Religion is not simply a set of beliefs. It is also a means of creating a sense of community

Kenan Malik in The Guardian

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. So runs the inscription above the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno. Through those gates walks Dante with his guide Virgil:

Now sighs, loud wailing, lamentation
Resounded through the starless air,
So that I too began to weep.
Unfamiliar tongues, horrendous accents,
Words of suffering, cries of rage, voices
Loud and faint, the sound of slapping hands…


Inferno is the first part, or canticle, of the Divine Comedy, Dante’s great triptych of journeys through hell, purgatory and heaven. Today, we read it as poetry, even if it is poetry that seems to have been touched by the divine. Seven hundred years ago, it was read as a glimpse of something far more real. Dante’s imaginative recreation of both the physical and the moral universe, and of the interlacing of the two, infused medieval culture and allowed Europeans to understand both their place in the physical architecture of the cosmos and their duties in the moral architecture of Christian society.

So far have we moved today from Dante’s reality that even the pope, if we are to believe the Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari, no longer acknowledges the existence of hell. Scalfari asked Pope Francis where “bad souls” go after death. Hell, Francis supposedly replied, “doesn’t exist”. “Sinning souls” simply “disappear”.

The Vatican has condemned the article, published in La Repubblica, insisting that the pope was misquoted. Whatever the truth, the controversy nevertheless points up the dilemma in which religion finds itself in the modern world. Religious values are immensely flexible over time. Christian beliefs on many issues have changed enormously in the past two millennia. Yet an institution like the Catholic church can never be truly “modern”.

Christianity, like all monotheistic religions, views human desires and beliefs as unreliable guides to notions of good and bad. Values derive primarily from God, and the authority of the church rests on its claim to be able to interpret the Bible and God’s word. Were the church to modify its teaching to meet the wishes of its flock, the authority of the institution would inevitably weaken. But were it not to do so, a chasm would emerge between official teaching and actual practice. Dante’s hell may be difficult to believe in, but to jettison difficult beliefs is to question the need for religion itself.

A recent pan-European survey by Stephen Bullivant, professor of theology at St Mary’s University in London, showed that in a dozen countries, including Britain, a majority of young people are irreligious. And even those who identify as religious have attitudes increasingly like those of their irreligious neighbours.

A survey of the social attitudes of British believers published in 2013 by Linda Woodhead, professor of sociology of religion at Lancaster University, suggested that two thirds of Catholics accepted abortion of some kind. Half said that they are primarily guided by their own reason, intuition or feelings. Fewer than one in 10 sought guidance from the church or Bible.


Religion is not simply a set of beliefs. It is also a means of creating a sense of community

Meanwhile, Woodward observes,, a minority of believers have marched in the opposite direction. They possess an absolute belief in God, make moral decisions primarily on the basis of religious sources, and are deeply conservative on issues of social morality. The literalism of fundamentalist Muslims and evangelical Christians speaks to a yearning for the restoration of strong identities and moral lines. The sectarianism of fundamentalist religion is reflected also in the political sphere. Witness the rise of tribal politics and of social movements built around excluding the Other.

All this poses a challenge, not just for believers, but for non-believers, too. Religion is not simply a set of beliefs. It is also a means of creating a sense of community, identity and meaning. One reason for the growth of fundamentalism is that all these seem in short supply today. The world appears increasingly trapped between an atomised liberalism, on the one hand, and a sense of community created by fundamentalist religion or reactionary politics, on the other.

In his 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who spent three years incarcerated in German concentration camps, meditates on that experience; a meditation on surviving hell.

“This is a profoundly religious book,” suggested the rabbi Howard Kushner in the foreword to the second edition. Frankl’s faith is, however, very different to that embodied in religion. It is a hymn not to a transcendent deity but to the human spirit that, through its own efforts, can transcend the immediacy of its being in the world. Humans, he suggests, find themselves only through creating meaning in the world. Meaning is not something to be discovered through God. It is something that humans create. “Man is ultimately self-determining,” Frankl wrote. “Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be.”

Today, it is that very capacity to “decide what our existence will be” that seems to have ebbed away. For all the material improvements in the world, life feels more precarious for millions of people. They seem to have less control in shaping the direction of their world.

Liberals often laud the Enlightenment as the moment when faith was replaced by reason. The new moral vision was, however, also rooted in faith, though of a different kind – faith that humans were capable of acting rationally and morally without guidance from beyond. It was that faith upon which Frankl drew. It was expressed not just through science and technology but also through politics that helped overthrow tyranny and bring about democracy. That faith, too, has eroded, as have the movements in which it was embodied.

Religion once helped provide meaning and identity through sublimating human agency to God’s will. Not only is it less capable of doing so these days, but when it does so, it often takes sectarian or bigoted forms. Equally, as the optimism that once suffused the humanist impulse has ebbed away, politics, too, is less capable of providing a means through which people can express agency. The politics that today seeks to do this is also often sectarian or bigoted.

“God is dead,” Nietzsche wrote, before adding: “Yet his shadow still looms.” That shadow is in reality our failure to create movements and institutions that can nurture a sense of meaning and belongingness and dignity. Disbelief in God carries little weight without also a faith in ourselves as human beings. Otherwise, we find ourselves in a different kind of hell.

Imran Khan on Himself

From The Friday Times

Friends, fundos and youthias, I want you to know that I took the Hypocritic oath ages ago while schmoozing my way across London with one eye on my political career back home, and the other on the chicks of Chelsea. I knew that once I’d taken the Hypocritic oath, I’d be free to do Hypocritical things. Like pretending to be a democrat while trying to oust elected governments via conspiracies. Like pretending to be a principled leader while treating my party like a principality. Like defending the disadvantaged while taking advantage of defenseless women. Like funding madrassahs in Pakistan whilst sending my owns sons to England’s best madrassah, at £ 22,000 a year.

The problem is not with me but with this formerly glorious land that was once full of stupas, but is now full of stupids.

Why is my marriage to my spiritual advisor a scandal? Because it shows my utter lack of judgment? Or because it reveals my callousness? Or both?

Well, I don’t care and I’m going to carry on doing whatever or whoever I like. I really thought I had it all under wraps and was enjoying the winter sun with my spiritual advisor out on the lawns of my Bunny Gala estate. Then, suddenly a drone flew past with GEO NEWS written on it. I waved and waved but it didn’t stop for me. It was not until my spiritual advisor gave me a violent nudge in the ribs that I stopped waving. My spiritual advisor dived under the table to hide herself but by then the drone had let down a streamer which said, “touch luck, dumb f—-k”. I was spelling it out to my spiritual advisor when I came to the end and realized that the middle three letters of the last word were missing.

The fact that GEO NEWS’ drones can’t spell so alarmed me that whilst still writing this diary, I began suffering from writer’s block. I turned to my spiritual advisor and said, “please give me a profound thought on which to conclude my diary”. She said what about “the end”?

Im the Dim 

It’s no good, Dawkins. No one’s going to abandon religion because some atheist is banging on at them about science

Mark Steel in The Independent

There’s a religious slot broadcast every morning on the radio, called Thought for the Day, and it’s marvellous. Because it usually involves some bishop telling you what he did the day before, and shovelling Jesus into it somehow. So it will go: “Last night I was watching an episode of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, in which a poor hapless restaurateur once again found himself on the wrong end of Gordon’s somewhat ribald invective. And I began to think to myself ‘Isn’t this a bit like Jesus’? Because Jesus too went out for supper one night, and that turned into a bit of a nightmare. Good morning.”

The fact that this quaint tradition endures with few complaints, despite a campaign led by the National Secular Society, suggests that the modern atheists are losing. So does the popularity of The Book of Mormon, the gloriously blasphemous musical I’ve finally seen, which, despite a swearing, camp Jesus and a plot revolving around religion being made-up nonsense, is strangely affectionate towards religion. You’re invited to judge the evangelists on what they do, rather than on what they believe, and that may be a vital part of its success, compared with the modern atheists whose attitude is: “Of COURSE Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, you idiots.”

Richard Dawkins, for example, complained that a Muslim political writer wasn’t a “serious journalist” because he “believes Mohamed flew to heaven on a winged horse”. I suppose if Dawkins had been in Washington when Martin Luther King made his famous speech, he’d have shouted: “Never mind your dream, how can Jonah have lived in a whale, you silly Christian knob?”

Followers of this ideal just can’t have it that some people are religious, even if they’re not doing any harm. I expect that during Ramadan they wander around Muslim areas in daylight shoving sandwiches in Muslims’ mouths, while reading from a biological paper on the workings of the digestive system.

One flaw in this approach is that it isn’t likely to win many converts. In all the debates in which Dawkins has argued with believers, there can’t have been many occasions when someone has said: “Ah NOW I see: we’re organisms composed of a complex series of particles. So that goddess with all the arms must be a load of bollocks.”

He can’t seem to grasp that what’s obvious to him might not look that way if you’ve been brought up in Catholic rural Spain or on the banks of the Ganges, so dealing with the intricacies of people’s ideas requires more than yelling science at them. If Dawkins were asked to treat an anorexic, he’d say: “This will be easy,” and shout, “Look – you’re NOT FAT, I’ll pick you up and chuck you over the wardrobe. THEN you’ll calculate that a man of my years couldn’t throw an adult unless they were in need of fattening up. So get these down you – they’re some pork pies I’ve got left over from Ramadan.”

The modern atheist often points to atrocities carried out by religious institutions, such as the tyranny of the Taliban or the child abuse of the Catholic Church, but isn’t it the actions of these people that are vile, not the religion itself? Unless your attitude is: “Those priests are a disgrace. They sexually abused children, covered it up for decades, then to top it all they give out stupid wafers in their service. How sick can you get”?

The contradictions of religion are certainly confusing. I spent a morning at a Sikh temple recently, where 4,000 free meals are provided for anyone who wants one, and hypnotic musicians play all day amid an addictive tranquillity. Everyone you meet exudes joy and respect, until I thought: “I reckon I could be a Sikh.” Then an elder informed me of the guru who fought for the Sikh people with such courage, that when his head was chopped off he carried on fighting for the rest of the day, blessed as he was by God. And if I’m honest, I think that’s where we had to agree to differ.

Even so, there’s so much to experience and discuss with followers at this temple – the process that led them from the Punjab to west London, the food, customs, community and music – so to start your acquaintance by explaining to them that you can’t run around without a head, maybe by performing a series of experiments with goats on the steps of the temple, would cut you off from any of that. In any case, if you turned up at Richard Dawkins’s house with 4,000 mates, I’d be surprised if you all got a meal out of him.

It’s almost as if the modern atheist is in agreement with the religious fundamentalist that a person’s attitude towards God is the most important aspect of their character.

This may be why, even among atheists, the strident anti-religious stance of those like Richard Dawkins appears less attractive than The Book of Mormon, whose creators said: “We wanted to write a love letter from atheists to religion.”

That must be the most heartening attitude of all, though if you were to take Cliff Richard and Abu Hamza to see it, they would probably literally explode in a fireball. Then millions from round the world would flock to see the site of such a miracle. 

Asaram Bapu's moment of reckoning

Dileep Padgaonkar in the Times of India

Every murky controversy that involves a self-appointed dispenser of cures for all physical, psychic and societal ailments sheds a harsh light on two on developments that have surfaced across the world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the rise of blind faith at a personal level and of politics rooted in religious radicalism. Both seek to provide an anchor to individuals and communities trapped in a maelstrom of unprecedented change spear-headed by technological innovations and the globalised economy.

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Also read

Modern Indian Spirituality

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These are perceived as threats to cultures and ways of life, to deeply-entrenched religious beliefs and to moral certitudes. And the riposte of ordinary folk to such threats is to repose their trust in those who claim to have a privileged access to God. Indeed, even when such individuals are caught with, so to speak, their pants down, the faithful are willing to overlook their trespasses. The yawning gap between what they preach – austerity, abstinence, altruism – and what they practice – an opulent life-style, sexual promiscuity and a no-holds-barred acquisitiveness – is of little concern to them.

The case of Asumal Harpalani aka Asaram Bapu is significant in this regard. Ever since he was accused of molesting a minor girl, the media have unveiled his trajectory from his birth in a family of modest means in the Sindh province of British India to one of the country’s most prosperous and influential ‘spiritual’ gurus. It tells a fascinating story of the transformation of a bootlegger – whose family arrived in Ahmedabad after Partition -into a figure who has built an empire that is conservatively estimated to be worth more than Rs. 10,000 crores and who, according to his official website, has twenty million followers in India and abroad. 

These followers have apparently not turned hostile to Asaram despite the contrasts between what he preaches and what he practices. He owns a posse of expensive cars, travels business class, ensures that he isn’t frisked by security at airports and continues to expand his real estate empire. Neither the cases of land-grabbing nor the cases of four youths who ‘disappeared’ in his institutions – the mutilated bodies of two of them were later found on the banks of the Sabarmati – have diminished his appeal.

That explains why most politicians take care not to rub him the wrong way. To take him to task is to alienate a sizeable section of the Hindu vote. Or so they reckon.  Congress leaders have yet to pull him up for his alleged sexual assault on a minor girl. But it is the BJP that takes the cake. Leaders like Uma Bharati and Pravin Togadia have rushed to his defence. In videos that have gone viral on Youtube other worthies of the Sangh Parivar have hailed him as a genuine saint. And the ‘saint’ himself has called the latest allegations a political conspiracy to frame him while son and presumptive heir has dubbed the minor girl as ‘mentally deranged.’

Armed with this support, Asaram has been able to defy law enforcers with impunity. On the grounds that he was engaged in meditation, he kept police waiting for several hours before he deigned to receive a summons to appear for questioning. He then grandly declared that he would not appear before the concerned authorities right away since he has a busy schedule until September 18. And he has continued to visit his scores of ashrams and educational institutions, address the faithful, heap scorn of the media and denounce his critics in a language that suits not a spiritual leader but, well, a clandestine seller of adulterated spirits. Such are the methods of the proponents of a Hindu Rashtra – the very ones that are dear to the proponents of a strident, Islamic rule in Muslim-majority countries or to literalist Christian evangelists in many parts of the world.

The only hope in this sordid saga is that the girl who has accused Asaram of molesting her will stick, along with her parents, to her courageous stand to expose him for what he is: a charlatan who tarnishes the uplifting traditions of Hinduism with his questionable conduct. Should the police do their job and arrest him without delay and haul him up before the courts, the victim would be vindicated.

The parties that swear by the rule of law will then fall in line while those who place their religious faith above the law and the Constitution will be shamed to follow suit. By and by, his blind devotees, too, would realise that the ‘saint’ they venerate is a man of straw. Keep your fingers crossed.

How can India give asylum to a person chased by the almighty US when it panics over giving a residence permit to a secular writer?

'I’m Not Surprised India Refused Snowden Asylum'

TASLIMA NASREEN

Edward Snowden asked 21 nations for political asylum. He got nothing but rejection, proving once again that free speech is just a decorative item for most governments. India’s embassy in Moscow received Snowden’s request for asylum. His request was rejected within hours. 

Since then, there has been much discussion about India’s generosity over giving shelter to persecuted people—and so then, why not Snowden? India has in the past granted political asylum to Dalai Lama and many other rebels. Some even mention my name in the list.

I am not sure whether I should be considered a political refugee in India. I was thrown out of my country, Bangladesh, in 1994 and found myself landing in Europe. It was difficult for me to live in a place which has a totally different climate and culture from where I grew up. Since I knew I couldn’t return to my country, I wanted to come to India. But India kept her doors firmly shut. Towards the end of 1999, I was given permission to visit as a tourist.

Forget asylum to a man chased by the US, India panics over a residence permit to a secular writer here.

I came to India not as a rebel Bangladeshi writer, but as a European citizen. I eagerly chose India’s state of West Bengal as my new home. But when I was physically attacked by Muslim fundamentalists, instead of taking act­ion against them, the government kept me under house arrest. Not only that, I was repeatedly asked to leave the state and, preferably, the country. When a group of Muslim fundamentalists orga­nised a protest against my stay in India, I was thrown out of Bengal, the state that had been my home for years. Finally, the central government took charge and put me in a safehouse. But there was pressure from the Centre too for me to leave the country. Now, I am given permission to live in India, but only in Delhi. My enemies are just a handful of corrupt, illiterate, ignorant Muslim fundamentalists but yet India cannot challenge them. 

I’m not surprised India refused Snowden asylum. How can a country give asylum to a person chased by the almighty US when it panics over giving a residence permit to a secular writer? But with India, one underst­ands; it can’t afford to take risks or make any big political mistake now. Indeed, a Eur­opean country should have given Snowden asylum. They have a long tradition of defending writers and journalists. Compared to India, they have a much older, truer democracies, and violation of rights and free speech is a rarity there. It’s time for Europe to show they are not mere colonies of the US.  However glorious a past India may have had, it doesn’t have the cou­rage to face possible US sanctions. If democracy were practised everywhere, and if it were not reduced to mere elections, independent voices from independent countries would have been respected. As it stands, the human species is yet to make the world an evenly civilised place. We ordinary people pay the brunt, we sacrifice our dignity, honor, rights and freedom. I really feel sorry for Snowden. If I were a country, I’d have given him asylum.

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Bangladesh-born Taslima Nasrin is the author of Lajja and other novels; E-mail your columnist: letters AT outlookindia.com

Middle Class Fundamentalism

The conceit of the anti-democrat

HARISH KHARE

  

Those who do not subscribe to the elite narrative on corruption are considered politically backward and their democratic choices unworthy of respect

The recent Karnataka Assembly vote has apparently disappointed the self-styled ideologues of the Indian middle class. These baffled theologians are wondering aloud how voters in Karnataka could opt for the very political party against whom the entire middle class had risen to its last MBA. How could the electorate not be influenced by the two-year-old high-pitched campaign against the “corrupt Congress,” launched by the upper middle-class dominated media, both electronic and print? Was not Bangalore one of the epicentres of the anti-corruption dharmayudha, led by the very venerable Santosh Hegde? How could the voters be so indifferent to the corporate-endorsed “good” candidates? There must be something terribly wrong with the poor if they are not buying into the upper middle class quest for the nobility of an honest society.

Perhaps the Karnataka vote has come just in time. For one thing, the vote punctures the self-serving assumption that the entire country subscribes to the Khan Market-centric narrative on corruption and governance. The disappointment among upper middle class theologians is perhaps sharper because it was only four months ago that the great oracle, Thomas Friedman, visited India and announced and hailed the birth of a “virtual middle class” as “one of the most exciting things happening on the planet.” The ayatollah from the land of platitudes and pretensions had predicted that the new “virtual middle class” would dominate and determine the destiny of India! And, now, an unenlightened electorate in Karnataka has proved such a spoilsport. The voters are dismissed by the new arbiters of civic virtues as ethically deficient and politically backward for voting the Congress.

These theologians of the upper middle class supremacy are entitled to their disappointment. But what should be a matter of concern to all who value social fairness and democratic equity is the elite conceit — that those who pride themselves on their new prosperity have achieved their current superior status entirely on their merit, based on individual talent and personally acquired skills, and that these meritorious achievements ipso facto elevate the class to a higher level of nobility, a superior morality, ethics and good taste. These upper middle class ideologues would not want to be reminded that they themselves are a product of an unfair system in an unequal society. But having made it good in this tainted and corrupt system, and having gained access to the global job market, these upper middle class fundamentalists now want the state and its institutions to turn their back on the poor and the have-nots. Any attempt at inclusive politics and economics is suspect in the eyes of these promoters of the elite virtues and values.

For now the middle class ideologues assert that they are entitled to a corruption free political order. Fine. To worry about corruption is in itself a desirable social good. It is even a noble quest. The trouble is that this overweening preoccupation with a corruption-free polity is not so innocent a pose.

The proposition is that so debilitating and so pervasive has corruption become that the nation can and must suspend all its beliefs and, instead, any leader or political party, presumably unstained by corruption, can be safely trusted to take the correct position on grand issues like the nature of economic growth, social order, foreign policy issues, the terms of our relationship with Pakistan or China, the place of the minorities and other weaker sections of society in the scheme of things, nature of federal polity, etc. According to the middle class ideologues, all these contestations — the very core of our political divide — can be relegated to the back burner, and our collective energies should be devoted to a single point agenda of a corruption-free society.

POLITICIANS AS ONLY VILLAINS

In their over-insistence on corruption, the upper middle class ideologues introduce another distortion: an exclusive focus on political leaders as the sole villains in the corrupt drama. This demonisation of the politician diverts critical attention away from the connivance, criminality and corruption of the business classes in each of the recent scams. If there has been a loot of natural resources, the most obvious instigator and beneficiaries of this unholy scramble are the corporate houses, some dubious and some not so dubious. Yet the middle classes-led narrative would like us to believe that it is only the bent politician who suborns the honest businessman’s ethics. All these innocent gentlemen need to be forced to serve a sentence of hard political education of at least three months in Jharkhand to understand the dynamics of this jugal bandi between the crooked entrepreneur and the corrupt politician.

The disappointment with the Karnataka vote reveals another charming vanity: the media is an honest conveyer of society’s anxieties and anger. Increasingly this claim no longer stands a close scrutiny. Sensitive and vigilant observers of the Indian media are worried about the emerging pattern of media ownership. It is a matter of deep democratic disappointment that none of the self-appointed mullahs of the anti-corruption jihad has ever gathered the personal courage or summoned the intellectual honesty to talk about the unhealthy convergence of media ownership and corporate houses. Nor, for that matter, has anyone dared to point out how judicial indulgence has become readily available to almost every crooked fund collector.

Perhaps the most troublesome arrogance is that these theologians of upper-class and upper-caste superiority have arrogated to themselves the right to speak for the entire range of middle classes. In sociological terms, such claims are totally untenable.

The most numerical component of the “virtual middle class” is a new and different sociological category. For want of a better word, let us call this group the post-slum middle class: this category should include those vast numbers who have just escaped the indignities and ugliness of the slums — shared toilets, open bathing space, and fights over erratic water supply — and have moved into tenements of their own, who now have the financial leeway to send a daughter to high school and a son to a computer centre. It is this group of new citizens who are experiencing for the first time a kind of comfort with some degree of economic sufficiency; and, they may be products of the new market but they still need and depend upon a caring state, a functional police force, an affordable education system, a working health care arrangement.

Certainly the dreams of the post-slum classes are not the same as those dreamt in the cosmopolitan cities’ gated communities, who organise their private security and where the “struggle” is over whether or not to buy admission for the mediocre son in a mediocre Australian university.

MIDDLE CLASS FUNDAMENTALISTS

It is obvious that our desi middle class fundamentalists look upon the American system as the ideal model of rectitude and efficiency, and good governance. They dare us to aspire to these global (read American) standards of good politics. They feel doubly empowered when a visiting American columnist pats our “civil society” for performing all those rites of anger and protest at India Gate. In this narrative, the American political arrangement and the processes are wonderfully free of corruption. What touching innocence. As if the American politicians, despite having spent more than $ 15 billion in the last presidential election, somehow remain immune to the demands of the fund-raisers; or as if successive British Prime Ministers have not reduced themselves to being salesmen for this or that London-based economic interest.

This is not the first time that democratic India has been sought to be imposed upon by an elitist mindset. Behind the breath-taking arrogance of the new anti-corruption jihadists there is a deeply disturbing conceit: if a free and fair electoral exercise does not produce a result to the liking of the upper middle class mullahs, then that very democratic process is not worthy of their respect and is of doubtful legitimacy. This elitist presumptuousness is the very anti-thesis of democratic ethos and deserves to be rejected.

Why do we take economists so seriously?

They have no foresight, no hindsight, and little humanity. Are they really the best people to lead us out of this crisis?

• 
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 6 June 2012 20.02 BST

The unemployed people bussed in to work as stewards at the jubilee – a sign of the scale of inequality in the west? Photograph: Shiv Malik for the Guardian

It's the economists, stupid! While we were not waving but drowning in soggy flags, economic stuff was happening. Big stuff, though it could not break through the gooey queen-fest. In the news blackout that was the jubilee, other countries were reporting the meltdown of the Spanish banks, and thus, eventually, the euro. Obama was on the phone to Cameron telling him to do something about Merkel. It's all pretty dire. It must be for me to understand it, for though I am not an economist, I know what I like. Some sort of stimulus, please. Fiscal will do nicely.

Actually, that may happen. Another £50bn could be pumped into the economy soon. Money does not grow on trees, you know. Except when it is called quantitative easing.

Why all this panic, though? Aren't economists in charge of it all? Yes. And this is the problem. These highly skilled people carry on, though they exhibit not only a lack of foresight but an astonishing lack of hindsight. Why on earth are they taken seriously when they keep getting things wrong? We are silenced by some jargon and bogus maths (sorry, probabilities) because we are mostly innumerate and because economic orthodoxy presents itself as a higher faith. I am not the only person uncertain as to what a trillion means, surely? It was explained to me in terms of time. A million is a few seconds, a trillion is 30 years – it's a lot of wonga.

The sudden ability to produce money out of thin air is exactly why economists such as Paul Krugman tell us that the Thatcher-lite hausfrau-speak of Osborne is senseless. The deficit is not like household debt, because if it was, I could go mad in Morrisons, go to the till promising to pay later and they would still give me cashback.

But we are indeed in reduced circumstances when debate is reduced to bankers arguing with economists. This clash of ideologies is not really left versus right. It is more akin to fundamentalists talking to agnostics. To be an austerity groupie, one has to ignore the actual behaviour of people; to believe fervently in Keynes, one has to ignore the behaviour of politicians.

Economics is not a science; it's not even a social science. It is an antisocial theory. It assumes behaviour is rational. It cannot calculate for contradiction, culture, altruism, fear, greed, love or humanity at all.

Sure, there are some new radicals on the block who daringly suggest that we should not adhere to the old models. We end up then with these money wizards shouting at each other on Newsnight while novelists such as John Lanchester translate for us. Only non-economists properly explain that money is not real and what was traded during the boom years were not real things, not even real futures, but guesstimates of futures bundled into some bizarre equation where no one at the top could lose. Gamblers always made money, but it became possible to make money without risking your own. It was risk, not wealth, that trickled down, so those without jobs could buy houses soon to be repossessed.

Risk-free capitalism was what the anti-globalisers always warned us about, but they had dreadlocks and dogs on string and were pepper-sprayed away. What they misjudged was how quickly developed countries would come to look like underdeveloped ones: the scale of inequality in "the west". In the US there are the incredibly wealthy and then those who sleep in the woods on the edge of broken cities; here, the unemployed are bussed in to "steward" the celebration of the billionaire monarch.

This is economic sense as it is practised by the deliberately dumb, those who bow down before the calculation that we can have even Spanish levels of youth unemployment (40%-50%) if it reduces the deficit by the next election. Meanwhile, if you have a job, do save up for your pension, because they have gone down the pan.

Some of the free-market economists are right, but politicians can't go there. The free movement of capital really requires the free movement of labour. Go where the jobs are, but do not complain when immigration undercuts your wage.

Do not complain either when economists and government ministers tell you that what you thought had a social purpose must now be profit-driven. Money must be made from schools, hospitals and looking after the elderly. The privatisation of care is one of the only growth industries. This is what you get from this dictatorship of economists, and it should be overthrown. It is wrong and keeps being wrong. The choices to be made now are moral, not economic ones. Only an idiot or an economist would think otherwise.