Aleksandr Dugin has come to public attention (even in Canada, though only fairly recently) as “Putin’s Brain,” as Foreign Affairs memorably dubbed him¹ – that is, as the ideological mastermind behind Russia’s moves toward reasserting imperial ambitions, notably with respect to Ukraine.

Is this accurate, or is it just media hype? The truth is that it’s extremely difficult to judge with confidence exactly to what extent Vladimir Putin’s more aggressive policies toward Ukraine or anywhere else reflect Dugin’s influence (or supposed influence) as an omnipresent publicist and behind-the-curtain adviser to aspiring czars. The suspicion easily arises that Putin uses Dugin, letting him rant on state TV, without himself buying into Dugin’s crazy worldview. But whether Dugin really is influencing Russian policy or is simply the object of excessive hype, intellectuals as well as ordinary citizens in the West need to be aware of him, lest they be taken in by his pretensions as a theorist and his claimed interest in civilizational dialogue and pluralism, which functions as a rhetorical cloak. Either way, he’s dangerous.²

Dugin has given his distinctive ideology a variety of different labels: National Bolshevism, neo-Eurasianism, the fourth political theory. They all amount to the same thing: a scheme for uniting all the global enemies of liberalism under Russian leadership and displacing the current liberal dispensation with something virulently antiliberal and antimodern or premodern. Dugin aims, in fact, at a fusion of totalitarian ideologies, from fascism and even Nazism at one end to Marxism at the other end. Yet his ideological roots are far closer to fascist and proto-Nazi sources (for instance, the demented “Ariosophy” doctrines of Guido von List and Jörg Lanz) than they are to anything in the Marxist tradition – which is why both Dugin’s English-language publishers and the websites that are drawn to him belong to the ultra-right. Dugin’s “politics” are bathed in the swampy waters of mystical esotericism and occultism, and his root-and-branch rejection of liberal democracy likely owes far more to his spiritualist and theological or pseudotheological commitments than to anything we would customarily understand as political or philosophical.

On February 5, 2015, Ontario’s TVO broadcast an episode of The Agenda with Steve Paikin featuring Dugin.³ The show, entitled “Big Minds on the Future of Democracies,” included Francis Fukuyama, a well-known and influential public intellectual, as well as Ivan Krastev, another widely respected political scientist concerned with the future of democracy. This already conveyed the impression that Dugin is a serious academic on a par with the other two. The show went out of its way to publicize Dugin’s newly published work Eurasian Mission, giving it equal standing with one of Fukuyama’s books. Eurasian Mission is published by Arktos Media, an incontrovertibly “Aryanist” or white supremacist outfit.⁴ On its cover, repeatedly displayed on the TV screens of TVO’s viewers, is the Symbol of Chaos⁵ – Dugin’s no less malevolent version of the swastika. It is hard to imagine that Paikin or the TVO producers knew what they were doing when they gave the purveyor of this reptilian ideology his platform on public television. But it is not too late to educate ourselves.

In presenting Dugin to their viewers, TVO advertised him as a “Russian philosopher and political activist.” Is Dugin a Russian philosopher? Yes, it seems that he is. Dugin’s book Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning (published by Radix, another far-right press) offers a competent and at times interesting commentary on the philosophy of Heidegger, one of the major thinkers of the 20th century. Only a fellow philosopher could pursue that kind of engagement with a philosopher as challenging and as important as Heidegger⁶ – although Dugin’s book in no way hides the fact that he’s at least as strongly drawn to Heidegger’s ideological significance as to his philosophical significance. Dugin is very intensely focused on the Heidegger of 1936–1945, a period throughout which Heidegger was a card-carrying Nazi, however much he may have believed that Hitler’s version of National Socialism was grossly inferior to his own.

Since the Enlightenment, there has been a line of important thinkers who have regarded life in liberal modernity as profoundly dehumanizing. This line includes Joseph de Maistre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt and Heidegger. For such thinkers, liberal modernity is so humanly degrading that one ought to, if one could, undo the French Revolution and its egalitarianism, and perhaps cancel out the whole moral legacy of Christianity. For all of them, hierarchy and rootedness are more morally compelling than equality and individual liberty.

In his Heidegger book, Dugin helps to bring out why certain intellectuals of the early 20th century gravitated toward fascism: a grim preoccupation with the perceived soullessness of modernity, and a resolve to embrace any politics, however extreme, that seemed to them to promise what Heidegger called “spiritual renewal.”⁷ Dugin is now the latest thinker in this line of philosophers of the radical right. But his identity as a philosopher is only one aspect of Dugin’s intellectual personality. He’s also very much captivated by mysticism and occultism, and he’s a determined ideologue who is willing to reach out to allies in the gutter.
It seems that there are really three Aleksandr Dugins: let’s call them the philosophical Dugin, the witchcraft-dispensing Dugin⁸ and the ideology-mongering Dugin. One notable work of Dugin’s available in English is entitled The Fourth Political Theory. Despite the misleading title, intended to convey the image of Dugin as a “theorist,” offering the world a new “political theory,” this work corresponds to the ideology-mongering Dugin. Here Dugin is not in the theory business at all; he’s in the ideology business. And the ideology that he is hawking involves celebration of blatantly totalitarian and ruthlessly imperialistic forms of politics. Consider a telling passage in a recent text by Dugin entitled “The Fourth Estate”:

The Fourth Political Theory … is built on the imperative of overcoming modernity and all three political ideologies in order (the order has tremendous significance): (1) liberalism, (2) communism, (3) nationalism (fascism). The subject of this theory, in its simple version, is the concept “narod,” roughly, “Volk” or “people,” in the sense of “peoplehood” and “peoples,” not “masses.”

What does Dugin mean in suggesting that while one must overcome all the leading ideologies of the 20th century, “the order has tremendous significance”? The implication is that the normative objections to liberalism far exceed the normative objections to fascism. Fascism may not be perfect, but there is more there (even in the Nazi version!) that is worthy of being incorporated in Dugin’s higher ideological synthesis than there is in Western-style bourgeois liberalism. Yes, all three ideologies have to be “overcome,” but they are not on the same level. One needs to rank them. Shockingly for a reader in the liberal West, the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century (Bolshevism, fascism, Nazism) rank higher – much higher – than morally egalitarian liberalism does.

Dugin’s desire to incorporate fascism into his antiliberal ideology is not a matter of conjecture or interpretation: he himself openly avows it. In The Fourth Political Theory, he writes that the kind of radically antiliberal grand coalition that he envisions – encompassing the far right, the far left, the radical Green movement, jihadi Islam and millenarian (for instance, evangelical and Pentecostal) Christianity – requires “putting aside anti-Communist as well as anti-fascist, prejudices. These prejudices are the instruments in the hands of liberals and globalists with which to keep their enemies divided. So we should strongly reject anti-Communism as well as anti-fascism. Both of them are counter-revolutionary tools in the hands of the global liberal elite.”⁹

Marxism was right in its collectivism and anticapitalism, and fascism/Nazism was right in its primordialism and antirationalism. These disparate ideologies have to be fused and made to work together (hence “National Bolshevism,” Dugin’s antecedent to neo-Eurasianism). In the interests of advancing this more potent synthesis of totalitarian ideologies, concerns about 20th-century fascism and Nazism are to be dismissed as mere “prejudices.” Dugin is far from being a closet fascist. Nor, for that matter, is he a closet Bolshevik. The key idea is that if Communism and Nazism were not sufficient on their own to defeat liberalism, only a synthesis of the two can do the job. Dugin’s suggestive slogan “Third Rome – Third Reich – Third International” aptly conveys the scope of his ambitions.

In The Fourth Political Theory, Dugin claims that he repudiates the “racism, xenophobia, and chauvinism” of the fascist past, which he refers to as “unacceptable elements” of fascism/Nazism.¹⁰ Yes, he wants to incorporate a fascist and Nazi component in his antiliberal ideology, but his will be a kinder, gentler fascism purged of racism and nationalist chauvinism. One would have to be credulous in the extreme to be taken in by these disclaimers. Dugin’s “National Bolshevism” arose in concert with the Pamyat’ movement of the late 1980s, which in turn is traceable in a direct ideological line back to the infamous Black Hundred movement in the early 20th century – responsible, according to Walter Laqueur, for 700 or so anti-Jewish pogroms.¹¹

With respect to Dugin’s political affiliations and alignments within Russia, the story is one of a bewildering multiplicity and diversity of political identities, zigzagging from the far right to the left to the right to the “centre,” and so on. What consistently underlies and makes sense of these frantic migrations and manoeuvrings all over the political map is commitment to a project of a Nazified Russia laying claim to an ambitious empire straddling continents, and thereby coming to dominate the world. If these mad imperial designs lead to World War III, so much the better,¹² since we know from Dugin’s lunatic theology that he heartily welcomes, in fact positively yearns for, an eschatological “climax” – what he typically refers to as Finis Mundi, “the end of the world.” Dugin offers us a millenarian vision that matches to an astonishing degree the parallel millenarianism of the Islamic State.¹³

What this erratic political career, with all its volatile ideological shifts, also tells us is that none of Dugin’s various statements and disclaimers (for instance, on the topic of racism) can be taken at face value. Or rather: the only Duginian utterances and pronouncements that can be trusted are those that are most extreme, which are certainly in no way lacking.¹⁴

In a YouTube video advertising one of his recent books (Putin vs. Putin: A View from the Right),¹⁵ Dugin celebrates Vladimir Putin as a new “czar.” He’s a new czar, Dugin insists, not because he’s a dictator or aspiring dictator but because the Russian people want and demand a czar. Putin is a czar by virtue of the kind of authority that he embodies – but also, clearly, because he is the spearhead of the project for a recovered Russian empire. The difference from earlier czars, it should be pointed out, is that the aspired-to empire in this case (as Dugin envisions it) far exceeds in its dimensions what the Russian Empire was in the past.

But make no mistake: Dugin is not speaking to Russian imperialists alone. Dugin aims to assemble as broad an antiliberal coalition as possible, extending even to environmentalist terrorists like the Unabomber, although he tends to side with Shia and Sufi Islam over Sunni Islam, sometimes going so far as cast Sunni extremists as if they were allies of the West. From Dugin’s own standpoint, all enemies of liberalism are crusaders fighting in the same cause – to destroy modernity. Dugin is an ecumenical jihadist. “Jihadists of all civilizations unite!” is his true slogan.

In a sense, exposing Dugin as a dangerous charlatan is redundant. He does it to himself with words spoken out of his own mouth. And it’s all on YouTube. Consider an especially revealing eight-minute interview filmed in Indonesia in which Dugin fully lays out his “political-theological” vision.¹⁶ He cites the authority of Russian Orthodox monks who assure him of the coming Apocalypse. He divides up the world into good Muslims (Sufi mystics and theocratic Shiites) and bad Muslims (Sunnis aligned with the West, it would seem); good Christians (Orthodox) and bad Christians (Western); good Jews and bad Jews (mainly bad!). He posits an “eschatological line” and arranges world civilizations on one side of this line or the other, foretelling their historical destiny or historical extinction. He predicts the reconquest of “Constantinople” on behalf of Russian Orthodoxy (the Islamic State predicts the same thing on behalf of the caliphate!). He refers to the existing world order as “Pax Judaica.” He claims to have a direct line to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (President of Iran at the time of the interview).

It is easy to dismiss all of this as a wild rant, since that is what it is, except that it is a wild rant emanating from someone listened to with seeming respect by the President of Russia, the former president of Iran and the current Foreign Minister of Greece. (There is a congenial-looking photo posted online of Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias posing in close proximity to Dugin.¹⁷) And even if Putin and the people around Putin are using Dugin rather than being influenced by him, there is no question that there are vast numbers of people, within and beyond Russia, who are being influenced by Dugin’s ideology and by his political-theological fantasies. According to Anton Barbashin and Hannah Thoburn, there are no fewer than 56 branch offices of Dugin’s Eurasian Youth Union: 47 within Russia and nine abroad.¹⁸

Our contemporary context is mightily relevant. I would urge readers to consult an acute analysis by John Gray in the October 2014 issue of Prospect entitled “The Liberal Delusion.” Gray argues that for liberals, peace, freedom and prosperity are self-evidently the natural aspirations of all human beings, and liberals get utterly bewildered when individuals or societies have the opportunity to choose these liberal ideals and instead unaccountably opt for antiliberal visions of life. One important example of this liberal bewilderment, but not at all the only one, concerns Putin’s Russia, where the President’s authoritarianism and his reassertion of “the claims of geopolitics, ethnicity and empire” are astoundingly popular. This makes no sense to those for whom liberal ideals are the default aspiration of humanity. Gray writes,

The Soviet debacle was an opportunity to reclaim a normalcy denied them for over 40 years. A sort of normalcy has returned; but it is the kind that Europe experienced in much of the first half of the last century, a condition of chronic crisis. Structural flaws in the single currency have left much of Southern Europe in permanent depression. Reunited by the fall of communism, the continent has been re-divided by the European project. Across Europe, there has been a resurgence of the far right and the politics of hate.

As we should have been taught by the catastrophes of the 20th century, cultural-economic-political crisis of this kind provides the perfect opening for demagogues and lunatics who can exploit these crises to turn the whole world upside down. If the far right and the politics of hate are enjoying a notable resurgence, which they are, then Dugin, however much he may appear to liberals as a kind of intellectual clown, is precisely the sort of thuggish enemy of liberalism whom we must most fear. We are learning anew that fascism (including its theocratic versions), with its brown uniforms and black flags, has a romance that liberals underestimate at their peril. Similar wisdom can be drawn from George Orwell as quoted by Graeme Wood in a recent report on the rise of the Islamic State written for The Atlantic: fascism is “psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.” Socialism and capitalism convey the message “I offer you a good time”; Hitler’s message, by contrast, is “I offer you struggle, danger and death.” “We ought not to underrate emotional appeal,” writes Wood.¹⁹ This is relevant to understanding not only the appeal of Hitler and the Islamic State but also that of Dugin.

It should seem obvious that the 20th century is not something any of us would want to replay in the 21st century. Nietzsche, in Ecce Homo, predicted in 1889 that the century to come would see “upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of. There will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth.” And so it came to pass! Why would any sane person want to do it all over again: see the world convulsed by totalitarian ideologies, genocide and apocalyptic wars? How can this prospect possibly be attractive – in the eyes of Dugin and his disciples or of anyone else? Can human beings really be so blind and misguided as to have learned nothing from the 20th century at its worst?

That seems unthinkable, yet the atrocious ideologies currently gaining ground in Europe and in other parts of the world are forcing us to reconsider what Gray calls “the liberal delusion,” the faith that history favours liberalism. That’s why Dugin and likeminded extremists have to be taken with deadly seriousness. As the recently assassinated Russian opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, put it in an interview with the Globe and Mail: “The most difficult question for Russia is what kind of revolution you will get – orange or brown or red. There is a very big danger for Russians and for the world because, unfortunately, nationalists and fascists are very popular in this country.”

Barack Obama in his Nobel Peace Prize address got it right – “evil does exist in the world” – and in the case of Duginism that very thing is staring us right in the face. Readers are urged to check out the websites of Dugin’s English-language publishers, Radix and Arktos Media, so that they may judge for themselves the ideological complexion of these organizations.²⁰ Is this a kind of guilt by association? No: Dugin is so eclectic and ecumenical in his extremism that we need to be aware of those with whom he associates in order to pierce through the bewildering variety of his sources and references. Dugin himself decides which toxic intellectual sources to draw on in defining his own ideology, and he likewise picks the vile comrades with whom he chooses to collaborate. Opting to align yourself with Julius Evola (one of Dugin’s arch-fascist intellectual heroes)²¹ and Arktos Media is decidedly a mode of self-disclosure and is probably our most reliable point of access to what Dugin is really about.

Andreas Umland, an important scholar of Duginism, has recently written that Dugin “envisages himself not as a public intellectual but rather as a mastermind who need not necessarily run the state himself, but should define the thinking of the elite: not a politician, but a meta-politician. Ideally, Dugin the theoretician would generate ideas that the political leaders and the propaganda workers would, consciously or subconsciously, realize.”²² With this concerted commitment to “meta-politics” on the part of Dugin and his followers as well as kindred ideologues of his ilk, we need, as one website rightly puts it, to keep “an eye on the neo-fascists burrowing their way into a subculture near you.”²³ Dugin puts huge emphasis on the idea of “geopolitics,” and his spreading influence, first in Russia and now in other societies, has its own significant geopolitical implications. After Putin’s aggressions against Ukraine, with their real potential for geopolitical mischief, it no longer seems hyperbolic to call Aleksandr Dugin one of the most dangerous ideologues on the planet.²⁴ All responsible citizens in the West need to know who he is and what he stands for.

Continue reading “Russia’s ecumenical jihadist” →

The Islamic State is only one example of its surprising return

Human history is full of surprises. Who would have imagined that something called the Internet would come along and comprehensively transform how the inhabitants of this planet relate to one another not only culturally and socially but even politically? After 1989, when one had decent reason to believe that the age of totalitarian ideologies was definitively over (or at least banished for many generations), who would have expected a new totalitarian ideology to be a significant global player so soon? And who on earth would have predicted that ancient theocracy, of all things, would come to define the core of this new ideology?

The problem of religion and politics is obviously still very much with us. For 35 years, we have had a stubbornly illiberal clerical regime in Iran. In Egypt not long ago we saw a popularly elected theocratic government, which was subsequently overthrown by what amounted to a military coup. Both Pakistan and Afghanistan are fighting deadly serious jihadi insurgencies with theocratic ambitions that may or may not be defeated. In Syria and Iraq, the jihadi movement that now calls itself “the Islamic State” (formerly ISIL or ISIS) aspires to a restored caliphate, and has been able to demonstrate, with notable military victories against the Syrian and Iraqi regimes, that those aspirations are not a wild fantasy. No one surveying the scene in 2014 could confidently assert that theocracy as a possible regime has been banished to the past.

Islam gets most of the headlines, but the problem of contemporary theocratic politics is by no means limited to Islamic contexts. In Israel, both domestic politics and relations with the Palestinians are severely complicated by theocratic political parties. In the Balkans, we recently saw the Serbian Orthodox Church trying to scuttle a settlement between Serbia and Kosovo brokered by the European Union. Or consider reports, not long ago, of radical Buddhist monks helping to incite anti-Islamic ethnic violence in central Myanmar. The last is perhaps especially disturbing (certainly if one presumes that no religious tradition could be more politically benign than Buddhism!) since it underscores the existence of ugly forms of theocratic politics beyond the ambit of the three Abrahamic faiths. We see a similar phenomenon in Hindu nationalism. Indeed, a theocratic potential exists in all the world religions.

All of this, of course, demands urgent responses at the level of policy and practical judgement. But the renewed challenge of theocracy in our time also demands more considered intellectual responses at the level of moral reflection. For starters, we need to ask ourselves once again what defines a secular society (that is, a society founded on a principled rejection of theocracy), and why we prize secularist principles as we do. Why is secularism for us in liberal democratic societies an indispensable civic good?

Religion’s complicated balance sheet

We have a classic statement of the theocratic idea in Rev. Jerry Falwell’s memorable line (in his 1976 U.S. Independence Day sermon) that “the idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.” To begin working through what is at issue here, think back for a moment to the 2012 U.S. presidential election. We wouldn’t want to bar Mitt Romney, a former bishop of the Mormon church, from seeking the presidency on account of his religious beliefs, but neither would we want those religious beliefs to have assumed any special authority had he been elected.

Political association is a community of citizens, not a community of believers. The political philosopher Will Kymlicka has written, “The boundaries of state and nation rarely if ever coincide perfectly, and so viewing the state as the possession of a particular national group can only alienate minority groups. The state must be seen as belonging equally to all people who are governed by it, regardless of their nationality.” The principle articulated here, which for me is a foundational one, is just the same (and just as valid) if we substitute religion and religious for nation and national (and the principle obviously has no less force in cases where a minority religion rather than the majority religion holds the seat of power). For the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to have any special authority vis-à-vis other denominations or other religions would mean that the state would be “owned” by Mormons, or owned by them to a greater extent than it is owned by other citizens. This would be, to put it fairly mildly, normatively problematical.

One’s views concerning a proper and desirable negotiation of the relationship between politics and religion inevitably draw on one’s general views about religion, and about whether introducing religion into political, social and moral matters tends to make things better or worse. Let me sketch my views as briefly as I can. Shared religion clearly provides a focus of communal loyalty and identity; and as people participate in these deeper identities they can become willing to sacrifice their own comfort or security in ways that may be more difficult to elicit from us secularist types. So we sometimes see religion provide a foundation for forms of moral and civic heroism that are indeed worthy of admiration.One might even consider the hypothesis that there’s a kind of “amplifier effect” associated with religion, exaggerating the moral tendencies that are already present – so that, in effect, religion makes good people better and bad people worse. The notion here would be that believing one knows what God expects of us tends to intensify human behaviour, whether generous or wicked, reinforcing our determination to care for the needy or persecute the unfaithful.

And if, human nature being what it is, there tends to be a preponderance of human vice over human virtue, that would then offer an easy explanation of why, in the overall balance sheet of human life, the harm associated with religion is at least equal to its benefits. I don’t think it’s reasonable for anyone to argue that religion is solely a source of good or solely a source of harm. Clearly, it’s a very complicated balance sheet, and determining exactly where the balance lies between the good that religion fosters and the harm that it does is anything but easy. Yes, the deeper identities and deeper solidarities elicited by religion sometimes make possible saintly good. But the very same deeper identities and deeper solidarities can also sometimes be mobilized on behalf of political evil.

Religion builds solidarities that often help people cope with the challenges of life, and sometimes even makes them better citizens. But naturally the question of whether religion contributes to useful solidarities is different from the question of the truth of what believers believe. My own fundamental problem with religion is more on the intellectual side than on the moral side. For me, the fundamental issue is what it does to human dignity to believe things that are unworthy of belief.

We’ve known for several centuries, and certainly since Darwin, that human beings – with their hopes for salvation and their fears of a death that is death and nothing else – are not the centre of some cosmic drama; and that God, if there is one, has no reason to take a special interest in the animal species that happens to have prevailed on this obscure planet. Don’t we simply embarrass ourselves by inflating our own importance to the level of objects of divine care and attention? It seems to me that, in the case of the three Abrahamic faiths, taking these religions seriously requires actually believing that (to take them in chronological order) there will be a Jewish Messiah, that Christ is the Redeemer of humanity’s sins, that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. But believing these articles of faith requires in turn the belief that this small planet of ours figures fairly importantly within a larger divine scheme. Is it intellectually credible, or intellectually respectable, to believe that in the post-Copernican, post-Darwinian world that we now inhabit? Even if everything connected with religion increased the stock of good in the world (which again is far from being a plausible view), wouldn’t there still be something humanly demeaning in needing to inject more meaning into the world than is really there in order to sustain a meaningful life?

I don’t think these are rhetorical questions. They are real questions that one is obliged to reflect on in pondering the proper role of religion in human life. No one disputes that life is full of mystery, and that with respect to the mysteries of birth, existence and death, there seems to be an ineliminable yearning to share in an apprehension of a meaning deeper than science will ever be able to supply. But as rational or cognitive beings, we understand – better than the purveyors of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament or the Qur’an were able to understand – that we live on a minute planet (an infinitesimal speck, really) in an unfathomably large universe, and it’s just not terribly plausible that human doings have the cosmic importance that these scriptures say they do. Furthermore, as moral beings, we can see quite clearly the historical reality that the world religions have caused at least as much havoc and destruction as they have moral good. As for God, it’s hard to see how it helps at all to abate the mysteries of existence that are apparent to all of us by simply invoking another mystery.

I can’t say I fully understand why so many people feel such a strong gravitational pull toward religion. But let’s face it, there are a thousand things I don’t understand about human nature. I don’t understand why people watch golf on television. I don’t understand why people vote for political parties representing the view that minimization of taxation is the highest purpose in political life. I don’t understand why people are interested in buying Rolex watches for $43,000. I don’t understand why people drive somewhere within walking distance when they can just as easily walk. And so on. Yet the reality is that these things are a part of how people define their lives, whether it makes sense to me or not. Nor is it particularly clear that I need to come to an understanding of these aspects of the inscrutable (to me) nature of human beings.

When religion becomes a problem

What matters, politically speaking, is not the reasonableness of what believers believe but rather how those beliefs affect our civic relationships – how we stand toward one another as citizens. For religion doesn’t just mean private belief. Religion commonly involves structures of churchly or priestly power and authority, and often asserts substantial political claims. Theocracy is the politicization of religion, which is why a liberal-secular society is not antireligious per se but is necessarily antitheocratic.

Admittedly, structures of clerical power are sometimes exercised for positive civic purposes. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s is an absolutely unchallengeable case of religion being mobilized for noble and worthy civic ends. Another shining example of politically beneficial clerical authority is the civic heroism of Buddhist monks marching in protest against the rule of Burmese generals. But quite often, that same power is exercised for purposes that are hardly benign. It suffices to glance around the world today. Think of the religiously sanctioned oppression of homosexuals in Africa, the influence of Serbian Orthodox priests during the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s, religious extremism in Israel and Palestine, theocratic politics in Iran and Afghanistan and Pakistan (a veritable sinkhole of ignominy and grief), the religious right in the United States. Think of countless other places where clerical political power is being abused – that is, helping to mobilize fear, hatred and cruelty. It is a common story, to the extent that it would be absurd to assert that the norm is for religious authorities to deploy their power and authority for worthy or even merely benign purposes.

Why do we pride ourselves on living in a secular society? We inhabit a society where women won’t be arrested or perhaps lashed for wearing the wrong clothes or listening to the wrong music; where no one will be accused of blasphemy or heresy; where one group of religionists won’t suffer pogroms at the hands of, or have their villages razed by, some other group of religionists (as apparently happens on a regular basis, for instance, in Nigeria); where gender equality won’t be put out of reach by people appealing to sacred scriptures; and so on. In short, we live in a society where religion is largely privatized, where liberty of individual judgement is vastly expanded, and where religion’s power of policing sexuality – historically, one of the chief sources, surely, of its social and political power – is dramatically curtailed. How can we consider this anything other than a political achievement of very large proportions?

Nor can it be assumed that theocratic politics are not a possibility even in the modern West. I’ve lived in two societies (Ireland and pre–Quiet Revolution Quebec) where, within living memory, politics was a priest-infested business. Neither of them was a happy experience. As Theodor Herzl said in trying to imagine what a Jewish state ought to look like, priests should be confined to their temples in the same way that soldiers should be confined to their barracks. The parallel Herzl drew impresses itself on us all the more vividly when we think again of present-day Egypt, where a military-dominated regime was replaced for one year by a theocratic regime, only to be deposed once again by the military. In short, as citizens we share a substantial common good in sparing ourselves the distortion of political life associated with theocracy, whether Islamic, Hindu, Christian or Jewish – and contemporary political life has given us samples of all four.

Interpretations of the world religions that are consonant with liberal and democratic citizenship do not pose a problem for political life. The problem is illiberal religion, especially versions of illiberal religion with political ambitions. And religions that ground nonliberal or antiliberal views of life cannot be simply legislated away; they need to be submitted to a process of reciprocal democratic engagement. Yet the exercise of comparing the present-day state of liberalized religion (e.g., Anglicanism in England) and that of illiberal religion (e.g., Anglicanism in Africa), and asking which is vibrant and which is declining, certainly gives one pause. It may well be, after all, that what typically elicits religious commitment is not the beliefs (about creation, salvation, the nature of the divinity and so on) but simply the longing for moral direction. That is, people seek a larger framework that instructs them in fairly clear terms about how to conduct themselves regarding sexual issues, family norms and social obligations more generally. If this thesis is true (or true in significant measure) then it would go a long way toward explaining why it is precisely illiberal religions (e.g., Pentecostalism, Mormonism and the more reactionary versions of Islam) that seem today to be capturing ever-larger “market share” among the religions on offer.

The liberal state doesn’t try to police the tendency of people to adopt a whole range of dubious beliefs. If people want to believe in astrology, let them believe in astrology. Belief in astrology starts becoming a political problem if large numbers of people start organizing themselves politically on behalf of that belief, to bully or arm-twist nonbelievers and to attempt to make structures of authority within this group of believers binding on the whole society. Politically speaking, a secular society is one where religious authorities have no special clout, and insofar as clerics participate in political debate (which is fully legitimate), it’s on the basis of citizen to citizen rather than shepherd to sheep (that is, minister to those who are ministered to, or pastor to recipients of pastoral care). Secularism in this sense has become the norm in Western liberal societies, and we should not allow ourselves to become so fearful of appearing Eurocentric that we hesitate to affirm that norm as normatively (that is, universally) justified.

The attractions of jihad

It’s often claimed that the way to make sense of the threatening jihadi ideologies we now see in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East is on the basis of a “root causes” analysis – that is, in terms of the grievances against the West felt by the poor and marginalized in the Islamic world. But does such a mode of analysis penetrate deeply enough into the positive attraction exerted by these ideologies (which evidently have the troubling capacity to draw into their orbit individuals who are middle-class and citizens of prosperous and influential societies such as our own)?

No doubt, the vast majority of Muslims are as repelled by the crimes of the Islamic State as non-Muslims are. But one of the things that distinguishes Islam as a world religion is its historical emergence coincident with the conquest of a world empire spread by the power of the sword. It would be strange if this wasn’t at least part of the allure drawing young middle-class men from Timmins and Calgary (many of them converts to Islam) to martyr themselves on behalf of the cause of medieval piety. The soldiers of the new caliphate, starting with their self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, aspire to an empire stretching from Morocco to India, and it is crucial to their conception of their own mission that this is an intended reclamation of past glory, not merely a newly invented ideological vision.

Unlike Al Qaeda, the Islamic State is not just a furtive gang of terrorists but an appreciable army of conquest on the march (hence closer to earning the label of “Islamofascism” controversially applied by writers like Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis to an earlier generation of jihadi Islam). Submissive piety represents one ideal of life outside the liberal horizon and the lust for glory represents another. Arguably, this ideological movement potently combines both. It remains to be seen how far the caliphate will march, or how long it will endure (especially now that there is an international coalition committed to engaging it militarily). But in the meantime, this odious theocracy has at least done us the service of reminding all of us that there will probably always be human beings for whom modernity presents itself as inherently slavish and degrading.

It’s so easy to take for granted that life within liberal post-Enlightenment horizons is self-evidently more attractive than the alternatives. Yet our own welfare and security may hang on whether we’re able to make progress in penetrating the riddle of the jihadis. That’s precisely why we need especially to exert ourselves to keep asking the questions that liberals rarely ask: Why do there continue to be human beings for whom a society geared toward treating its citizens simply according to a standard of decency and mutual respect isn’t good enough? And why are theocratic enemies of liberal society so convinced that a society oriented to secular freedom and equality fundamentally impoverishes human beings? In other words, what human longings are left unfulfilled in liberal society?