The Conspiracy against Progress

As I pointed out in an earlier blog, “Religious Identity Crises”, the province of Quebec has been recently divided over the government’s attempt to ban the wearing of ostentatious religious symbols by public employees, particularly those in positions of authority. About half the population is opposed, on the grounds that this would infringe on freedom of religion and minority rights. The other half of the population supports the move, believing that government employees should be neutral and avoid trying to win everyone over to their cause by showing off their own religious affiliations in public.

Unfortunately, the entire debate has been undermined by several factors, not the least of which is the enormous difficulty governments always have in trying to control people’s religious behavior through legislation. This time around, the government initially weakened its own case by refusing to ban the crucifix attached to the wall behind the speaker in the National Assembly, as well as the Christian prayers that still often precede meetings at the municipal level of government. The constitutional division in Canada also interferes in a clear understanding of the debate, with most federalists opposing the government’s position and most separatists upholding it.

Among all the various religious symbols targeted by this initiative, the one that seems to upset most government supporters is the head scarf (hijab) worn by a minority of Muslim women, as well as the far less frequent face mask (niqab) and the even rarer burqa that covers a woman from head to toe. This particular practice of hiding various parts of the female body from public view has also divided the feminist movement. The more orthodox feminists think that all those garments are in fact religious symbols of female oppression, rather like the yellow Stars of David that Jews were required to wear  in Nazi-occupied Europe. The more revisionist feminists, on the other hand, think that banning those garments among public employees would simply isolate those particular Muslim women even more than they are now (a minority within a minority).

Opponents of the government’s point of view, as well as some of its supporters, also believe that it is wrong to focus on such superficial issues, instead of controlling much more serious problems involving mainly immigrant minorities, such as female excision, female infanticide, attempts to impose sharia even when that would mean breaking dozens of Canadian laws, virginity checks being performed on young girls, religious schools refusing to cover the government curriculum even when they are being highly subsidized with public money, and so on and so forth. In other words, so far as religion is concerned, should we have majority rule or minority rule?

Many of the government’s adversaries on the religious symbols debate are also upset because they think that many of those supporting the ban are racists. According to them, too many people assimilate all Muslims with religious fanatics currently terrorizing many of the world’s Muslim majorities. They say that it may be necessary to condemn fanaticism in those countries, but it is irrelevant to do so in secularized Christian countries where Muslims are as yet still in a small minority. Even in today’s globalized world, they refuse to admit that everything that Muslims do in any country necessarily affects other people’s attitudes towards them everywhere just as much as everything that Christians, Jews, Hindus or Buddhists do anywhere at all also affects everyone else’s attitudes towards them.

Unfortunately, the millions of people belonging to any one of the world’s major religions do not have all that much control over their fellow believers’ behavior. Most Muslims, like most other believers, tend to support anyone from their community who is being attacked by outsiders, just as anyone who believes in such “secular religions” as patriotism or libertarianism also tends to react in the same way. The world-wide reluctance among all believers to criticize anyone from within, even when those other believers are doing something that is not recommended by their religion, is in fact very similar to the patriotic maxim: “May my country always be right, but my country right or wrong.”

As a result, Muslim majorities often refuse to condemn Muslim terrorists even though the Koran apparently denounces terrorism quite specifically. At the same time, in the case of women wearing coverup clothing, moderate Muslims often refuse to criticize such garb even though it seems that the only relevant reference in the Koran is an admonition that women should strive for modesty when appearing in public. Do those Muslim women who choose to wear the hijab, along with tight-fitting clothes and a lot of makeup, really expect others to believe in their hypocritical attempts at modesty?

On the other hand, it is certainly true that many of those wearing such clothing are probably doing so for reasons of personal identity with their culture, as I pointed out in my previous article on the subject. However, it is insulting everyone’s intelligence to ask anyone to believe that those women are not aware that covering up like that is part and parcel of the message of all ultra-conservative religious factions, for which any kind of feminism is anathema. Even more laughable is the recent attempt by some Quebec feminists to claim that hijab wearers have somehow chosen to follow their own separate (but equal) path toward women’s liberation!

Many of the problems caused by this kind of cultural identity all over the world, including the much more serious problems already mentioned, are also greatly exacerbated by the incomplete conversion of many ethnic populations to most of the world’s official religions. As I pointed out in my autobiography, when various peoples previously holding to some animist or polytheist religion were converted to such religions as Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism, much of that conversion was incomplete. Often, cultural characteristics from the prior religious affiliations were not totally eradicated, with the result that millions of people nowadays in fact adhere to hybrid, or syncretic, beliefs.

The most commonly recognized example of such hybrids is in Haiti, where millions of people adhere simultaneously to two very different forms of religious belief, Catholicism and voodoo. But dozens of other such hybrids also exist in many other countries, with the result that hundreds of millions of people all over the world who are supposed to be Christians or Muslims or Buddhists, in fact simultaneously believe in pre-conversion deities, or magic, or some other practice that is not at all consistent with what is normally considered to be characteristic of those official religions. “Even” in the USA, “even” nowadays, millions of people officially call themselves Christians, while also believing in such totally un-Christian ideas as magic, sorcery, speaking in tongues or the use of amulets to ward off evil spirits.

As a result of this, many of the cultural practices referred to earlier in this article do not in fact exclusively belong to the religions with which they are often being associated. Everyone knows that head scarves, veils and total body coverings are not just worn by some Muslim women, but also by some women of other religious affiliations, such as the more traditionalist orders of Catholic nuns. However, in most Muslim societies, it seems that most women who choose to wear those garments do so mostly for cultural reasons that in fact predate the arrival of Islam, and were not originally imposed for strictly Islamic reasons. The same argument applies to excision in various parts of Africa and the Middle East, as well as to dozens of other cultural practices such as forced marriages, female infanticide and so on. It is quite possible that many of the founders of those religions would be horrified to find out how many such “tribal” practices are currently being identified as part of their faith, in today’s world.

Another very important point in this whole debate is that the fundamentalist sects that promote those reactionary forms of behavior owe a lot of their current support to Western counter-insurgency. As far back as the nineteenth century, the British empire often promoted Islamic fundamentalism in particular as part of its attempt to take and to hold onto power in many different Muslim countries. This was all part of the empire’s “Negro king” strategy, incorporating militarily defeated kings or chieftains of indigenous populations, not only in Africa but also in many other parts of the colonial world, as local administrators of conquered ethnic groups under ultimate British rule. After the Second World War, the USA took over this counter-insurgency strategy to help control dozens of other countries, using local collaborators and religious traditionalists to help defeat world communism, as well as every nationalist economic strategy adopted at one point or another by practically every Third World country.

Islamic fundamentalism under various different disguises has also been actively promoted by well-heeled, ultra-conservative, comprador countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, whose enormous wealth usually comes from supplying industrial countries with natural resources and financial services. So the fact that Islamic fundamentalism has become almost as powerful in today’s world as Christian fundamentalism, is largely dependent on huge supplies of money rather than on its own intrinsic attraction to millions of ordinary Muslims. All over the Muslim world, it has become practically impossible for local dissent to support severely weakened nationalist or communist movements, leaving ultra-radical Islam as the only useful alternative to comprador (collaborator) governments.

Like the Tea Party movement in the USA, Islamic fundamentalism has become immensely powerful largely because of its “inherited” wealth from outside sources. Popular organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah also run large social-welfare schemes for their peoples because every local government is under some kind of foreign control, for which “socialism” or “government intervention” have become very dirty words. Christian fundamentalism, as well as Hindu and Buddhist fundamentalism, have also become popular for similar reasons in dozens of other countries.

Is it any wonder, therefore, that many immigrant Muslim women in Quebec, and many other countries, find identification with Islamic fundamentalism to be so intoxicating? The multicultural lobby in Canada is also egging on the more extremist factions of all the major religions as part of its ultra individualist strategy. At least in this country, multiculturalism has taken on a libertarian stance, encouraging the recent trend among religious believers to decide for themselves which sort of religion they want to support. Instead of expressing their religious faith in the original sense, through submission to a higher authority, today’s believers can themselves decide, individually, what constitutes appropriate behavior.

The Quebec government’s initiative is therefore being challenged by constant references to the universal charter of rights and freedoms (1948), as well as its more recent Quebec (1975) and Canadian (1982) versions. Freedom of religion is now being interpreted not as a choice among several collectively constituted, authoritarian religions, as was originally envisioned, but as a personal choice, in which each individual believer gets to choose whichever religious idea he or she considers to be most satisfying. Since religious beliefs are supposed to be much more deeply felt than non-religious beliefs like nationalism or socialism, everyone expressing sacred beliefs gets to be protected by the charters, even when such individualized beliefs have no particular grounding in any established religion.

Debates like the one in Quebec have now become a universal phenomenon, every country in the world being forced to adopt some particular attitude toward this kind of controversy. Curiously enough, in some countries, apostasy is still punishable by death, while in other parts of the world, people get to cherry-pick whatever kind of religious permutation or combination that satisfies their own personal egos.

The Science of Psychotherapy

Recently, I read a special issue of a French magazine that was mostly about the history of psychotherapy. Whether talking about history or psychology or any of the other human sciences, the professional journalists who work for that magazine always try to do a good job of presenting to the general public the gist of recent work from scientists all over the world. In this particular issue, they reported on on all the different ways that mental illness has been treated over the centuries, focusing on the various kinds of psychotherapy that have been developed since the scientific method began to be applied back in the nineteenth century.

Their survey confirmed many of the suspicions that I had already gleaned from reading dozens of other articles and books on the subject in the past. The coordinated efforts of hundreds of researchers and clinical practitioners in the field of mental illness have not produced anything like the kind of progress that has taken place in most of the physical sciences, or in treating most physical diseases. Although some progress has been made in treating some kinds of mental illness, using various branches of psychotherapy and quite a few useful drugs, the advances made so far have been quite disappointing.

Unfortunately, it seems that more than a few people in that field have reacted to that relative lack of progress by themselves regressing like some of their patients often do.

Many of them have gone so far as to abandon the scientific method itself, and have let themselves be influenced by ancient religions, particularly the buddhist religion, and even in some cases by shamanism and other prehistoric methods of “treatment”.

Those influenced by buddhism seem mostly to be concentrated within one of the more recent branches of therapy, sometimes described as the third generation of the combined cognitive-behavioral approach. Many of those people are using meditation techniques to treat their patients, particularly  a method called mindfulness, which appears to be an attempt to induce patients to concentrate all their efforts on their own immediate problems and not to let themselves be influenced any more by anything going on in the larger world that surrounds them. Cutting oneself off mentally from the rest of humanity, however, looks quite similar to ancient monastic attempts to get away from the corrupting effects of urban-based civilization by living in self-sufficient agricultural settlements (monasteries) far away from normal society.

It is difficult to see how those professional therapists can reconcile such an approach with the scientific training that many of them received during their university education in modern psychology or clinical psychiatry. Even more dumbfounding is how the university faculties or hospitals to which those people are still often administratively attached could possibly condone such obvious atavism. After having spent the past few centuries since the Enlightenment trying to free human thought from religious and ideological prejudices, it is hard to imagine why the people who are supposed to be running those programs allow this kind of regression to continue moving farther and farther away from more obviously evidence-based methods of intervention.

Even more disturbing are some of the more recent trends within what is sometimes called ethnic psychiatry. One of the articles in the French magazine I was referring to earlier was a polemic in favor of treating people under the influence of shamans from animist religions, in a different way than those used when treating people coming from a Western-oriented, post-Christian, secular tradition. The idea being promoted in that article was that psychologists and psychiatrists trying to treat people from an animist culture should temporarily pretend to support the use of magic and incantations in order to help mentally unbalanced people from those cultures overcome their psychological problems. This was seen as a method of gaining such people’s trust, who would presumably never accept advice from anyone openly promoting any kind of scientifically based approach. The author of that article also felt that people living within an animist culture were simply not capable of identifying with any rational approach, or being helped by it in any way.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that this sort of thing is just a special case of the negative influence of politically correct ways of thinking. What is implied in articles like this one is that anyone trying to use scientifically based methods with people from animist cultures is necessarily a racist. To fight this racism, a culturally accommodating therapist must therefore be someone who accepts the “fact” that science is just another competing method of human communication, not any more nor less effective against mental illness than trying to drive away evil spirits with magic incantations.

Clinical practitioners under the influence of such cultural relativism seem to believe that modern science is not a universal method that all cultures have been adopting, at least recently, but is instead an exclusively Western-based anomaly that must necessarily produce racist attitudes when used outside post-Christian, secular societies. The cultural relativists seem to have entirely forgotten that all the Western countries themselves left behind firmly established belief in ancient religions and/or animist beliefs only very recently. Most of those countries also include large populations of true believers even nowadays, not only because of recent immigration from various parts of the Third World, but also because they all harbor their own home-grown animist populations. Not to mention millions of fundamentalists, combining forms of Christian literalism with magical beliefs of prehistoric origin such as speaking in tongues.

Instead of trying to accommodate themselves to pre-scientific modes of thought, the ethnic psychiatrists would be better off trying to gradually integrate their patients into a more up-to-date way of ascertaining reality. Taking the cultural relativist short-cut is nothing but a dead-end. The very definition of mental illness, after all, lies in losing touch with human society as it is currently constituted. Neither mindfulness nor cultural relativism are capable of helping someone connect properly with today’s world, but instead lead people in quite the opposite direction.