from the edge

Friday 9 January 2015

Je suis Charlie Hebdo - The truth of the matter

I have started to notice when a few weeks go by without a plane crash or terrorist attack taking place somewhere in the world.  Perhaps this is because we are now so conditioned to expect the unexpected that we are permanently braced for the worst. Being permanently on red alert is also a way of telling ourselves that we are not really afraid, that we are ready for whatever life throws at us, including random acts of murder. Various levels of ‘terror alert’ help us to do this.  

Those who commit acts of terror aim to exercise power by generating a climate of fear. Terrorism is terrorism, after all. Generating fear is the way people who crave attention, recognition, or even worship, get their megalomaniac ‘fix’. In the case of Jihadism in its current manifestations, megalomania is delusion dressed up as religion. It is not true religion.

True religion is about having a deep relationship with a loving God, both individually and as God’s people, in the sure knowledge that all people are God’s and that all are equally valued and loved by him. False religion is ultimately about the worship of oneself and forcing others to worship the person I call ‘me’, often because the false ‘me’ is driven by self hatred of one kind or another. False religion, and the megalomania it engenders, often appears in personality driven worshiping contexts pertaining to any one of a number of religions, just as it does on the global political stage. It becomes dangerous and violent when driven by lust for power and the desire for control over the lives of others, even if this is not recognised by the person or persons concerned. True religion begins with renouncing power and control over other people.

Truth exposes delusion and so does true religion. But this exposing can work both ways, like a double edged knife. Insofar as true religion, and the truth through which it speaks, exposes dangerous delusion, it also exposes our own fears and ourselves for what we are, both privately and publicly. The truth does this by naming and shaming those who threaten us and, in so doing, by naming and shaming our own fears, hatreds and delusions. Once we have faced these inner wild beasts, we can lay hold of them, understand them and deal with them. We can even laugh at them. We can understand and laugh at our fear of being attacked by crazed religious extremists. Political satire, whether or not we always like or agree with it, helps to make this possible.

Cartoons are really drawings in the sand. For some, they can be powerful solvents of toxic fear. But while they may come across as  temporary things, quickly forgotten and easily erased by the artist, they also leave an indelible mark on the collective inner consciousness, the place where hatred is engendered through fear, the one feeding continuously on the other until they erupt in violence. The artist who draws in the sand deals in powerful subtleties. He or she reveals both truth and delusion.

There is an occasion in the life of Jesus of Nazareth when a woman is brought to him who has been caught committing adultery, a flagrant breach of Jewish law and of the bounds of respectability. When asked who should throw the first stone, he responds with a question and with a drawing in the sand. The question and the drawing clearly belong together. The question pertains to a collective and private fear of judgment and to the delusions of power and of being beyond reproach cherished by those who believe they have the right to judge and condemn others. “Which of you is without sin?” he asks. “Let him throw the first stone.” Jesus knew the truth and saw the delusions which come so easily to those who wish for power, or who perhaps already have it.

What did each person see written in the sand as he dropped his stone and turned away from the woman? It was probably no more than a single word, or a quick line drawing unmasking a delusion about the kind of person he was, or about what he secretly wished he was. The delusion and the desire had made him single minded, even fanatical, in the practice of his religion. False fanatical religion expressed itself in a desire to punish someone else for his own self hatred.

We are seeing something like this being worked out through the language of religious violence today. The criminal so called Jihadists who act out their fantasies in Paris streets and supermarkets are really no more than disillusioned people who are full of self hatred. They must be stopped, wherever they are, both there and further afield. But simply stopping them, with force if necessary, will not diminish their hatred or their fear and it will not diminish ours either.


In order to finally rid ourselves of the fear and the hatred which feeds violence, we have other work to do. We have to use the other side of the double edged knife to exorcise the sins of injustice committed against Arab people in the past century and in which we have all played a part. Violence and hatred will only be fully quelled when we have taken away the deeper and perhaps only partly recognised ‘drivers’ of the current violent episode. This is the wider and far more significant truth which cartoonists need to be drawing in the sand. 

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