Ian Buruma
Ian Buruma is one of our most accomplished journalists, and Taming the Gods is a short book but a challenging one. It tackles the vexing issue of the religious challenge to liberal democracy. "My book is an attempt to sort out, in different cultures, how democracies have been affected, for better or worse, by these tensions [between religion and politics]"
Buruma is that rare bird equally at home not only in Europe and America, but also in East and West. He devotes a chapter to Europe and America, one to China and Japan, and a third to Europe again, but this time focused on its confrontation with Islam.
Throughout all, Buruma sounds a recurrent note: the toxicity of blending religion and politics, whether when religion usurps the mantle of politics or politics usurps that of religion.
Buruma's stated model is Tocqueville (one couldn't do better), and his perspective insistently historical. "Relations between church and state … cannot be explained as abstractions. They can only be understood in the context of history. Since it is my intention to try and make sense of the world we live in, rather than write a polemic, history, and thinkers in history, will form a large part of my account."
Buruma is as good as his word, and his book is certainly the richer for it. His rendition especially of the unfamiliar (to me) politico-religious history of China and Japan manages to be both concise and fascinating. If I was less enthralled by his chapters on Europe and America, it was because his account of their greatest thinkers sometimes seemed too potted and textbookish. Dealing journalistically with philosophers like Spinoza and Locke, one runs the ever-present danger of treating them as journalists themselves, taking their statements too much at face value, missing their depth, grace and deviousness.
Buruma's treatment of Europe and America is unusual in stressing their commonalties rather than their differences. As he persuasively argues, Europe is not simply the godless place that Americans imagine or America the hyperbolically pious one of European contempt and apprehension.
Rather, the nations on both continents have been striving throughout the modern period to find the right balance between the religious and the secular. Each nation has its distinctive style, informed by its distinctive history. France's approach is not America's; nor, however, is it England's or Holland's. Buruma is at pains to defend Americans against European notions of them as a fanatical booboisie. While he holds no brief for the American religious right, he notes that, unlike its European counterpart, it has been and remains democratic. He thinks that, in fact, Americans have managed the issue of religion rather well.
As Europe and America have misunderstood one another, so have the West and East Asia. While Westerners have long tended to regard the politics of China as "secular," Buruma shows that, rather, religion has found political expression there in forms so foreign to us as to be invisible. The Emperor bore the "mandate of Heaven" and his stewardship of his vast realms was infused with "religious" meaning.
Nor was there a clear line between the natural and the supernatural: The Emperor was deemed the agent of celestial harmony. Political breakdown was cosmic breakdown. This view fostered such cataclysms as the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64), with its estimated 30 million deaths. Sun Yat-Sen's nationalism and Mao's communism represented only partial breaks with this syncretic politico-religious tradition. Much in them (as in what has followed) is intelligible only in light of it.
In Japan, too, Buruma charts the pitfalls of political syncretism. It reached its peak in the cult of the Emperor, a deliberate late-19th-century contrivance intended to advance national unity (and which effectively pre-empted progress toward democracy). Buruma calls his chapter on Asia Eastern Wisdom, but this is palpably ironic.
Buruma's final chapter, on Islam in Europe, poses the problem of "Enlightenment Values." Are these still valid, and if so, do they require the suppression of illiberal practices (Islamic or otherwise) or (within limits) their toleration?
Buruma does not deny that "some of the most ferocious enemies of liberal democracy now happen to be revolutionary Islamists," or that "the problem is all the more acute, since the violent revolutionaries are no longer strangers from faraway countries but young people born and bred in Europe whose first languages are not Arabic but English, French, or Dutch."
He argues, however, for a generous interpretation of liberal tolerance as embracing even illiberal doctrines and practices, so long as these are not violent. Like some other contemporary writers, he seeks to redefine liberalism not as a way of life but as the umpire of diverse ways of life, not all of which need be liberal. Your response to his argument will likely hinge on whether you can accept this position.
Clifford Orwin is professor of political science at the University of Toronto and Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He has written frequently on issues of religion and politics.