A Religious Response to Religious Violence”

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “A Religious Response to Religious Violence” Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks New York University Yeshiva University May 4, 2015 MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Rabbi Sacks has 16 honorary degrees. Prime Minister Tony Blair called him” an intellectual giant. He has a doctorate from King’s College in London, his undergraduate with Cambridge. He is the author of numerous books. He is the retired Chief Rabbi of Great Britain. RABBI JONATHAN SACKS: We’ve had three basic responses. Response one, the Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al., religion is the source of violence or a source of violence, and therefore if you want to get rid of violence, the first thing you have to do is to get rid of religion. There is the second religious response, which says violence has nothing to do with religion. Violent men exploit religion, they use it, they manipulate it, but that religion per se has nothing to do with violence. And the third response, which is, “Our religion is terrific, it’s their religion that’s the problem.” Now, each of those is palpably false. First of all, the idea that religion is the primary driver of violence is very easily refutable by the standard work on warfare, Philips and Axelrod’s classic Encyclopedia of Wars, that covers 1,800 wars in the course of history and shows, just incidentally, that only 10 percent of them were fundamentally driven by religion. So religion is not the major cause of violence in history. Secondly, the idea that religion has nothing to do with violence is equally absurd because to understand the violence of ISIS, you have to understand its religious basis, and indeed its religious textual basis, and how religious texts are interpreted. And, thirdly, “Our religion good; their religion bad,” does neglect or overlook a rather tragic history because Judaism and Christianity gave rise to violence of not dissimilar intensity in their time. ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “A Religious Response to Religious Violence” Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks May 2015 In fact, I think a clock has ticked in the history of the three Abrahamic monotheisms, and that clock says that in the 15th century of an Abrahamic monotheism violence explodes in the form of religious civil war. It happened in Judaism in the first century, if we are to believe Josephus, that the inhabitants of the besieged Jerusalem were more intent on killing one another than killing the Romans outside. That’s around 1,500 years into the history of Judaism. It happened in Christianity in the 16th century with the Wars of Religion following on the Reformation. That’s around 15 centuries into the history of Christianity. And on the basis of that magnificent wide sample of two, I predicted in 2002 that the 21st century would be the century of civil war within Islam, and I don’t think that was wrong. And I was very interested to hear from Graeme Wood yesterday that indeed one of the main apocalyptic texts of Islam predicts that the 15th century of Islam will be the century of the apocalypse. So in a sense, all the Abrahamic monotheisms have faced it at the same stage in their development. So it’s not, “Our religion good; their religion bad,” it’s that our religion got the bad out of the way before the other lot. So, therefore, all three I think are simply not deep enough, and therefore what I want to do this morning very briefly is to ask three questions. Number one: What is the relationship between religion and violence? Number two: What is the relationship between monotheism and violence? And number three: What is the relationship between the three Abrahamic monotheisms and violence? And those are separate questions. So let’s begin with the first. I don’t know if you’ve seen the wonderful film about Alan Turing called The Imitation Game. Benedict Cumberbatch is told by Keira Knightley, “You’ve got to be a bit more human.” So he tries to tell a joke. Two men in a jungle. They hear a lion approaching. The first looks around for a place where they can both hide. The second starts putting on his running shoes. The first says to the second, “You’re crazy. What are you doing? You can’t run faster than a lion.” And the second replies, “I don’t need to run faster than the lion, I just need to run faster than you.” That is the joke, but the point is that this actually is key to understanding, not Alan Turing, but Charles Darwin, and the reason is that Charles Darwin was puzzled by the following thing. We see in these two characters, the first one is the altruist, he’s concerned with 2 ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “A Religious Response to Religious Violence” Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks May 2015 saving both of them, the second is the survivalist-- it doesn’t matter what happens to the other guy as long as he survives, and Darwin rightly saw that it’s the guy who puts on the running shoes that survives, it’s the altruist that gets eaten by the lion, and therefore over time the gene for altruism should get extinct because the survivalists survive and the altruists risk their life for others and therefore disproportionately don’t hand on their genes to the next generation. And Darwin’s answer is that we hand on our genes as individuals, but we survive in groups. And it is altruism that allows us to form groups, without which we would not survive. And that then explains how human beings have both a propensity for altruism -- compassion, care, empathy, sympathy, all this stuff -- and at the same time, a propensity for violence and evil. They are born at the same time, they derive from the same source, which is that we, in order to survive, both cooperate and compete. We cooperate in order to compete. We are altruistic towards the members of our group, and we are aggressive to the members of other groups, and that makes us both angels and demons at the same time, angels to the guys like us, and demons to the guys not like us. And that is the source both of virtue and of violence. Virtue and violence are not opposed, they come from the same thing. So the real question that then arises is, how did humans ever suspend their natural egoism, their natural survival instinct, long enough to form groups in the first place? To which there is a threefold answer, a progressive deepening or widening. The first one, of course, was given by J.B.S. Haldane when asked, “Would you jump in the river to save your brother?” and he replied, “No, but I would jump into the river to save two brothers or eight cousins.” This, of course, you risk your own life because your brother shares half of your genes, and your cousin, one-eighth of your genes, and this became, as you know, through William Hamilton in the 1960s developed into the theory of kin selection. The first principle of altruism is we’re altruistic to the people in our family because we share genes with them. It was the second question that has raised all the interest over the last 30 years in sociobiology or whatever it’s called nowadays, and that is, how do we form altruistic engagements with people who are not genetically related to us? And that, as you know, was solved by something called the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. The 3 ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “A Religious Response to Religious Violence” Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks May 2015 prisoner’s dilemma tells us that two individuals acting in their own interest will achieve an outcome that is bad for both of them, individually and collectively. That is because they don’t trust one another. But if they repeatedly encounter one another, eventually they learn to reciprocate, and because they both benefit from this. So human groups depend on the evolution of trust, and the end result of trust is that I do something for you because I expect you to do the same for me, known as tit-for-tat or reciprocal altruism. Now, the problem with reciprocal altruism is you have to remember who you’re dealing with. Did the guy for whom you are thinking of making a sacrifice do the same for you in the past? Is he or she trustworthy? And that needs a lot of memory space. There’s an Oxford anthropologist called Robin Dunbar who has worked out on the basis of brain size that you can calculate by the size of a brain of a particular life-form how big the natural or the largest possible group is, and for humans it works out at 150. Is that right? That’s the Dunbar coefficient. I happened to be giving this lecture to the senior military staff in Sandhurst, and the chaplain got up and said, “Oh, you know what, we have exactly 150 chaplains in the British Army. If you have an intake of 150 kids in a school per year, they will all know one another. Beyond that, they won’t know one another and there will be an impersonal atmosphere in the school.” So reciprocal altruism will get you friendship with more than your direct relatives, but it puts a limit on 150 or so, so it only works for hunting-gathering clans or for tribes or for villages. What happens when the first large groups emerge, i.e., cities? Without cities, no civilization.

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