Religious culture and neofascist ethics

I just finished reading a book about a compulsory course, or rather program, called “Ethics and Religious Culture”, that has been imposed on all primary and secondary students in Quebec since 2008. The book, La face caché du cours “Éthique et culture religieuse”, (literal translation: (The hidden face of the course on “Ethics and Religious Culture”) was published in 2016 and edited by Daniel Baril and Normand Baillargeon. It is in fact a series of a dozen critical essays, written singly or collectively by a total of 14 different authors, seven of those texts severely criticizing many different aspects of the ECR program and five more texts proposing different ways of replacing that program with something much more appropriate. Most of the authors are Quebec educators, philosophers and freethinkers well-known for their support of laicity, secularism and critical thinking.

Another contributor, Sylvie Midavaine, is a teacher and freethinker from France whose text describes the various different ways by which France’s historically rigorous separation of Church and State (since 1905), particularly in that nation’s schools, has been undermined recently by revisionist consultants like Régis Debray. Since 2001, while pretending to do a better job of teaching students about religion, as an ordinary fact of life, those revisionists have really decided to promote religion as a remedy for current social problems instead. The other non-Québécois contributor, philosopher Christopher DiCarlo from Ontario, suggests that every Canadian province, including Quebec, should reject any program similar to the one adopted in Quebec, and replace it with a much more progressive program aimed at teaching critical thinking instead, that has recently been developed, and approved, for secondary schools in Ontario.

The main argument of the ten essays focused on the Quebec program, is that it is an enormous step backward for that province’s schools to have reintroduced religious education only eight years after they were finally liberated from the grip of the previously existing Catholic and Protestant school boards. Even though Quebec replaced its largely private, Christian school system, originally adopted in 1875, with a much more modern, state-run Ministry of Education back in 1964, an enormous effort still had to made to overcome all sorts of complicated constitutional hurdles protecting the denominational school boards up until the year 2000.

For a brief period of time, parents in Quebec had a choice between registering their children in a traditional religious course, or sending them instead to a non-religious, “personal and social development” program. During the opening years of this century, however, the highly emotional political debate concerning to what extent Quebec should accommodate an ever-increasing number of demands for special treatment in public institutions, coming from several different kinds of fundamentalist religious groups, spilled over into the education sector. Even though the Quebec government initially promised that it would not promote religion openly, but would adopt a more neutral approach, it decided instead in 2008 to introduce the “Ethics and Religious Culture” program into all of its schools. This compulsory course has in fact eliminated all pretences at overall government neutrality toward religion.

For example, in the “ethics” part of the program, children are taught that whereas in the past Quebec society was heavily biased in favour of men (sexism), nowadays gender equality has been accepted as the new norm. However, in the “religious culture” part of the program, the whole idea of sexual equality is totally ignored in the textual part of the manuals made available to teachers, while the very numerous illustrations used in those same manuals almost always show girls and women engaged in “traditional” occupations like cooking and cleaning, rather than in going to work every day like the men do. The same misogynist bias also shows up in practically all the projects being proposed to pupils, in order to get their grades. The number one preoccupation of the authors of those manuals seems to be to studiously avoid all possible criticism of the traditional religious bias against gender equality. The refusal to criticize any religion, in any way at all, supposedly being justified by the need to present every religion in an entirely “positive” light, so as to naively make every religious community “feel good” about every other religious community. All teachers are instructed to always promote the slogan “vivre ensemble”, in other words “live together (harmoniously)”.

The authors of the essays directly criticizing the ECR program have come up with hundreds of examples taken from that program to show just how incredibly biased it is in favour of religion, particularly in favour of the more fundamentalist interpretations of each designated religion. The program is heavily focused on the Christian religion, and only uses references to the Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu and indigenous religions in a vain attempt to appear unbiased, while making no reference to such other religions as Confucianism or Shintoism. No attempt whatsoever is made to accommodate unbelievers, who according to recent polls make up about 12% of the total Quebec population. Nor does the program take into account the fact that most of the people in Quebec, from every religious community, are only “cultural believers”, who say that they belong to some particular religious denomination, such as Catholicism or Sunni Islam, for reasons of cultural identity, but who are not the least bit interested in actually practising whatever religion to which they claim to adhere.

As in the religious accommodations debate, the Quebec government has been heavily influenced by such anti-Enlightenment philosophers as Charles Taylor, Canada’s number one advocate of multiculturalism, as well as by a large number of like-minded civil servants in the Ministry of Education, left over from the previously existing, confessional administration. Taylor and his followers believe that Western civilization made a major mistake after the Middle Ages by going back to the ancient Greek philosophers rejection of religion in favour of rationalism and critical thinking, then going on to develop modern science instead. They are convinced that a major emphasis on traditional spirituality is the only way to save every separate culture from the moral and social “collapse” that they feel is inevitably brought on by the loss of traditional cultural landmarks. They also believe that each religious community should always remain entirely separate from every other such community, even when living side by side, and that all such communities should not allow any impious elements to try to foist any possible universal or secular values on any of them.

In other words, Quebec’s ECR program has become a sort of “moral rearmament” policy aimed at saving society from materialist perdition, in the same hypocritical way that the ultra-conservative, and ultra-corrupt, Duplessis government tried to promote a similar, ultra-Catholic, political program during the “Grande Noirceur”. Which is to say, during the “dark age” of Quebec history, at first from 1936 to 1939 and then from 1944 to 1959, when Maurice Duplessis was the provincial premier. In a recent article in Quebec’s Le Devoir newspaper (March 19, 2017), doctoral student Jérôme Blanchet-Gravel also referenced Taylor’s multiculturalism as being quite similar to the “total renovation” of Western society that was being proposed several decades ago by such reactionary thinkers as René Guénon, using traditional, religious-identity attitudes imported from Oriental countries in order to save the West from its supposedly unfortunate modernism.

For Daniel Baril, the ECR program also closely resembles Isiah Berlin’s “Counter-Enlightenment” philosophy, which treated all possible points of view as if they had equal value. I would add that many aspects of the program also seem quite similar to the efforts being made nowadays by the recently elected Trump administration in the USA, using slogans like “alternative facts” in order to appear to give minimal support to physical science and technology, but only for the defence industry, while rapidly eliminating all the social and biological sciences, as well as the humanities, and replacing them with a massive return to old-time religion. From a scientific point of view, however, religious belief in totally imagined heavenly fathers and heavenly mandates in fact possesses about the same degree of (in)credibility as belief in magic and other paranormal nonsense. Which is entirely different from the rigorous testing of hypotheses through observation of nature and experimentation that are the hallmarks of modern science. Expressions like “Christian science”, “Islamic science”, “a democratic Jewish state”, and so on, also have to be seen for what they really are, that is as propaganda attempts at deliberately confusing fact with fiction.

Another major shortcoming of this program, that was also thoroughly denounced in the book, is its ridiculous attempt to present morality as if it were entirely dependent on religion. This is another incredibly bogus idea, which seems strangely out of place in today’s world, when innocent victims are being massacred every day, all over the world, not only by hundreds of thousands of paramilitary religious fanatics but also by their regular-military enemies, constantly bombing civilians from the air instead of confronting the terrorists head on. Any serious student of history, as well as of current events, has to laugh out loud at any suggestion that religious ideologies could possibly have anything whatever to do with improving the world’s overall level of morality. This is equivalent to trying to suggest that the totalitarian communist program of “militant atheism” turned all the former communist (or state-capitalist) countries into bastions of moral superiority. Today’s most important, proselytizing ideologies, neoliberalism and neofascism, are just as bad, or even worse, from a moral standpoint.

The entire thrust of Quebec’s ECR program seems to be aimed, as essayist André Gagné pointed out, at “radicalizing” as many young Québécois as possible, turning them into out and out, raving-lunatic, religious fanatics. His solution, teaching the history of religion instead from an uncompromising, scientifically accurate point of view, is an excellent idea since it would certainly discourage the formation of fundamentalist extremism, rather than encouraging it like the present program does.

As I pointed out in the article (“Gare au racisme raisonnable”) that I published ten years ago (September 16, 2007) in the Quebec newspaper, La Presse, there are already far too many true believers in religious fundamentalism, spread out all over the world. Millions of people in the West are already reacting in a “racialized”, Islamophobic way toward Muslims, treating every Muslim as a terrorist and refusing to recognize that most of the world’s Muslims are in fact “moderate” or “cultural” believers, rather than fanatics. Millions more people in the Muslim-majority countries have also been reacting for quite some time in the same, “racialized” fashion toward Christians (“Christianophobia”), Jews (anti-semitism) and all the other religious minorities in their midst (such as Yazidis or Druzes). Millions of Hindus in India are also reacting to religious minorities in that country (Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, etc.), in the same “racialized” fashion. The same thing goes for Buddhist majorities treatment of their own religious minorities in predominantly Buddhist countries and Jewish treatment of their minorities in Israel. And so on and so forth, all over the world.

The last bloody thing that this world needs now is yet another country (or province like Alberta) deliberately fomenting religious fanaticism inside its education system. Every neofascist country and movement on this blighted planet, from the USA to Turkey, from Hungary to Myanmar (Burma), from Russia to Malaysia, from Brazil to Nigeria, from Bangladesh to Australia, needs to turn its public schools into another crucible for fundamentalism even less than it needs to embark on such equally reactionary projects as building a new, or much-expanded, nuclear-weapons, or fossil-fuels, program.

The world-wide identity politics sweepstakes

The most curious observation that can be made about today’s world is that at the same time it has never been so intensely globalized, it has also never witnessed such an enormous outpouring of identity politics. All over the world, every single identifiable group of human beings is currently involved in a sort of undeclared, international competition aimed at asserting each and every cultural and/or ideological form of separate identity that currently exists.

For the past several thousand years, our species was initially concentrated on spreading out all over the globe, gradually establishing hundreds of different cultures, religions, empires, nations and political traditions, some of which have disappeared along the way, but many of which still attract deeply-felt pledges of allegiance nowadays. In some of those cases, certain traditions have managed to cooperate with each other and to settle down in adjacent spaces without necessarily being involved in violent conflict. During those same years, however, many other competing world-views have also been periodically going to war with each other in order to control disparate clumps of imperial territory, as geographical bases of operations for several of those intensely diverging ideological outlooks. To the extent that historians have been unable to find any single year since the beginning of recorded, or reconstructed, time during which several different clusters of people, in several different parts of the world, were not bashing each other’s brains out for some expansionist, identity-oriented reason or another.

Now, all of a sudden, the human beings belonging to all those diverging orientations have woken up to a brave new world of advanced communication systems that put every kind of separate existence into constant contact, and quite often reiterated conflict, with every other competing form of identity. Each existing variety of group togetherness currently feels obliged to project its own version of humanity onto every other version, all of them simultaneously trying to prove each one’s supposedly inherent superiority over every other definition of togetherness.

Nevertheless, I do not think that there would necessarily be anything wrong with such a world-wide competition between competing identities if it was conducted in a civilized way, and if at least some of the participants tried to put the accent on at least a few more progressive points of view, instead of constantly emphasizing dozens of more atavistic outlooks. It would certainly be a lot less demoralizing if at least some of the identities being projected were not exclusively based on dominating the rest of the world.

In order for concerned citizens to keep track of every relevant debate between all the different kinds of extant identity, I therefore propose that some group of dedicated people with considerable resources set up an official, world-wide, identity politics sweepstakes. This could work more or less along the lines of Amnesty International’s numerous, and most of the time entirely justified, denunciations of the rotten ways in which political dissidents all over the world are so often being mistreated by various reactionary regimes and authorities. The language that AI uses in its denunciations is almost always oriented in a hierarchical way, indicating to what extent that organization feels that the targeted regime has transgressed. Going all the way from relatively mild imprecations in some cases, to total condemnation in those other cases in which many different, antediluvian regimes completely refuse to recognize the very existence of any individual or collective human rights whatsoever. Unfortunately, we do not hear very often from that source about governments or movements that have been exemplary in their peaceful recognition of dissident opinions.

An even more obvious example of how one could go about setting up such an official log-book of identity politics would be to adopt something like Transparency International’s list instead. That organization explicitly (though not always perfectly) classifies countries in a top-down fashion, going all the way from the world’s (relatively) most honest and above-board countries to the world’s most opaque and dishonest governments. But in order to adapt such a list to the much more complicated world of identity politics, the people working on such a log-book would first have to take a long time scouring the world media in order to identify all the different kinds of human identity currently being propagated. Unlike Amnesty International or Transparency International, the kinds of propagated clusters involved in identity politics certainly include regimes and governments from all the world’s countries, but go far beyond those to also include cultural, religious and ideological entities within each country, as well as many others that transcend established national borders in many different ways.

All the world’s major religions, for example, are divided up into dozens of different identity groups, some of whom, like the Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant and other assorted movements within Christianity, or the different varieties of Sunni and Shiite traditions within Islam, have existed for centuries, while others are of more recent invention. All the other religions in the world, including not only but also Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shintoism, as well as indigenous religions like totemism and shamanism, are also divided up into dozens of competing confessions. Just to complicate matters further, within each one of those religious traditions, there also exist competing “shades” of belief, opposing “moderate” or “mainstream” groups to different kinds of fundamentalist, evangelical or revivalist movements, as well as more esoteric forms of belief such as sufism within Islam.

For their part, the fundamentalist elements inside every religion are currently attempting to convince all their co-believers to adopt a more radicalized vision of what they currently presume that their religion’s founders were trying to do when they initially set up those religions, many centuries ago. Hence the Salafi movement within Islam, which is the controlling ideology inside various countries, such as Saudi Arabia, as well as of various political organizations, such as the Islamic State. Another such ideology is the Pentecostal form of evangelism within Christianity, having developed a considerable political influence all over the Christian world, but which seems to be especially strong inside such countries as the USA and Canada.

Once again, however, examples of religious tolerance and cooperation do not seem to be as well known as more dogmatic attitudes. When competing religious authorities do work together, they often do so merely to denounce governments, movements or individual thinkers promoting freedom from religion, a philosophical point of view that relies on critical thinking, rationalism, modern science, humanism and atheism for its inspiration.

But cultural identities are not just confined to religious forms of propaganda, like those mentioned above. Another kind of cultural identity that also forms part of the world-wide configuration of competing sets of ideas these days is the kind that is linked to certain specific civilizations, such as Western civilization. In that particular ideological construct, the Western world often likes to project an image of itself as being a bastion of liberty, democracy and human rights, particularly individual rights but also including collective rights, such as equality between men and women. From the Western point of view, the world’s non-Western civilizations, such as the Chinese one for example, are not nearly as free or as democratic as it is because of the relative absence of such liberating characteristics. Different parts of the Western world, including not only established nation-states like the USA, Canada, Britain, Spain, France and Germany, but also currently dependent geographical entities like Quebec, Scotland, Catalonia and Corsica, often attribute those characteristics to themselves more than to rival constitutional entities, but in reality they are all part of a common Western heritage. This includes such contributions as the scientific revolution, the secular Enlightenment of the eighteenth-century, and the development of evolution and natural selection as a biological replacement for divine intervention.

To be sure, the Western world’s projection of itself, like every other such projection, does not always have to jibe with the facts. In Donald Trump’s USA, for example, “alternative facts” are often trotted out so that blatantly racist, sexist and anti-democratic policies can still be presented as somehow or another upholding the above-mentioned Western principles of civilization. In France, the extreme right-wing National Front has covered up its ultra-Catholic origins, hypocritically trying to use the republican tradition of laicity (secularism) as a weapon against Muslim immigration. Both of those reinterpretations of reality, however, are just more or less sophisticated ways of hiding the fact that Western civilization has not always supported democratic principles anyway, not so much inside the Western group of countries, and not at all in its colonial and neocolonial dealings with the rest of the world. Not to mention the fact that totalitarian ideologies like fascism and communism also share distinctly Western origins.

In addition, the neoliberal ideology, adopted by all the Western governments for the past forty years, as well as by most non-Western governments, has consistently been used to help all those governments ultra-rich citizens mistreat their less fortunate citizens. Democracy, sexual equality and minority rights have never really been upheld in the consistent way that the Western mythology has regularly projected itself as having always supported them. Today’s right-wing populist and neofascist movements and governments are also incorporating a large number of neoliberal policies (such as even more tax cuts and financial deregulation for the ultra-rich) into their programs. Nevertheless, even though the Western world does not always support any of “its” declared principles, it still repeatedly projects them as if those principles really mean something more for the West than for any of the other civilizations.

Neoliberalism and neofascism are also very important examples of ideologies that transcend national borders, religious borders and the borders of competing civilizations, currently dominating political discourse all over the world. Just like classical liberalism, twentieth-century fascism, totalitarian communism and democratic socialism (social-democracy) used to dominate identity politics all over the world, for previous generations. Not to mention the two different varieties of political nationalism, anti-imperialist nationalism (associated with less powerful countries) and imperialist nationalism (associated with more powerful countries). It should not come as a surprise that the anti-imperialist form of nationalist identity has a tendency to promote progressive ideas more often than does the imperialist variety.

Just because those more secular ideologies transcend different kinds of geographical borders does not mean, however, that they are not part of identity politics. Human beings are just as likely to invest deeply-felt emotions in those ways of thinking as they are to invest similar emotions in religious identities, or those related to competing civilizations. The most well-known example of this sort of thing being the extremely intense feelings associated with the widespread Chinese adoration of Chairman Mao’s teachings during the Cultural Revolution back in the 1960s and 1970s.

The centuries long debate, first inside Western civilization, then throughout the world, between economic nationalism and economic liberalism (culminating in neoliberalism), also demonstrates that economic ideologies, as well as strictly political ones, have to be included in any list of identity politics. For example, even though the kind of protectionism and isolationism currently associated with Donald Trump’s administration in the USA may be severely truncated and delusional, it is still, after all, a very emotional kind of economic nationalism. Economic policy therefore has to be included within identity politics, as does the kind of conflicting and highly polarized social policies that led, in one direction, toward the different kinds of socialism, and, in the opposite direction, to the different kinds of social Darwinism, currently known as libertarianism (the social aspect of neoliberalism). No one can deny that those policy differences also engender highly charged forms of identity politics.

There is of course a great deal of overlap between the different kinds of identity politics. The Western world, for example, has been much more influenced by the Christian religion than by any of the other ones. To be sure, Judaism has also had a considerable influence on the West, notably through the mediation of the Christian Zionist movement, but also through the influence of the nation of Israel, originally founded mostly by European Jews, from the Ashkenazi tradition. But Christianity, like Judaism, has never been an exclusively Western religion, not even if we take into account the role of missionaries from various Western countries in spreading different kinds of Christianity to other parts of the world, notably but not exclusively during the colonial period of history.

For its part, the Chinese civilization also likes to project certain other ideas onto the rest of the world, which are either quite different from any of the other cultural projections currently being propagated, or quite similar, depending on one’s point of view. The Chinese ideology puts a great deal of emphasis on national unity, the dominant Han people within China downplaying the historical roles of any of the current nation’s minority peoples, such as the Tibetans or the Turkish-speaking, Muslim element (Ouigours). To the extent that today’s China seems to many foreign historians, who the Chinese government seems to think do not understand such things as well as they should, as being more of a multinational empire than as a single-people nation. Which is more or less similar, after all, to the way that many Western countries, such as Trump’s America, put the emphasis on White Christians as the core group within each one of their nations, without explicitly excluding national minorities, or recent immigrants, from each projection.

Another element within the official Chinese projection of itself is the idea of combining several, previously-competing religious traditions, notably Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, into a harmonious cultural ensemble under the enlightened leadership of many of the more successful dynastic emperors. Today’s “perfectly representative” Communist Party is still projected as enjoying the same mandate from heaven that was handed down to it by its imperial predecessors. Which, at least officially, does not include the less successful would-be emperors, like the one who exiled himself several decades ago to Taiwan, officially an unfortunate Chinese province still suffering under foreign imperial domination. The relative prosperity of the Chinese economy nowadays is also officially promoted as constituting proof of the veracity of the current Communist Party mandate to rule that particular imperial nation. Like the West, however, China also oscillates between economic nationalism and neoliberalism, as well as between totalitarian communism and libertarianism (at least for the ultra-rich “red diaper babies” currently in power).

Russia is another obvious example of an imperial country presenting itself as an alternative civilization, bridging the gap between the Asian East and the European West. The current regime governing the Russian Federation (or imperial nation) takes approximately the same approach toward Russian domination of all the national minorities within that federation as the Chinese regime does toward its own minorities. Its favoured religion is Orthodox Christianity, which is still trying to project Moscow as the “Third Rome”, following the collapse of Constantinople (the Byzantine, or Eastern Roman empire) back in the fifteenth century.

Russia’s main claim to fame nowadays seems to be its pretension that it has succeeded where many other competing civilizations have failed, in managing to control Islamic radicalism within its own borders. Its method in so doing having been mainly to fight violence with violence, overcoming foreign-sponsored terrorism with a firestorm of state-sponsored terrorism. This seems to be the project that the Russian Federation is currently proposing to the Russian-influenced Trump administration in the USA, as a means of pacifying Islamic terrorism not only in North Africa and Western Asia, but wherever else that it raises its ugly head. All that is required for such cooperation to succeed is for the Western powers to stop trying to crowd Russia out of its traditional sphere of influence (i.e., the countries that used to be part of the old Soviet bloc during the Cold War).

There are several other competing civilizations currently projecting their own world views onto everyone else, the most important of which is obviously the Muslim world. However, the enormous conflicts between the Sunni and the Shiite branches of Islam, themselves divided into several opposing factions, make it well nigh impossible for the Muslim civilization to present itself as a united front. Several competing regional sources of power, based on the most powerful (imperial) nation-states within the Muslim community, complicate those divisions even further.

Still, the Gulf-state-sponsored Islamic terrorist movement has nevertheless managed to create what almost amounts to a civil war all over the Muslim world, extending its malignant influence even into immigrant communities in Western Europe and North America. Its ultimate goal is to rekindle the Islamic caliphates (political-religious empires) of days gone by, provoke a Samuel Huntington style clash of civilizations and eventually impose an antediluvian version of the will of Allah over the entire world. Unfortunately, as has already happened several times in the past, “the will of Allah” always turn out to be whatever the most powerful strongman among those competing for that post wants it to be. Even if most Muslims do not currently agree with him.

So, given the existence of all these partly independent, partly overlapping, projected forces bubbling around these days inside the superheated caldron of conflicting human ideologies, on what basis could the “group of dedicated people with considerable resources” that I talked about earlier, possibly set up the kind of world-wide identity politics sweepstakes that I am proposing? Such an organization would surely require the adoption of a set of agreed-upon criteria for determining which of the competing collective-ego projections currently in the running are the closest, or the furthest away, from proposing something that could presumably be useful to humanity as a whole, and not just to some particular section of it.

It seems to me that the only such criteria would have to universal ones, that is to say ways of measuring human achievement that are not at all dependent on any parochial policy goals that appear to be the private property of any one of the opposing ideological contraptions identified earlier. So far as I am concerned, only socially-based criteria, which have largely been forgotten since the onslaught of neoliberalism back in the 1980s, would satisfy such a request. Every one of those social concerns has engendered policy goals common to all human beings currently living on this planet.

The first such criterion would be to measure to what extent each ideological force seems to be trying to diminish, or instead to further increase, the enormous income gap between the social classes that the neoliberal ideology has reinforced over the past several decades. At the moment, all the world’s poor people, and middle-class people, have been thoroughly alienated from the massive recent expansion in wealth that has taken place since the 1970s. Even though several hundred million people in places like China and India are not as extremely poor as they used to be prior to those countries belated entry into the industrial revolution, they still remain much poorer than the approximately 30 000 dollar (US) (per year) threshold for entry into the genuinely middle class.

Unfortunately, the United Nations definition of “middle class” starts much lower than that more appropriate figure, artificially including millions of poor people inside its overly optimistic interpretation of reality. Hundreds of millions of agricultural or service workers in all those only partly-industrialized countries still remain as poor as they ever were, while millions of definitely middle-class people currently spread out all over today’s world still have exactly the same purchasing power as the middle classes (in the West and Japan) had already achieved back in the 1970s. In other words, all the recently-created wealth in the entire world has been soaked up by a very small minority of the world’s total population.

This fact is probably the number one reason that has pushed millions of economically alienated people into supporting the ultra-reactionary forms of identity politics currently being offered by all the neofascist, and/or right-wing populist, movements that have grown much stronger all over the world. In days gone by, most of those people would presumably have supported instead some kind of progressive, or social-democratic, kind of movement, like the Sanders campaign in the USA might have become had it cut its ties with neoliberal Democrats. The fact that most of them did not, and still do not, support such a movement, not only in the USA but also in many other countries, is a testimony not only to the deleterious effect of reactionary, laissez-faire propaganda. It also owes a lot to the negative example of totalitarian communism, as well as to the democratic socialist abandonment of the working-class and their evolution into opportunistic extensions of ordinary liberal political parties.

The second criterion for the proposed identity politics sweepstakes would be showing to what extent each religious or secular ideology supports, or opposes, gender equality all over the world. Of course, the people in the proposed organization sponsoring the intercontinental sweepstakes would have to be able to distinguish between political forces that genuinely uphold women’s liberation in every one of its different aspects, and those other forces that only pay lip-service to such a goal. Including not only such easy to decipher elements as the Trump administration in the USA, but also such less obviously opposed, but still not entirely sincere, supporters as the Trudeau government in Canada. All neoliberal movements and governments would have to be placed on the antediluvian side of this debate, because of austerity’s more devastating effects on women than on men. So would most of the world’s unreformed religious organizations. This would make it possible to distinguish between ideological formations totally in favour of gender equality, those totally opposed, and everything in between.

The third criterion would be showing how much each political force opposes, or reinforces, racism. This latest category would have to include not only very obvious kinds of “traditional” racism, that come right out and denounce racial equality completely, but also those that instead support a less traditional, more disguised, form of racism, sometimes called “reverse racism”. Racism, after all, is not just confined, as some naive people still seem to think, to the Western powers involved in promoting colonialism, slavery, neocolonialism, or racial segregation, over the past several centuries. It is also, unfortunately, very much “alive and kicking” all over the rest of the world, including in such officially anti-apartheid countries as South Africa.

Reverse racism also includes such “reverse amalgams” as the current Western liberal tendency to denounce any critique of socially conservative religions, like Islam still tends to be, as belonging to those liberals artificially enlarged definition of Islamophobia. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with anyone denouncing the Western-based, right-wing populist refusal to distinguish between “moderate”, or “mainstream” Islam, and radical-fundamentalist, or even terrorist forms of Islam, also known as Islamo-fascism. Nor, for that matter, to extend that analysis to similar divisions operating within any of the other religions.

“Islamophobia”, or an irrational fear of Islam, does indeed exist within right-wing political opinion in general, especially in the Western countries. Millions of naive people all over the world, as well as many professional manipulators of popular opinion, fail to realize, deliberately or not, that most Muslims nowadays are not extremists, nor are they terrorists. It is also true that many right-wing people have indeed “racialized” Muslims, treating Islam as if its was an inferior “race” of people, conveniently forgetting that many Muslims do not hail, not even originally, from the Muslim-majority countries situated somewhere in between Morocco and Indonesia, but from every other part of the world as well. The right-wing populists also refuse to accept not only the idea that Muslims do not belong to any particular “race”, but also that “race” itself does not exist as a scientific fact. In reality, “race” is a category invented by racists, not something that really exists from a biological point of view.

Unfortunately, for their own opportunist political purposes, many Western liberals often include any criticism of Islam whatsoever as being a form of “Islamophobia”, the “reverse amalgam” mentioned above. They are so intent at trying to prove to everyone that they are not themselves racists, that they constantly downplay all the negative aspects of Islam as a religion, and not just the entirely negative aspects of Islamism, which is a political ideology, not a religion. Islam itself, however, is not very often a progressive force in human society for various other reasons, the most important of which is that it is a religion like all the others, that is to say an inherently irrational and unscientific way of interpreting reality. It is constantly being used, again like all the other religions, as the “opium of the people”, a weapon used by ultra-rich and ultra-powerful people inside the Muslim community, to keep poor and middle-class people in their (undemocratic) place, underneath their “superiors”.

There is also no doubt about the fact that most of the factions within Islam do indeed generally treat women as being inferior to men, in the same way that most Christian factions, and those within most of the other religions, either used to do several decades ago, or still do nowadays. Muslim countries, or immigrant communities, using sharia law in their social relations, cannot avoid misogyny without overhauling that entire system. Even in those places that have adopted some reforms, divorce, for example, still seems to be much easier for most Muslim men to accomplish than it is for most Muslim women. In order for even “moderate”, or “mainstream”, Islam to be classified as progressive, rather than reactionary, a lot more change would have to take place. In other words, criticism of Islam as a whole is not necessarily a form of Islamophobia. All religions, as well as all other ideological projections, can be criticized in a rational way, so long as the reasons given for that criticism are not irrational, or deliberately “racialized”.

So, even if no one takes up my proposal to create a functioning, world-wide, identity politics sweepstakes, I really do think that it would be a very good idea if everyone started judging all the world’s currently projected ideologies according to their relative effect on those three, universal criteria. Diminishing, or further enlarging, the income gap between the social classes; fighting for, or against, gender equality; and encouraging racism, or denouncing it, not only directly but indirectly. In other words, will the world of the future become more progressive, or more reactionary? Even without an official sweepstakes, the prize for winning is still a choice between advancing what is good or accepting what is evil. Is reaction better than progress, after all? I don’t think so.