An exchange of violences

We no longer know what it is to be religious, and haven’t for a while. During the past 200 years sensible people in the west have conte...

We no longer know what it is to be religious, and haven’t for a while. During the past 200 years sensible people in the west have contested our religions until they lack significant content and force. These religions now ask little of anyone and, quite rightly, play little part in our politics. The truly religious, following the logic of submission to political and moral ideals, and to the arbitrary will of God, are terrifying to us and almost incomprehensible…

Confronted by this, it takes a while for our “liberalism” to organise itself into opposition and for us to consider the price we might have to pay for it. We also have little idea of what it is to burn with a sense of injustice and oppression, and what it is to give our lives for a cause, to be so desperate or earnest. We think of these acts as mad, random and criminal, rather than as part of a recognisable exchange of violences… Consumer society has already traded its moral ideals for other satisfactions, and one of the things we wish to export, masquerading as “freedom and democracy” is that very consumerism, though we keep silent about its consequences: addiction, alienation, fragmentation.

We like to believe we are free to speak about everything, but we are reluctant to consider our own deaths, as well as the meaning of murder. Terrible acts of violence in our own neighbourhood — not unlike terrible acts of violence which are “outsourced”, usually taking place in the poorest parts of the third world — disrupt the smooth idea of “virtual” war that we have adopted to conquer the consideration of death.

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‘‘Virtual” wars are conflicts in which one can kill others without either witnessing their deaths or having to take moral responsibility for them… Modern western politicians believe we can murder real others in faraway places without the same thing happening to us, and without any physical or moral suffering on our part…

War debases our intelligence and derides what we have called “civilisation” and “culture” and “freedom”. If it is true that we have entered a spiral of violence, repression and despair that will take years to unravel, our only hope is moral honesty about what we have brought about.

And not only us. If we need to ensure that what we call “civilisation” retains its own critical position towards violence, religious groups have to purge themselves of their own intolerant and deeply authoritarian aspects.

Excerpted from Kureishi’s article in ‘The Guardian’, July 19