. This defies the uncertainty principle that is the essential feature of secularism. Religion in any and all its manifestations can be only a subject for scrutiny, interrogation and tests of justification and legitimacy but never simple affirmation or mere acceptance. Under such a dispensation religion is best understood and treated as a quaint personal and private predilection. Its claims on the public space are at best traditional, purely ornamental and ceremonial, getting a polite indulgence on the margins for a few high days and holidays but not given routine prominence, the kind of educative exposure that would unduly impact on popular consciousness.  So Songs of Praise endures, because God can be allowed to have a few good tunes. For the rest religious programming becomes comfy sofa magazine shows of unbearable niceness and a complete absence of anything challenging or argumentative, let alone disturbing to the conscience of the times and virtually never mentioning God. Alternatively, it may appear in investigative trawls through the perverse and perversions advanced in the name of religion by the extremes. The perception grows in society that true and authentic expression of religion is to be found among the extremists, making the plaintive whimpers of the mainstream ever harder to hear and more subject to equivocation and outright incomprehension.

The result is not only an absence of religion in the public space but also the growth of a profound religious illiteracy that spreads like a virus through society. Fewer and fewer people become acquainted with what religion actually says and does. Religious education by the faithful is something children must be shielded from because it is tantamount to brainwashing, a foreclosure of choice. Though how one learns anything without education is a question best not asked. And why education in the doubt of secularism, or its curriculum surrogate comparative religion, is not merely another form of indoctrination that prejudices the capacity for belief and commitment is again a question that dares not state its case. We exist in a climate where all religions must struggle against the tide of inquisition which usually focuses on monumentally irrelevant questions and miss the salient points of what genuinely matters to people of faith. Self description, self portrayal by the faithful becomes more and more difficult further compounding the rise of general religious illiteracy. We end with a situation where those who do not believe assume the right to define what is authentic in religion and therefore who and what is typical, representative of religions belief and believers. While this is an acute problem for minority non Christian religions, and I speak as one of the sorest afflicted, it is by no means exclusive to us. I would suggest it now affects what passes for common knowledge of Christianity itself.

Society has accumulated both a distorted and reductive idea of what constitutes religion, any religion. It has only a minimal understanding of the beliefs, practise and contemporary interpretations of any and all religions. And all religions are best known through their least appealing historic failures. Religion has gone beyond being what believers say and do in the name of religion, the sociological reformulation of the comparative religion explanation. It has become identified by the very worst believers have ever done to themselves and others in history. In which case it is little wonder we are not exactly welcome in the public space – for none of us, or only the most select few, can claim to be without taint, to be entirely innocent of grievous faults, always to have lived up to our best calling either in the practise of our own faith or in relations with those of other faiths.

The generalities of the conception of religion, any religion, at large in Britain today present us with a bleak and depressing picture. Before we can consider what is to be done we need to take stock of what is left of the presence of religion in the public space. The reductive redoubt falls into two categories: religion is ritual; religion on its best behaviour is about niceness, a vague, non specific woolly sense of some sorts of moral and ethical parameters.

Ritual is the most obvious relic of religion and not surprisingly has come to be seen not only as what religion is about but as the prism through which it is best understood. Ritual observance is about high days and holidays and the rites of passage of human existence: the occasions marking birth, marriage and death. Individually this is how people make the significance of major events in their lives memorable, utilising the facility of formal religion as an integral part of the opportunity for ‘a bit of do’. I am not one of those who spurn this kind of encounter. I would argue it can be one of the few occasions when religious out-reach is possible. And there is another face of such ritualised religious observance I find myself supporting more and more. It seems to me grand state occasions, which integrate or revolve around acts of religious observance have become increasingly important in the bleak landscape we face. I think of things like the funeral of the late Queen Mother – vicariously the memorialising and laying to rest we would all like to give to a beloved grandmother and expressed through the solemnity of religion where we hear the words that signify what belief is about, even if we do not necessarily grasp the fullness of their meaning. Ritual is not redundant, ritual is important as occasion for collective shared meaning if we can learn how to use it constructively. I remember, for example, being in Malaysia at the time of the Dunblane school atrocity when a gunman shot and killed children in their primary school. I was deeply impressed and moved to find that BBC World Service television broadcast the entirety of a church service from Dunblane. One could pick out other such instances. True we can complain such instances are reductive, religion is not solely about celebration or consolation. However, both are significant starting points, points of entry on public consciousness. If state occasions and public memorials are the only time we get to acknowledge the existence of something beyond the material, so be it. Our challenge is how we find a way to go further.

If religion as ritual is a reductive relic, the growth of the presentation of religion as niceness is what I would term a disaster.  It is little more than a placebo for a society that no longer either understands what religion is or knows how to cope with what religion should or ought to be. All those dread magazine programmes which are about the nice things religious people do but run a mile from engaging with why, what these actions signify and how they have meaning and implications for the whole of one’s outlook on life the universe and everything are a sad reflection of what vestigial religion has become.  On the one hand it suggests that religion pertains to morality in the broadest sense without ever seriously engaging with why or how such moral behaviour derives from or relates to religion. And, of course, niceness precludes asking any kind of tough questions to disturb the composure of the religious, the latently religious or the openly non religious.

Religion as moral reflection is the Thought for the Day factor. It is the fiendish challenge to be engaging, personable, relevant, pithy and profound in less than four minutes. The considerable constraints of the medium mean a general acceptance that mention of God is, by and large, a switch off for the audience. The thought that occurs to me is while this vestigial and truncated nod in the direction of religion testifies to a thirst for moral consideration, what is actually offered to the audience is morality without context. For people of faith moral reflection is rooted in its only proper context, the belief we are all answerable to a power far beyond the human. It is God consciousness alone which makes moral imperatives important in our individual and social life. Being witty and wise, a good raconteur, may make the population think more kindly of the religious on a daily basis. It does not amount to a bridgehead for spreading education and understanding of the content and meaning of any particular faith. The rotation of multifaith voices which is now the order of the days makes its contribution to the identikit interchangeable world religion gloss that is little different from the new age eclectic make your own religion for your own personal world philosophy. The message gets us little further than the proposition: be nice and be good if you can, should circumstances permit. Most of the thoughts I hear on such daily outings leave me with an enduring feeling of sadness and remorse, however wise and apposite their content.

I would suggest this prevalence of niceness is a feature of another problem, the real dilemma we need to consider. The placebo effect is a function of what society considers the intractable problems of how to placate the greatest number in what is now a multi faith rather than just a multi denominational society.  It is that very British response of being polite. It seeks out the lowest common denominator by which everyone seems to have some mention while leaving all the big issues determinedly ignored.  I happened upon an instance recently which illustrates the point. On a Sunday morning magazine programme I watched a film report in which one nice white English family was despatched to spend one day sharing the Ramadan fast with an equally nice Muslim family. The two families clearly had never met before, a certain reticence and stiffness was evident all round. Other than the fact that Muslims do not eat – though even the exact specifics of this rather significant element managed to be glossed over – we learnt little apart from the fact the children of the white family did not fancy the idea much. Virtually nothing of what it means to fast, not I agree a very visual subject, was included. And no sooner had they arrived than the white family departed laden with packages of cooked food – what that has to do with fasting not being explained either. This, I am sure, is what the producers of the programme considered doing their bit for cross cultural understanding: let niceness prevail and we will somehow muddle through. Let me state clearly I am of the opinion it is precisely what will not do at all.

It seems to me we are toying with the thin edge of the wedge that is the American solution. In a country awash with religion Americans have a public space where all religions can participate and be noticed –within caveats and reason – but only on the basis of being minimised. So, one can publicly wish people ‘happy holidays’ but for goodness sake don’t mention Christmas. Thus the entire basis from which Christianity derives can only be privately understood and represented in the public space only in the secularised form of a mass excuse for questionable un-Christian consumer excess. American houses are dressed up, illuminated with Santas, reindeer, snowmen, helpful elves and even the occasional angel doing who knows what damage to the global environment all for the sake of a religious celebration. Meanwhile people dedicated to secularism under the guise of the separation of church and state determine that display of nativity scenes in public spaces will cause offence to non Christians and should not be permitted. It is not only a Martian who would find it impossible to understand what’s going on. Put me down as totally befuddled! The cultural influence of America is such that similar lunacy is on the rise here in Britain.

And so, at last we need to consider the elephant question. Is it really the case that Muslim, Hindu or Sikh are or would be affronted by public display of nativity scenes? Or indeed would they be offended by more robust and abundant public reference to and acknowledgement of Christian worship and observance. My assessment, from all I know and have experienced, is certainly not. It would be taken as an encouraging sign by minorities that religion matters and would invariably lead to pleas for ‘me too’ – and that is the elephant we need to hunt down. What afflicts religion in the public space in Britain begins with what afflicts Christianity in a Christian country. The dilemmas of the public space have not been created by the arrival of non Christian faiths – that is an excuse, a rationalisation after the fact. But while Christianity is in retreat in the public space there is no hope that the question of how the public space can should or ought to be made available to minorities, to non Christian faiths will be sensibly discussed let alone resolved. All faiths, therefore, face a common shared dilemma. For the public space is important in establishing balance, setting benchmarks that affect the teaching of what religion is, what it requires and most importantly what it neither requires nor permits among its followers. The public space is vital for the self representation of religions to ensure there can be informed public debate about how we construct an equitable, just and honourable mutually respectful society that is good for welcomes and includes the best contributions of all its citizens. I would argue we all have a great deal to gain from mutual support in finding answers to problems that already do and will continue to affect us all, though perhaps in different ways.

Let me briefly explain why the arrival of non Christian faiths is not basic to the problem. The popular image of the inability of various religious to get along with one another does not start, as a lived experience here in Britain, with Christian Muslim relations, though the history of Christian Jewish relations is a different matter, it does not begin with Christian Hindu or Christian Sikh or Christian Buddhist relations. In honesty we have to recognise it begins within Christianity itself. Intolerance, religious wars and persecution are internal to the history of Christian religion in Britain. The question of tolerance, mutual tolerance among Christian denominations is a long struggle not entirely ended. We all have a great deal to learn from that history: first how not to repeat it ever again; second how to extract from it constructive elements that can create a route map to a genuinely tolerant society where faith is mutually understood and mutually respected and where religions are collectively strengthened to portray themselves in their own terms and take on an active role in the public life.

Tolerance is a virtue, but it is far from easy. True tolerance is not being nice; it is making the difficult choice to respect and give access to beliefs and practises you are sincerely convinced should not exist. If indeed the religious can achieve this task we can truly lead the way for the rest of society. What we are seeking is not an abrogation of the identity and distinctiveness of each religion, not a melange, the all religions are the same option – clearly they are not. What I am seeking and hoping can come to pass is something much more taxing, but ultimately rewarding. I want to consider the possibility that we transcend not our distinctions but our faulty understanding and application of exclusivity.  If religions can overcome this propensity and envision an inclusive public space of informed respectful mutual coexistence I believe they can lay the groundwork for what I call transmodernity.

So what is the job the religious should set as their prime target? Simply put, and with such profound complexity as the idea of ‘simple faith’, the return of a respect for sacredness as the underpinning of social values. And the commitment to social values as the necessity for ensuring human dignity, social justice, equity and the opportunity for all to fulfil their God given talents and be included in the project of bettering the condition of our society and the whole world for all people. The betterment we seek can only be found through efforts to build sustainable peace and mutual tolerance. It is our task to explain how God consciousness is what I would term the secure handhold that should lead us on this path and help us to make better choices, to assess and make judgements about how we are progressing in the right direction or not. It is no small task. But it is quintessentially the religious task. What we share, in all our diversity, is the common sense of our createdness. We are not merely sentient beings in charge of our own destiny. We are agents of a Creator beholden to the source from which we receive the great gift of life, beholden for how we use our endowments and talents, beholden for how we exercise the responsibilities of the freedom of our existence, beholden for how we treat all others who are equally created beings, beholden for how we make use of the material world into which we are born, beholden and answerable beyond this life and this world for all our actions in this life. For people of faith all things are not relative, not endlessly open to the dictates of circumstance or human fads and fancy. The questions of life, about how we live, individually and collectively, are questions of choice and accountability to be weighed and reasoned with on scales of judgement: good, better, best as compared with bad, worse, and worst selecting as best we are able the options which promote and sustain human betterment for all and the earth we share. This is meaning of religion.

The substance of agreement that unites us is considerable. However, these basic propositions come to us through diverse histories, different founding texts, and different traditions of human interpretation, both within and between different religions. We have different terminology and ways of saying what we mean on the same subject. Moreover, shared values come in different guises, analogous yet often so differently expressed, differently structured and bound into different cultural systems that the commonalities are not immediately obvious. And culture is not the meaning of religion, only its flawed man made vessel, so culture can become a byword for distorting religion into customs and practises which in effect countermand the teachings of religion and the delivery of religious values. Not everything that comes down to us through history makes finding commonality and common cause easy. The commonalities are things we have to search for through and beyond the human history which divides us into distinct identities and groupings. Values, morals and ethics are where we can meet, if we make the effort to find our common ground. Values, morals and ethics matter because they are our road map and compass bearings for living a God conscious life. They are not endlessly flexible, but they are ways of asking questions, reasoning with and determining how to negotiate the circumstances of our times in the best possible way.

The very diversity which appears to divide us provides an important lesson. All our differences substantiate that there is more than one way to seek righteousness. At our best we all have diverse, multiple ways of organising and delivering shared values. We each have to find our own way to be relevant to the circumstances and conditions of contemporary times, to be modern. In our different ways the process of reasoning with our times to find the common ground of shared values can be a positive force. In a dialogue, or more correctly now and in Britain, a polylogue among our differences has the potential to illuminate new possibilities for us all. In our separate yet mutual efforts to be relevant we can learn from each other and come to find and apply new insights on our own understanding of our own beliefs. Living together confronted by shared circumstances we have much to learn from each other. I do not mean by this that we embark on a process of becoming each other, that we negate the differences among and between us. I mean we can find ways in which we can transcend our differences by using our religious and cultural values to enhance our capacity to live peacefully together with mutual respect and tolerance. Such transcendence places its emphasis on how we put our faith in action rather than focusing on our theological differences. I am not saying such differences become irrelevant but I am suggesting they are not insuperable obstacles to collective effort. I am certain they could, should, and ought to help us all, each in our own way, to rise to the very best that we are called to be. Instead of obstacles, we have to make them hurdles we surmount to achieve peaceful coexistence and mutual promotion of harmonious community through diverse fellowship of faiths. This is the condition I call transmodernity.

Transmodernity is a concept designed to address the positive element of self-renewal and self reformation that exists in all diverse world cultures. I should explain that initially I developed this concept to address the global problem of dominance, the dominance of perspectives derived solely from the history of western civilization. Dominance is a fact of history, but one which has had a pernicious effect on our world. It constrains non-western cultures and identities, shackles them with the slur of inferiority and in consequence deforms the possibility of a genuinely plural world, a world that liberates and includes the constructive contribution of all communities and human imagination. Dominance is a doctrine of exclusivity that insists those who do not subscribe, align themselves with and conform to its strictures are marginalized. As I have tried to make clear the dominance of our day is a secularist ascendancy which has turned its back not just on the cultural diversity but also on religious diversity within western civilisation itself. If, and I am by no means sure it has, this has been accepted by British society it ill suits the worldview and cultural formation of minority communities in Britain. It inhibits them by disorienting their commonly accepted lifeways and social antennae. It works to make genuine inclusive, full participation in British society an intractable problem. It makes difference the only function of multiculturalism. Whereas what we need to locate and bring into the mainstream is what culture, the extensive expression of religious identity, is actually for – an adaptive mechanism that enables cooperation and collaboration in mutually shared effort to make society as a whole a better place for everyone.

It is for this reason that I think we need the idea of transmodernity to help us transcend the limitations of the multiculturalism we have practised to date. Dominance is also inherent in our own religious outlooks. The missionary zeal of monotheistic religions leads to an aspiration to convert or conqueror the world. Each faith – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – not only has an exclusivist notion of truth but insists that truth is the same for everyone and at all times. Transmodernity means we transcend such conventional notions of religious truth and traditional ideas of religious dominance. I think monotheistic faiths need to move forward and recognise that each faith is true in its own terms and Truth is so complex, so Infinite, that it cannot be totally enclosed within a single religious outlook. Truth may not be contingent but it can be seen in different light, at different times, by different people, with different perspectives. There are different truths; but each truth is important and immutable for those who hold it. Everyone must be allowed to live by the worldview which seems true to them. This will be a painful realisation for certain religious communities but it is an essential step forward if the monotheistic faiths are to transcend their history of antagonism and conflict.

If the problem is dominance then transmodernity is arriving at a social compact which does not privilege any one standpoint including religion, secularism or liberal humanism. This will seem a troubling prospect for some. A statement of faith is the ultimate privileging of one way of viewing the world. But there are none among us who in conscience would not acknowledge that our faith includes, demands and requires a duty of care, extending the benefit of our values enacting our moral and ethical framework on behalf of all humanity whether of our faith or not. We are all called to care for humanity as a whole as they are. We are all called to care for the wellbeing of all God’s creation, human, animal, vegetable and mineral. What transmodernity asks of religion is perhaps more even than it asks of secular liberal humanism. Yet what it asks is already inherent in the faiths we profess. And that is why if the religious can make this transformation they can lead the way to a better human future for all. What transmodernity asks of us is to give to others our very best; but to offer our best according to the needs of others in such ways as they can truly receive it greatest benefit; to do what is right according to our faith and understanding not irrespective of what other people believe but irrespective of whether they believe as we do. It is a considerable distinction. And it can only be achieved by a negotiation through difference; it requires a search for consensus across and respecting our differences. It is a negotiation about how we live together in the world as people with different identities, identities derived from faith which remain distinct yet find their truest meaning in creating a peaceful, harmonious, sustainable society that is just, equitable, concerned with meeting the needs, realising the potential and including the contribution of all. In making such a society we may all be changed. My argument, however, is that we will all be changed into better representatives of our different faiths. What will change most is the society in which we live together. We can create the opportunity of remaking it more in the image and according to the dictates of faithful conscience. If we open ourselves to such a future we construct the possibility of more open futures grounded in the example of living faiths. We offer society the potential of realising the main product of transmodernity: mutually assured diversity.

In many ways I think I am asking us all to consider that religion has lost hold of its place in society by seeming to be more concerned with the claims to exclusivity and dominance of our theology, the particularities of our doctrine than with working for what we are called to bring forth as a result of faith. Instead of ‘Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven’ we have given too much attention to making my kingdom as I say it should be on the human authority of my religious interpretation. In this insistence on orthodoxy we have encouraged secularisation as the way to make the peace among and between us. Thus we jettisoned both baby and bath water! Religion has played its part in empowering a society that no longer knows the meaning of faith and struggles to define any parameters or limitations to constrain, guide and counsel individual human desires. Together we can bemoan that condition. The question before us is can we transcend our insularity to achieve a transmodern society infused with the open and shared example of living faiths?
For all the energy expended in the search for exclusivity the truth is there never have been successful monocultures. Our societies have always been diverse and complex. Culture and society have never been discrete, exclusive, static, bounded, uniform, orthodox entities. Internally all cultures and societies have always been heterogeneous, speaking with multiple voices. They have been and are interpretive communities. What I am suggesting is that we turn away from the historic fact that it is easier and less demanding to sit on pinheads defining what pure faith should be than to plunge into the complexities of the world searching conscientiously for right action and righteous workable solutions to actual human predicaments. It is certainly more difficult to take the option for society when we have to acknowledge and find consensus with people with whom we do not agree. I simply make the case society is now in such a dire state, so imperilled by the absence of faiths in the public space that we cannot in conscience stand aside, no matter how difficult we conceive the task to be.

Theory is one thing. What can and should we do in practice to revitalise our faith and usher it back into the public space of British society? Here is one thing of which I am certain. Unless Christianity in all its diversity reclaims its place in the public space there is little chance for minority non-Christian religions to advance their claims. However, defiant some voices among minorities maybe, in my experience people like me, members of minorities, feel the lack of a vibrant Christian presence in public life. We think if Britain is a Christian country it should continue to be so, demonstrably and publicly. Our concern is that we too, as minorities, are then permitted and welcomed to public notice of our high days and holidays, to express our conscientious beliefs as a motive force for engaging in British society and to be part of inclusive ritual commemoration and observance on occasions that speak to the collective identity of the Britain we can build together.

On the symbolic level there has been progress. Prayers offered by representatives of various faith groups has become part of certain state occasions. We have established the principle of state funding for faith schools for a diversity of faiths. As the father of a son who attended a Catholic secondary school I can attest how appreciative of the ethos and unafraid of the concept members of minority communities are. But faith schools are not unalloyed benefits, nor the only possible answer. I think of a project in Liverpool to establish a mainstream state community school with an Islamic ethos. As the project unfolded, with cross party and multifaith support, it became evident that the principles of an Islamic ethos in action in our education system delivered values that won the endorsement and support of non-Muslim parents too because they expressed shared values that can coexist and serve everyone in the mainstream. It seems to me entirely healthy that state funded state schools should be required to diversify their intake. Is it really the case that I am more prepared to entrust my son to a Catholic school than other British parents would be to send their children to an Islamic or Hindu state funded school? It would be the transmodern thing to do, it would set benchmarks, standards and oversight for Islamic and other schools I am anxious should be enforced. If it is an option few can imagine, then it defines a serious problem we need to work together to address. I can tell you my son, the only Muslim in his school, won two prizes in his first year: one for the Christmas and the other for the Easter religious quiz. To live in Britain as an active and engaged British citizen I and my children must be informed and aware of the beliefs and history of religion in Britain. It has not made my son less a Muslim, but I feel, it ensures he will be a better informed, more thoughtful and conscientious Muslim who is a better partner to his non-Muslim neighbours and fellow citizens. The symbolic presence of multifaith representatives at state occasions leads me to point out that unless we reclaim Christmas and Easter and Christian festivals there is little chance we can offer public recognition to minority communities. I would like to see public recognition of Eid ul Fitr that marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, of Divali and Guru Nanak’s Birthday or Wesak Day (marking the birthday of the Buddha) and so on.

Acknowledging and providing public recognition of diverse celebrations of faith is a beginning. Beyond that, we need to be clearly heard on issues of poverty, human dignity and human rights, equality and good community relations, freedom and fairness. We need to stand up against structured injustice, naked greed and conspicuous consumption, the politics of corruption and class division. We need to champion the cause of the disadvantaged and the marginalised. There is no injustice out there which does not have an ethical or moral dimension and about which the religious can be complacent. We need to create the public spaces where faith groups can engage in social action for and on behalf of not only sectional communities but all of society.

To arrive at the transmodern situation we have to find ways to enable open, mutually tolerant and respectful debates among and between the diversity of voices of faith in British society. Such debate does not and cannot belong solely to religious professionals: it has to become an engagement at the level of the generality of ordinary people. To be transmodern we have to prepare the groundwork and not inhibit the interest ordinary citizens have in what makes them different so that they can discover how alike, cooperative and collegial they can be, how common the ground is in terms of basic values they share. While ultimately making Britain a society where religions and the religious talk together about what is relevant to their lives must be a task for the mass of ordinary people it is as institutional and organised religious communities we bear the responsibility of leading the way, opening the spaces.

We don’t need to shout or whisper. But we do need to talk in earnest with ourselves; and we have to assert the fact that religion has a vital part to play in shaping public debates. As people of faith we will have to try hard to be heard on a plethora of issues about the moral status and ethical action of British society. But it is time for all people of faiths to ensure that their voices are clearly heard for the cause of human betterment now and in Britain.

The Wyndham Place Charlemagne Trust was formed in 1999 by the merger of the Wyndham Place Trust (founded in 1959 to promote a concern for peace, world order and the rule of law) and the Charlemagne Institute which sought to promote study of European values and beliefs.

The Trust, which is independent of religious or cultural affiliations, exists to promote dialogue between people with a wide range of political and religious opinions and from different cultural and professional backgrounds. It aims to address European and world issues, not just from a political or economic perspective, but from the point of view of values and beliefs and to inform public opinion and to influence those who shape policy in the UK, Europe and the wider world.

Earlier titles of Corbishley lecture reports include:

Strategies for Peace
Professor C.F. von Weizsäcker

Securing the Future of Democracy
Ambassador Audrey F Glover

The Management of Intractable Conflicts
Ambassador Thorvald Stoltenberg

The United Nations: Forward or Back?
Sir Brian Urquhart KCMG MBE

Peace in the Middle East
Dr Abba Eban

Islam and the West
Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan

The Irish Settlement: What Next
John Hume MP MEP

The Council of Europe Fifty Years on – its Future
Lord Russell Johnston

Justice and Revenge: International Law after Tuesday 11th September
Geoffrey Robertson QC

Sustaining Dialogue: Multicultural Societies under Pressure
Ram Gidoomal OBE

UN at the Crossroads (2004)
Dame Margaret Anstee DCMG

The Kingdom of God and this world: the Church in public life (2007)
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor