In defense of the scapegoat – A review of “Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence” by Karen Armstrong

In the course of my (largely disparate) reading over the past couple of years I have read a couple of books that could be described as ranging from being skeptical of organized religion’s influence on society to being basically anti-religion. These books range from “god is not great: how religion poisons everything” by the late Christopher Hitchens; “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins; and “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris. A common thread running through many of these books and those  of others in the field is that religion and religious faith has being a net negative in the world and that some of the darkest and lowest acts of man have not occurred in spite of adherence to some faith tradition but have largely occurred because of it. This viewpoint is definitely not lacking in justification: human history is replete with examples of instances where people were driven to commit the most horrifying violent crimes because they felt some divine impulse to commit such acts. Given this background, I was quite pleased when I come across this book by the noted author and former nun, Karen Armstrong that sought to advance an argument against this potentially simplistic view of religion’s impact on the history of violence.


If I took away a central argument from this book, it will be that i) humans have had violent interactions with members of their society for all of our history; ii) for most of history, religious activities and beliefs formed the principal organizing template for most societies and provided the main (/only) opportunity for people to give meaning to their lives; (iii) as a result all human activities, including violent ones, were layered with spiritual significance; and (iv) as a result of this religious significance, religion came to be somewhat unfairly viewed as the reason for these acts of violence when they would have happened anyway. The author’s argument is quite persuasive. For most of human history, people in most human societies would have been completely puzzled by phrases such as “religious life” or “separation of church and state” – people had one life and it was deeply religious in nature. Religion pervaded everything: agriculture (praying for rain and a good harvest); government (remember the “divine right of kings”); healthcare (remember all the stories about the healing of the sick in the bible?); family (only the church could sanction marriages); warfare and conquest (remember the divinely-ordained conquering of Canaan in biblical times and Pope Alexander’s splitting of the world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence in the 15^th century). The list goes on and on, but the general point to be made is the ubiquity of religious symbols and significance in the pre-Enlightenment world. The author gives detailed examples of these historical trends in the areas most impacted by some of the world’s most prominent faith traditions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism etc.) and the central roles these faith traditions played in the evolution of the societies in which they were dominant.  

In addition to the display of an encyclopedic understanding of the evolutions of the world’s major religions and societies, the author also advanced two important concepts that I found novel and compelling. The first is the necessary and foundational role of “structural violence” in creating the agrarian state: the precursor to modern states. The second concept is the redefinition of the sacred as something (an idea, a belief etc.) that people are willing to die for.

The author argues that in making a transition from hunter-gatherer societies, human beings had to embrace systematic and structural violence. Life was very simple and limited in hunter-gatherer societies: the rhythm of life was determined by the sporadic availability of wild plants and fruits for gathering and animals for hunting. The adults of each family gathered and hunted the food required at a given time. Everyone was involved in getting food and there was no surplus to speak of. In such a society wholly devoted to subsistence there could be no scientific, religious or aesthetic advancements. However, for civilization to advance a new class of thinking elite (priests, philosophers, architects etc.) had to develop and these people who are essentially “idlers”, in a strict agrarian sense, had to be maintained somehow. The only sure way to ensure this was to compel the peasant to do extra work in order to generate the surplus needed to maintain the elite. Since many humans are rational and will gladly stop working once their needs are met, “structural violence” became necessary to keep peasants in-line and busy generating the surplus required to keep the thinking elite fat and happy. Religion came in very handy as the hand maiden of this structural violence and from this unholy marriage came the birth of human progress.

While I found the idea of structural violence to be very interesting, I thought the related idea of defining the sacred as anything people are willing to die for to be the more novel of the two concepts. Redefining the sacred in this way allows a reader to see religion-inspired conflicts as only a subset of conflicts sparked by belief in sacred ideas and to identify secular sacred ideals as another big inspiration and motivator for conflict and bloodshed.

A good example of a time and place where secular ideals attained sacred status was in post-revolutionary France. The armies of Napoleonic France fought with as much fervor and fanaticism as any religiously inspired army led into battle by crucifix-bearing clergy. A flavor of the sacred nature that the Napoleonic armies attached to the ideals of their cause can be gleaned from the lyrics to the army’s main battle anthem, the Chant du Depart. The chorus of the song (below) could easily have come from a religious song and it shows that the believers in the revolution had essentially elevated the ideals of the republic to something akin to a sacred cult and for this cult the soldiers would gladly lay down their lives.
 

La République nous appellee	The Republic is calling us
Sachons vaincre ou sachons périr	Let's know how to vanquish or let's know how to perish
Un Français doit vivre pour elle	A Frenchman must live for her [the Republic]
Pour elle un Français doit mourir	For her [the Republic] a Frenchman must die

 Overall, I thought this was a very engaging and informative book that has led me to see the history of religion’s impact of society in a whole new light.

 

“Horseman of the Enlightenment” – A review of Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts

 

Whatever name you may choose to call it, the period between the mid-17^th century and late 18^th century was very significant in Europe. Great minds such Baruch de Spinoza, Rene Descartes, Voltaire, John Locke, and many thinkers too numerous to list, advanced new ideas that revolutionized a person’s relationship with his fellow citizens, to his leaders (/rulers) and to his God. The broadly accepted name for the period which offered this new beginning in Western civilization is “The Enlightenment”. The late writer Christopher Hitchens once described the Enlightenment as the period when humans started to realize that “God is not going to help you and to that extent you are on your own. There may be a God but he doesn’t care about you and you have to take your own responsibility”. This was the period when the Western world started to make great strides to escape the stupefying chokehold of concepts such as divine rights of kings and the abject feudalism that had kept many societies from operating at anything close to their full potential. Essentially, the Enlightenment embodied a really awesome set of ideas that now sit as the foundation of our modern lives.  

 
However, thinking and writing of great ideas is not sufficient to cause change in society.  Ideas need their thinkers to be sure but it is crucial that they have their “enforcers”. Enforcers provide a “sword arm” to the quill of the writer. These enforcers (usually generals, politicians, diplomats, or some other form of statesman) are the ones who take the ideas of the great thinkers, codify them into laws and then ensure that society bends to the will of the laws inspired by these ideas. History is replete with examples of ideas that languished until enforcers showed up. Communism was little more than an interesting governing theory advanced in the writings of Marx and Engels until Vladimir Lenin showed up and led an uprising that threw off the Romanovs from the Russian throne in 1917 and Mao Zedong led his men to victory in the Chinese civil war that ended in 1949. Fabianism’s effect was also barely felt outside of select intellectual circles in London until it became the governing philosophy of the U.K.’s Labor Party for much of the first part of the 20^th century and until Jawaharlal Nehru essentially made it the organizing template for India’s post-independence economy (at least until the 1990s). On the other side of the aisle, the ideas around limited government didn’t travel much beyond the circles of Milton Friedman’s acolytes until the transatlantic duo of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan foisted this governing philosophy on their countries by sheer force of personality and political savvy. In this light it is quite safe to say that The Enlightenment needed its own enforcer before it could affect the lives of everyday people. In many ways, Napoleon Bonaparte was the enforcer of the Enlightenment.  He identified with many of the ideas espoused in the Enlightenment, codified them into laws and enforced them ruthlessly across Europe with the help of his formidable Grand Armee. The historian Andrew Roberts and author of the latest masterpiece on Napoleon captured this essence beautifully when he said “Napoleon represented the Enlightenment on horseback”.

Mr. Roberts’ book does a great job of restoring some sheen to a leader whose reputation has been sullied and distorted by deliberate misinformation of his successful adversaries and the simplistic lens of popular culture. However, to the author’s credit, he stops well short of penning a hagiography of the man. Many people when asked about great villains in history are often quick to list Napoleon alongside such certifiable monsters as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Napoleon was no such person and this book does great justice to the man’s life by advancing a balanced view of his actions and impact on the world stage. And there is much that is attractive, and even admirable, about his life and the impact he had on the world stage.

Napoleon packed a lot into his short and productive life. At the personal level, his rise is a testament to the heights to which ambitious and resourceful people can rise under reasonably positive conditions. A minor nobleman from a provincial outpost of France (Corsica), Napoleon rose to become a talented young general in the post-revolution army, then first consul and finally emperor of an empire fashioned out of Bourbon-era France, parts of present-day Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain and Austria. As a statesman, he is probably unrivalled in European history for the sheer scale of the imprint he left on the continent’s character. As his armies swept through Europe, he liberated many Jewish populations from the ghettos that many longstanding European monarchies had confined them. It could also be argued that he delivered death (or at least coma) blows to feudalism in the various regions of Europe that came under his control or influence. He codified and streamlined the tangled affair that was post-revolutionary France’s laws into a set of legal codes immortalized as the Code Napoleon. The Code Napoleon was a huge first step in realizing the concept of equality before the law and still survives as the basis / template of the legal systems in places as diverse as the American state of Louisiana, to Senegal, Belgium, Japan and of course modern France. He created a whole educational system geared towards developing the best minds in France, regardless of their social background and supported meritocracy to a level not deemed possible in the various European monarchies of his day. For example, most of his marshals (i.e., his most important generals) were said to come from the working classes.

Napoleon’s life was not, in any way, a wholly successful affair. For one, while he won the vast majority of the battles he fought, he managed to lose a crucial number of those that mattered the most. Not least is Waterloo: a defeat that led him to live out the rest of his life on an island (St. Helena) that gives true meaning to the phrase “middle of nowhere”. He also lost a lot of treasure and men in a head scratching and ultimately futile military campaign in Spain. The Spanish resistance to French occupation was aided by the clergy, attaining an almost religious fervor.

Napoleon was also not lacking in many substantial defects and the book lays many of these defects bare. He was a misogynist, not just by modern standards but also by the standards of his day. He was deeply disrespectful and dismissive of women in power. A situation that could have contributed to the peculiar loathing that powerful women (such as the Queens of Prussia, Naples and Russia) had for him. Essentially, one will be hard pressed to find any acts taken by Napoleon to improve the rights of women and this is particularly glaring because of the progressive views that he held on the rights of the working classes and those of confessional minorities. As much as he promoted excellence and meritocracy in the army and the civil service, he was also excessively zealous in promoting the careers of his largely mediocre (and often disloyal) siblings. He promoted his ne’er do well brothers into really important roles in his empire and they almost all failed abysmally in their roles and / or betrayed him when the going got tough. It may be interesting to speculate that in both of these failings (i.e., the misogyny and zeal in promoting his family) he may have betrayed his true roots as essentially a middle class product of the petite noblesse from an agrarian outpost of France. In fact on his dying bed this great man, who made the greatest monarchs of Europe quake in their boots at the thought of his approaching army,  spent a good deal of time in his will ensuring that his sons (legitimate and otherwise) were in a good position to inherit some relatively minor farmland and estates in his native Corsica.

Overall, the book is an engaging read and an excellent full portrait of a substantial man who is too often crudely caricatured.