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So. Good morning.

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My my name is the alcohol call for those who don't come, but I think we know basically each other.

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So that's lovely. And I would be playing host today this for part of the day.

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Um, and by way of introduction, I thought,

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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.

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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.

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And this request was a good occasion to reflect upon the fact that, well,

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my work has always revolved around what is usually identified with this title religion, politics, Israeli identities, or these markers.

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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.

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The request really put me in a very uncomfortable position.

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Now, I was already at that point quite immersed in the literature, critical of secularism,

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secularisation and so forth, which usually goes under the title of the post secular.

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And I just knew maybe felt is a better word that something isn't quite right with the vast scholarship that is

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continuously published and usually taught under the headline of religion and politics in Israel and in other ways.

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More specifically, it was clear to me that this prevalent discourse hides more than it reveals that while

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it conveniently divides political reality into clearly demarcated camps and stances,

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a famous cleavage allegedly separating secular from religious Jews in Israel.

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In my case, which is thought as a fundamental of Israeli society in every introductory course, is nevertheless, it nevertheless misses quite a lot.

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Specifically, this discourse ignores some obviously theological, if you want to put it, escape words or not,

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or if we want to be even more critical idolatrous aspects of the politics of the allegedly secular nation state.

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But admittedly, I wasn't able to clearly articulate to myself and to my students at the time what it is that makes me

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so uncomfortable and quite frustrated with the field in which I was working as a student of politics.

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It was at that point that I finally came to the work of William Coven, Timothy Fitzgerald,

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and others who reminded their readers and reminded me in this case that the problem is exactly with the taking for granted,

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the non self-reflective use we make of concepts and terms which are the infrastructure of our speaking of reality,

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thinking of it and ultimately of understanding it. Specifically,

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they have challenged the use of the concept of religion as if it were some platonic marker of surprise for

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recall and supra cultural essence that takes different shapes but is ultimately the same wherever and wherever.

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Whenever we look most urgently, this conceptual scheme is not politically neutral.

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It justifies certain political configurations and delegitimizes others.

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It is, in other words, yet another example of how knowledge and power are intertwined.

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Clearly, there is an urgent, persistent need to challenge the very taken for granted infrastructure of our

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discussion of social and political reality in order to better understand it.

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And the Israeli case, which is the one I did with, is only one instance of a much larger and I guess deeper picture.

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Hence this symposium. Quite simply, our aim today is to establish a modest we want to enable a discussion that challenges what

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in many parts of the academic and public sphere is still taken to be obvious and beyond.

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Debate matters usually put under the heading of secularism, religion, liberalism, the nation state and so forth.

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Clearly, this is not about a phenomena unique to Israel.

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Quite the opposite. So the structure of the debt will follow this logic.

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The first session, which we are opening now, will deal more directly with the discourse on religion, its consequences, and its alternatives.

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The second session with Elizabeth, Chairman Hurd and Yolanda Johnson will, will I'm sorry, will focus on liberalism, secularism and the nation state.

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And the third session would aim to tie this critical discourse directly with the Israeli case,

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with you would actually have it myself, although it would it will naturally be present throughout the day.

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The Israeli case is kind of left for the end.

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The format of the symposium is dialogical and it is open.

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I speakers all share a certain viewpoints and critical perspectives,

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and the idea is to enable a public dialogue, something that will be an opening to a wider discussion.

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So we asked each of the speakers to prepare some main themes for the discussions,

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and after some short opening remarks, they will engage in a dialogue.

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Later on, we will invite the wider audience to partake in this discussion.

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So now is the time to present the two speakers of our first session.

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Uh, this morning to my far right, Professor Timothy Fitzgerald, formerly a reader in religion at the University of Stirling.

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Tim has theorised critical religion in many brilliant works published in Japan, India and North America here in the UK and other European countries.

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Among these are his groundbreaking the ideology of religious studies from 2001.

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Discourse on civility and barbarity. A critical history of religion and related categories from 2007.

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And religion. And politics. And International Relations.

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The Modern Myth from 2011. His works.

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His different works. Treat religion not as a standalone category,

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but as the key term in the modern configuration of categories that constitute and construct secular liberal reality.

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He has thus worked on the critical deconstruction of politics and political economy and thereby in relation to religion.

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He has recently also focussed his critique on the concept of politics in a forthcoming monograph titled Abolishing Politics,

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some of which is already available for you to read online. To My Cross the Right, Professor William,

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the Professor of Catholic Studies and the Director of the Centre for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology.

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A researcher at a research centre that deals with the Catholic Church in the Global South at DePaul University.

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Professor Governor's main areas of research have to do with the Church's encounter with social, political and economic realities.

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He is especially interested in the social implications of traditional Catholic beliefs and practices.

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In addition to numerous articles, he has authored six books and edited three more until now.

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In this, he has dealt with themes of the church's social and political presence in situations

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of violence and economic injustice may be most immediately relevant to our themes.

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Today are his seminal work from 2009 the myth of religious violence, secular ideology and the roots of modern conflict,

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and more recently, migrations of the Holy 2011 and Field Hospital, the church's engagement with the Wounded World from 2016.

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He is currently working on a book on secularisation and idolatry,

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exploring the ways in which a supposedly disenchanted Western society remains enchanted by nationalism, consumerism and cult of celebrity.

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So welcome. Thank you for coming and welcome. So maybe I can ask you to open with some gentlemen, please.

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Shall I? Sure. Go ahead.

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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.

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It was a very good, interesting degree.

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It was very well taught. We had courses.

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We had three philosophy of religion papers, four divisions or sections.

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We had anthropology of religion, we had sociology of religion, we had the psychology of religion.

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And then we had two world religions. The world religion paradigm was still very dominant at that time.

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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.

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As I say, I really enjoyed doing this religious studies degree,

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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.

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I didn't know what it meant, what it referred to.

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You know, in anthropology, in philosophy and sociology, there are quite a number of debates about the definition of religion.

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Nobody could agree. Well, some agreed, but there was a lot of contestation around it, but nobody was actually questioning the category itself,

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because the category is already very well institutionalised in all sorts of powerful ways.

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One obvious way in which is probably institutionalised, is that the universities are non-religious, secular.

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The problem arises that if you cannot agree on a definition of religion and by the way, this is not just academics,

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because you can read some legal scholars in legal journals who have talked about the problem for the high.

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For example, in the United States, the Supreme Court,

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who have made all sorts of judgements about what is a religious belief or institution and what is a non-religious, secular one.

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But there are no consistent criteria for making this this decision.

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So I came out not knowing what religion is, what it refers to.

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And that, of course, leads to what is secular, the secular non-religious.

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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.

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Also, that led me to look at politics, political economy, a nation state culture.

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How do you how do you tell the difference between a culture, a cultural institution,

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a social institution, a political institution, a religious institution?

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I've looked into all of these categories, the Enlightenment, progress, history.

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History is one of the most problematic categories we have.

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And I just before I stop, I just want to indicate part of where this problem is.

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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.

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We intuitively know how to use the term religion or politics, the political nation, history and so on.

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On the other hand, as soon as you look at any of these categories, you find that they're full of contradictions.

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They're indefinable. Many of them have absolutely no definable boundaries.

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So they overlap each other in all sorts of ways.

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Why is it that such problematic, contested categories which themselves define what we mean by modernity?

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After all, they have a historical genealogy. How is it that we use them with such intuitive certitude and self-confidence?

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Okay, I'll just stop there for the moment. But so I came to this.

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As a graduate student, I took a course on modern liberalism in political theory.

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And so we were reading Rawls and Rorty and people like that.

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And they're kept coming up this idea that the wars of religion were the founding moment of liberalism.

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You know, the story goes that after the Reformation, Protestants and Catholics were killing each other.

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And so the state had to step in and put religion to the side.

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And that's what created peace in the world.

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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,

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you know, Cardinal Richelieu was on Gustavus Adolphus side in the 30 Years War.

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You know, why did the Catholic cardinal intervene on behalf of the Lutherans?

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I discovered that the second half of the 30 Years War was more or less a war between the two Catholic dynasties of Europe,

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the Bourbons and the Habsburgs. And so I found this really confusing.

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So I started to look into the question of religion, and I read Wilfred Cantwell, Smith's book,

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The Meaning and End of Religion, which kind of got all of this started in 1962.

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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.

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Internal faith. Right. Which everybody has. Right? Right.

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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,

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is a modern term and it's a Western term. It's not found in other Earth, other places.

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And so that was really helpful for me.

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So eventually then I so my first second published article was it was on that the wars of religion and problematise in this category.

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And when I was a grad student and then eventually I came back to it and wrote that book, The Myth of Religious Violence,

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where I try to take it beyond the wars of religion and this whole idea that religion itself causes violence.

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And so and that's when I encountered Tim's work, the ideology of religious studies.

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And then the scales fell from my eyes. I was like, that's why religion is so.

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That's why we can't decide whether these are religious wars or not, because the category of religion is all B.S., right?

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So. So the myth goes well,

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there's this essential difference between religious and secular religion has a tendency to produce more violence and therefore religion.

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Needs to be kind of marginalised and that's the way you keep the peace.

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So the, the chapters of the book then are the first chapter just going through these arguments and

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showing that in all of these arguments that religion has a tendency to cause violence.

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They can't keep the categories from shifting.

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Right. And so Christopher Hitchens, for example, not an academic, but he's just a fun example.

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You know, religion, his book, God Is Not Great, Religion Causes Violence, Religion Causes.

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The subtitle of the book is with typical British understatement, How Religion Poisons Everything.

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Right?

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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?

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And he basically solves the problem by saying, well, those are religions, do totalitarianism is has this,

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you know, impulse towards megalomania, you know, whatever his reasons are.

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And so he just shifts the shifts them. So basically the distinction between religious and secular is the distinction

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between things that Hitchens doesn't like and the things that Hitchens likes.

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Right. And so so I go through nine different examples of this in the first chapter.

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The second chapter is then doing a genealogy of the term religion.

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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.

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So it's not an essential difference. It's something that's been socially constructed.

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The third chapter is on the wars of religion. So I go back to that, do the work with the historians.

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I have a section where I do 42 different examples of where Catholics killed Catholics, Protestants,

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Protestants or Catholics and Protestants collaborated in the so-called wars of religion.

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And so trying to piece that apart and finding that so that the narrative is religion is the problem, the state is the cure.

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And I find that religion is not the cause, but it's the product of the wars of religion, the creation of religion,

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which is something that comes out of these wars and that the state is not the solution.

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It's in fact, the cause of the wars.

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It's the kind of it most of the wars are about the centralisation of power over against local forms of power and authority.

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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.

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And it's finally kind of resolved in the civil authorities favour in the 16th century.

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And so then the last chapter is about how this distinction continues to be useful in bad ways.

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Mostly, you know, you marginalise so-called religious practices.

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The Supreme Court in the United States by talking about how the dangers of if you subsidise parochial schools,

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then religious violence is going to break out. And ridiculous ideas like this, and mostly in foreign policy as well.

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Muslims are essentially irrational because they are not essentially irrational, but they don't separate religion and politics.

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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.

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And so that's that's how I got into it.

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And how can you maybe discuss how in what ways is it helpful to now think about these matters having deconstructed,

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I mean, the negative aspects of it? I mean. Well, I think for me, it's is a negative.

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It's a bit like negative theology in a way. I'm not trying to offer anybody an alternative.

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I'm just drawing attention to the world of abstractions in which all communications are conducted,

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abstractions which appear to us to be intuitively concrete and theoretical.

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And I'm interested in why these very general categories.

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I've made a list of them religion, politics, society,

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society and societies seems intuitively a neutral and perfectly harmless idea until you look at the history of the way society has been constructed.

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Theoretically political economy.

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How does what is the difference between politics and political economy, and how do you distinguish between politics and economics?

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At first it looks like a knockdown, easy to answer issue, but the more you go into the two to the.

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These categories.

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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,

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you realise that whatever your intentionality at that particular moment,

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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.

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And the reader has all sorts of different ways to read what your, what, your, what you're writing or saying.

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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.

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It seems to me to be that politics is basically empty of any clear meaning.

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And people have been very angry with me.

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I mean, I find that the the reaction to this to be itself quite interesting.

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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.

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I cannot and this is an empirical question.

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Some of you might be able to find texts earlier where the noun word politics is being used and

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it's being used to distinguish a domain of government from something else called religion.

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This is another crucial factor. And I find this that John Locke has a great deal to do with this.

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When I go back to the Putney debates of the 1640s, this is the revolutionary period in England.

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I can't find the discourse on politics in the non word.

199
00:22:43,500 --> 00:22:50,070
Perhaps it's there, perhaps I've missed it. But that that's a challenge which I would like to hear.

200
00:22:50,850 --> 00:22:55,530
I think it's being processed, if you like, but it hasn't yet arisen.

201
00:22:56,370 --> 00:23:09,089
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,

202
00:23:09,090 --> 00:23:09,990
for example.

203
00:23:11,910 --> 00:23:23,670
Then when you actually look at the way politics is used in texts right across the humanities and social sciences today, politics is universal.

204
00:23:24,270 --> 00:23:33,090
There's a politics of every time, every place, every language, every power relationship is described as politics and political.

205
00:23:33,870 --> 00:23:48,210
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,

206
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which is part of the critique of the sacred monarch and the ensuing regime,

207
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the inherited status of ecclesiastical, not of the temporal lords, and the power of the church and the priestly hierarchies.

208
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It's in that context that you get a whole number of terms, many of them which already existed.

209
00:24:17,940 --> 00:24:28,950
But in the case of politics, which I think was being invented, they're being reified into a new discourse,

210
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a new power, such a power rhetorics with very, very concrete conditions we can look at.

211
00:24:38,400 --> 00:24:42,570
And then over the 18th and 19th centuries, they've become normalised.

212
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We've forgotten their origins. They've become part of our normalised vocabulary and way of thinking that become institutionalised in universities.

213
00:24:54,720 --> 00:25:01,200
And now people don't want to actually look at their origins or their contradictions in use.

214
00:25:02,070 --> 00:25:06,629
So I think this is true of many of the categories that I've been looking at.

215
00:25:06,630 --> 00:25:09,780
They've got double meanings. They're indefinable.

216
00:25:10,020 --> 00:25:20,219
I mean, if everything is political, which is often asserted, the politics of everything or even all human relationships,

217
00:25:20,220 --> 00:25:24,630
political theorists often said they're all political in some sense.

218
00:25:25,440 --> 00:25:32,489
But on the other hand, how do you square that with the historical origin of this discourse in the 17th century,

219
00:25:32,490 --> 00:25:37,380
where it has a much more specific meaning to do with representative government,

220
00:25:37,740 --> 00:25:42,400
that is to say, the representation of male property interests in Parliament.

221
00:25:42,420 --> 00:25:44,940
That was fundamentally what politics was invented.

222
00:25:45,100 --> 00:25:57,100
For the representation of male male property interests and other rights which were associated like that in a, in a very specific past situation.

223
00:25:57,340 --> 00:26:00,630
And, you know, I so were good reasons for it.

224
00:26:00,640 --> 00:26:05,410
After all, the king had arbitrary powers. He could confiscate people's lands.

225
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He could put them in prison if he didn't like them.

226
00:26:09,250 --> 00:26:20,630
So the idea of natural rights became a profoundly important discourse and one of the fundamental rights, which is called natural.

227
00:26:20,650 --> 00:26:25,660
And that will bring me to nature in a minute, because that's one of my favourite categories,

228
00:26:26,740 --> 00:26:33,100
is that that of private property and the representation of private property.

229
00:26:33,850 --> 00:26:37,299
So that's pushed us a bit, but a bit further forward.

230
00:26:37,300 --> 00:26:39,520
So I'll stop there. Yeah.

231
00:26:40,360 --> 00:26:51,099
So you mean the fluidity of the terms is sometimes used as an argument against this line of reasoning because people will say,

232
00:26:51,100 --> 00:26:54,969
well, every category has fuzzy boundaries, right?

233
00:26:54,970 --> 00:27:03,250
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.

234
00:27:03,250 --> 00:27:10,450
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.

235
00:27:10,450 --> 00:27:16,689
But I think in some ways the problem is not just that they're very fluid and fuzzy.

236
00:27:16,690 --> 00:27:24,969
The problem is that under certain circumstances the boundaries get quite clear and then when you don't want them to be clear anymore,

237
00:27:24,970 --> 00:27:28,090
then you shift them in another direction, you know?

238
00:27:28,090 --> 00:27:36,220
And so when you want them to be clear, then it's very clear that Islam is a religion,

239
00:27:36,520 --> 00:27:41,830
but American nationalism is not right and the boundaries suddenly get very clear.

240
00:27:42,820 --> 00:27:50,320
But then you move on in another area where it's convenient to kind of make them fuzzy again and then.

241
00:27:50,620 --> 00:27:59,259
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,

242
00:27:59,260 --> 00:28:03,370
people did not see what they were doing as politics or religion,

243
00:28:03,370 --> 00:28:10,449
or maybe they didn't use the concept, but what they did correspond to our concept of religion.

244
00:28:10,450 --> 00:28:14,649
So it's been there. People would offer theories of an economy.

245
00:28:14,650 --> 00:28:19,480
No one was speaking of economy in ancient times, but they were having an economy.

246
00:28:20,470 --> 00:28:25,210
Well, I think that implies that if they had an economy,

247
00:28:25,640 --> 00:28:32,860
we anthropologists talk about the economics and the politics and the religions

248
00:28:32,860 --> 00:28:40,510
of primitive societies or societies which are less developed and us perhaps,

249
00:28:41,770 --> 00:28:46,780
but unfortunately they didn't have a word for it and they didn't make those distinctions.

250
00:28:47,380 --> 00:28:52,240
So do we just assumed that they were too stupid to know what we now know?

251
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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.

252
00:29:01,540 --> 00:29:07,570
You couldn't quite understand their own, their own situation.

253
00:29:08,320 --> 00:29:16,270
Or do we say, well, no, actually it's a kind of imperialism because it was really in the colonial era that we

254
00:29:16,270 --> 00:29:22,899
wanted to reconstruct other people's lives so that they conform to our to our needs,

255
00:29:22,900 --> 00:29:33,520
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.

256
00:29:35,200 --> 00:29:38,529
So yeah, that's what I would say to start the conversation off.

257
00:29:38,530 --> 00:29:52,090
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,

258
00:29:52,750 --> 00:29:56,890
University of California, Berkeley, a very secular public institution,

259
00:29:57,430 --> 00:30:04,540
and talking to the political science graduate students and gave my presentation.

260
00:30:04,540 --> 00:30:10,420
And then they said, Well, so what do we do with the term religion?

261
00:30:10,510 --> 00:30:14,230
And I said, Well, I prefer not to not to use that term.

262
00:30:15,010 --> 00:30:17,770
And later then one of them was saying, you know,

263
00:30:17,770 --> 00:30:26,410
we've been trying really hard to get this very secular international studies department to take religious religion seriously.

264
00:30:26,710 --> 00:30:32,620
And after so many years, we've finally gotten that to happen, and now you're pulling the rug out from under us.

265
00:30:33,130 --> 00:30:40,780
And so it became clear to me that you always need to talk about that.

266
00:30:40,780 --> 00:30:47,239
We need to talk about the term, right? I mean that. Critique is sometimes, oh, you want to get rid of that term.

267
00:30:47,240 --> 00:30:50,790
You want to get rid of all the terms. What are we going to do without terms?

268
00:30:50,810 --> 00:30:54,230
Right. And and I think you can't just get rid of them.

269
00:30:54,240 --> 00:30:58,309
What you need to do is put them under a magnifying glass.

270
00:30:58,310 --> 00:31:02,930
And so instead of talking about religion as if religion is this,

271
00:31:03,410 --> 00:31:10,430
and you start talking about religion as if religion is this, right, it's not a thing which is out there.

272
00:31:10,820 --> 00:31:15,560
It's a lens through which we read the world.

273
00:31:16,040 --> 00:31:20,240
And the only problem with that analogy is that these help me see better.

274
00:31:20,660 --> 00:31:28,070
Right. And most of the time, the term religion blurs things and distorts things.

275
00:31:28,080 --> 00:31:31,630
But there could be benign uses of it.

276
00:31:31,640 --> 00:31:37,760
I mean, perhaps to distinguish what I do in church from what I do in my garden,

277
00:31:38,270 --> 00:31:43,130
that the kind of some sort of distinction between religious and secular might be.

278
00:31:43,140 --> 00:31:47,450
But then I'd go, well, you would get really well regarded. Well, exactly.

279
00:31:47,470 --> 00:31:53,110
I mean, I don't want to make. Yeah, I'm trying to come up here. Here's one use I.

280
00:31:53,480 --> 00:32:00,770
So I gave a talk one time and a guy who taught theology at the University of Virginia in the Religious Studies Department said,

281
00:32:00,800 --> 00:32:04,610
hey, you're going to put me out of a job, right? And I said, Oh, okay.

282
00:32:04,940 --> 00:32:13,310
You know what? What the term religion does is help theology to go on at Thomas Jefferson's university.

283
00:32:13,790 --> 00:32:19,969
Right. Which I think is wonderful. I mean, this is just this subversive kind of a foot in the door.

284
00:32:19,970 --> 00:32:25,340
And I think that's great. So there there is an instance where it might be used well, but in lots of other instances,

285
00:32:25,580 --> 00:32:34,220
most other instances, I suppose the use is not benign and it always needs to be examined in that way.

286
00:32:34,460 --> 00:32:43,720
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.

287
00:32:43,730 --> 00:32:46,700
We're always going to be using general kind of categories,

288
00:32:47,570 --> 00:32:54,830
but we need to we need to always be critically aware of what what kind of power they're enacting.

289
00:32:55,580 --> 00:33:03,530
Yeah, I think that's good. And I think one of the rhetorical mechanisms that makes these categories seem self-evident,

290
00:33:03,540 --> 00:33:11,540
men in the church in a vertical is that they operate in binaries a centralising either or binaries.

291
00:33:11,540 --> 00:33:19,220
So religion and non it's either religious or it's non-religious, secular, it's either supernatural or it's natural.

292
00:33:19,730 --> 00:33:23,150
It's either about faith or it's about real knowledge.

293
00:33:24,170 --> 00:33:34,700
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,

294
00:33:36,230 --> 00:33:40,910
you find that the arguments slip from one binary to another.

295
00:33:41,660 --> 00:33:48,680
So God's and the world, you know, the other world, this world, there's a whole series.

296
00:33:48,680 --> 00:33:55,010
So these binaries stand in for each other and they actually form a kind of circle.

297
00:33:55,700 --> 00:33:58,609
So there's a continual displacement of meaning.

298
00:33:58,610 --> 00:34:05,420
You never actually get to the foundational binary, and eventually you'll come back to religion and secular.

299
00:34:05,840 --> 00:34:06,460
So there's,

300
00:34:06,770 --> 00:34:18,920
there's this binary displacement mechanism which disguises from us that none of these terms can actually be clearly distinguished from each other.

301
00:34:19,310 --> 00:34:31,010
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,

302
00:34:31,490 --> 00:34:38,660
everything is nature, everything is natural, everything can be explained naturalistically.

303
00:34:39,350 --> 00:34:47,600
So what is not nature? Well, you could say, well, the supernatural is not nature.

304
00:34:47,900 --> 00:34:59,900
Oh, but cognitive psychology tells us that religion is really about certain mental states, which can be explained by evolutionary biology.

305
00:35:00,110 --> 00:35:05,030
So they are really natural. They're just naturalistic fantasies.

306
00:35:05,720 --> 00:35:14,300
What about the artificial? Well, yes, it seems a very useful thing to make a distinction between the artificial and the natural.

307
00:35:14,990 --> 00:35:20,209
But on the other hand, by artificial we make we mean human made.

308
00:35:20,210 --> 00:35:25,040
And surely human beings are natural. I mean, human nature is part of nature.

309
00:35:25,580 --> 00:35:28,850
So the artificial is also ultimately natural.

310
00:35:30,440 --> 00:35:40,970
What about the unnatural well, unnatural things, you know, really ethical issues for different groups.

311
00:35:43,100 --> 00:35:52,770
Homosexuality. Is un natural. Well, yes, but it's not really because everything is natural and my sexuality is as natural as heterosexuality.

312
00:35:53,310 --> 00:35:57,150
So in our dominant discourse, nature is everything.

313
00:35:57,300 --> 00:36:06,810
What? What stands outside nature? I mean, my point is that if everything is nature, then the world is empty of any specificity.

314
00:36:06,810 --> 00:36:11,730
It has no clear. It has no clear reference.

315
00:36:12,930 --> 00:36:16,080
It's like the world. Everything is included in the world.

316
00:36:16,110 --> 00:36:23,420
So what does the world mean? You can't point to nature just as you can't point to a religion.

317
00:36:23,430 --> 00:36:34,440
You can't point to politics. You might think you can, but these abstract categories appear as though they represent things in the world.

318
00:36:34,710 --> 00:36:41,130
But then when you look for them, they dissolve. So I'm interested in why do they have power?

319
00:36:41,580 --> 00:36:49,020
Why do they have rhetorical power if they're so empty of any kind of clear referential meaning?

320
00:36:49,680 --> 00:36:55,130
Why do we keep using them? What is it that makes us feel that we can't live without them?

321
00:36:55,160 --> 00:37:01,020
That we have this compulsion to deploy them, that we must classify the world in terms of them?

322
00:37:03,480 --> 00:37:09,870
It seems like one of the one of the remedies is to get as empirical as you possibly can.

323
00:37:11,220 --> 00:37:25,770
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.

324
00:37:25,770 --> 00:37:27,990
And that's us. That's a that's a step.

325
00:37:28,980 --> 00:37:39,630
But instead of talking about Islam, let's talk about this particular school of Wahhabism in 18th century Saudi Arabia.

326
00:37:40,470 --> 00:37:47,180
And let's let's burn down as as as close to the ground is as we can get.

327
00:37:47,190 --> 00:37:54,330
And so instead of making hard arguments, is Islam a religion of peace or is it a religion of violence?

328
00:37:55,140 --> 00:37:58,200
Well, let's talk about these particular schools.

329
00:37:58,200 --> 00:38:02,009
Let's talk about these particular historical circumstances.

330
00:38:02,010 --> 00:38:06,989
Let's get as as near to the ground, as as empirical as we can.

331
00:38:06,990 --> 00:38:14,040
Let's let's look at Tasso. Wagner's work on the Pueblo Indians is really fascinating.

332
00:38:14,040 --> 00:38:28,979
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,

333
00:38:28,980 --> 00:38:36,450
they have no religion. Of course, it's just part of their their dances are part of their way of life.

334
00:38:36,750 --> 00:38:45,090
Until the federal government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, wants them to stop dancing and they want them to assimilate into culture.

335
00:38:45,090 --> 00:38:51,390
And so they get some white lawyers who say invoke the principle of religious freedom.

336
00:38:51,990 --> 00:38:55,350
And so they do that. And it works in some ways.

337
00:38:55,350 --> 00:38:59,770
It gives them a little bit of defence to invoke the concept of religious freedom.

338
00:38:59,790 --> 00:39:06,059
The problem then is that it then becomes part of the internal discourse of the tribe and people within

339
00:39:06,060 --> 00:39:12,930
the tribe then begin using the term religious freedom to assert their right not to participate.

340
00:39:13,530 --> 00:39:22,740
Right. And so now you've introduced something which is which threatens to tear the chair of the tribe apart and has now.

341
00:39:23,310 --> 00:39:26,580
So it's this this double edged sword.

342
00:39:26,580 --> 00:39:33,840
So so the more specific that you can get about this, about how the discourse is actually working,

343
00:39:33,840 --> 00:39:43,440
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?

344
00:39:43,470 --> 00:39:52,470
Uh, uh, well, uh, naturalisation of this concept as has been right, and you already mentioned it doesn't happen just out of nowhere.

345
00:39:52,470 --> 00:39:59,460
As you mentioned, we got I mean, there's this historical need and an agency that plays a role in constructing it.

346
00:39:59,910 --> 00:40:07,830
And in a sense, when we were upon these questions of boundaries and meanings and we kind of, uh,

347
00:40:08,160 --> 00:40:14,700
shift the focus away from maybe what is most important someone who is benefiting from this.

348
00:40:14,700 --> 00:40:18,850
So can you now address the benefit and beneficiaries?

349
00:40:18,870 --> 00:40:29,940
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.

350
00:40:30,240 --> 00:40:36,510
And this is not a mistake, that it's not a coincidence that it first comes into play in the early modern period,

351
00:40:36,510 --> 00:40:40,920
in the period when you get the creation of the modern Western state.

352
00:40:41,340 --> 00:40:49,250
And so what it does then under. Those circumstances is and this is very clear and lock, I think is that it takes.

353
00:40:49,550 --> 00:40:58,130
So there's been this contest of power between the civil and the ecclesiastical authorities since the fourth century, since Constantine converts.

354
00:40:58,430 --> 00:41:03,500
You don't have politics and religion, but you do have priests and kings.

355
00:41:03,860 --> 00:41:08,380
And you get this this dual authority of civil and ecclesiastical authorities.

356
00:41:08,390 --> 00:41:12,320
It's a contest. Sometimes the civil authorities have the upper hand.

357
00:41:12,800 --> 00:41:17,630
Then you get the investiture controversy and the ecclesiastical authorities have the upper hand.

358
00:41:17,840 --> 00:41:22,340
It finally works itself out in the early modern period where the civil authorities gain the upper hand.

359
00:41:22,640 --> 00:41:31,850
And so religion then becomes what the ecclesiastical authorities have authority over, and it becomes something which is essentially private.

360
00:41:32,840 --> 00:41:40,610
And then once you've invented that sort of category, then it's also the period of of colonial expansion,

361
00:41:40,940 --> 00:41:45,830
and they discover that it's very useful in colonial contexts.

362
00:41:47,300 --> 00:41:55,250
So so you find that to use this this religious secular distinction in India under British rule,

363
00:41:55,580 --> 00:42:00,830
means that to be British is to be public and to be Indian is to be private.

364
00:42:00,830 --> 00:42:10,460
If you take everything it means to be Indian and encapsulated in this thing called Hinduism and then make Hinduism into a religion,

365
00:42:10,760 --> 00:42:16,399
you can take everything it means to be Indian and kind of make it make it private,

366
00:42:16,400 --> 00:42:24,800
which is really why the BJP, the kind of Hindu nationalist party today, refuses to call Hinduism a religion.

367
00:42:24,980 --> 00:42:29,330
Right. Yeah, I'm not sure, because it's it's all it's all these other things.

368
00:42:29,330 --> 00:42:40,610
Right. And so the and there's a lot of really interesting work being done about the power relations in under colonial context.

369
00:42:40,610 --> 00:42:42,860
So those are a couple of examples,

370
00:42:42,860 --> 00:42:53,990
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,

371
00:42:54,440 --> 00:43:02,959
but then it kind of mutates and takes on these kind of universal characteristics and of course it takes on those universal

372
00:43:02,960 --> 00:43:13,440
characteristics because Western European civilisation becomes fancies itself universal precisely in this period which allows it then to,

373
00:43:14,330 --> 00:43:17,330
to, to go out and change the world.

374
00:43:17,650 --> 00:43:22,400
And I think we could add to that the the invention of the individual,

375
00:43:23,630 --> 00:43:31,910
because the invention of all this system of rights is also the invention of the individual who has these rights.

376
00:43:32,480 --> 00:43:37,280
And that was connected to the privatisation of land during the enclosures.

377
00:43:39,500 --> 00:43:50,390
When Cromwell went to to Ireland, basically the theft of Catholic lands was also the creation of a market in the land,

378
00:43:50,840 --> 00:43:57,559
because William Petit went to the to the land surveyor general,

379
00:43:57,560 --> 00:44:08,090
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.

380
00:44:08,330 --> 00:44:13,729
So you begin to get a cash a cash economy and land on.

381
00:44:13,730 --> 00:44:22,610
100 years later, Thomas Jefferson was doing the same with the apparently empty lands of North America.

382
00:44:23,690 --> 00:44:28,310
He was marking them out in plots so that they can be bought and sold more easily.

383
00:44:28,850 --> 00:44:42,980
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.

384
00:44:43,430 --> 00:44:51,440
I think the the idea of private ownership is quite fundamental to the the idea of the

385
00:44:51,440 --> 00:44:59,960
individual as a kind of inviolable protected entity who is not dependent on anybody else.

386
00:45:01,520 --> 00:45:09,620
You know, I would also mention that the idea of liberty has been very interesting.

387
00:45:09,620 --> 00:45:19,070
Theorises negative liberty and positive liberty and negative liberty is this idea that nobody has a right to invade my privacy.

388
00:45:20,330 --> 00:45:30,140
This was originally to defend people against the king and the, the, the, the lords who inherited their status and so on.

389
00:45:32,060 --> 00:45:33,920
But it became a kind of dogma.

390
00:45:34,340 --> 00:45:43,550
It's actually, I think, at the foundation of classical liberalism, what we call classical liberal political economy, is that actually comes.

391
00:45:43,610 --> 00:45:50,569
Out of this and is in a is an ideological theories zation of the individual and the rights the natural

392
00:45:50,570 --> 00:45:56,660
rights of the individual and the sort of almost absolute distinction between the individual and the rest.

393
00:45:57,420 --> 00:46:07,280
And I want you to address an argument that's usually thrown at critical religion or maybe as a misunderstanding.

394
00:46:07,280 --> 00:46:10,920
But I want you to think about it, please, if you can allow it.

395
00:46:11,450 --> 00:46:21,830
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.

396
00:46:22,700 --> 00:46:26,440
And it depends what you mean when you say no such thing.

397
00:46:26,450 --> 00:46:28,910
Right? I mean, clearly there is such a thing.

398
00:46:30,170 --> 00:46:42,410
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.

399
00:46:43,640 --> 00:46:51,950
It's a thing. Again, in this sense that it's it's a very powerful lens through which we view the world.

400
00:46:52,550 --> 00:46:55,940
And and so if that's what you mean by no such thing.

401
00:46:55,970 --> 00:46:59,090
So there's there's a couple of different ways I'm thinking about it.

402
00:46:59,510 --> 00:47:06,800
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.

403
00:47:07,070 --> 00:47:11,330
And they thought I was just kind of playing some kind of semantic trick on them.

404
00:47:12,260 --> 00:47:16,670
But that's not that's not the argument. So in one sense, it's not.

405
00:47:17,180 --> 00:47:23,690
There's no such thing in the sense of it just being like a rock that you that you run into out there.

406
00:47:23,930 --> 00:47:29,200
But on the other hand, of course, it it exists and we need to talk about it.

407
00:47:29,210 --> 00:47:35,030
Well, I would disagree with that. I mean, I think I would at least put it differently.

408
00:47:35,030 --> 00:47:37,310
I would say there is no such thing as religion.

409
00:47:37,340 --> 00:47:46,100
I would say that religion is a contingent historical way of classifying certain institutions right for polynomials.

410
00:47:46,970 --> 00:47:58,459
If you want to, you know, on the basis of a binary of the binary that these are these are these are religious practices.

411
00:47:58,460 --> 00:48:03,950
They're therefore superstitious. They're not in tune with modern scientific thinking.

412
00:48:04,520 --> 00:48:13,640
They therefore have to be demarcated so that we can clear a space for what is truly rational, which is markets,

413
00:48:13,910 --> 00:48:26,780
banks, finance, money, economy, centralisation of bureaucracy, proper law courts, not these superstitious things.

414
00:48:26,780 --> 00:48:29,920
The hangover from the past.

415
00:48:29,930 --> 00:48:33,469
You see what I'm saying? So I would say, yeah, religion is not a thing.

416
00:48:33,470 --> 00:48:38,050
And it's this illusion of ratification that's operating.

417
00:48:39,800 --> 00:48:43,460
Religion is a category. It's a it's a classification category.

418
00:48:43,790 --> 00:48:53,060
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.

419
00:48:54,170 --> 00:48:57,470
So just about everything can be described as religion.

420
00:48:58,070 --> 00:49:01,729
But at the same time, there's an either or this is religion.

421
00:49:01,730 --> 00:49:05,900
This is not religion operating as a binary, as centralisation.

422
00:49:06,410 --> 00:49:11,180
So this this is a very powerful rhetorical technique of confusion.

423
00:49:12,500 --> 00:49:18,770
How do we observe it just to respond to I mean, I think Tim is exactly right.

424
00:49:18,770 --> 00:49:26,660
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.

425
00:49:27,260 --> 00:49:30,829
But Tim used the term arbitrary. We just had this discussion over email.

426
00:49:30,830 --> 00:49:37,399
I used to use that term and somebody called me out on it and said it's not arbitrary that in

427
00:49:37,400 --> 00:49:43,129
fact it's used for very specific power purposes and I think you'd agree with that as well.

428
00:49:43,130 --> 00:49:48,680
It's arbitrary in the sense that you can use it in all sorts of different ways,

429
00:49:48,680 --> 00:49:53,000
but but the ways that it actually gets used are not not simply arbitrary.

430
00:49:53,010 --> 00:50:00,770
They're there. But so anyway, that's that's one word that I've stricken from my vocabulary when talking about these matters.

431
00:50:00,770 --> 00:50:05,000
Yeah, I think we could say that it has ideological directionality.

432
00:50:05,060 --> 00:50:09,560
Right. It's not necessarily a conscious, it's not necessary.

433
00:50:09,560 --> 00:50:12,860
In fact, I think it's much more powerful for being largely unconscious.

434
00:50:12,950 --> 00:50:20,960
Yeah. Yeah. That's why it works so powerfully. And that's why, you know, we reproduce these categories unconsciously.

435
00:50:21,380 --> 00:50:31,030
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?

436
00:50:31,040 --> 00:50:34,490
Yeah. How many different ways can this be read?

437
00:50:34,740 --> 00:50:43,220
Well, what is the political I mean, some some texts that you read by political theorists, they have the term.

438
00:50:43,350 --> 00:50:49,739
Politics and political. It's just endlessly repeated in almost every sentence.

439
00:50:49,740 --> 00:50:57,870
And you think, well, actually, if you just took the word out completely of the CSA would be any loss.

440
00:50:58,440 --> 00:51:01,559
Would we lose any real meaning? I'd suggest no.

441
00:51:01,560 --> 00:51:08,720
Probably we would gain a lot. So maybe two related issues that emerge out of it.

442
00:51:08,760 --> 00:51:15,810
First, what do we do when as students of a reality of a certain society or, you know, a group of people?

443
00:51:16,290 --> 00:51:19,170
What do we do with those who identify through these categories?

444
00:51:19,650 --> 00:51:26,460
In the Israeli case, for example, being religious or being secular reason is is a fundamental tenet of people's identity.

445
00:51:27,030 --> 00:51:32,280
And secondly, related to that, once we've deconstructed the terms and the concept,

446
00:51:32,280 --> 00:51:37,050
how can we now approach a reality and talk about those things that are put under these categories

447
00:51:37,890 --> 00:51:43,920
without falling into the trap and still saying something that would be meaningful to our audience?

448
00:51:44,880 --> 00:51:52,250
Well, I don't feel an obligation to to answer, because you say you don't.

449
00:51:52,530 --> 00:52:05,219
I think that you will. No, I think it's just to to point out the contradictions, the in defined abilities,

450
00:52:05,220 --> 00:52:13,950
the tendency to universal ization and to leave it to people, to say, I'm not a legislator.

451
00:52:14,130 --> 00:52:17,040
I'm not going to tell people how they must use language.

452
00:52:17,790 --> 00:52:27,119
But I do have a right to point out that the way that we use language, very general categories that are organising our knowledge,

453
00:52:27,120 --> 00:52:34,560
organising our institutions, indeed defining the nation state, which is another very problematic.

454
00:52:34,890 --> 00:52:37,140
I mean, after all, what is the national interest?

455
00:52:38,460 --> 00:52:43,920
You know, so many politicians claiming to represent the national interest, but who will what is the nation?

456
00:52:44,100 --> 00:52:56,250
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.

457
00:52:57,330 --> 00:53:03,270
So I think that I have a right and a duty to points out to challenge people to

458
00:53:03,270 --> 00:53:09,120
look at these categories without then going on to tell them how they must behave.

459
00:53:11,040 --> 00:53:20,310
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,

460
00:53:21,950 --> 00:53:30,120
and it begins to the kind of lower you get of the scale of abstraction, the more helpful things are, I find.

461
00:53:30,120 --> 00:53:36,060
And part of the problem is the religious secular distinction creates this.

462
00:53:36,360 --> 00:53:40,030
I mean, in an era where we talk about how we can't talk to each other anymore,

463
00:53:40,060 --> 00:53:44,459
that's one of the things that really prevents us from talking with each other.

464
00:53:44,460 --> 00:53:48,720
Sam Harris The kind of famous atheists is that, you know,

465
00:53:48,750 --> 00:53:54,180
Muslims believe things that are completely beyond rationality, so we can't even talk to them.

466
00:53:54,660 --> 00:53:59,190
Right? And so all you can use is coercion when you can't talk to somebody.

467
00:53:59,200 --> 00:54:03,450
So these these categories create this impassable gap.

468
00:54:03,600 --> 00:54:11,429
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?

469
00:54:11,430 --> 00:54:14,550
In which the basic argument is everybody believes in something.

470
00:54:14,880 --> 00:54:18,060
So don't tell me I'm a believer and you're an unbeliever.

471
00:54:18,330 --> 00:54:22,500
You tell me what you believe. I'll tell you what I believe. And then let's have a conversation.

472
00:54:24,020 --> 00:54:30,120
All right. So before we open this for a wider discussion, and I'm conscious of the, of the time, uh,

473
00:54:30,680 --> 00:54:37,490
I just wanted to go back to your personal perspectives on it, and I started by a small anecdote.

474
00:54:37,910 --> 00:54:47,720
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,

475
00:54:47,900 --> 00:54:57,950
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.

476
00:54:59,040 --> 00:55:03,320
In a way, he dismissed everything you said because. Yeah, because you would.

477
00:55:03,530 --> 00:55:11,209
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.

478
00:55:11,210 --> 00:55:17,570
Can you maybe contemplate on this relationship between the two of you, or did this it personal takes on me.

479
00:55:18,920 --> 00:55:28,639
Right. Yeah, that's a really interesting point, because usually we would not become friends because there's this divide, right?

480
00:55:28,640 --> 00:55:32,900
Religious, secular would be the normal way of classifying us in some ways.

481
00:55:33,470 --> 00:55:40,070
Um, but, um, but that's one of the things that this type of discourse has done,

482
00:55:40,070 --> 00:55:50,450
I think, is allow for friendships to happen across those very artificial boundaries.

483
00:55:50,750 --> 00:56:01,420
Mm. Yeah. Um, uh, well, as I say, and I did a religious studies degree and I came out not knowing what religion was.

484
00:56:01,430 --> 00:56:06,590
I think there are also deeper things going on, but I don't really want to get into them.

485
00:56:06,740 --> 00:56:09,709
But it was sort of subject to personal things.

486
00:56:09,710 --> 00:56:23,080
But um, uh, the, this, um, this problem of boundaries, uh, you know, uh, as people saying this sort of a centralising boundary and,

487
00:56:23,630 --> 00:56:28,670
and the fact that one is defined by receiving a secular salary in a university,

488
00:56:28,670 --> 00:56:28,970
you know,

489
00:56:30,920 --> 00:56:42,110
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.

490
00:56:43,170 --> 00:56:45,680
Um, so that was all feeding into it.

491
00:56:47,000 --> 00:56:55,070
But um, yeah, I think that I thought that Bill's book, The Myth of Religious Violence, is brilliant and very necessary.

492
00:56:55,550 --> 00:57:01,550
And I think it brought out problems in the discourse that were present in John Locke.

493
00:57:01,760 --> 00:57:06,860
I mean, it goes right back to John Locke and other people's, as you argue it, uh,

494
00:57:07,550 --> 00:57:18,230
attempt to other religion to make it something which allowed a new concept of government as a representation of private property interests,

495
00:57:18,230 --> 00:57:24,920
male private property interests to to appear vertical and obvious and natural.

496
00:57:25,160 --> 00:57:32,620
Yeah. Because he talked about them as natural rights. I think it's the right time to now open.

497
00:57:32,660 --> 00:57:35,770
I mean, I'm sure there are many questions. Yes.

498
00:57:35,920 --> 00:57:40,110
Do you want to introduce yourself when you ask the question, please? Yes. I'm AnnaSophia.

499
00:57:40,120 --> 00:57:48,730
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.

500
00:57:49,090 --> 00:57:56,230
So maybe I should just leave the room, but surprise you that I do have some problems with this.

501
00:57:58,720 --> 00:58:02,560
That the use of abstractions is complicated.

502
00:58:04,150 --> 00:58:09,210
That's obvious. I think we all agree that many terms are multivalent.

503
00:58:09,330 --> 00:58:17,640
That's the term I would use. I'm a great believer in defining the way you use a multivalent check.

504
00:58:18,980 --> 00:58:26,300
I believe that if you define what you mean by religion, it's actually quite a good thing to use.

505
00:58:27,380 --> 00:58:32,630
Now, my problems with what I've heard tried to make notes trying to make sense of this.

506
00:58:33,050 --> 00:58:37,370
My greatest problem is the concentration on the 17th century.

507
00:58:38,030 --> 00:58:51,409
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,

508
00:58:51,410 --> 00:58:56,120
which is the confrontation, the interaction between Christians and Jews.

509
00:58:56,750 --> 00:59:06,200
Let's say between 1013 hundred and when I in another place was teaching political thought, medieval political thought to my students.

510
00:59:07,040 --> 00:59:16,970
What was particularly helpful to understand what was meant by regnant in soccer, adults, priesthood and kingship?

511
00:59:17,480 --> 00:59:25,700
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.

512
00:59:25,700 --> 00:59:30,410
Magnum So this kind of, I would use the word temporal.

513
00:59:30,470 --> 00:59:34,100
I would never, ever, ever use the word secular for the medieval period.

514
00:59:34,370 --> 00:59:40,009
Totally meaningless right now when you start looking at it in terms of Christian Jewish relations,

515
00:59:40,010 --> 00:59:46,159
you just realise how impregnated the temporal scene is.

516
00:59:46,160 --> 00:59:52,280
The temporal sphere is with Christianity and you immediately realise that you

517
00:59:52,280 --> 00:59:56,750
don't have this kind of church state nonsense because it just doesn't exist.

518
00:59:57,290 --> 01:00:03,230
And the great problem you begin to realise is that you're looking at different jurisdictions.

519
01:00:03,530 --> 01:00:11,120
You're looking at jurisdiction of the priestly side of things and you're looking at the jurisdiction of the temporal side of things.

520
01:00:11,510 --> 01:00:14,750
But then and that's another problem I have with your discussion.

521
01:00:15,140 --> 01:00:27,370
You realise that a binary approach to the medieval problematic here is also totally meaningless because it isn't just kings and church.

522
01:00:27,380 --> 01:00:31,730
I think a person having to use the word ecclesiastical powers or something.

523
01:00:32,240 --> 01:00:36,379
But then you immediately realise that the word church is desperately complicated.

524
01:00:36,380 --> 01:00:40,640
What is church is church Rome. Rome would wish that churches.

525
01:00:40,640 --> 01:00:46,730
Rome. Of course it is in Rome because the Pope doesn't have that kind of power in this particular period.

526
01:00:47,030 --> 01:00:51,860
And then you realise you have to think about Episcopal Authority, you have to realise about the priest,

527
01:00:52,160 --> 01:01:00,350
and then you have the inner religious religiosity as Langmuir is very good in talking about the differences between these terms.

528
01:01:01,130 --> 01:01:09,470
So my real problem also is that within the medieval context, I'm thinking about Lateran four 1215,

529
01:01:09,470 --> 01:01:16,520
a very important church council with an unbelievably powerful, well, a pope.

530
01:01:16,530 --> 01:01:24,410
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.

531
01:01:24,950 --> 01:01:29,840
So if you look there at the particular canons to do with Christian Jewish relations,

532
01:01:30,080 --> 01:01:37,730
you have a particular canon where it says that Jews and Christians need to dress differently because there's too much interaction,

533
01:01:38,000 --> 01:01:40,790
sexual interaction between Christians and Jews, etc.

534
01:01:41,210 --> 01:01:51,170
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.

535
01:01:52,430 --> 01:01:57,050
There is a term is religio Christianity. That's a very, very rich term.

536
01:01:57,060 --> 01:02:03,320
It doesn't just mean the church, it doesn't just mean a foetus face.

537
01:02:03,320 --> 01:02:06,530
It means a very wide multivalent thing.

538
01:02:06,980 --> 01:02:10,610
So this is why I have problems with this.

539
01:02:10,610 --> 01:02:14,360
This idea of the 17th century and all of a sudden religion is discovered.

540
01:02:14,660 --> 01:02:17,150
I think it's much, much older.

541
01:02:17,630 --> 01:02:25,520
I think when you talk about finding the individual, people were finding their individuality in the 12th century in a different way.

542
01:02:25,850 --> 01:02:32,750
When I think of Roman philosophy entering into the work that Christian theologians were doing,

543
01:02:33,350 --> 01:02:39,830
deep thought about dominion, about property, enormous discussions about that.

544
01:02:40,040 --> 01:02:48,530
I think about My City is a Padua who writes his defence report this early 14th century, struggling between an emperor,

545
01:02:48,890 --> 01:02:54,530
between kings, between city states, between all kinds of different forms of priesthood.

546
01:02:55,070 --> 01:03:00,889
So I think there is a much more complicated cast to all of this, which to my mind,

547
01:03:00,890 --> 01:03:09,800
if you take that into account and if you define your terms, nature, again, something totally different in the era.

548
01:03:10,190 --> 01:03:15,260
That's my point. And that's your point. But I can't I can't see where would disagree.

549
01:03:15,620 --> 01:03:19,230
It's just you want to get rid of the term I. I think it's a useful.

550
01:03:19,290 --> 01:03:24,660
I didn't say get rid of it. I didn't say that there was there was terms that we shouldn't use.

551
01:03:24,870 --> 01:03:28,680
No, I didn't. I'm not a legislator. I'm not a legislator.

552
01:03:29,690 --> 01:03:33,959
Anyway, I guess my response would be similar to Tim's.

553
01:03:33,960 --> 01:03:36,540
I'm not sure where we're disagreeing.

554
01:03:37,290 --> 01:03:45,749
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,

555
01:03:45,750 --> 01:03:51,530
you know, and so we've always just got to use it carefully and we've always got that.

556
01:03:51,600 --> 01:03:58,440
That's what I would say. So in the case of religio, of course, religion was an ancient term, right?

557
01:03:59,070 --> 01:04:04,379
But it means something quite different. It's not set off against the secular.

558
01:04:04,380 --> 01:04:11,970
In Roman times you could say religio me east. You know, it's religion to me, which means I have a binding obligation.

559
01:04:11,970 --> 01:04:15,060
But it could be something. It could be to a God, it could be to a neighbour.

560
01:04:15,360 --> 01:04:23,040
As as Augustine says, in the city of God, the religious secular distinction is a distinction between two different kinds of priests.

561
01:04:23,400 --> 01:04:28,920
In the medieval era. Religio is a virtue for for Aquinas in the 13th century.

562
01:04:28,920 --> 01:04:33,299
It's not, you know, something. And so. So, yeah.

563
01:04:33,300 --> 01:04:37,530
So I'm not sure where. Timothy said very clearly he wanted to get rid of the term.

564
01:04:37,770 --> 01:04:46,770
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.

565
01:04:47,760 --> 01:04:54,240
Look at their historical genealogy. Look at how they are indefinable.

566
01:04:54,810 --> 01:04:56,940
How they overlap with each other.

567
01:04:57,450 --> 01:05:07,260
How they are contested through throughout the last decades, and yet how they remain as permanent parts of our reproduction.

568
01:05:08,370 --> 01:05:12,750
That's what I've said. I mean, to get rid of it, what does it mean to get rid of it?

569
01:05:12,780 --> 01:05:19,090
It's a shorthand for saying, look critically at the characters of the understand we deplore.

570
01:05:19,530 --> 01:05:26,460
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.

571
01:05:27,210 --> 01:05:31,010
Part of what they're trying to do is to deconstruct the religious secular dichotomy

572
01:05:31,020 --> 01:05:36,700
and the kinds of politics that follow from an entrenched binary between the religion,

573
01:05:36,930 --> 01:05:41,280
religious and the secular, which is something I've done in my work since I started doing my work.

574
01:05:41,760 --> 01:05:49,900
What I think ultimately follows from this in my reading is precisely to find a space for the sort of work that doing,

575
01:05:50,000 --> 01:05:53,150
to have the kind of resonance it should have.

576
01:05:53,190 --> 01:05:57,419
In other words, not to be automatically forced into some kind of category,

577
01:05:57,420 --> 01:06:01,799
but rather to that history is in the process of the institutions that you're speaking at,

578
01:06:01,800 --> 01:06:10,530
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.

579
01:06:10,530 --> 01:06:19,109
And what you said was very important that the secular, the inside turn you need to be able to and for students,

580
01:06:19,110 --> 01:06:26,760
for scholars to be able to hear that and really internalise what it means for their work, I think is extraordinarily important.

581
01:06:27,090 --> 01:06:31,160
And so I don't hear you. I agree that the term doesn't make sense to me either.

582
01:06:31,170 --> 01:06:32,549
And I can talk about that later if you want.

583
01:06:32,550 --> 01:06:40,710
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.

584
01:06:40,980 --> 01:06:49,490
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,

585
01:06:49,590 --> 01:06:56,200
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.

586
01:06:56,650 --> 01:06:59,820
So that's yeah, that's really helpful. Thank you.

587
01:06:59,880 --> 01:07:06,270
Yeah. But before we move on to the question, just address Anna's point about the focus on 17th century.

588
01:07:07,830 --> 01:07:13,739
So my focus on the 17th century, the 16th, 17th century is just that.

589
01:07:13,740 --> 01:07:18,180
That seems to be where the modern where the modern turn happens.

590
01:07:18,180 --> 01:07:22,709
You can see it happening beginning in the 15th century with certain platonist

591
01:07:22,710 --> 01:07:30,390
like coups and marsilio ficino in coming into the early 16th century and so on.

592
01:07:30,690 --> 01:07:40,350
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.

593
01:07:40,800 --> 01:07:44,340
And in all of these changes kind of happen gradually.

594
01:07:44,340 --> 01:07:56,530
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.

595
01:07:56,550 --> 01:08:00,270
That's that's the only point that I and that and that's, of course,

596
01:08:00,280 --> 01:08:07,140
is is the point at which the colonial enterprise takes place, too, which I don't think is a coincidence.

597
01:08:08,310 --> 01:08:17,730
Yeah, well, I agree. And I would add that it's, um, it's the post reformation where you.

598
01:08:18,520 --> 01:08:24,830
You're getting the use of the vernacular much more than the old Latin, and you're getting old.

599
01:08:25,300 --> 01:08:34,030
So you've got the colonial interests which are developing. You've got enclosure movements which are becoming more and more rapid.

600
01:08:34,660 --> 01:08:47,740
And then you've got some very determined people who are giving the example of William Penn who wanted to write Bills of Rights.

601
01:08:48,700 --> 01:08:52,870
John Locke was also writing Bills of Rights, and they were writing them.

602
01:08:53,290 --> 01:09:04,690
They were thinking about about different forms of governance and the the use of this.

603
01:09:05,230 --> 01:09:14,230
I mean, if somebody can find me the non word politics in the consistent discourse where it is being distinguished from something called religion.

604
01:09:14,590 --> 01:09:19,870
Earlier than the 1680s. I mean, I've searched for it, but I may have missed it.

605
01:09:21,910 --> 01:09:25,450
But if you can find it, then I would be interested in that.

606
01:09:26,530 --> 01:09:29,680
It's not quite the same as the separation of church and state.

607
01:09:30,160 --> 01:09:33,660
That's that is beginning to especially in Massachusetts.

608
01:09:33,670 --> 01:09:48,790
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,

609
01:09:48,790 --> 01:09:53,920
a centralisation that you find in William Penn or that you find in John Locke.

610
01:09:54,670 --> 01:10:04,120
So I think the significance and also in the case of English and England, it's going to be slightly different.

611
01:10:04,390 --> 01:10:09,760
Holland may be ahead. I mean, Holland was arguably the first capital this nation.

612
01:10:10,030 --> 01:10:15,840
Amsterdam was the centre of global finance, virtually, wasn't it, before London?

613
01:10:15,880 --> 01:10:19,300
I mean, it shifted to London in the 1690s,

614
01:10:19,810 --> 01:10:28,270
but Holland was the the centre of a great deal of world trade and even even the Catholic colonial powers

615
01:10:28,270 --> 01:10:38,080
were using Amsterdam and Rotterdam and those other other centres of trade and finance for their own,

616
01:10:38,470 --> 01:10:47,110
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,

617
01:10:47,110 --> 01:10:55,090
but I think in English you can actually see these discourses emerging and you can see the context in which they're.

618
01:10:55,360 --> 01:11:01,810
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.

619
01:11:01,960 --> 01:11:06,430
It has. And antecedents well into the medieval period.

620
01:11:06,730 --> 01:11:14,860
The investiture controversy in the 11th century is really where you get the sorting out between ecclesiastical and civil authorities in some ways.

621
01:11:15,220 --> 01:11:19,510
Right. Because until that time, the Kings have liturgical functions.

622
01:11:19,900 --> 01:11:24,940
And one of the things that that Gregory of the seventh tries to do is sort those things out.

623
01:11:24,940 --> 01:11:30,340
And that in some ways is the beginning of these kinds of binary distinctions.

624
01:11:30,520 --> 01:11:37,239
So that's just to affirm what you're saying, that all of these things begin to take shape in the medieval period,

625
01:11:37,240 --> 01:11:43,480
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.

626
01:11:43,510 --> 01:11:48,879
Sorry to interrupt, but for example, our Protestant faith,

627
01:11:48,880 --> 01:11:54,880
which was the predominant meaning of religion in English and the first in the in

628
01:11:54,880 --> 01:12:02,830
the 16th and 17th century is in binary opposition to the superstitious barbarism.

629
01:12:05,200 --> 01:12:16,900
I mean, even the Catholics are described as pagans by the Protestants, or especially in the case of especially, they were the Irish.

630
01:12:17,230 --> 01:12:24,760
The Irish. So it's not as though it's a different it's a different number of binary oppositions which

631
01:12:24,760 --> 01:12:29,950
are emerging and which are quite different from the ones that were operating earlier.

632
01:12:33,250 --> 01:12:37,220
Thank you. It's hard to know quite how to interpret.

633
01:12:37,600 --> 01:12:45,370
I don't work in precisely in this field. One is Julian Zelizer, professor of medieval Spanish studies at King's College London.

634
01:12:46,060 --> 01:12:48,750
And I was particularly interested in professor.

635
01:12:49,430 --> 01:13:01,250
I love this song because I think it's really important to take into account the problems that you've raised over his stories,

636
01:13:01,260 --> 01:13:09,560
isolation, his own values. You have acknowledged that things don't suddenly spring for you all from in the 17th century.

637
01:13:09,890 --> 01:13:23,360
That has been the was in your discussion your starting point is the way in which maternity operates in your discussion is absolutely fascinating.

638
01:13:23,780 --> 01:13:26,960
So on one hand, you say, well,

639
01:13:27,080 --> 01:13:34,610
of course there are antecedents in the very use of the term antecedent apply suggests a kind of a TV analogy or genealogy.

640
01:13:36,810 --> 01:13:46,160
And on the other, you talk about, you know, modern insecticides, but it just doesn't work.

641
01:13:46,200 --> 01:13:52,460
So this is not a game, you know? I mean, it's easy to say, well, one can find examples of this before.

642
01:13:52,950 --> 01:13:54,060
That's not really the point.

643
01:13:54,570 --> 01:14:05,220
The point is, in this particular discussion, to reinforce what you were getting, sort of historical contingency is absolutely fundamental.

644
01:14:06,360 --> 01:14:11,490
So it's not as you say, I agree with you, it's not a question of trying to define ontologically.

645
01:14:11,670 --> 01:14:17,540
What we mean by nature, the individual has an extraordinary living, maternity and so on.

646
01:14:17,550 --> 01:14:26,670
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,

647
01:14:27,110 --> 01:14:37,230
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.

648
01:14:37,890 --> 01:14:46,800
So in addition to thinking about how we use stories, I would encourage us all to well,

649
01:14:46,860 --> 01:14:59,700
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,

650
01:15:00,090 --> 01:15:05,710
put it at the intersection of language and power. So that's if I have a question.

651
01:15:08,470 --> 01:15:10,930
Where do you get your theory of ideology from?

652
01:15:11,620 --> 01:15:20,890
And secondly, the work that is done in the humanities on cultural semantics, for example, Raymond Williams, he was from the seventies.

653
01:15:21,160 --> 01:15:27,310
Updated recently or Roland brings some comparisons to modernism.

654
01:15:27,580 --> 01:15:29,740
Five words cultural semantics.

655
01:15:30,130 --> 01:15:40,930
That's where I really see an important intersection between the kind of work that historians like to do in literary linguistics.

656
01:15:42,070 --> 01:15:47,590
Thank you very much. I mean, you're absolutely right. I'm caught in the in the circular trap.

657
01:15:47,980 --> 01:15:51,460
I use the term modern, but actually modern is part of our problem.

658
01:15:52,300 --> 01:16:03,790
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.

659
01:16:04,120 --> 01:16:11,290
But I think there is we are caught in the circularity and it also, in a sense, constructs historical time.

660
01:16:12,040 --> 01:16:19,510
I mean, the very idea of historical time that we're working within is itself a product of these processes.

661
01:16:19,530 --> 01:16:23,320
So we're in a kind of paradoxical circularity.

662
01:16:25,160 --> 01:16:30,430
And how how do you set theory of ideology?

663
01:16:30,430 --> 01:16:35,880
Ideology is another problem. I use the term ideology because I don't know where else to go.

664
01:16:35,890 --> 01:16:41,230
But the very idea of ideology, you might argue, is also there.

665
01:16:41,440 --> 01:16:43,240
I mean, another word is revolution.

666
01:16:44,410 --> 01:16:59,030
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,

667
01:16:59,050 --> 01:17:08,379
the American Revolution and the Russian Revolution? Well, it seems to me that these are, if you like, discursive deconstructed the idea of revolution.

668
01:17:08,380 --> 01:17:13,990
And the idea of progress, which is also a highly problematic concept,

669
01:17:14,950 --> 01:17:22,690
have become rhetorically fused in the 18th century, and you get the idea of revolutionary progress.

670
01:17:24,280 --> 01:17:35,810
But I think that we're all certainly I am aware of being caught in the kind of circularity which you're indicating now.

671
01:17:36,960 --> 01:17:40,170
See the European track to the circularity was just.

672
01:17:41,130 --> 01:17:46,770
Um, I suppose it may be just emphasising the point.

673
01:17:46,860 --> 01:17:49,980
One of the points that emerged from the conversation was the.

674
01:17:50,930 --> 01:18:02,600
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,

675
01:18:02,600 --> 01:18:14,260
the concepts that be embedded in modern terms, and we are trying to explore and the conceptual tools that we hope to understand.

676
01:18:14,750 --> 01:18:19,520
So in terms of ideology, the fact that the term ideology wasn't in.

677
01:18:20,730 --> 01:18:24,580
Clean until the end of the 18th early 19th century.

678
01:18:25,010 --> 01:18:28,870
Doesn't mean to say you can either analyse the public psychologically.

679
01:18:28,870 --> 01:18:32,920
And that's like saying, you know, this sort of you there's no such thing before misogyny.

680
01:18:33,130 --> 01:18:38,800
Before the 16th century, the term misogyny was invented in order to respond to a need.

681
01:18:40,150 --> 01:18:47,360
So. You know, the distinctions, for example, between culture and religion.

682
01:18:48,720 --> 01:19:02,820
You can see that very, very clearly articulated in historical evidence in the 15th and 16th century before the term culture was ever invented.

683
01:19:03,060 --> 01:19:08,130
The idea of culture which idea of culture of people, which idea of culture?

684
01:19:08,700 --> 01:19:11,819
Culture is something which is separate from separate from religion.

685
01:19:11,820 --> 01:19:17,730
Culture is something that is a series of so a group of social practices that define you as a group.

686
01:19:18,150 --> 01:19:27,450
I think it's just just a pure assertion because when you actually look at the way the terms of culture are actually deployed,

687
01:19:27,690 --> 01:19:30,750
I'm talking about a time when there is no term culture.

688
01:19:32,420 --> 01:19:36,560
Right. So what? Which we've all said we should.

689
01:19:36,830 --> 01:19:41,090
Culture is a very slippery term. What we mean by income can vary enormously.

690
01:19:41,390 --> 01:19:50,080
Do you understand culture at some anthropological? Then you can see in the 15th and 16th century.

691
01:19:51,600 --> 01:19:57,170
In in you mentioned today the conflict between Judaism and Christianity.

692
01:19:57,180 --> 01:19:58,589
But I'm thinking of, for example,

693
01:19:58,590 --> 01:20:06,570
in the 16th century where there were Christians of Muslim descent being persecuted because they continued to speak Arabic.

694
01:20:06,780 --> 01:20:13,080
They continued to watch themselves. They continued to dance with.

695
01:20:14,700 --> 01:20:23,180
The dances that. Associated with that past. I think all Christians should look at these do some from customers customers.

696
01:20:24,200 --> 01:20:27,380
We are Christians. Customer practices.

697
01:20:27,510 --> 01:20:34,910
Okay as you know right from the pre 1490 253 to forcibly converts.

698
01:20:35,240 --> 01:20:42,680
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.

699
01:20:43,750 --> 01:20:47,950
Corporate culture. Think of that earlier and survey.

700
01:20:48,190 --> 01:20:55,840
But Courtney culture you have you have Hebrew poems, a Jewish poems in vernacular French,

701
01:20:56,380 --> 01:21:02,650
which clearly use images of courtly culture but in a Jewish centred setting.

702
01:21:03,560 --> 01:21:11,630
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,

703
01:21:11,900 --> 01:21:17,900
but something that we now would like to identify with humanism, interest in intention, things like that.

704
01:21:18,140 --> 01:21:25,760
You look at Hebrew material and you look at lots of material and you can pick up these things.

705
01:21:25,910 --> 01:21:31,940
And it isn't religious. You can pick up interest in intention, particular ways.

706
01:21:31,970 --> 01:21:35,100
A little vignettes about what individuals do.

707
01:21:35,480 --> 01:21:44,389
Sorry to interrupt, but it shows that they want to address this, or I guess just a couple of points.

708
01:21:44,390 --> 01:21:48,740
Ideology is a term I tend to avoid because it tends to just mean ideas I don't like.

709
01:21:49,640 --> 01:21:54,860
And in that sense, it might be a kind of useful thing. Right wing theories, right?

710
01:21:54,860 --> 01:21:58,819
I mean, that idea is right.

711
01:21:58,820 --> 01:22:03,530
I mean, the problem with the term ideology is that it gives the indication that, you know,

712
01:22:03,560 --> 01:22:08,180
there's some you can get rid of ideology and you can get down to the real thing, you know.

713
01:22:08,180 --> 01:22:16,009
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,

714
01:22:16,010 --> 01:22:19,069
then you're going to get to the you get to the real economic base.

715
01:22:19,070 --> 01:22:20,780
And that's that's why I would avoid that.

716
01:22:21,590 --> 01:22:29,690
With regard to the term culture, it's interesting the relationships between the word culture, cult and cultivation, right?

717
01:22:29,690 --> 01:22:37,070
So all of these things then are in some senses originally related,

718
01:22:37,430 --> 01:22:44,180
but then eventually get problematise and separate, separated out into different things.

719
01:22:44,180 --> 01:22:53,030
Cult culture in cultivation, but originally there, and that is part of this kind of differentiation process.

720
01:22:54,480 --> 01:23:01,250
But, but, but I think originally it's they're, they're all very carefully, intensely intertwined.

721
01:23:01,760 --> 01:23:10,760
And no one, my dad, I mean, our customary practices are they cultural of the social or the political of a religious?

722
01:23:11,750 --> 01:23:15,590
Because customary practices are classified in all of these ways.

723
01:23:16,160 --> 01:23:22,700
So then the question arises, well, what's the difference between the cultural customary practice and the social customary practices?

724
01:23:23,150 --> 01:23:27,650
And what's the difference between the social cultural practice and the religious cultural practice?

725
01:23:28,400 --> 01:23:32,930
They don't seem to have any we don't seem to have a way of distinguishing between them.

726
01:23:32,930 --> 01:23:41,210
And yet we have different disciplines cultural studies, social sciences, political science, religious studies.

727
01:23:42,290 --> 01:23:45,820
What have we distinguish? And I was trying to make presented.

728
01:23:45,890 --> 01:23:53,590
So is that hey, you have a Christian Muslim descent who is representing the beautiful principles.

729
01:23:54,790 --> 01:24:02,799
Saying that you persecute us tonight is the opportunity to speak the language of our ancestors,

730
01:24:02,800 --> 01:24:08,440
the customs of our ancestors, because you see us as Muslims, but we are fact Christians.

731
01:24:11,050 --> 01:24:20,290
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.

732
01:24:20,890 --> 01:24:26,350
Now, whatever you want to say, how do you, however, I guess I should put it.

733
01:24:27,010 --> 01:24:33,550
It's not how we classify. I think the question is, is is absolutely correct.

734
01:24:34,210 --> 01:24:38,680
It's not how we would want to classify these activities.

735
01:24:38,830 --> 01:24:41,890
This man speaking on behalf of his people.

736
01:24:42,670 --> 01:24:50,320
It's trying to do is it's trying to recognise that he can perceive a split.

737
01:24:52,010 --> 01:24:55,700
For which he does not have the language, the terms.

738
01:24:58,210 --> 01:25:04,480
That's the issue. So let us take a look at it, if I may.

739
01:25:05,410 --> 01:25:11,700
I think I mean, with that idea, as you continue to click this positions,

740
01:25:11,710 --> 01:25:17,980
I think we there's two issues involved here is the temporal dimension of concepts.

741
01:25:18,400 --> 01:25:23,500
But you put contingencies. Obviously, I mean, religion in one point.

742
01:25:24,220 --> 01:25:32,610
Another point is that the very different meaning of the label is the same in the container of that.

743
01:25:33,990 --> 01:25:39,750
You know, he quoted this label. There's different contexts in different periods and different spaces.

744
01:25:40,590 --> 01:25:51,180
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.

745
01:25:52,440 --> 01:25:57,480
So sorry, the logic of of the observer and the logic of the observed.

746
01:26:00,060 --> 01:26:10,170
The logic of the account in the way that the person who observes and describes and the person who is being described.

747
01:26:11,220 --> 01:26:17,160
So, I mean, I wouldn't be easily go and say that individual is I don't know.

748
01:26:17,340 --> 01:26:21,450
I mean, in terms of history. But you need some kind of reflection.

749
01:26:21,450 --> 01:26:27,420
I mean, the person like if I take the term identity, I don't think there was identity in 14th century.

750
01:26:28,120 --> 01:26:34,980
Of course, analytically there was. If we look backward as historian, but nobody would use the term identity.

751
01:26:35,100 --> 01:26:40,320
So there's no identity in that term. So disconnected from the picture exist here.

752
01:26:40,770 --> 01:26:49,530
And the basic idea is the temporal dimension and therefore many of concepts as they move along history.

753
01:26:50,280 --> 01:26:58,589
And so I think I think that basically, I mean, we don't have to argue about fixed concept and concept,

754
01:26:58,590 --> 01:27:01,800
but that phrase, the time, I mean, we all agree on that.

755
01:27:02,400 --> 01:27:05,850
It's that example of the Maurice goes.

756
01:27:06,180 --> 01:27:11,730
It seems to me he did have language to describe that and it was fine.

757
01:27:12,090 --> 01:27:17,790
He said, We're we're Christians and we're not Muslims. And that did the job that he needed to do.

758
01:27:18,030 --> 01:27:26,160
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.

759
01:27:27,600 --> 01:27:32,280
Right. But not because he didn't have a way of distinguishing religion and culture.

760
01:27:32,760 --> 01:27:38,280
Right. It's because they didn't think that they were would open up a very interesting discussion that we could have.

761
01:27:38,370 --> 01:27:45,509
But I think to the point that the world has been waiting patiently and if if we don't

762
01:27:45,510 --> 01:27:50,460
allow the world to speak in might just all deniers vacation time I don't know so please.

763
01:27:50,670 --> 01:27:57,360
Professor Goodman. Well actually an anthropologist by training and I didn't have an anthropologist throw in the room here.

764
01:27:57,360 --> 01:28:01,280
But if you want to replay this, this is every anthropology seminar we're having here.

765
01:28:02,590 --> 01:28:12,720
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.

766
01:28:13,290 --> 01:28:24,700
I was just like, well, I was inclined then to classify your work in Japan, I think,

767
01:28:24,810 --> 01:28:31,860
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.

768
01:28:32,190 --> 01:28:35,320
And as Kurt said, there was no work for any individual.

769
01:28:35,550 --> 01:28:40,350
There was no work for nature. I suspect it was in the work of politics and economics.

770
01:28:40,810 --> 01:28:46,730
So you had that already a highly complex society in a divided society of classes.

771
01:28:47,160 --> 01:28:54,979
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?

772
01:28:54,980 --> 01:29:00,230
What? What? I mean, you know, we've got a Western history, which is very true.

773
01:29:00,440 --> 01:29:06,020
What do you take from a society like that? Isn't a simple society, very complex society with a writing system?

774
01:29:06,680 --> 01:29:06,919
Well,

775
01:29:06,920 --> 01:29:18,800
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.

776
01:29:19,310 --> 01:29:24,260
And it's it's it's it's very true.

777
01:29:25,310 --> 01:29:40,130
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,

778
01:29:40,400 --> 01:29:49,760
they should have a written constitution. And that written constitution must distinguish between religion and the secular state.

779
01:29:50,330 --> 01:29:55,100
And then within that you get certain rights of religious practice,

780
01:29:55,850 --> 01:30:04,190
which is also a practical way of getting Christians and Japan and the debates about what does this term religion mean?

781
01:30:04,700 --> 01:30:07,250
How do we translate this into Japanese?

782
01:30:07,310 --> 01:30:17,300
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.

783
01:30:17,660 --> 01:30:22,340
They tried all sorts of different Japanese terms, basically.

784
01:30:22,360 --> 01:30:33,890
Even today, I mean, I used to ask my students, both in English and in Japanese, what do you understand by religion?

785
01:30:33,930 --> 01:30:42,410
What do you understand? And most of them, if they ever said anything, was Christianity.

786
01:30:43,160 --> 01:30:47,330
Sometimes they'd say Buddhism, Christianity and Buddhism.

787
01:30:47,750 --> 01:30:54,890
I'd say, Well, what about going to the temple, going to the shrine festivals and so on?

788
01:30:55,700 --> 01:30:59,210
And they'd say, Oh, those are just Japanese customs.

789
01:31:00,590 --> 01:31:04,880
There are customary practices that had nothing to do with religion.

790
01:31:06,740 --> 01:31:15,620
And it's Satoshi Hori who's here, has recently published this book on Japanese temple priests and the problems that they

791
01:31:15,620 --> 01:31:21,560
still today have with this notion that they're religious as distinct from secular.

792
01:31:23,360 --> 01:31:27,970
Could I just add also that in Chinese there was no no term for religion.

793
01:31:28,700 --> 01:31:35,269
The debates in China on how to translate religion followed ten years after the Japanese

794
01:31:35,270 --> 01:31:43,580
ones apparently in what in what system of representations anywhere in the world.

795
01:31:43,790 --> 01:31:47,990
Was there an easy translation of these terms into the Indigenous languages?

796
01:31:48,410 --> 01:31:57,290
Nobody has come up with any outside of Europe and North America, as far as I can see in North America.

797
01:31:58,220 --> 01:32:01,280
Well translated. Well into North America. No, no. Quite.

798
01:32:01,320 --> 01:32:07,190
Yes. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And therefore, the question is for me, it so persistent.

799
01:32:07,400 --> 01:32:14,330
Why is it so institutionalised? What is it doing beyond what we can actually notice?

800
01:32:15,740 --> 01:32:21,890
Can we take the last question before we adjourn this session? Any last comment?

801
01:32:23,450 --> 01:32:30,920
Thank you for. Folks here. I just want to add two points related to the things that we've already discussed.

802
01:32:31,490 --> 01:32:35,240
I think the main thing in this context is perception.

803
01:32:36,500 --> 01:32:46,460
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.

804
01:32:46,790 --> 01:32:55,460
I think it's a perception. I mean, in my research, I'm doing research about conflicts and religions.

805
01:32:56,120 --> 01:33:01,820
And I found that conflict, a religious perception of conflict, is different.

806
01:33:01,970 --> 01:33:07,460
I mean, we can't define conflict in any way. We want to be kind of like study about the definition.

807
01:33:07,880 --> 01:33:12,920
But at the same time, people can perceive the mission in some way or the other way.

808
01:33:13,250 --> 01:33:19,310
So I think the main point, how we perceive and how we kill people have different perception.

809
01:33:19,910 --> 01:33:29,090
And we can discuss the issue of perception and religion and how it's connected to different kinds of issues in political sphere.

810
01:33:30,340 --> 01:33:38,780
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.

811
01:33:38,780 --> 01:33:44,549
Our context of conflict along. Yeah.

812
01:33:44,550 --> 01:33:51,840
I guess one example of that might be the way the Iranian revolution is read in the United States.

813
01:33:52,860 --> 01:34:00,360
So you've got the Shah, you know, rules from 1953 to 1979.

814
01:34:00,360 --> 01:34:12,030
And it was a kind of brutal police force, the SAVAK, you know, torture, killing thousands of people with the full United States support.

815
01:34:14,040 --> 01:34:22,950
A revolution happens in 1979, and the way Americans prefer to read that is that they've had some kind of religious,

816
01:34:24,060 --> 01:34:30,780
kind of fanatical religious awakening. Suddenly our television screens are filled with these people chanting Death to America.

817
01:34:31,350 --> 01:34:41,010
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.

818
01:34:41,310 --> 01:34:46,980
What we prefer to tell ourselves is that this is a religious awakening.

819
01:34:46,980 --> 01:34:55,920
They've gotten hold of some crazy version of Shia Islam and they've had this kind of fanatical religious experience.

820
01:34:56,280 --> 01:35:01,169
And now what are we going to do about this extremism that we're dealt with?

821
01:35:01,170 --> 01:35:05,579
And so it helps the religious secular distinction, the religion,

822
01:35:05,580 --> 01:35:11,790
politics distinction in that case helps to kind of cast a fog of amnesia over our own actions

823
01:35:11,790 --> 01:35:21,810
and then makes the perception of Islam to be intolerant and crazy and fanatical in that way.

824
01:35:22,170 --> 01:35:27,840
And so that's that's one of the one of the kinds of work that that this distinction does

825
01:35:27,840 --> 01:35:34,110
in terms of perception and masks and the long view on exactly the politics of secularism.

826
01:35:34,650 --> 01:35:40,870
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I hope maybe you'll talk more about that this afternoon.

827
01:35:41,190 --> 01:35:48,720
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But but the whole way that Islam is perceived in the West has to do with these binaries.

828
01:35:48,810 --> 01:35:58,049
Right. They don't distinguish religion from politics and therefore they mix these two volatile substances together.

829
01:35:58,050 --> 01:36:05,040
And and and it's and and therefore, it's, you know, violence is is inevitable.

830
01:36:05,160 --> 01:36:12,270
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.

831
01:36:12,270 --> 01:36:16,140
Right. And that's that's the whole point is that the more you can dig down,

832
01:36:16,440 --> 01:36:25,200
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,

833
01:36:25,380 --> 01:36:25,890
no, you know,

834
01:36:25,890 --> 01:36:36,240
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.

835
01:36:36,600 --> 01:36:42,570
And the more useful it is, it seems to me that this just sort of triggered by what's.

836
01:36:43,900 --> 01:36:49,980
I was saying so obviously and some of his thoughts came from school.

837
01:36:51,880 --> 01:36:56,920
He emphasised a lot on his speech acts and the particular work,

838
01:36:56,920 --> 01:37:02,660
which is sort of being done something very important, especially that a lot of similar work has come out of that.

839
01:37:03,100 --> 01:37:09,399
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,

840
01:37:09,400 --> 01:37:18,250
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.

841
01:37:18,820 --> 01:37:25,090
So, I mean, I guess my question is how you sort of say let's drill down and focus on the empirical matter.

842
01:37:25,140 --> 01:37:32,620
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,

843
01:37:32,620 --> 01:37:36,340
very specific context of food debates in sort of 17th century England.

844
01:37:36,700 --> 01:37:44,349
But then obviously so much as being included in that process of colonialism, racism, all this has been all these big terms,

845
01:37:44,350 --> 01:37:51,840
which obviously you always publicising some sort of lesson and we see, you know, is so very important, critical purpose.

846
01:37:51,850 --> 01:37:55,120
I mean, as it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

847
01:37:55,120 --> 01:38:05,739
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,

848
01:38:05,740 --> 01:38:09,610
pure empirical and then kind of theoretical stuff.

849
01:38:09,610 --> 01:38:10,239
Obviously,

850
01:38:10,240 --> 01:38:21,790
empirical and theoretical are always in conversation and you've got to make generalisations in order to to create knowledge in any circumstances.

851
01:38:22,960 --> 01:38:28,510
Maybe a better word than. Yeah, I don't know then empirical specific or something like that.

852
01:38:29,200 --> 01:38:35,529
But you've got to do the concrete historical work and always have your theoretical

853
01:38:35,530 --> 01:38:41,920
discussion tethered very carefully to the actual concrete historical work.

854
01:38:42,280 --> 01:38:52,389
And, and the more you can bring the generalisations to a lower level, it seems to me, the more helpful it gets.

855
01:38:52,390 --> 01:38:58,629
And then if you can just be critically aware of what happens every time you go to

856
01:38:58,630 --> 01:39:04,000
the kind of higher level of generalisation that it seems like about the best we can,

857
01:39:04,180 --> 01:39:12,009
the best we can do. Yeah. Yeah. And another way might be to say that we, we can't think without abstractions.

858
01:39:12,010 --> 01:39:22,900
We're always going to have general concepts. The problem is that when are fictions or theories are abstractions,

859
01:39:25,360 --> 01:39:37,030
cease to be pragmatic and become reified as though they're representing some permanent part of an objective world which exists outside of them.

860
01:39:37,810 --> 01:39:46,150
Then we've lost the plot. And the the problem is being aware of of when that is happening and why it's happening.

861
01:39:46,870 --> 01:39:50,049
So when he talks about being more empirical,

862
01:39:50,050 --> 01:39:59,920
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,

863
01:39:59,920 --> 01:40:09,730
by looking at and representing it and remaining that critical awareness so that we don't get lost in these rarefied abstractions,

864
01:40:09,880 --> 01:40:12,620
something along those lines to some extent.

865
01:40:12,910 --> 01:40:19,300
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.

866
01:40:19,870 --> 01:40:24,730
Joe Absolutely. Yes, sure. Yeah. No, in fact, it will be could be problematic.

867
01:40:24,850 --> 01:40:29,480
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So how do you suggest that we deal with that?

868
01:40:29,590 --> 01:40:32,920
Another way of putting it, it's a no brainer.

869
01:40:33,250 --> 01:40:38,680
I mean, we're all balance. I mean, another way of putting that is that we're all telling stories, right?

870
01:40:39,010 --> 01:40:44,050
We're all telling narratives and and being aware of that isn't necessarily helpful.

871
01:40:44,560 --> 01:40:49,090
Yeah, I'll take the prerogative to join here.

872
01:40:49,090 --> 01:40:52,530
But just by noting that you used arbitrary, it was just not.