S14, E2: On Performance
Series 14: Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Bridge Between Wildernesses
This is the second episode of a series exploring the response to Ayaan Hersi Ali’s open letter, Why I am now a Christian, published late 2023 on Unherd.
See, S14, E1: Flavours of Heresy and S14, E1B: The B-Side/"She Said She Said" which amounts a double episode.
Sympathetic Perspectives
Can anybody see the light?
Where the morn meets the dew
And the tide rises
Did you realise no one can see inside your view?
Did you realise for why this sight belongs to you?
“Strangers”, Portishead, Beth Gibbons (lyrics)
In this series I look at the public discussion that followed Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s announcement of her Christian conversion. Here I want to talk about two contributions to the conversation from different perspectives, that for my purposes, fit together well.
The article by
is more reasonable than might be supposed by its unsympathetic title, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Shameful Conversion to Christianity” and the second, an excellent analysis by , “Is Religion Even About Truth?”, which I will talk about first.In the previous B-Side episode …
I quote Richard Dawkins as saying:
… my concern is actually not so much with the evils of religion as with whether it’s true.
The Four Horsemen: Hour 2 of 2 - Discussions with Richard Dawkins, Ep 1
The title of O’Connor’s YouTube video, ‘Is Religion Even About Truth?’, could be a questioning response to that. They are, I suggest, inversely related questions.
Dawkins’ focus is on the truth; the ability to demonstrate scientific explanations and debunk religious stories on the basis of evidence. At the root of that must be the concern that false beliefs harm people and human progress. To me that looks like ‘untruths’ qualify as an, ‘evil of religion’ and if so, it’s right to think about the relative harm that each flavour of religion creates.
By contrast O’Connor is asking whether the truth of religion matters if the practice of it results in good outcomes. I should add (and hastily too) that this was a speculation about Hirsi Ali’s rationale and there is no suggestion that he advocates this himself.
Both positions are fundamentalist in their turn:
The sanctity of truth is more important than good outcomes or, (untruthful) means don’t justify the ends.
Good outcomes sometimes trump truth (ends justify the means).
I will come back to those but first, to avoid (unintentional) misrepresentation, here is a lump of relevant text that I carefully transcribed from the O’Connor video:
[...] I can understand if it really is the case that Christian values are necessary to fend off existential threats, why a society might have good reason to adopt those values but if it is possible, as Ayaan's case appears to show that it is, for a person to actually call themselves a Christian, after simply aligning themselves with these values, absent any relevance of the existence of God, or say the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus, then I think we have uncovered some evidence for a controversial hypothesis that many of those celebrating Ayaan's conversion would probably wish to resist - that religion is something you do, not something that's true.
“Is Religion Even About Truth?”, Alex O’Connor
It’s difficult to dispute, because if Hirsi Ali’s adoption of Christianity were successfully performative, how would we know? This is not as ‘left field’ as it might appear, because many other commentators have suggested her conversion is purely political, which would also make it a performative act. In a later episode I ask how we might view it were we to suspect it’s only a political convenience.
Now referring back to what I consider to be extreme positions in reverse order.
Ends Justify the Means
Christianity is an Abrahamic religion that preceded Islam by a millennia and there is some overlap of belief in what is apparently the same god. Might it also be possible to make the case that ‘performing as a Christian’ could work to improve aspects of society (if it were to help build bridges to the religious) without any requirement to have a belief in the supernatural? To be honest I would feel discomfort too but that is not a good reason not to consider it. I think Dawkins would say ‘no’ on the basis it amounts to tolerating falsehoods just to have a discussion.
Means Justify the Ends
I don’t know if I read it or heard it in an interview so am a little unhappy I cannot readily check my recollection, but Dawkins related a story where he was debating religion at a university - I think it was Oxford or Cambridge. As I remember it, his opponent was advocating for religion. At the dinner later that evening, he asked his interlocutor how such a bright legal scholar could believe in a god. He was horrified when she replied that she didn’t and that she was using it as an exercise to practice mooting. It seems that he felt an important subject had been reduced to a game.
I was shocked for a different reason. Debating wasn’t a game for her because for the justice system to work (i.e. to ensure both sides of a legal argument are competently represented) it’s necessary for legal professionals to be able to argue a position that they do not personally believe. It was a great developmental opportunity for her, to pit herself against one of the world’s most prominent atheists, making a case she did not believe in. Does it mean she is not a serious person as Dawkins seemed to suppose? No, quite the opposite, because in my view she displayed the type of competence necessary to build bridges.
Besides, the price of truth is not the same for everyone, and therefore the cost-benefit of having principles vary. This means we are not morally able to make that calculation between truth and pragmatism for somebody else. I refer to those oppressed by religion, with no voice and no-one speaking to, or for them. We can say it’s wrong but we can’t prescribe how they should respond. What alternative do we offer if their suffering (poverty, pain and hunger), is made tolerable by a religion that tells them it is for a reason, that reward lies ahead?
Hirsi Ali bore the consequences of her actions (fleeing an arranged marriage, speaking out and making herself a target for extremist violence), and her personal history motivated her to warn the West about the dangers of radical Islam. Would it be consistent of Hirsi Ali to conclude that to confront the extremes of one ideology, it may be necessary to go into battle with another? At one time of course New Atheism seemed to meet the requirements.
For the New Atheists her message could be generalised, because she provided them with an example of what was wrong with all unchecked religions, so she found allies and they found her. Yet that position also alienated her from moderately religious who might have otherwise joined her in common cause, for example, against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), forced marriages and the subjugation of women in Muslim countries.
Perhaps she came to see that her mission had been hijacked by allowing herself to believe that all religions are equally evil. I think we have to ask whether she would have reached a different conclusion, if there had been greater tolerance for the secular-humanists, within what became the mainstream atheist movement.
Winning Arguments
refers to the argument that Christianity is necessary to uphold the values of western civilization and also to the individual seeking meaning and purpose - which he credits to Jordan Peterson.
Peterson used it to win over Dave Rubin. Now, with Ayaan, he’s claimed another scalp.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Shameful Conversion to Christianity, Earthly Idealism, Don Watkins
I found that comparison challenging and deleted three paragraphs explaining why.
Perhaps Hirsi Ali saw some utility in Peterson’s arguments and took them into consideration. As others have noted, her glowing reference to Tom Holland’s Dominion, seems relevant too. However, I think the significance of these influences are overstressed when you set them against the context of her life experience. It seems odd to suppose she must be easily swayed, while denying the contributory failings of the atheist movement i.e., to build bridges or move the conversation along in the last decade. We have to want to fix it.
I think this defection feels personal to many atheists because it’s an indictment of the movement’s inflexibility and maladaption. This also explains why the broad reaction has been to trivialise her inherent dissatisfaction instead of recognising it’s something that must be properly understood.
For me, Watkins’ stand out paragraph is:
All of this was avoidable. Peterson’s argument is a bad argument. But no atheist has stepped up to convincingly answer it because there is no moral leadership among today’s secular thinkers. Instead of offering the world an inspiring rational moral ideal, atheists have evaded the issue, or, worse, embraced a secular form of Christian ethics.
ibid.
This is true and the aspiration for an ‘inspiring rational moral ideal’, sounds great, although I have little idea how we would get agreement on it. Currently, atheism is in a cul-de-sac, and I suggest that it’s only by reversing out and finding our way to reconnect with secular-humanist principles, that we can get moving again.
Fewer battle lines and more common ground with the moderately religious has to be the way to preserve Western culture and contain extremist ideologies. There can be no work-around and there is no direct path to an atheist utopia, assuming that’s what it would be. What can drop out of a moderate approach is firstly openness, and where interests overlap, progress.
Any mention of ‘initiatives’ and ‘policy’ may feel like the imposition of an agenda, but to shy away from taking practical steps is to remain imprisoned in the abstract. To establish a direction might require leadership in some form but we don’t need an alternative harlequin-suited guru to make it ok when we occasionally forget to make our beds.
The tragic loss of Christopher Hitchens cannot be full appraised by what he said. Had he lived, unlike many of his contemporaries, his thinking would not be frozen in 2011. We know he was capable of changing his mind and did not seek anyone’s permission to do so. I like to think he would be more sympathetic to Hirsi Ali than others because he would have recognised that her association with New Atheism has been paralysing.
Although I would not be in favour of embracing ‘a secular form of Christian ethics’, I think it is essential that we can agree on some basic principles that might also be read across to the religious. Secularism is not a concession to religion. Ideally it would set out the conditions for religions and atheism to interact and be tolerant of each other. This also means that the intolerant ideologies that can’t adapt exclude themselves. Surely, that was the opportunity that Hirsi Ali thought she had found, back when New Atheism seemed to be the only game in town.
On History
In her critiques of art, Camille Paglia (an atheist), stood up for the great arcs of history. What was remarkable might be difficult to fully appreciate over three decades later and I notice an odd paradox.
On the one hand her break-out book Sexual Personae was radical in 1990, but even those who disagreed with her conclusions, could hardly fault her scholarly diligence in producing such a well-researched treatise. Her insistence that art cannot be understood without accounting for the contemporary religious and cultural influences, would have been obvious to most people then, even if they had no idea what the historic context was. That she even bothered to make that case at a time when it was still fairly intuitive is a credit to her prescience. She painstakingly joined the dots but I don’t think anyone doubted that the dots were there.
This can no longer be taken for granted because whereas history was once a study of the past, now it has become a judgement on it, the historic protagonists made guilty in absentia by ex post facto law. Paglia had a sense of what was coming and opposed the threat of post-modernist dogma infiltrating academic administrations to grab power and strangle academic freedoms. She noticed as it quietly tailgated other apparently harmless philosophical movements through the door.
So I don’t agree with
when he says that Hirsi Ali glosses over the atrocities that Christians performed in the past - it’s not just that they were irrelevant to her point, but that they are well known and baked in.Christianity did not outgrow its “dogmatic stage.” It was defanged thanks to the heroic courage of men and women who refused to bow to dogma (and thanks to Aristotle). […]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Shameful Conversion to Christianity, Earthly Idealism, Don Watkins
Aristotle was worm food over 300 years before Jesus was said to be manger-bothering. Although some may have been influenced by Greek texts it’s difficult to imagine they were ever common currency amongst the early Christians. Nevertheless, if we assume his writings helped people find courage to stand up to the excesses of the Church, then we also have to do some accounting for the impact of his views on natural slavery. Can we say they are also baked in or are we ‘glossing over’?
It is true, of course, that most of the people who created western civilization were Christians and often argued in Christian terms. How could it be otherwise in a world where Christianity held a monopoly on man’s mind thanks to centuries of coercion and indoctrination?
ibid.
It’s part of her argument that mainstream Christianity evolved into something that that is in the fabric of almost every area of Western culture. A culture that has benefitted the world in many ways. If it’s to be a requirement that every stage of that cultural evolution has to be justified, there would be no foundation anywhere in history, fit for any civilisation to be built upon. It’s not an argument that gets us anywhere.
The Foundation for Gratitude
And what of us? Do any of us, by our existence, justify the suffering across say 200,000 years of primate evolution that it took to get us here? Although it seems ludicrously solipsistic to suppose the Earth is a paradise created for us by a god, it’s still natural to occasionally feel thankful, for being incidental beneficiaries of a life here. Perhaps ancient peoples needed somewhere to park their gratitude so created gods to thank and appease.
In thoughtful moments we might consider the cost to other lifeforms who helped convey the genetic information through time to primitive humans and on to us. Should our gratitude be for the suffering and destruction of the billions of species that it took to produce the world we inherited and the ecosystem we live in? Is it possible to think of ancient life in anything other than the abstract? If so, godless or not, can our gratitude or guilt be anything other than ‘performative’?