Somali Tales

This series of article will follow the “A true mission” series. I will try to discuss my influence and justify some of my choices, and the subjects which interest me.

My aim is simple:

• Do some academic research for my fiction
• Share my inspirations
• Keep a record of how I write
• Think through and refine my own perspective on a world devoid of monotheism.
• Understand what a truly secular world could be
• Understand the true nature of humans

To understand this article, one must note that religion contain many metaphysical claims, while a secular world does less. A secular world has foundation on the “empirical,” what is testable.

Once we have establish that, the article will be clearer and explain why I occasionally link metaphysics and religion.

My greatest focus will be on the most controversial aspect of religions: violence. This is the topic I want to discuss in this series “violence in a fictitious world.”

To imagine violence in a more secular world, we have to understand what it is, what is the root of it, and how much does it relate to the metaphysical.

Let’s do some light research

To explore the topic of violence, I chose Harmakaputra’s 2016 paper “Between Transcendence and violence. Gianni Vattimo and René Girard on Violence in a Secular Age.” You can find it on JSTOR if you have an institutional membership.

René Girard’s scapegoat theory has always fascinated me. I have studied both “non-scientific” psychology (psychoanalytic theories) and more serious experimental psychology on an academic level, and both tell something primal about the human’s mind. If you have some knowledge of the defense mechanisms of “projective identification” as theorized by Melanie Klein, or some other defense mechanisms related to violence, you will perceive how Girard’s work is both deep and evocative of the truth. His view will be explored in part 2.

Before reading Harmakaputra’s article, I was not aware of Gianni Vattimo’s work, but it seems to have influence many modern thinkers one way or another. His view is the first one we will explore. First to establish what is “metaphysics” and then what is a secular world, according to him.

The article

Harmakaputra takes a clear stance in his article: religion is sometimes used to support violence, but it is not the only origin of conflicts. For him, violence is ubiquitous in a sense and there is no way to completely resolved it.

Two other perspectives on violence are Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism, and Vattimo’s stance on metaphysics as the root of violence. Both Girard and Vattimo agree on the idea that transcendence is closely related to violence, even if they differ on the underlying mechanism linking one to the other. To understand both of these scholars, it is important to remind oneself that they are Christians (in their own sense) and from Western countries, and both aspects are relevant for their theories.

Transcendence and metaphysics

This part contains the following claims:

• Religion is closely related metaphysics (“hard truths”)
• Hard truths are “dead”
• True transcendence is the end of metaphysics (“hard truths”) in favor of “weak thoughts” (interpretation of the world)
• Greatest acts of violence have been committed based on metaphysical pretenses
• Christianity destiny is to become secular (Ages according to Joachim Fior)
• Secular times: ethics with laws to regulate the ways in which charity is enacted
• Secular times mean “relational” times.

Transcendence is a complex notion, in philosophy and theology. Let us explain it in further; highlighting Vattimo’s understanding of the Nietzschean statement “God is dead,” Harmakaputra states that the true meaning of the sentence is the following: absolute, objective truth no longer exists. Now, for humans, the concept of God is no longer made of absolute (“facts”) but of interpretations.

Even philosophical thoughts are subjected to interpretations. Thus, transcendence is used to explain the evolution from “strong” objective truths to weak thoughts.

In the “weak thought” promoted by Vattimo, thinking becomes “edifying,” providing instruction, rather than proving the correctness of a position.

My understanding is that, in secular times, we do our best to argue and discuss ideas, while in religious time we advance what we perceive as being the truth. In a less religious time, we leave individual performance of rightness and go toward a “relational” stance, where we create meaning together.

Harmakaputra (p.119):

“Every idea of the sacred is grounded in the metaphysical claim of God, either the “violent” God of natural religions or God as the wholly other.”

This reaffirms my perception of his position as focusing on a relational stance rather than separateness.

Remember that in Nietzschean notion, “God” means every “truth,” including truths proclaimed by religions. In turn, Vattimo “consistently proclaims the death of the sacred as the true transcendence.” (p.119) Thus, transcendence as an event of historical importance belongs to secular time.

Using Joachim Fior’s stages of salvation, Vattimo believes that “secularity is the sign of this third age of salvation history in which freedom has reached its fullness.” (p.119) Vattimo believes that secularity is inherently Christian, in the sense developed by Fior.

Indeed, we can understand his position through that fact that for Christians, Christ is an incarnation of the divine, thus there is not a need any more for a metaphysical God. With the coming of the third age of Christianity, Christians will relate to Him as “friends” and not as “servants” anymore. They will gain their freedom. Moreover, in this given stage, there may not be any action required, but simple “contemplation.”

Islam and Judaism do not share this view on incarnation, and both believe in a completely transcendent God. But this focus on Vattimo’s notion of secularity brings us to his search for a way to return to religion, and away from the sacred, by the dissolution of metaphysics. The relation to violence is here: Vattimo believes that this return will lead to the rejection of violence (a metaphysical, unattainable God) and that we would live through more charitable times.

In summary, Vattimo sees a strong relation between metaphysics and violence.

“It is the case that the moments of greatest violence in history have always been justified by well-structured metaphysical pretenses.

Any entity or institution which claims absolute truth is dubious for Vattimo and risks perpetrating violent actions. He says that any type of strong ideology which works like a cult (like Nazism) is included in this definition of “metaphysics.”

The relation to monotheism

According to Vattimo, love/charity and freedom are the essence of Christianity and violence should be fought with them. As exposed by Harmakaputra, Vattimo believes his religion (Christianity) is both a problem and a solution for Western societies.

In turn, with the end of metaphysics, human beings will rely on ethics – charity regulated by laws to offer everyone freedom. Indeed, liberty – the individual’s as well as the freedom from other’s oppression, is at the root of Vattimo’s theories. There is no place for any type of institutionalize religious thoughts in this context.

I find his vision very modern (it resembles the view of many Western non-believers), but also misleading. How can a religion be stripped from its “whys” like “because it is God’s command to love thy neighbor,” but not of its “what” such as “loving one’s neighbor”? On an individual level, Vattimo is known to proclaim; “thanks to God, I’m atheist,” while still rejecting atheism, which is even more strange in a sense. But he clarifies his position later, by calling for the return of the religious.

This is where it is important to remind Vattimo’s own religion and cultural background can create bias in his view. Because he promotes the return to religion, his religion, and not a complete abandonment in favor of scientific opinions.

Summary

• Vattimo promotes Christian’s values, which he defines as love/charity and freedom as the foundation of secular times in the Western world.

How it relates to my fiction:

This part contain:

• Discussion of Vattimo’s position on hard truths and metaphysics
• Introduction to the notion bioethics and a world based on “science”
• Talk of morality and religion

My fiction focuses on Islam and not Christianity. But the thought process and the claims of Vattimo help me set the stage for a secular world, from a westerner and a Muslim point of view.

In relation to what I have previously mentioned, I ask my how does a democracy use religious values in a secular world without calling it religious “practice”? Or should we call it a religious practice, devoid of the metaphysical?

From Vattimo’s perspective, it is by removing the idea that there are hard truths (there are X amounts of atoms in the universe at the instant t; water is H₂0; Earth is X billions of years old). In turn, we can question the fact that without any hard truth, what makes us value x rather than something else? What gives it worth?

It is an ancient philosophical question, summarized by “what is the meaning of life” ?

During my studies, I have been introduced to what is called “bioethics;” in the medical domain, it is morality without the belief of a human purpose, or an afterlife. It recognizes evolution as true, or at least as the most likely force guiding our lives. This view claim that life has no “purpose”, since there is no afterlife.

While bioethics cannot entirely base itself on our natural instincts because so many of them go against the well-being of the majority, it reinforces the need for arguments in ethical decisions. There are no definitive truths, but strong and well-thoughts arguments and theories. You must give compelling arguments in favor or against “murder” for example, like state execution, self-defense and so forth.

Regarding Vattimo’s opposition of metaphysics, my intuition is that there are some hard truths, whether we can grasp them or not, at least for some domain. An example not related to morality is water is essentially H₂0. If in another world, in another galaxy, there was a substance which resembles water, but is not made of H₂0, then it is not water, in my point of view. Anyway, this is a complex philosophical and logical question, but both opinion can be argued on metaphysical ground, since metaphysics aim to answer “what is X.”

However, when it comes to morality, I agree with bioethics principles: there are no hard truths. Religions only expose the options given by a God and what He likes or dislikes. In a sense, God has an opinion, which then becomes the truth. Something is “sinful” because God says so and not necessarily because the action is itself entirely and only “bad,” on every ground.

Stealing or lying seem bad on every ground, until you see a hungry orphan stealing an apple from a very rich merchant. Or if you lie to protect an innocent from a murderous states, like some people did in WW2.

As Vattimo notes, some religions adopt a hard stance on some things. However, they give clear indications on every “exceptions.”

Islam is a complex case and in my knowledge, the only hard line (a command without any exception) is the rule against “idolatry.” Muslims receive the command to believe in one God, and then everything else fall within these commands. Some branch of Judaism a have similar command with no exception to the rule.

But on the subject of moral, what religions give is a framework to take actions. Murder is “forbidden” and “bad” (a hard truth), but executing a murderer is “permitted” under very strict rules. The application of this exception is very complex in itself, and reinforces the interdiction to kill someone.

This affirms that in the end, some religions have some hard metaphysical truths, but argumentation and interpretation are also inherent to them.

So, in a sense I agree with Vattimo about the need for “weak thoughts,” but not about the dissolution of metaphysics. We, humans, can make mistake about the interpretation of religious commandment.

Conclusion

For a fictitious world without monotheism, the question is can nature or science, rooted in the empirical, give us a framework to take moral actions ?

While writing my “science fiction” piece, I came to believe that the disappearance of religions, as exposed in this article, will have some downside.

My belief is that in the emergence of a completely secular world, old institutions, and anything “negative” brought by religious institutions, will be maintained by new institutions. On a more cultural aspect, I also question art without metaphysical symbolism, knowing how religions have influence literature, painting and architecture.

You may think differently which is fair, but I think that violence is inherently human and beauty is transcendent. We will discuss our violent nature with Girard’s theory and I have already explored the transcendence of beauty and art in this piece free on medium.

Thank you for reading this article. I admit it stays a bit superficial but we will go deeper on the subject of violence in the next articles. In part 2, we will explore René Girard’s theories and the topic of violence a little bit further, and try to answer some of the question regarding violence in a secular world.