On Paris 13/11: Religious Entitlement, Intolerance, and Imposition

 

I followed last Friday’s tragic events, as they unfolded, on my mobile phone on a dance floor inside a club in Malta.  As soon as the death toll from Le Bataclan popped up on my screen, I became visibly shocked.  In part because I have always liked Eagles of Death Metal, and in part because, also through my current research on club music culture, I have come to see alternative music dance floors and concert venues across the world as connected spaces of nighttime leisure.  The tragic events thus shook me and struck deep and close to home.  I could only think of them as coordinated attacks, legitimized by religious codes and beliefs, on people having fun and enjoying the Friday nightlife.  The official statement by ISIS on Saturday, claiming responsibility for the attacks, only confirmed my initial impression, referring to those murdered at Le Bataclan as ‘pagans gathered for a concert of prostitution and vice’. 

So do not tell me that religion has nothing to do with it. 

Choosing to believe in a god and to live a religious life is not the problem.  It is when those beliefs turn into a cause that strikes beyond the sphere of religion that the problem arises.  In considering this and the tragic events, we should be thinking about three important key issues.  First, any side of religion that leads to a sense of entitlement.  At the kernel of this lies a persuasion that living by the codes of one religion makes one better off than anyone living by the codes of any other religion, or than those who do not live by any religious code.  A projected sense of entitlement may be innocuous enough on its own.  Choosing to place a ‘Jesus Loves Me’ bumper sticker on the rear windshield of your car and believing that you are privileged in the grace of god, for example, is fine, as long as you do not expect to be entitled to parking spaces over anyone who does not.  Believing that one is entitled to rule, dictate, and bend the ‘rules of the Land’ because he or she is empowered by the ‘rules of God’, however, becomes a problem.  Second, any form of religion that leads to intolerance.  Intolerance towards those who live by a different system of belief or no system of belief at all, will always and undoubtedly lead to conflict.  Third, any interpretation of religion that leads to imposition.  Any attempt to impose one’s own code and beliefs on others, especially through violent means, logically cannot be characteristic of any religion that preaches peace and tolerance.

ISIS’s statement claiming responsibility for the latest attacks in Paris reeks of entitlement, intolerance, and the belief in a God-given right to impose.                      

Affirming that organized religion does not really have to do with violence, because religion is all about peace, would be naïve and short sighted in the face of the evidence.  Today there are 128 bodies waiting to be buried in Paris, clearly showing otherwise.  Somewhere along the translation, violence is being justified.  Closing one’s eyes to the fact that organized religion may thus provide conditions and purpose, and be a vehicle for acts like those that have unfolded, would mean closing one’s eyes to an essential piece of a complex puzzle.  That is precisely why religion, in all its forms, especially how these manifest and reinforce themselves in the ‘capillaries’ of human society, should continue to be studied, and considered in tackling the terrorism problem in this day and age.  Most importantly, it should be openly criticized.

Scores of men and women do not blow themselves up, knowingly leading to the deaths of hundreds of others in the process, unless they firmly believe that they will get rewarded directly and divinely in some afterlife as a consequence of and following the very act.   There must certainly be plenty of plain old hate and anger towards the West brewing in there, but all of it is comfortably embedded within and legitimized by a religious structure, which is being appropriated as a cause.

There is little doubt that ISIS had a lot to gain from these latest attacks in terms of propaganda, especially when considering the blows it took on the battlefield over recent weeks.  Yet, beyond the organization, its politics, and its propaganda machine, are those men and women willing to actually die, and in the process kill, for God.  A close consideration of religion should undoubtedly figure essentially in any attempt to understand why they do it.

We should not respond to these acts with intolerance towards those who are religious.  We should only hold it against those who seek to use religion to keep us from enjoying rock ‘n’ roll. 

Peace, Love, Death Metal.

On Supermoons, Indifference, and Hope

(Photo: The lunar eclipse, as seen through my phone's camera from the Għargħur church parvis)

It is not unusual for me to wake up at some very late point of the night, and go on walks when I cannot find sleep again.  The silence helps me think, and the exercise also tends to do the trick in making me tired enough to want to get back into my bed and actually nod off.  Last night was marked by a particularly lengthy episode of sleeplessness.  So at 4 a.m., I decided to brave the rain and venture out, alone for a walk around the village.  I knew that it happened to be just about the right time to witness the rare Supermoon lunar eclipse, but I also realised that any celestial body would be hard to spot through the rain cloud cover.  About thirty minutes into my walk, notwithstanding, the rain stopped, and as I looked up I could clearly see the clouds part to reveal clusters of stars, and the ‘blood moon’ in all of its red hued glory. 

My first reaction was to smile at myself and at my stroke of luck.  My second was to think about how, had I been able to fall asleep, the eclipse would still have happened, and the clouds would still have parted at that specific point in time.  Moreover, I thought about how, when the next full lunar eclipse is projected to take place in 2033, I may or may not be alive and able to witness it.  It will happen, even if I am not. 

The experience brought me face to face with a somewhat familiar indifference of the universe, towards me, and towards us, as individuals, as communities, as species.  It also made me think about how we are built to ignore this indifference.  We tend to be preoccupied with giving meaning to calendar events, marking them with public and flamboyant rites de passages.  We place ourselves at the centre of everything, and pretend to find an existing structure and order, killing and dying for some overseeing God, when there is none.  We link effect to cause, to a wider scheme of things that we have constructed ourselves, and create our own proofs for what was or what was not meant to be, when the only certainty is that everything around us occurs randomly, with the greatest irreverence towards who we are and how we feel.  Yet, in leaning on one of my favourite writers Albert Camus, I thought about how one can find hope right in the middle of this hopelessness.

There are other, more mundane things than a rare cosmic event, that have a profound impact on me in making me think deeply about the negligible impact I have on them.  Seeing familiar people age and grow old, walking with a slightly heavier limp than they walked with last month, also tends to remind me of human mortality and how, sooner or later, we are all bound to return to dust.  Yet there are times when these same old limping dogs give me a fleeting but soothing impression that they are wiser than I am in not only having seen more life than I have, but in also being closer to a silent, internal peace with the inescapable effects of time and the indifference of the universe.  They are happy cripples.  They are Camus’s rebels, in having faced and come to terms with the meaningless blip that is a lifetime, and have turned their backs on it, committing the ultimate act of rebellion by being happy and living on, in spite of it.  This internal peace, I believe, is key to the right way of going through life, and of witnessing belittling lunar eclipses with the knowledge that yes, we are insignificant and there is nothing out there looking out for us, but that it does not matter.      

I cannot say that I have yet come to make my own peace with time and indifference, but I am working on it, and I hope to be able to get there and experience Camus’s invincible Summer, soon.                                                                  

On Satan, The Hulk, and Moral Panic in Malta

The Maltese people consistently prove to be exceptionally great at creating and fueling the fires of moral panic.  In paraphrasing Stanley Cohen’s definition in ‘Folk Devils and Moral Panics’ (1972), moral panic is a state of collective anxiety that occurs across a population, when individuals, groups, or occurrences (folk devils) are perceived as deviating from, and by virtue of that deviance compromising the, established structures, values, and order of that population.  In the creation and perpetuation of moral panic, the perceived threat is exaggerated and the associated deviant habits are amplified by the media, as well as by individuals (defined by Cohen as moral entrepreneurs) who occupy prominent positions within the ranks of political and religious institutions. 

An example of moral panic can be drawn from Malta of the early 90s.  At the time, widespread concerns about imminent accession into the EU, especially ones associated with immoralities and transgression that a freer economy and inward flow of foreign people and their vices would bring with it, became crystallised in an overall heightened state of anxiety about the Devil having come down amongst us.  Local newspapers ran headlines about acts of devil worship and ‘Black Masses’ (Quddiesa Sewda) taking place in the darkest and most remote corners of the islands.  Popular imagination ran wild, escalating into narratives of consecrated hosts and babies being stolen from church and hospital, only to be combusted and offered to Satan.  The archbishop of Malta established the Diocesan Commission on Occult and Satanism, involving a number of local exorcists who, like Mulder and Scully in the original The X-Files series airing on Italia Uno at the time, were tasked with investigating the sinister happenings that were supposedly taking place all around us.  Much to my disappointment as a fan of The X-Files, concrete evidence supporting the claims that Satan had been conjured and was walking amongst us Maltese was never produced then.  It is interesting to note, however, that the Diocesan Commission on Occult and Satanism still stands today, and its members still hold ‘reparatory masses’, meant to somehow counteract satanic rituals occurring at the same time, on nights of full moon.   

In also suggesting that folk devils are alive and well today, another example can be drawn from Malta of last week.  A man, reportedly Libyan, got into some argument or other in the local equivalent of the biblical city of Gomorrah – (nighttime) Paceville.  The argument escalated, the man wielded a switchblade or knife of some sort, threw it around and injured six people.  By morning, a grossly inflated version of events had spread like wildfire.  Some news portals reported that a Libyan man who went on a violent rampage in Paceville had injured twenty-five (25) people.  Maltese Facebook and message board users had their pitchforks out, raised to outcries of ‘send them back’, ‘enough is enough’, and ‘no more immigrant terrorist thugs’.  My own first reaction to the reported news was that it must have either been a case of The Hulk having gone down to Paceville, or just another case of some of that good old moral panic.  As it eventually transpired, it was a case of the latter.  Some local media channels had based their news stories on an exaggerated eyewitness version of events, spontaneously triplicating the number of people injured by the man in the process.  Mass horror ensued.

Concern and reports about rites of devil worship in early 90s Malta were founded in people’s anxieties about a sudden influx of and access to foreign goods and commodities, and a moral ambivalence towards modern values that were creeping up from mainland Europe’s horizon.  Popular imagination was also fuelled by the wave of heavy metal music and associated imagery that had become popular with local youths at the time, and that is traditionally also a product and symbol of youth resistance against the status quo.  The blatant exaggeration of last week’s events in Paceville and the reactions that followed may have at least in part been triggered by the current concern about the influx of migrants from the opposite side of the pond and their values, or perceived lack thereof.  The violent acts of an individual were rapidly appropriated, blown up, and transposed onto cries of ‘drive them out’ by the local vox populi.

Moral panic is of course by no means a localised phenomenon.  I suspect, however, that the type that manifests itself amongst the Maltese is of a particularly resilient sub species.  This may have to do with persistent anxieties about the outsider (il-barrani), the threats he could bring with him, and more pressingly, where he fits within the Maltese people's dichotomous conceptualisation of the world (Good versus Evil, Red versus Blue, et cetera).  The walls and watchtowers erected along our shores centuries ago for the purpose of keeping the evil alien out may not only be consolidating the perceived threat in Maltese collective memory and conscience, but also turning keeping it out into a matter of national pride.  The resilient importance and strength of the voice of moral entrepreneurs, who many times take pride in stating and displaying how close and similar they are to the regular Joe (minn ta’ ġewwa, qalb in-nies, et cetera), may also be playing an important role in legitimising an inflated sense of outrage whenever cultural homogeneity is threatened.  The Maltese people’s flair for the dramatic, and especially for dramatic public performances on Friday night television, may also be a further reason for which folk devils keep rearing their heads here.  At the end of the day, we might just love the drama. 

The issue undoubtedly deserves further anthropological reflection.  Armed with reasonable certainty that moral panic is here to stay, I am sure that there will be ample time for it. 

On Opinion, and Mission Statements

This morning, I caught myself thinking about how much I despise the expression ‘In my opinion...’, particularly when it occurs as a statement opener.  The phrase implies nothing but one’s own admission that the case he or she is about to present is wonky at best, and at the very least partially flawed.  In my mind, there are two cases in which the ‘In my opinion...’ qualifier is used; the case in which it does not need to be used in the first place, and the case in which it is being used in an attempt to pressure the reader or listener into accepting even the most nonsensical subsequent proposition as valid. 

Consider, for example, the two statements; ‘In my opinion, we should not slaughter and eat animals’, and ‘In my opinion, the world was created in six days, five thousand years ago’.  The first presents a legitimate view which may be backed by some logical thought and justification, and may in turn lead to a reasonable individual choice of what one consumes and does not consume.  The second, on the other hand, bears stronger witness to the right to be a fool than to the right to have an opinion. 

In the first case, the opinion premise could be altogether omitted, and the statement ‘We should not slaughter and eat animals’ could well stand on its own.  In practice, as long as the vegans do not try to take my steak away, I respect their choice, and I may even come to acknowledge some of their reasons for sticking to tofu.  In the second, the opinion premise is only masking total hogwash.  Whilst vegans may present some points to support their position, one will never be able to present any reasonable point for a history of dinosaurs trotting onto Noah’s ark in fulfilling some divine master plan. 

This fallacious nature of opinion is why I will not be using this space to attempt to form and share my own.  Rather, here I intend to present some insights and knowledge I hope to gather during my time as a doctoral research student in anthropology, doing ethnography in Malta.  I will also seek to share any collateral thoughts that come to me during my journey.  I shall consider this to be a reflexive journal of sorts.  Some reflections will be about mundane current affairs, others about more pressing existential matters.  I shall seek to discuss both as openly as I can, and to keep my writing accessible to a wide audience.     

Whilst my aim is to become a good ethnographer and not a great blogger, I shall give this space as much time as I can afford.  I pledge to try my best at networking, and at welcoming feedback and open discussion from colleagues, students, and men of God alike.

Because supposedly, it helps.