So. Good morning.
My my name is the alcohol call for those who don't come, but I think we know basically each other.
So that's lovely. And I would be playing host today this for part of the day.
Um, and by way of introduction, I thought,
I want to start with something of a personal note and then I may be given a more rational explanation of what we're hoping to achieve today.
So it was actually a real story that a few years ago I was I was asked to teach a course on religion and politics in Israel.
And this request was a good occasion to reflect upon the fact that, well,
my work has always revolved around what is usually identified with this title religion, politics, Israeli identities, or these markers.
I have never taught such a course before and I was quite confused and I wasn't really sure why I was so uncomfortable with doing so.
The request really put me in a very uncomfortable position.
Now, I was already at that point quite immersed in the literature, critical of secularism,
secularisation and so forth, which usually goes under the title of the post secular.
And I just knew maybe felt is a better word that something isn't quite right with the vast scholarship that is
continuously published and usually taught under the headline of religion and politics in Israel and in other ways.
More specifically, it was clear to me that this prevalent discourse hides more than it reveals that while
it conveniently divides political reality into clearly demarcated camps and stances,
a famous cleavage allegedly separating secular from religious Jews in Israel.
In my case, which is thought as a fundamental of Israeli society in every introductory course, is nevertheless, it nevertheless misses quite a lot.
Specifically, this discourse ignores some obviously theological, if you want to put it, escape words or not,
or if we want to be even more critical idolatrous aspects of the politics of the allegedly secular nation state.
But admittedly, I wasn't able to clearly articulate to myself and to my students at the time what it is that makes me
so uncomfortable and quite frustrated with the field in which I was working as a student of politics.
It was at that point that I finally came to the work of William Coven, Timothy Fitzgerald,
and others who reminded their readers and reminded me in this case that the problem is exactly with the taking for granted,
the non self-reflective use we make of concepts and terms which are the infrastructure of our speaking of reality,
thinking of it and ultimately of understanding it. Specifically,
they have challenged the use of the concept of religion as if it were some platonic marker of surprise for
recall and supra cultural essence that takes different shapes but is ultimately the same wherever and wherever.
Whenever we look most urgently, this conceptual scheme is not politically neutral.
It justifies certain political configurations and delegitimizes others.
It is, in other words, yet another example of how knowledge and power are intertwined.
Clearly, there is an urgent, persistent need to challenge the very taken for granted infrastructure of our
discussion of social and political reality in order to better understand it.
And the Israeli case, which is the one I did with, is only one instance of a much larger and I guess deeper picture.
Hence this symposium. Quite simply, our aim today is to establish a modest we want to enable a discussion that challenges what
in many parts of the academic and public sphere is still taken to be obvious and beyond.
Debate matters usually put under the heading of secularism, religion, liberalism, the nation state and so forth.
Clearly, this is not about a phenomena unique to Israel.
Quite the opposite. So the structure of the debt will follow this logic.
The first session, which we are opening now, will deal more directly with the discourse on religion, its consequences, and its alternatives.
The second session with Elizabeth, Chairman Hurd and Yolanda Johnson will, will I'm sorry, will focus on liberalism, secularism and the nation state.
And the third session would aim to tie this critical discourse directly with the Israeli case,
with you would actually have it myself, although it would it will naturally be present throughout the day.
The Israeli case is kind of left for the end.
The format of the symposium is dialogical and it is open.
I speakers all share a certain viewpoints and critical perspectives,
and the idea is to enable a public dialogue, something that will be an opening to a wider discussion.
So we asked each of the speakers to prepare some main themes for the discussions,
and after some short opening remarks, they will engage in a dialogue.
Later on, we will invite the wider audience to partake in this discussion.
So now is the time to present the two speakers of our first session.
Uh, this morning to my far right, Professor Timothy Fitzgerald, formerly a reader in religion at the University of Stirling.
Tim has theorised critical religion in many brilliant works published in Japan, India and North America here in the UK and other European countries.
Among these are his groundbreaking the ideology of religious studies from 2001.
Discourse on civility and barbarity. A critical history of religion and related categories from 2007.
And religion. And politics. And International Relations.
The Modern Myth from 2011. His works.
His different works. Treat religion not as a standalone category,
but as the key term in the modern configuration of categories that constitute and construct secular liberal reality.
He has thus worked on the critical deconstruction of politics and political economy and thereby in relation to religion.
He has recently also focussed his critique on the concept of politics in a forthcoming monograph titled Abolishing Politics,
some of which is already available for you to read online. To My Cross the Right, Professor William,
the Professor of Catholic Studies and the Director of the Centre for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology.
A researcher at a research centre that deals with the Catholic Church in the Global South at DePaul University.
Professor Governor's main areas of research have to do with the Church's encounter with social, political and economic realities.
He is especially interested in the social implications of traditional Catholic beliefs and practices.
In addition to numerous articles, he has authored six books and edited three more until now.
In this, he has dealt with themes of the church's social and political presence in situations
of violence and economic injustice may be most immediately relevant to our themes.
Today are his seminal work from 2009 the myth of religious violence, secular ideology and the roots of modern conflict,
and more recently, migrations of the Holy 2011 and Field Hospital, the church's engagement with the Wounded World from 2016.
He is currently working on a book on secularisation and idolatry,
exploring the ways in which a supposedly disenchanted Western society remains enchanted by nationalism, consumerism and cult of celebrity.
So welcome. Thank you for coming and welcome. So maybe I can ask you to open with some gentlemen, please.
Shall I? Sure. Go ahead.
Yeah, I thought I'd start with just telling a story about the religious studies degree I did at King's College London in the 1970s.
It was a very good, interesting degree.
It was very well taught. We had courses.
We had three philosophy of religion papers, four divisions or sections.
We had anthropology of religion, we had sociology of religion, we had the psychology of religion.
And then we had two world religions. The world religion paradigm was still very dominant at that time.
I studied Hinduism and Buddhism, which we now think of as Orientalist constructs, but at that time they were thought of in a slightly different way.
As I say, I really enjoyed doing this religious studies degree,
and one of the most fruitful outcomes of doing it was that when I came out of that degree, I had no idea of what religion is.
I didn't know what it meant, what it referred to.
You know, in anthropology, in philosophy and sociology, there are quite a number of debates about the definition of religion.
Nobody could agree. Well, some agreed, but there was a lot of contestation around it, but nobody was actually questioning the category itself,
because the category is already very well institutionalised in all sorts of powerful ways.
One obvious way in which is probably institutionalised, is that the universities are non-religious, secular.
The problem arises that if you cannot agree on a definition of religion and by the way, this is not just academics,
because you can read some legal scholars in legal journals who have talked about the problem for the high.
For example, in the United States, the Supreme Court,
who have made all sorts of judgements about what is a religious belief or institution and what is a non-religious, secular one.
But there are no consistent criteria for making this this decision.
So I came out not knowing what religion is, what it refers to.
And that, of course, leads to what is secular, the secular non-religious.
So that immediately becomes problematic. And then and I'm not going to carry on because we want to hear what Bill has to say.
Also, that led me to look at politics, political economy, a nation state culture.
How do you how do you tell the difference between a culture, a cultural institution,
a social institution, a political institution, a religious institution?
I've looked into all of these categories, the Enlightenment, progress, history.
History is one of the most problematic categories we have.
And I just before I stop, I just want to indicate part of where this problem is.
On the one hand, we deploy all of these categories in our writing and our thinking, in our public discourse as though it's obvious what is meant.
We intuitively know how to use the term religion or politics, the political nation, history and so on.
On the other hand, as soon as you look at any of these categories, you find that they're full of contradictions.
They're indefinable. Many of them have absolutely no definable boundaries.
So they overlap each other in all sorts of ways.
Why is it that such problematic, contested categories which themselves define what we mean by modernity?
After all, they have a historical genealogy. How is it that we use them with such intuitive certitude and self-confidence?
Okay, I'll just stop there for the moment. But so I came to this.
As a graduate student, I took a course on modern liberalism in political theory.
And so we were reading Rawls and Rorty and people like that.
And they're kept coming up this idea that the wars of religion were the founding moment of liberalism.
You know, the story goes that after the Reformation, Protestants and Catholics were killing each other.
And so the state had to step in and put religion to the side.
And that's what created peace in the world.
So. So I decided I was going to follow this up. And I started reading histories of the wars of religion and discovered right away that,
you know, Cardinal Richelieu was on Gustavus Adolphus side in the 30 Years War.
You know, why did the Catholic cardinal intervene on behalf of the Lutherans?
I discovered that the second half of the 30 Years War was more or less a war between the two Catholic dynasties of Europe,
the Bourbons and the Habsburgs. And so I found this really confusing.
So I started to look into the question of religion, and I read Wilfred Cantwell, Smith's book,
The Meaning and End of Religion, which kind of got all of this started in 1962.
And although the way he ends up on it, he ends up saying, well, it's religion is not a noun, it's a U.S.A. or something like that.
Internal faith. Right. Which everybody has. Right? Right.
Yeah. So he ends up being problematic, but he but he goes back and and he discovers that the term religion as we use it,
is a modern term and it's a Western term. It's not found in other Earth, other places.
And so that was really helpful for me.
So eventually then I so my first second published article was it was on that the wars of religion and problematise in this category.
And when I was a grad student and then eventually I came back to it and wrote that book, The Myth of Religious Violence,
where I try to take it beyond the wars of religion and this whole idea that religion itself causes violence.
And so and that's when I encountered Tim's work, the ideology of religious studies.
And then the scales fell from my eyes. I was like, that's why religion is so.
That's why we can't decide whether these are religious wars or not, because the category of religion is all B.S., right?
So. So the myth goes well,
there's this essential difference between religious and secular religion has a tendency to produce more violence and therefore religion.
Needs to be kind of marginalised and that's the way you keep the peace.
So the, the chapters of the book then are the first chapter just going through these arguments and
showing that in all of these arguments that religion has a tendency to cause violence.
They can't keep the categories from shifting.
Right. And so Christopher Hitchens, for example, not an academic, but he's just a fun example.
You know, religion, his book, God Is Not Great, Religion Causes Violence, Religion Causes.
The subtitle of the book is with typical British understatement, How Religion Poisons Everything.
Right?
And so he you know, all the religion causes all these bad things he addresses at some point the objection, well, what about Stalinism and so on?
And he basically solves the problem by saying, well, those are religions, do totalitarianism is has this,
you know, impulse towards megalomania, you know, whatever his reasons are.
And so he just shifts the shifts them. So basically the distinction between religious and secular is the distinction
between things that Hitchens doesn't like and the things that Hitchens likes.
Right. And so so I go through nine different examples of this in the first chapter.
The second chapter is then doing a genealogy of the term religion.
And there's a whole lot of work that's being done on this and how it's created in the context of colonialism and so on.
So it's not an essential difference. It's something that's been socially constructed.
The third chapter is on the wars of religion. So I go back to that, do the work with the historians.
I have a section where I do 42 different examples of where Catholics killed Catholics, Protestants,
Protestants or Catholics and Protestants collaborated in the so-called wars of religion.
And so trying to piece that apart and finding that so that the narrative is religion is the problem, the state is the cure.
And I find that religion is not the cause, but it's the product of the wars of religion, the creation of religion,
which is something that comes out of these wars and that the state is not the solution.
It's in fact, the cause of the wars.
It's the kind of it most of the wars are about the centralisation of power over against local forms of power and authority.
It's the ultimately it's the triumph of the civil over the ecclesiastical powers which which conflict has been going on since the fourth century.
And it's finally kind of resolved in the civil authorities favour in the 16th century.
And so then the last chapter is about how this distinction continues to be useful in bad ways.
Mostly, you know, you marginalise so-called religious practices.
The Supreme Court in the United States by talking about how the dangers of if you subsidise parochial schools,
then religious violence is going to break out. And ridiculous ideas like this, and mostly in foreign policy as well.
Muslims are essentially irrational because they are not essentially irrational, but they don't separate religion and politics.
And so they're subject to this kind of volatility. So we need to help them be more rational by bombing the crap out of them.
And so that's that's how I got into it.
And how can you maybe discuss how in what ways is it helpful to now think about these matters having deconstructed,
I mean, the negative aspects of it? I mean. Well, I think for me, it's is a negative.
It's a bit like negative theology in a way. I'm not trying to offer anybody an alternative.
I'm just drawing attention to the world of abstractions in which all communications are conducted,
abstractions which appear to us to be intuitively concrete and theoretical.
And I'm interested in why these very general categories.
I've made a list of them religion, politics, society,
society and societies seems intuitively a neutral and perfectly harmless idea until you look at the history of the way society has been constructed.
Theoretically political economy.
How does what is the difference between politics and political economy, and how do you distinguish between politics and economics?
At first it looks like a knockdown, easy to answer issue, but the more you go into the two to the.
These categories.
And the more you look at how they're used in a wide variety of texts and contexts and see how they slip and slide all over the place,
you realise that whatever your intentionality at that particular moment,
in that particular context might be, it's feeding into a much wider kind of power discourse of which you might not be fully conscious.
And the reader has all sorts of different ways to read what your, what, your, what you're writing or saying.
I wonder if I could just take politics as an example, because politics, I've said, is a number of conferences and academic for that.
It seems to me to be that politics is basically empty of any clear meaning.
And people have been very angry with me.
I mean, I find that the the reaction to this to be itself quite interesting.
Now, my my historical reading is that the noun, the discourse on the noun word politics arose in the second half of the 17th century.
I cannot and this is an empirical question.
Some of you might be able to find texts earlier where the noun word politics is being used and
it's being used to distinguish a domain of government from something else called religion.
This is another crucial factor. And I find this that John Locke has a great deal to do with this.
When I go back to the Putney debates of the 1640s, this is the revolutionary period in England.
I can't find the discourse on politics in the non word.
Perhaps it's there, perhaps I've missed it. But that that's a challenge which I would like to hear.
I think it's being processed, if you like, but it hasn't yet arisen.
Now, if if it's true that politics as a noun with discourse in the context of a distinction from something called religion arises in the 1680s,
for example.
Then when you actually look at the way politics is used in texts right across the humanities and social sciences today, politics is universal.
There's a politics of every time, every place, every language, every power relationship is described as politics and political.
So on the one hand, you have this contradiction. You have the historical, incipient or emergence of a discourse in a particular set of conditions,
which is part of the critique of the sacred monarch and the ensuing regime,
the inherited status of ecclesiastical, not of the temporal lords, and the power of the church and the priestly hierarchies.
It's in that context that you get a whole number of terms, many of them which already existed.
But in the case of politics, which I think was being invented, they're being reified into a new discourse,
a new power, such a power rhetorics with very, very concrete conditions we can look at.
And then over the 18th and 19th centuries, they've become normalised.
We've forgotten their origins. They've become part of our normalised vocabulary and way of thinking that become institutionalised in universities.
And now people don't want to actually look at their origins or their contradictions in use.
So I think this is true of many of the categories that I've been looking at.
They've got double meanings. They're indefinable.
I mean, if everything is political, which is often asserted, the politics of everything or even all human relationships,
political theorists often said they're all political in some sense.
But on the other hand, how do you square that with the historical origin of this discourse in the 17th century,
where it has a much more specific meaning to do with representative government,
that is to say, the representation of male property interests in Parliament.
That was fundamentally what politics was invented.
For the representation of male male property interests and other rights which were associated like that in a, in a very specific past situation.
And, you know, I so were good reasons for it.
After all, the king had arbitrary powers. He could confiscate people's lands.
He could put them in prison if he didn't like them.
So the idea of natural rights became a profoundly important discourse and one of the fundamental rights, which is called natural.
And that will bring me to nature in a minute, because that's one of my favourite categories,
is that that of private property and the representation of private property.
So that's pushed us a bit, but a bit further forward.
So I'll stop there. Yeah.
So you mean the fluidity of the terms is sometimes used as an argument against this line of reasoning because people will say,
well, every category has fuzzy boundaries, right?
We have to of course, you can't exactly say what a culture is, but we all kind of, you know, know what we're talking about.
And so you need these kind of categories and we can kind of quibble about the edges of them, but we kind of know what the centre is.
But I think in some ways the problem is not just that they're very fluid and fuzzy.
The problem is that under certain circumstances the boundaries get quite clear and then when you don't want them to be clear anymore,
then you shift them in another direction, you know?
And so when you want them to be clear, then it's very clear that Islam is a religion,
but American nationalism is not right and the boundaries suddenly get very clear.
But then you move on in another area where it's convenient to kind of make them fuzzy again and then.
Then they become fuzzy. Yeah. So what do we what do you do with the argument that, well, maybe when you look back in the past,
people did not see what they were doing as politics or religion,
or maybe they didn't use the concept, but what they did correspond to our concept of religion.
So it's been there. People would offer theories of an economy.
No one was speaking of economy in ancient times, but they were having an economy.
Well, I think that implies that if they had an economy,
we anthropologists talk about the economics and the politics and the religions
of primitive societies or societies which are less developed and us perhaps,
but unfortunately they didn't have a word for it and they didn't make those distinctions.
So do we just assumed that they were too stupid to know what we now know?
That we've developed so much that our categories are more accurate, more in tune with reality, that they were living in a sort of superstitious past.
You couldn't quite understand their own, their own situation.
Or do we say, well, no, actually it's a kind of imperialism because it was really in the colonial era that we
wanted to reconstruct other people's lives so that they conform to our to our needs,
our power considerations. So if I think that's how I respond to that, I mean, I've actually written a lot about about that very problem.
So yeah, that's what I would say to start the conversation off.
Yeah. I mean it all depends on how things are used and I think I've, I finally came to this, I was talking to graduate students at Berkeley,
University of California, Berkeley, a very secular public institution,
and talking to the political science graduate students and gave my presentation.
And then they said, Well, so what do we do with the term religion?
And I said, Well, I prefer not to not to use that term.
And later then one of them was saying, you know,
we've been trying really hard to get this very secular international studies department to take religious religion seriously.
And after so many years, we've finally gotten that to happen, and now you're pulling the rug out from under us.
And so it became clear to me that you always need to talk about that.
We need to talk about the term, right? I mean that. Critique is sometimes, oh, you want to get rid of that term.
You want to get rid of all the terms. What are we going to do without terms?
Right. And and I think you can't just get rid of them.
What you need to do is put them under a magnifying glass.
And so instead of talking about religion as if religion is this,
and you start talking about religion as if religion is this, right, it's not a thing which is out there.
It's a lens through which we read the world.
And the only problem with that analogy is that these help me see better.
Right. And most of the time, the term religion blurs things and distorts things.
But there could be benign uses of it.
I mean, perhaps to distinguish what I do in church from what I do in my garden,
that the kind of some sort of distinction between religious and secular might be.
But then I'd go, well, you would get really well regarded. Well, exactly.
I mean, I don't want to make. Yeah, I'm trying to come up here. Here's one use I.
So I gave a talk one time and a guy who taught theology at the University of Virginia in the Religious Studies Department said,
hey, you're going to put me out of a job, right? And I said, Oh, okay.
You know what? What the term religion does is help theology to go on at Thomas Jefferson's university.
Right. Which I think is wonderful. I mean, this is just this subversive kind of a foot in the door.
And I think that's great. So there there is an instance where it might be used well, but in lots of other instances,
most other instances, I suppose the use is not benign and it always needs to be examined in that way.
So it's always the question of use, just it's not about abolishing the categories and now we've got no general categories to use.
We're always going to be using general kind of categories,
but we need to we need to always be critically aware of what what kind of power they're enacting.
Yeah, I think that's good. And I think one of the rhetorical mechanisms that makes these categories seem self-evident,
men in the church in a vertical is that they operate in binaries a centralising either or binaries.
So religion and non it's either religious or it's non-religious, secular, it's either supernatural or it's natural.
It's either about faith or it's about real knowledge.
There's a whole series of binaries. And if when people want to define a category like religion since but using that one as a kind of marker,
you find that the arguments slip from one binary to another.
So God's and the world, you know, the other world, this world, there's a whole series.
So these binaries stand in for each other and they actually form a kind of circle.
So there's a continual displacement of meaning.
You never actually get to the foundational binary, and eventually you'll come back to religion and secular.
So there's,
there's this binary displacement mechanism which disguises from us that none of these terms can actually be clearly distinguished from each other.
I mean, if you take supernatural, natural, for example, if you look at the way the term natural is or nature is used and dominant discourses today,
everything is nature, everything is natural, everything can be explained naturalistically.
So what is not nature? Well, you could say, well, the supernatural is not nature.
Oh, but cognitive psychology tells us that religion is really about certain mental states, which can be explained by evolutionary biology.
So they are really natural. They're just naturalistic fantasies.
What about the artificial? Well, yes, it seems a very useful thing to make a distinction between the artificial and the natural.
But on the other hand, by artificial we make we mean human made.
And surely human beings are natural. I mean, human nature is part of nature.
So the artificial is also ultimately natural.
What about the unnatural well, unnatural things, you know, really ethical issues for different groups.
Homosexuality. Is un natural. Well, yes, but it's not really because everything is natural and my sexuality is as natural as heterosexuality.
So in our dominant discourse, nature is everything.
What? What stands outside nature? I mean, my point is that if everything is nature, then the world is empty of any specificity.
It has no clear. It has no clear reference.
It's like the world. Everything is included in the world.
So what does the world mean? You can't point to nature just as you can't point to a religion.
You can't point to politics. You might think you can, but these abstract categories appear as though they represent things in the world.
But then when you look for them, they dissolve. So I'm interested in why do they have power?
Why do they have rhetorical power if they're so empty of any kind of clear referential meaning?
Why do we keep using them? What is it that makes us feel that we can't live without them?
That we have this compulsion to deploy them, that we must classify the world in terms of them?
It seems like one of the one of the remedies is to get as empirical as you possibly can.
And so instead of talking about religion, religion is this and religion is that, let's talk about Islam and let's talk about Christianity.
And that's us. That's a that's a step.
But instead of talking about Islam, let's talk about this particular school of Wahhabism in 18th century Saudi Arabia.
And let's let's burn down as as as close to the ground is as we can get.
And so instead of making hard arguments, is Islam a religion of peace or is it a religion of violence?
Well, let's talk about these particular schools.
Let's talk about these particular historical circumstances.
Let's get as as near to the ground, as as empirical as we can.
Let's let's look at Tasso. Wagner's work on the Pueblo Indians is really fascinating.
So she looks at the Pueblo Indians in the 19 tens and 1920s and discovers when the discourse of religion enters into their their tribal life,
they have no religion. Of course, it's just part of their their dances are part of their way of life.
Until the federal government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, wants them to stop dancing and they want them to assimilate into culture.
And so they get some white lawyers who say invoke the principle of religious freedom.
And so they do that. And it works in some ways.
It gives them a little bit of defence to invoke the concept of religious freedom.
The problem then is that it then becomes part of the internal discourse of the tribe and people within
the tribe then begin using the term religious freedom to assert their right not to participate.
Right. And so now you've introduced something which is which threatens to tear the chair of the tribe apart and has now.
So it's this this double edged sword.
So so the more specific that you can get about this, about how the discourse is actually working,
it seems to be that that's the that's the most helpful thing. Can I ask you just to reflect upon the question of the interests behind this?
Uh, uh, well, uh, naturalisation of this concept as has been right, and you already mentioned it doesn't happen just out of nowhere.
As you mentioned, we got I mean, there's this historical need and an agency that plays a role in constructing it.
And in a sense, when we were upon these questions of boundaries and meanings and we kind of, uh,
shift the focus away from maybe what is most important someone who is benefiting from this.
So can you now address the benefit and beneficiaries?
Sure. I mean, to me it seems like, um, where it, where it first comes into play, where the term is first created is in the early modern period.
And this is not a mistake, that it's not a coincidence that it first comes into play in the early modern period,
in the period when you get the creation of the modern Western state.
And so what it does then under. Those circumstances is and this is very clear and lock, I think is that it takes.
So there's been this contest of power between the civil and the ecclesiastical authorities since the fourth century, since Constantine converts.
You don't have politics and religion, but you do have priests and kings.
And you get this this dual authority of civil and ecclesiastical authorities.
It's a contest. Sometimes the civil authorities have the upper hand.
Then you get the investiture controversy and the ecclesiastical authorities have the upper hand.
It finally works itself out in the early modern period where the civil authorities gain the upper hand.
And so religion then becomes what the ecclesiastical authorities have authority over, and it becomes something which is essentially private.
And then once you've invented that sort of category, then it's also the period of of colonial expansion,
and they discover that it's very useful in colonial contexts.
So so you find that to use this this religious secular distinction in India under British rule,
means that to be British is to be public and to be Indian is to be private.
If you take everything it means to be Indian and encapsulated in this thing called Hinduism and then make Hinduism into a religion,
you can take everything it means to be Indian and kind of make it make it private,
which is really why the BJP, the kind of Hindu nationalist party today, refuses to call Hinduism a religion.
Right. Yeah, I'm not sure, because it's it's all it's all these other things.
Right. And so the and there's a lot of really interesting work being done about the power relations in under colonial context.
So those are a couple of examples,
but it seems to me like the original purpose of it is to solve these disputes within Western European society in the early modern period,
but then it kind of mutates and takes on these kind of universal characteristics and of course it takes on those universal
characteristics because Western European civilisation becomes fancies itself universal precisely in this period which allows it then to,
to, to go out and change the world.
And I think we could add to that the the invention of the individual,
because the invention of all this system of rights is also the invention of the individual who has these rights.
And that was connected to the privatisation of land during the enclosures.
When Cromwell went to to Ireland, basically the theft of Catholic lands was also the creation of a market in the land,
because William Petit went to the to the land surveyor general,
I think his title was, and he mapped out the lands in plots, measured plots so that they could be bought and sold more easily.
So you begin to get a cash a cash economy and land on.
100 years later, Thomas Jefferson was doing the same with the apparently empty lands of North America.
He was marking them out in plots so that they can be bought and sold more easily.
So I think the idea of the the individual and the rights of the individual, which are described as natural rights at the time, inalienable rights.
I think the the idea of private ownership is quite fundamental to the the idea of the
individual as a kind of inviolable protected entity who is not dependent on anybody else.
You know, I would also mention that the idea of liberty has been very interesting.
Theorises negative liberty and positive liberty and negative liberty is this idea that nobody has a right to invade my privacy.
This was originally to defend people against the king and the, the, the, the lords who inherited their status and so on.
But it became a kind of dogma.
It's actually, I think, at the foundation of classical liberalism, what we call classical liberal political economy, is that actually comes.
Out of this and is in a is an ideological theories zation of the individual and the rights the natural
rights of the individual and the sort of almost absolute distinction between the individual and the rest.
And I want you to address an argument that's usually thrown at critical religion or maybe as a misunderstanding.
But I want you to think about it, please, if you can allow it.
So are you saying there's no religion, there's no such thing as religion? No, that's that's often the way the argument is caricatured, I think.
And it depends what you mean when you say no such thing.
Right? I mean, clearly there is such a thing.
But again, it's a it's not a thing in the sense of a thing in out there that you just bump into, like you bump into a wall or something.
It's a thing. Again, in this sense that it's it's a very powerful lens through which we view the world.
And and so if that's what you mean by no such thing.
So there's there's a couple of different ways I'm thinking about it.
And some people took my book as saying, Well, there's no such thing as religion, and so there can't be any religious violence.
And they thought I was just kind of playing some kind of semantic trick on them.
But that's not that's not the argument. So in one sense, it's not.
There's no such thing in the sense of it just being like a rock that you that you run into out there.
But on the other hand, of course, it it exists and we need to talk about it.
Well, I would disagree with that. I mean, I think I would at least put it differently.
I would say there is no such thing as religion.
I would say that religion is a contingent historical way of classifying certain institutions right for polynomials.
If you want to, you know, on the basis of a binary of the binary that these are these are these are religious practices.
They're therefore superstitious. They're not in tune with modern scientific thinking.
They therefore have to be demarcated so that we can clear a space for what is truly rational, which is markets,
banks, finance, money, economy, centralisation of bureaucracy, proper law courts, not these superstitious things.
The hangover from the past.
You see what I'm saying? So I would say, yeah, religion is not a thing.
And it's this illusion of ratification that's operating.
Religion is a category. It's a it's a classification category.
And it has a historical contingency. And it's reached the point where the contents of what can be described as religion are virtually arbitrary.
So just about everything can be described as religion.
But at the same time, there's an either or this is religion.
This is not religion operating as a binary, as centralisation.
So this this is a very powerful rhetorical technique of confusion.
How do we observe it just to respond to I mean, I think Tim is exactly right.
And that's, I guess, what I was trying to to make the distinction between a thing out there and the kind of lens for for viewing the world.
But Tim used the term arbitrary. We just had this discussion over email.
I used to use that term and somebody called me out on it and said it's not arbitrary that in
fact it's used for very specific power purposes and I think you'd agree with that as well.
It's arbitrary in the sense that you can use it in all sorts of different ways,
but but the ways that it actually gets used are not not simply arbitrary.
They're there. But so anyway, that's that's one word that I've stricken from my vocabulary when talking about these matters.
Yeah, I think we could say that it has ideological directionality.
Right. It's not necessarily a conscious, it's not necessary.
In fact, I think it's much more powerful for being largely unconscious.
Yeah. Yeah. That's why it works so powerfully. And that's why, you know, we reproduce these categories unconsciously.
I mean, how many people who are writing a text, an academic text, and the social sciences would stop and ask themselves, What do I mean by politics?
Yeah. How many different ways can this be read?
Well, what is the political I mean, some some texts that you read by political theorists, they have the term.
Politics and political. It's just endlessly repeated in almost every sentence.
And you think, well, actually, if you just took the word out completely of the CSA would be any loss.
Would we lose any real meaning? I'd suggest no.
Probably we would gain a lot. So maybe two related issues that emerge out of it.
First, what do we do when as students of a reality of a certain society or, you know, a group of people?
What do we do with those who identify through these categories?
In the Israeli case, for example, being religious or being secular reason is is a fundamental tenet of people's identity.
And secondly, related to that, once we've deconstructed the terms and the concept,
how can we now approach a reality and talk about those things that are put under these categories
without falling into the trap and still saying something that would be meaningful to our audience?
Well, I don't feel an obligation to to answer, because you say you don't.
I think that you will. No, I think it's just to to point out the contradictions, the in defined abilities,
the tendency to universal ization and to leave it to people, to say, I'm not a legislator.
I'm not going to tell people how they must use language.
But I do have a right to point out that the way that we use language, very general categories that are organising our knowledge,
organising our institutions, indeed defining the nation state, which is another very problematic.
I mean, after all, what is the national interest?
You know, so many politicians claiming to represent the national interest, but who will what is the nation?
And the historical ambiguities and the idea of a nation which, you know, the modern nation states is quite different from the older uses as a nation.
So I think that I have a right and a duty to points out to challenge people to
look at these categories without then going on to tell them how they must behave.
Right. Yeah. I mean, it just seems to me to be if somebody tells me they're a methodist or if somebody tells me they're an atheist or something,
and it begins to the kind of lower you get of the scale of abstraction, the more helpful things are, I find.
And part of the problem is the religious secular distinction creates this.
I mean, in an era where we talk about how we can't talk to each other anymore,
that's one of the things that really prevents us from talking with each other.
Sam Harris The kind of famous atheists is that, you know,
Muslims believe things that are completely beyond rationality, so we can't even talk to them.
Right? And so all you can use is coercion when you can't talk to somebody.
So these these categories create this impassable gap.
Right. And so it's much more helpful if, you know, like Chris Hedges has a book called I Don't Believe In Atheists, right?
In which the basic argument is everybody believes in something.
So don't tell me I'm a believer and you're an unbeliever.
You tell me what you believe. I'll tell you what I believe. And then let's have a conversation.
All right. So before we open this for a wider discussion, and I'm conscious of the, of the time, uh,
I just wanted to go back to your personal perspectives on it, and I started by a small anecdote.
When I first discussed, uh, Bill's book with a colleague actually in Berkeley, um, his immediate reaction, and I said, you know, I was,
I shared my, uh, my appreciation and really my, uh, realisation and said that as kids came over and said, well, you know, he's a theologian.
In a way, he dismissed everything you said because. Yeah, because you would.
Yeah, that's it. I mean, if, uh. And. But you between the two of you, I mean, you come to this from very different perspectives.
Can you maybe contemplate on this relationship between the two of you, or did this it personal takes on me.
Right. Yeah, that's a really interesting point, because usually we would not become friends because there's this divide, right?
Religious, secular would be the normal way of classifying us in some ways.
Um, but, um, but that's one of the things that this type of discourse has done,
I think, is allow for friendships to happen across those very artificial boundaries.
Mm. Yeah. Um, uh, well, as I say, and I did a religious studies degree and I came out not knowing what religion was.
I think there are also deeper things going on, but I don't really want to get into them.
But it was sort of subject to personal things.
But um, uh, the, this, um, this problem of boundaries, uh, you know, uh, as people saying this sort of a centralising boundary and,
and the fact that one is defined by receiving a secular salary in a university,
you know,
immediately alerts one to one's dependence on the category of religion as what has to be othered in order to get the non religious institution.
Um, so that was all feeding into it.
But um, yeah, I think that I thought that Bill's book, The Myth of Religious Violence, is brilliant and very necessary.
And I think it brought out problems in the discourse that were present in John Locke.
I mean, it goes right back to John Locke and other people's, as you argue it, uh,
attempt to other religion to make it something which allowed a new concept of government as a representation of private property interests,
male private property interests to to appear vertical and obvious and natural.
Yeah. Because he talked about them as natural rights. I think it's the right time to now open.
I mean, I'm sure there are many questions. Yes.
Do you want to introduce yourself when you ask the question, please? Yes. I'm AnnaSophia.
Who? Lafayette. I've got an interest here. I'm in the faculty of Theology and religion and I hold the chair for you studying the Abrahamic religions.
So maybe I should just leave the room, but surprise you that I do have some problems with this.
That the use of abstractions is complicated.
That's obvious. I think we all agree that many terms are multivalent.
That's the term I would use. I'm a great believer in defining the way you use a multivalent check.
I believe that if you define what you mean by religion, it's actually quite a good thing to use.
Now, my problems with what I've heard tried to make notes trying to make sense of this.
My greatest problem is the concentration on the 17th century.
Now I am actually a medieval historian, and I've learned most about religion and about the term secular by my interest in medieval history,
which is the confrontation, the interaction between Christians and Jews.
Let's say between 1013 hundred and when I in another place was teaching political thought, medieval political thought to my students.
What was particularly helpful to understand what was meant by regnant in soccer, adults, priesthood and kingship?
I said, Well, let's think about it in terms of Christian Jewish relations and what they what we could do with that was to realise that.
Magnum So this kind of, I would use the word temporal.
I would never, ever, ever use the word secular for the medieval period.
Totally meaningless right now when you start looking at it in terms of Christian Jewish relations,
you just realise how impregnated the temporal scene is.
The temporal sphere is with Christianity and you immediately realise that you
don't have this kind of church state nonsense because it just doesn't exist.
And the great problem you begin to realise is that you're looking at different jurisdictions.
You're looking at jurisdiction of the priestly side of things and you're looking at the jurisdiction of the temporal side of things.
But then and that's another problem I have with your discussion.
You realise that a binary approach to the medieval problematic here is also totally meaningless because it isn't just kings and church.
I think a person having to use the word ecclesiastical powers or something.
But then you immediately realise that the word church is desperately complicated.
What is church is church Rome. Rome would wish that churches.
Rome. Of course it is in Rome because the Pope doesn't have that kind of power in this particular period.
And then you realise you have to think about Episcopal Authority, you have to realise about the priest,
and then you have the inner religious religiosity as Langmuir is very good in talking about the differences between these terms.
So my real problem also is that within the medieval context, I'm thinking about Lateran four 1215,
a very important church council with an unbelievably powerful, well, a pope.
Yeah, he did have quite a bit of power in a third, as I think all man said, a very paid pope, which is quite a nice way of putting it.
So if you look there at the particular canons to do with Christian Jewish relations,
you have a particular canon where it says that Jews and Christians need to dress differently because there's too much interaction,
sexual interaction between Christians and Jews, etc.
And then the second part of that particular thing says, and Jews should not appear in Holy Week because they will mock, they religio Cristiana.
There is a term is religio Christianity. That's a very, very rich term.
It doesn't just mean the church, it doesn't just mean a foetus face.
It means a very wide multivalent thing.
So this is why I have problems with this.
This idea of the 17th century and all of a sudden religion is discovered.
I think it's much, much older.
I think when you talk about finding the individual, people were finding their individuality in the 12th century in a different way.
When I think of Roman philosophy entering into the work that Christian theologians were doing,
deep thought about dominion, about property, enormous discussions about that.
I think about My City is a Padua who writes his defence report this early 14th century, struggling between an emperor,
between kings, between city states, between all kinds of different forms of priesthood.
So I think there is a much more complicated cast to all of this, which to my mind,
if you take that into account and if you define your terms, nature, again, something totally different in the era.
That's my point. And that's your point. But I can't I can't see where would disagree.
It's just you want to get rid of the term I. I think it's a useful.
I didn't say get rid of it. I didn't say that there was there was terms that we shouldn't use.
No, I didn't. I'm not a legislator. I'm not a legislator.
Anyway, I guess my response would be similar to Tim's.
I'm not sure where we're disagreeing.
I said that I I've repented from saying we shouldn't use the term and because of my encounter with those graduate students who said,
you know, and so we've always just got to use it carefully and we've always got that.
That's what I would say. So in the case of religio, of course, religion was an ancient term, right?
But it means something quite different. It's not set off against the secular.
In Roman times you could say religio me east. You know, it's religion to me, which means I have a binding obligation.
But it could be something. It could be to a God, it could be to a neighbour.
As as Augustine says, in the city of God, the religious secular distinction is a distinction between two different kinds of priests.
In the medieval era. Religio is a virtue for for Aquinas in the 13th century.
It's not, you know, something. And so. So, yeah.
So I'm not sure where. Timothy said very clearly he wanted to get rid of the term.
When, when, when, you know what I said if you listen, is that we should look at look at how these terms are actually deployed.
Look at their historical genealogy. Look at how they are indefinable.
How they overlap with each other.
How they are contested through throughout the last decades, and yet how they remain as permanent parts of our reproduction.
That's what I've said. I mean, to get rid of it, what does it mean to get rid of it?
It's a shorthand for saying, look critically at the characters of the understand we deplore.
Yeah. Know what they're trying to do and it's what they've done in their work is to get better by coming up later in the show.
Part of what they're trying to do is to deconstruct the religious secular dichotomy
and the kinds of politics that follow from an entrenched binary between the religion,
religious and the secular, which is something I've done in my work since I started doing my work.
What I think ultimately follows from this in my reading is precisely to find a space for the sort of work that doing,
to have the kind of resonance it should have.
In other words, not to be automatically forced into some kind of category,
but rather to that history is in the process of the institutions that you're speaking at,
the vocabularies you're using to resonate and to be heard in their own terms, rather than to be immediately classified as this, that, or the other.
And what you said was very important that the secular, the inside turn you need to be able to and for students,
for scholars to be able to hear that and really internalise what it means for their work, I think is extraordinarily important.
And so I don't hear you. I agree that the term doesn't make sense to me either.
And I can talk about that later if you want.
But I do think what we're calling for here is the politicisation of parochial discourse of the term rather than simply getting rid of it.
And so I actually hear you as being in some tension, but ultimately what you're doing is with the modern categories, which are not your categories,
is to characterise them in order so that moderns can hear what you are doing, because otherwise they just can't even make sense of it.
So that's yeah, that's really helpful. Thank you.
Yeah. But before we move on to the question, just address Anna's point about the focus on 17th century.
So my focus on the 17th century, the 16th, 17th century is just that.
That seems to be where the modern where the modern turn happens.
You can see it happening beginning in the 15th century with certain platonist
like coups and marsilio ficino in coming into the early 16th century and so on.
But it really begins to take shape. Religion becomes a kind of universal and Cruz a religion becomes a universal and interior kind of impulse.
And in all of these changes kind of happen gradually.
But but that's the the focus is that's where this kind of binary gets gets created, you know, in a whole new way then than it is in the medieval era.
That's that's the only point that I and that and that's, of course,
is is the point at which the colonial enterprise takes place, too, which I don't think is a coincidence.
Yeah, well, I agree. And I would add that it's, um, it's the post reformation where you.
You're getting the use of the vernacular much more than the old Latin, and you're getting old.
So you've got the colonial interests which are developing. You've got enclosure movements which are becoming more and more rapid.
And then you've got some very determined people who are giving the example of William Penn who wanted to write Bills of Rights.
John Locke was also writing Bills of Rights, and they were writing them.
They were thinking about about different forms of governance and the the use of this.
I mean, if somebody can find me the non word politics in the consistent discourse where it is being distinguished from something called religion.
Earlier than the 1680s. I mean, I've searched for it, but I may have missed it.
But if you can find it, then I would be interested in that.
It's not quite the same as the separation of church and state.
That's that is beginning to especially in Massachusetts.
You know, Roger Williams, I think, was the name of his Rhode Island road idea, but it hasn't quite reached that level of consistent binary,
a centralisation that you find in William Penn or that you find in John Locke.
So I think the significance and also in the case of English and England, it's going to be slightly different.
Holland may be ahead. I mean, Holland was arguably the first capital this nation.
Amsterdam was the centre of global finance, virtually, wasn't it, before London?
I mean, it shifted to London in the 1690s,
but Holland was the the centre of a great deal of world trade and even even the Catholic colonial powers
were using Amsterdam and Rotterdam and those other other centres of trade and finance for their own,
their own shipping, their own trade. So it may have been in Holland, in Dutch that this happens earlier, but I don't read Dutch,
but I think in English you can actually see these discourses emerging and you can see the context in which they're.
But can I just can I just affirm one more thing that you said, though, is that it doesn't suddenly happen in the 17th century.
It has. And antecedents well into the medieval period.
The investiture controversy in the 11th century is really where you get the sorting out between ecclesiastical and civil authorities in some ways.
Right. Because until that time, the Kings have liturgical functions.
And one of the things that that Gregory of the seventh tries to do is sort those things out.
And that in some ways is the beginning of these kinds of binary distinctions.
So that's just to affirm what you're saying, that all of these things begin to take shape in the medieval period,
but they don't kind of come to fruition until the early modern. I mean, it doesn't mean to say that there weren't other binaries operating.
Sorry to interrupt, but for example, our Protestant faith,
which was the predominant meaning of religion in English and the first in the in
the 16th and 17th century is in binary opposition to the superstitious barbarism.
I mean, even the Catholics are described as pagans by the Protestants, or especially in the case of especially, they were the Irish.
The Irish. So it's not as though it's a different it's a different number of binary oppositions which
are emerging and which are quite different from the ones that were operating earlier.
Thank you. It's hard to know quite how to interpret.
I don't work in precisely in this field. One is Julian Zelizer, professor of medieval Spanish studies at King's College London.
And I was particularly interested in professor.
I love this song because I think it's really important to take into account the problems that you've raised over his stories,
isolation, his own values. You have acknowledged that things don't suddenly spring for you all from in the 17th century.
That has been the was in your discussion your starting point is the way in which maternity operates in your discussion is absolutely fascinating.
So on one hand, you say, well,
of course there are antecedents in the very use of the term antecedent apply suggests a kind of a TV analogy or genealogy.
And on the other, you talk about, you know, modern insecticides, but it just doesn't work.
So this is not a game, you know? I mean, it's easy to say, well, one can find examples of this before.
That's not really the point.
The point is, in this particular discussion, to reinforce what you were getting, sort of historical contingency is absolutely fundamental.
So it's not as you say, I agree with you, it's not a question of trying to define ontologically.
What we mean by nature, the individual has an extraordinary living, maternity and so on.
So that's why understand the cognitive use, the word that was used I think twice in the discussion, which seems to be absolutely fundamental,
where as far as I can see from having read your work and I need to be, is the look that I missed or you used twice was ideological.
So in addition to thinking about how we use stories, I would encourage us all to well,
I don't think anybody else here to encourage you to to say more about your theory of ideology theory by on the chain as a set of beliefs,
put it at the intersection of language and power. So that's if I have a question.
Where do you get your theory of ideology from?
And secondly, the work that is done in the humanities on cultural semantics, for example, Raymond Williams, he was from the seventies.
Updated recently or Roland brings some comparisons to modernism.
Five words cultural semantics.
That's where I really see an important intersection between the kind of work that historians like to do in literary linguistics.
Thank you very much. I mean, you're absolutely right. I'm caught in the in the circular trap.
I use the term modern, but actually modern is part of our problem.
Where does the idea of modernity come from? So I think that there is quite a lot more to the argument that I've been trying to develop.
But I think there is we are caught in the circularity and it also, in a sense, constructs historical time.
I mean, the very idea of historical time that we're working within is itself a product of these processes.
So we're in a kind of paradoxical circularity.
And how how do you set theory of ideology?
Ideology is another problem. I use the term ideology because I don't know where else to go.
But the very idea of ideology, you might argue, is also there.
I mean, another word is revolution.
How did we get from the idea of revolution as one heavenly body going round another or the revolution of a wheel to the idea of the French Revolution,
the American Revolution and the Russian Revolution? Well, it seems to me that these are, if you like, discursive deconstructed the idea of revolution.
And the idea of progress, which is also a highly problematic concept,
have become rhetorically fused in the 18th century, and you get the idea of revolutionary progress.
But I think that we're all certainly I am aware of being caught in the kind of circularity which you're indicating now.
See the European track to the circularity was just.
Um, I suppose it may be just emphasising the point.
One of the points that emerged from the conversation was the.
We may not have been articulated as such, but I think it's really important to make a distinction between the terms that we are trying to sell,
the concepts that be embedded in modern terms, and we are trying to explore and the conceptual tools that we hope to understand.
So in terms of ideology, the fact that the term ideology wasn't in.
Clean until the end of the 18th early 19th century.
Doesn't mean to say you can either analyse the public psychologically.
And that's like saying, you know, this sort of you there's no such thing before misogyny.
Before the 16th century, the term misogyny was invented in order to respond to a need.
So. You know, the distinctions, for example, between culture and religion.
You can see that very, very clearly articulated in historical evidence in the 15th and 16th century before the term culture was ever invented.
The idea of culture which idea of culture of people, which idea of culture?
Culture is something which is separate from separate from religion.
Culture is something that is a series of so a group of social practices that define you as a group.
I think it's just just a pure assertion because when you actually look at the way the terms of culture are actually deployed,
I'm talking about a time when there is no term culture.
Right. So what? Which we've all said we should.
Culture is a very slippery term. What we mean by income can vary enormously.
Do you understand culture at some anthropological? Then you can see in the 15th and 16th century.
In in you mentioned today the conflict between Judaism and Christianity.
But I'm thinking of, for example,
in the 16th century where there were Christians of Muslim descent being persecuted because they continued to speak Arabic.
They continued to watch themselves. They continued to dance with.
The dances that. Associated with that past. I think all Christians should look at these do some from customers customers.
We are Christians. Customer practices.
Okay as you know right from the pre 1490 253 to forcibly converts.
Yeah but there is no way in which they got to through the cultural what we would now calls the cultural function of that distinct from.
Corporate culture. Think of that earlier and survey.
But Courtney culture you have you have Hebrew poems, a Jewish poems in vernacular French,
which clearly use images of courtly culture but in a Jewish centred setting.
Whereas of course, you have the Christian quirky culture you have, you have if you think, well, we now, then of course they would call it,
but something that we now would like to identify with humanism, interest in intention, things like that.
You look at Hebrew material and you look at lots of material and you can pick up these things.
And it isn't religious. You can pick up interest in intention, particular ways.
A little vignettes about what individuals do.
Sorry to interrupt, but it shows that they want to address this, or I guess just a couple of points.
Ideology is a term I tend to avoid because it tends to just mean ideas I don't like.
And in that sense, it might be a kind of useful thing. Right wing theories, right?
I mean, that idea is right.
I mean, the problem with the term ideology is that it gives the indication that, you know,
there's some you can get rid of ideology and you can get down to the real thing, you know.
And in some ways, that's how Marx, I think, tends to use it as that you can base and superstructure and if you can just get rid of the superstructure,
then you're going to get to the you get to the real economic base.
And that's that's why I would avoid that.
With regard to the term culture, it's interesting the relationships between the word culture, cult and cultivation, right?
So all of these things then are in some senses originally related,
but then eventually get problematise and separate, separated out into different things.
Cult culture in cultivation, but originally there, and that is part of this kind of differentiation process.
But, but, but I think originally it's they're, they're all very carefully, intensely intertwined.
And no one, my dad, I mean, our customary practices are they cultural of the social or the political of a religious?
Because customary practices are classified in all of these ways.
So then the question arises, well, what's the difference between the cultural customary practice and the social customary practices?
And what's the difference between the social cultural practice and the religious cultural practice?
They don't seem to have any we don't seem to have a way of distinguishing between them.
And yet we have different disciplines cultural studies, social sciences, political science, religious studies.
What have we distinguish? And I was trying to make presented.
So is that hey, you have a Christian Muslim descent who is representing the beautiful principles.
Saying that you persecute us tonight is the opportunity to speak the language of our ancestors,
the customs of our ancestors, because you see us as Muslims, but we are fact Christians.
Now what he's trying to do is trying to accentuate the difference between I'm sorry, I just can't avoid the words culture and religion.
Now, whatever you want to say, how do you, however, I guess I should put it.
It's not how we classify. I think the question is, is is absolutely correct.
It's not how we would want to classify these activities.
This man speaking on behalf of his people.
It's trying to do is it's trying to recognise that he can perceive a split.
For which he does not have the language, the terms.
That's the issue. So let us take a look at it, if I may.
I think I mean, with that idea, as you continue to click this positions,
I think we there's two issues involved here is the temporal dimension of concepts.
But you put contingencies. Obviously, I mean, religion in one point.
Another point is that the very different meaning of the label is the same in the container of that.
You know, he quoted this label. There's different contexts in different periods and different spaces.
But I also add to that is that what vapour like Survivor will distinguish between the logic of the observable and the logic of the observed.
So sorry, the logic of of the observer and the logic of the observed.
The logic of the account in the way that the person who observes and describes and the person who is being described.
So, I mean, I wouldn't be easily go and say that individual is I don't know.
I mean, in terms of history. But you need some kind of reflection.
I mean, the person like if I take the term identity, I don't think there was identity in 14th century.
Of course, analytically there was. If we look backward as historian, but nobody would use the term identity.
So there's no identity in that term. So disconnected from the picture exist here.
And the basic idea is the temporal dimension and therefore many of concepts as they move along history.
And so I think I think that basically, I mean, we don't have to argue about fixed concept and concept,
but that phrase, the time, I mean, we all agree on that.
It's that example of the Maurice goes.
It seems to me he did have language to describe that and it was fine.
He said, We're we're Christians and we're not Muslims. And that did the job that he needed to do.
If that wasn't sufficient, then he would have had to invent other kinds of categories in the job he wants to do that spelled 50 years later.
Right. But not because he didn't have a way of distinguishing religion and culture.
Right. It's because they didn't think that they were would open up a very interesting discussion that we could have.
But I think to the point that the world has been waiting patiently and if if we don't
allow the world to speak in might just all deniers vacation time I don't know so please.
Professor Goodman. Well actually an anthropologist by training and I didn't have an anthropologist throw in the room here.
But if you want to replay this, this is every anthropology seminar we're having here.
So everything but my real job is I'm the professor Japanese studies and I came to Timur's work through his work in Japan for many, many years.
I was just like, well, I was inclined then to classify your work in Japan, I think,
because I think the interesting thing about your kind of the correct spot right there is this kind of thing is that there was no book for religion.
And as Kurt said, there was no work for any individual.
There was no work for nature. I suspect it was in the work of politics and economics.
So you had that already a highly complex society in a divided society of classes.
You have to do this. You have. But I don't know what words you use, which is so you know, what do you take?
What? What? I mean, you know, we've got a Western history, which is very true.
What do you take from a society like that? Isn't a simple society, very complex society with a writing system?
Well,
living in Japan myself and becoming aware of the history of Japan and struggling with Japanese language made me aware of the problems of translation.
And it's it's it's it's very true.
Japanese historians that, you know, have looked at the debates when the Western powers were demanding that Japan open up and that to be civilised,
they should have a written constitution. And that written constitution must distinguish between religion and the secular state.
And then within that you get certain rights of religious practice,
which is also a practical way of getting Christians and Japan and the debates about what does this term religion mean?
How do we translate this into Japanese?
And I think as as you know, Roger, eventually they came up with Shoot, Kill, Shoot, Kill was a kind of very obscure word in some Buddhist texts.
They tried all sorts of different Japanese terms, basically.
Even today, I mean, I used to ask my students, both in English and in Japanese, what do you understand by religion?
What do you understand? And most of them, if they ever said anything, was Christianity.
Sometimes they'd say Buddhism, Christianity and Buddhism.
I'd say, Well, what about going to the temple, going to the shrine festivals and so on?
And they'd say, Oh, those are just Japanese customs.
There are customary practices that had nothing to do with religion.
And it's Satoshi Hori who's here, has recently published this book on Japanese temple priests and the problems that they
still today have with this notion that they're religious as distinct from secular.
Could I just add also that in Chinese there was no no term for religion.
The debates in China on how to translate religion followed ten years after the Japanese
ones apparently in what in what system of representations anywhere in the world.
Was there an easy translation of these terms into the Indigenous languages?
Nobody has come up with any outside of Europe and North America, as far as I can see in North America.
Well translated. Well into North America. No, no. Quite.
Yes. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And therefore, the question is for me, it so persistent.
Why is it so institutionalised? What is it doing beyond what we can actually notice?
Can we take the last question before we adjourn this session? Any last comment?
Thank you for. Folks here. I just want to add two points related to the things that we've already discussed.
I think the main thing in this context is perception.
I mean, if we're talking about religion and religious and Islam and Christianity, I think it's about the pure like definition that we can discuss it.
I think it's a perception. I mean, in my research, I'm doing research about conflicts and religions.
And I found that conflict, a religious perception of conflict, is different.
I mean, we can't define conflict in any way. We want to be kind of like study about the definition.
But at the same time, people can perceive the mission in some way or the other way.
So I think the main point, how we perceive and how we kill people have different perception.
And we can discuss the issue of perception and religion and how it's connected to different kinds of issues in political sphere.
And so this is the main thing that I'm trying to do to think about the relation between definition of religion and how it can be affected.
Our context of conflict along. Yeah.
I guess one example of that might be the way the Iranian revolution is read in the United States.
So you've got the Shah, you know, rules from 1953 to 1979.
And it was a kind of brutal police force, the SAVAK, you know, torture, killing thousands of people with the full United States support.
A revolution happens in 1979, and the way Americans prefer to read that is that they've had some kind of religious,
kind of fanatical religious awakening. Suddenly our television screens are filled with these people chanting Death to America.
And rather than examine America's role in the region for the better part of the 20th century and their support for the Shah and so on.
What we prefer to tell ourselves is that this is a religious awakening.
They've gotten hold of some crazy version of Shia Islam and they've had this kind of fanatical religious experience.
And now what are we going to do about this extremism that we're dealt with?
And so it helps the religious secular distinction, the religion,
politics distinction in that case helps to kind of cast a fog of amnesia over our own actions
and then makes the perception of Islam to be intolerant and crazy and fanatical in that way.
And so that's that's one of the one of the kinds of work that that this distinction does
in terms of perception and masks and the long view on exactly the politics of secularism.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I hope maybe you'll talk more about that this afternoon.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But but the whole way that Islam is perceived in the West has to do with these binaries.
Right. They don't distinguish religion from politics and therefore they mix these two volatile substances together.
And and and it's and and therefore, it's, you know, violence is is inevitable.
We just talking what is the other one? I think because the perception inside the Islam there is different perceptions of Islam is exactly, of course.
Right. And that's that's the whole point is that the more you can dig down,
instead of talking about Islam as like this or religion is like that, the more you can kind of dig down at the empirical level and say,
no, you know,
this particular school of Shia Islam in Iran has these kinds of precedents and here are the kind of external forces that helped to shape it and so on.
And the more useful it is, it seems to me that this just sort of triggered by what's.
I was saying so obviously and some of his thoughts came from school.
He emphasised a lot on his speech acts and the particular work,
which is sort of being done something very important, especially that a lot of similar work has come out of that.
That's I mean, one of the so I mean, I'm sure you're aware of some of the reasons of that sense of decolonial tension, you know,
across various sort of disciplines so that people won't say which of the causes of civil liberties and racism with these sorts of things.
So, I mean, I guess my question is how you sort of say let's drill down and focus on the empirical matter.
What, you know, what are we actually focusing on? Because we've seen someone like Francis Skinner, he's doing down he's looking at a very,
very specific context of food debates in sort of 17th century England.
But then obviously so much as being included in that process of colonialism, racism, all this has been all these big terms,
which obviously you always publicising some sort of lesson and we see, you know, is so very important, critical purpose.
I mean, as it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Thanks. I mean, that's good. That's helpful. And I'm not trying to make some sort of distinguishing just hard and fast distinction between empirical,
pure empirical and then kind of theoretical stuff.
Obviously,
empirical and theoretical are always in conversation and you've got to make generalisations in order to to create knowledge in any circumstances.
Maybe a better word than. Yeah, I don't know then empirical specific or something like that.
But you've got to do the concrete historical work and always have your theoretical
discussion tethered very carefully to the actual concrete historical work.
And, and the more you can bring the generalisations to a lower level, it seems to me, the more helpful it gets.
And then if you can just be critically aware of what happens every time you go to
the kind of higher level of generalisation that it seems like about the best we can,
the best we can do. Yeah. Yeah. And another way might be to say that we, we can't think without abstractions.
We're always going to have general concepts. The problem is that when are fictions or theories are abstractions,
cease to be pragmatic and become reified as though they're representing some permanent part of an objective world which exists outside of them.
Then we've lost the plot. And the the problem is being aware of of when that is happening and why it's happening.
So when he talks about being more empirical,
perhaps we're talking about being more critically aware of how we of the arbitrary elements of the way we're classifying whatever it is,
by looking at and representing it and remaining that critical awareness so that we don't get lost in these rarefied abstractions,
something along those lines to some extent.
So I just I guess my point was essentially the even contemptuous approach doesn't suit me that this was not an effect of power itself.
Joe Absolutely. Yes, sure. Yeah. No, in fact, it will be could be problematic.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So how do you suggest that we deal with that?
Another way of putting it, it's a no brainer.
I mean, we're all balance. I mean, another way of putting that is that we're all telling stories, right?
We're all telling narratives and and being aware of that isn't necessarily helpful.
Yeah, I'll take the prerogative to join here.
But just by noting that you used arbitrary, it was just not.