Why religion is here to stay and science won’t destroy it

Peter Harrison in The Wire.In



In 1966, just over 50 years ago, the distinguished Canadian-born anthropologist Anthony Wallace confidently predicted the global demise of religion at the hands of an advancing science: ‘belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge’. Wallace’s vision was not exceptional. On the contrary, the modern social sciences, which took shape in 19th-century western Europe, took their own recent historical experience of secularisation as a universal model. An assumption lay at the core of the social sciences, either presuming or sometimes predicting that all cultures would eventually converge on something roughly approximating secular, Western, liberal democracy. Then something closer to the opposite happened.

Not only has secularism failed to continue its steady global march but countries as varied as Iran, India, Israel, Algeria and Turkey have either had their secular governments replaced by religious ones, or have seen the rise of influential religious nationalist movements. Secularisation, as predicted by the social sciences, has failed.

To be sure, this failure is not unqualified. Many Western countries continue to witness decline in religious belief and practice. The most recent census data released in Australia, for example, shows that 30 per cent of the population identify as having ‘no religion’, and that this percentage is increasing. International surveys confirm comparatively low levels of religious commitment in western Europe and Australasia. Even the United States, a long-time source of embarrassment for the secularisation thesis, has seen a rise in unbelief.

The percentage of atheists in the US now sits at an all-time high (if ‘high’ is the right word) of around 3 per cent. Yet, for all that, globally, the total number of people who consider themselves to be religious remains high, and demographic trends suggest that the overall pattern for the immediate future will be one of religious growth. But this isn’t the only failure of the secularisation thesis.

Scientists, intellectuals and social scientists expected that the spread of modern science would drive secularisation – that science would be a secularising force. But that simply hasn’t been the case. If we look at those societies where religion remains vibrant, their key common features are less to do with science, and more to do with feelings of existential security and protection from some of the basic uncertainties of life in the form of public goods. A social safety net might be correlated with scientific advances but only loosely, and again the case of the US is instructive. The US is arguably the most scientifically and technologically advanced society in the world, and yet at the same time the most religious of Western societies. As the British sociologist David Martin concluded in The Future of Christianity (2011): ‘There is no consistent relation between the degree of scientific advance and a reduced profile of religious influence, belief and practice.’

The story of science and secularisation becomes even more intriguing when we consider those societies that have witnessed significant reactions against secularist agendas. India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru championed secular and scientific ideals, and enlisted scientific education in the project of modernisation. Nehru was confident that Hindu visions of a Vedic past and Muslim dreams of an Islamic theocracy would both succumb to the inexorable historical march of secularisation. ‘There is only one-way traffic in Time,’ he declared. But as the subsequent rise of Hindu and Islamic fundamentalism adequately attests, Nehru was wrong. Moreover, the association of science with a secularising agenda has backfired, with science becoming a collateral casualty of resistance to secularism.

Turkey provides an even more revealing case. Like most pioneering nationalists, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic, was a committed secularist. Atatürk believed that science was destined to displace religion. In order to make sure that Turkey was on the right side of history, he gave science, in particular evolutionary biology, a central place in the state education system of the fledgling Turkish republic.

As a result, evolution came to be associated with Atatürk’s entire political programme, including secularism. Islamist parties in Turkey, seeking to counter the secularist ideals of the nation’s founders, have also attacked the teaching of evolution. For them, evolution is associated with secular materialism. This sentiment culminated in the decision this June to remove the teaching of evolution from the high-school classroom. Again, science has become a victim of guilt by association.

The US represents a different cultural context, where it might seem that the key issue is a conflict between literal readings of Genesis and key features of evolutionary history. But in fact, much of the creationist discourse centres on moral values. In the US case too, we see anti-evolutionism motivated at least in part by the assumption that evolutionary theory is a stalking horse for secular materialism and its attendant moral commitments. As in India and Turkey, secularism is actually hurting science.

In brief, global secularisation is not inevitable and, when it does happen, it is not caused by science. Further, when the attempt is made to use science to advance secularism, the results can damage science. The thesis that ‘science causes secularisation’ simply fails the empirical test, and enlisting science as an instrument of secularisation turns out to be poor strategy. The science and secularism pairing is so awkward that it raises the question: why did anyone think otherwise?

Historically, two related sources advanced the idea that science would displace religion. First, 19th-century progressivist conceptions of history, particularly associated with the French philosopher Auguste Comte, held to a theory of history in which societies pass through three stages – religious, metaphysical and scientific (or ‘positive’). Comte coined the term ‘sociology’ and he wanted to diminish the social influence of religion and replace it with a new science of society. Comte’s influence extended to the ‘young Turks’ and Atatürk.

The 19th century also witnessed the inception of the ‘conflict model’ of science and religion. This was the view that history can be understood in terms of a ‘conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought – the theological and the scientific’. This description comes from Andrew Dickson White’s influential A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), the title of which nicely encapsulates its author’s general theory. White’s work, as well as John William Draper’s earlier History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), firmly established the conflict thesis as the default way of thinking about the historical relations between science and religion. Both works were translated into multiple languages. Draper’s History went through more than 50 printings in the US alone, was translated into 20 languages and, notably, became a bestseller in the late Ottoman empire, where it informed Atatürk’s understanding that progress meant science superseding religion.

Today, people are less confident that history moves through a series of set stages toward a single destination. Nor, despite its popular persistence, do most historians of science support the idea of an enduring conflict between science and religion. Renowned collisions, such as the Galileo affair, turned on politics and personalities, not just science and religion. Darwin had significant religious supporters and scientific detractors, as well as vice versa. Many other alleged instances of science-religion conflict have now been exposed as pure inventions. In fact, contrary to conflict, the historical norm has more often been one of mutual support between science and religion. In its formative years in the 17th century, modern science relied on religious legitimation. During the 18th and 19th centuries, natural theology helped to popularise science.

The conflict model of science and religion offered a mistaken view of the past and, when combined with expectations of secularisation, led to a flawed vision of the future. Secularisation theory failed at both description and prediction. The real question is why we continue to encounter proponents of science-religion conflict. Many are prominent scientists. It would be superfluous to rehearse Richard Dawkins’s musings on this topic, but he is by no means a solitary voice. Stephen Hawking thinks that ‘science will win because it works’; Sam Harris has declared that ‘science must destroy religion’; Stephen Weinberg thinks that science has weakened religious certitude; Colin Blakemore predicts that science will eventually make religion unnecessary. Historical evidence simply does not support such contentions. Indeed, it suggests that they are misguided.

So why do they persist? The answers are political. Leaving aside any lingering fondness for quaint 19th-century understandings of history, we must look to the fear of Islamic fundamentalism, exasperation with creationism, an aversion to alliances between the religious Right and climate-change denial, and worries about the erosion of scientific authority. While we might be sympathetic to these concerns, there is no disguising the fact that they arise out of an unhelpful intrusion of normative commitments into the discussion. Wishful thinking – hoping that science will vanquish religion – is no substitute for a sober assessment of present realities. Continuing with this advocacy is likely to have an effect opposite to that intended.

Religion is not going away any time soon, and science will not destroy it. If anything, it is science that is subject to increasing threats to its authority and social legitimacy. Given this, science needs all the friends it can get. Its advocates would be well advised to stop fabricating an enemy out of religion, or insisting that the only path to a secure future lies in a marriage of science and secularism.

Big data prove it is possible for a society to be riddled with racism in the complete absence of racists.

The government audit shows racism can be endemic even in the absence of racists


Trevor Phillips in The Financial Times


If Theresa May’s challenge to her own government on race equality does nothing else, it should take some of the terror out of talking about racial difference. Her government’s compendium of data about ethnic minorities’ experience across 130 public service areas, published this week, confronts us with a baffling puzzle: in a society demonstrably more open-minded than a generation ago, why do race and ethnicity remain such powerful pointers to an individual’s place in society?

You do not have to be a specialist in race relations to know that your doctor is more likely to be a Sikh than a Somali. Most of us can see that people from certain backgrounds — South Asians, Chinese — are more likely than others — African Caribbeans, Pakistani Muslims — to wind up as chief financial officers of big companies.

Sir John Parker, in a review that concluded this week, called out the paucity of non-white leaders in Britain’s top companies, confirming what most business leaders know: there are many available candidates but black and brown faces still do not turn up in the boardroom — except perhaps when they come to clean.

White Britons remain cautious about making such observations, for fear of being held personal responsible for racial inequalities. People of colour stay silent because nobody wants to sound like a grievance-monger. The race audit could be the best chance in years to break the silence.

Ministers have anticipated the charge of stirring up minority resentment by releasing a flood of data, some of which show that whites too can be at a disadvantage. White boys, for example, are far less likely to get in to a good university than the proverbial hijab-wearing Bangladeshi-heritage girl. By acknowledging that some differences might turn out to be intractable, Mrs May’s injunction that disparities should either be explained or eliminated could encourage a more open debate.

Some critics suggest that the audit will undermine minorities’ faith in public services. This underestimates the common sense of most people of colour. We do not live to complain about racism. On the contrary, we factor it into our daily lives, shrugging off discourtesies. But forbearance should not be confused with compliance. The data show that people of colour are right to have low expectations of their treatment by the healthcare system, the police or the courts. Their resentment should not be a surprise.

The audit is far from complete. Crucially, it tells us nothing about the UK’s most important economic issue — low productivity. Yet race relations can have a profound impact on the workplace.

A US survey shows that more than a third of white-collar employees think discussing race is off limits in the office, even though staff of all races think it affects their prospects. Blacks and Latinos believe their ethnicity holds them back; whites fear a word out of place will torpedo their careers. Annual appraisals have become stilted affairs: white bosses worry that too critical an assessment will land them in the dock for bigotry. Poor performance goes unchallenged and mediocrity protected.

The data released this week have all been available before. But together they could revolutionise our understanding of racism. Since the 1999 Macpherson Report into the death of Stephen Lawrence, the official doctrine has been that pretty much everyone everywhere was wrapped up in a racist conspiracy, even if they did not know it.

If that is true, how can we explain the fact that every measure of racial hostility has declined steadily over the past 40 years but there has been no corresponding fall in racial disadvantage? The answer is that most racial disadvantage is not the product of individual attitudes. Even if we were to adopt the widest definition of a racial incident, including online insults, and attribute every one of those acts to a prejudiced white person, it remains statistically demonstrable that the average person of colour will encounter such hostility once in their lifetime — not enough to produce the persistent patterns revealed by the audit.

So if Britons are individually better people what is preventing us becoming a better nation? Part of the answer is inertia: racial patterns we inherited and have not dealt with effectively. An example would be ethnic segregation in cities, baked into the geography because of settlement patterns generations ago.

A new source of racial disparities stems from what may be called techno-racism. Online decision systems use apparently neutral data: names, addresses, place of education. But these data carry racial markers that machines can read as reasons to reject minority applications for jobs, loans or insurance. In the US, companies are rewriting mortgage-lending programmes, having seen fines in excess of $100m for discriminating against African-American borrowers. Big data prove it is possible for a society to be riddled with racism in the complete absence of racists.

Mrs May says that government departments will have “nowhere to hide” in future. Unfortunately, her own privacy legislation will protect ministers from scrutiny. Data protection means that neither public bodies nor private corporations are allowed to keep ethnic data about individuals. A prime ministerial decision to allow companies, particularly recruitment firms, to hold ethnic data could be transformative.

Mrs May’s audit has opened a Pandora’s box. But when the first woman in the legend unleashed evils on humanity, Hope sat gleaming at the bottom. Our modern Pandora, lifting the lid on racism, is betting the facts may be the best way to solve our most toxic social problem. In this, at least, she has to be right.

Move over central bankers, your models are part of the problem

The new masters of the universe are struggling to understand what makes a modern economy tick and their actions could prove harmful.

Chris Giles in The Financial Times

Central bankers usurped the titans of Wall Street as the masters of the universe almost a decade ago. They rescued the global economy from the financial crisis, flooding the world with cheap money. They used their powers effectively to get banks lending again. Their actions raised asset prices, keeping business and consumer confidence up. Financial markets and populations hang on their words. But never have they been so vulnerable. 

As they gather in Washington for the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund, there is a crisis of confidence in central banking. Their economic models are failing and there are doubts whether they understand the effects of interest rates and other monetary policies on the economy. 

In short, the new masters of the universe might not understand what makes a modern economy tick and their well-intentioned actions could prove harmful. 

While there have long been critics of the power of central bankers on the left and the right, such profound doubts have never been so present within their narrow world. In the words of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, they risk being the next ones to be found swimming naked when the tide goes out. 

The ability of central banks to resolve these questions does not just affect growth rates, but is fundamental to the health of the democracies of advanced economies, many of which have been assailed by populist uprisings. 

“If we can’t get inflation back up [trouble lies ahead]. We can’t have political stability without wage growth,” says Adam Posen, head of the Peterson Institute and formerly a central banker at the Bank of England. 

The root of the current insecurity around monetary policy is that in advanced economies — from Japan to the US — inflation is not behaving in the way economic models predicted. 

Deflation failed to materialise in the depths of the great recession of 2008-09 and now that the global economy is enjoying its broadest and strongest upswing since 2010, inflationary pressures are largely absent. Even as the unemployment rate across advanced economies has fallen from almost 9 per cent in 2009 to less than 6 per cent today, IMF figures this week show wage growth has been stuck hovering around annual increases of 2 per cent. The normal relationships in the labour market have broken down. 

Amid this forecasting nightmare, some frank talk is breaking out. Janet Yellen, chair of the US Federal Reserve and the world’s most important central banker, has been the most direct. “Our framework for understanding inflation dynamics could be mis-specified in some fundamental way,” she said last month. Her sentiments are spreading. 

For Mark Carney, governor of the BoE, global considerations “have made it more difficult for central banks to set policy in order to achieve their objectives”. Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, is keeping the faith for now, but observes, “the ongoing economic expansion . . . has yet to translate sufficiently into stronger inflation dynamics”. 

Claudio Borio, chief economist of the Bank for International Settlements, which provides banking services to the world’s central banks, says: “If one is completely honest, it is hard to avoid the question: how much do we really know about the inflation process?” 

The details of macroeconomic models are fiendishly complicated, but at their heart is a relationship — called the Phillips curve — between the economic cycle and inflation. The cycle can be measured by unemployment, the rate of growth or other variables, and the model predicts that if the economy is running hot — if unemployment falls below a long-run sustainable level or if growth is persistently faster than its speed limit — inflation will rise. 

The models are augmented by a concept of inflation expectations, which keep inflation closer to a central bank’s target — usually 2 per cent — if the public trusts that central bankers will do whatever it takes to return inflation to that level after any temporary deviation. The holy grail for central bankers is to claim credibly that they have “anchored inflation expectations” at the target level. 

In the model, the most important factors that explain price movements are therefore the degree to which the economy has room to grow without inflation, termed “slack” or “the output gap”, and the public’s inflation expectations. 

The role of central banks in the model is to set the short-term interest rate. If a central bank sets its official interest rates low, people and companies will be encouraged to borrow more to spend and invest and discouraged from saving, boosting the economy in the short term. Higher interest rates cool demand. 

The first fundamental problem with the model is, as Mr Borio says, “the link between measures of domestic slack and inflation has proved rather weak and elusive for at least a couple of decades”. 

While Japan’s unemployment rate is now back down to the levels of the 1970s and 1980s boom, leaving little slack, inflation is barely above zero. In Britain, unemployment has almost halved since 2010, but wage growth has stuck resolutely at 2 per cent a year. 

But many economists and central bankers are wedded to the underlying theory, which is about 30 years old, and seek to tweak it to explain recent events rather than ditch it in favour of less orthodox ideas. Such nips and tucks are occurring all over the world, although the explanations differ. 

Ms Yellen has highlighted measurement issues in inflation and “idiosyncratic shifts in the prices of some items, such as the large decline in telecommunication service prices seen earlier in the year”. Similarly, the ECB is fond of a new definition — “super core inflation”, which strips out more items from the index and shows the bank performing better against its target than the headline measure. But few central bankers are happy with meeting targets only once they have moved the goalposts. 

A second explanation is that the level of unemployment that is consistent with stable inflation has fallen. In 2013, the BoE thought the UK economy could not withstand unemployment falling below 7 per cent before wages and inflation would pick up. It now thinks that rate is 4.5 per cent. On this reasoning, inflation has been low because there was more slack in the economy than they had thought. 

The problem with such explanations, as Daniel Tarullo, a Fed governor for eight years until April, notes, is that if central bankers keep changing their notion of sustainable unemployment levels “sound estimation and judgment are sometimes hard to differentiate from guesswork in attempting to see through transitory developments”. 

A third explanation is that central bankers have been so successful in anchoring inflation expectations, companies do not seek to raise prices any faster and workers do not ask for wage rises even when jobs are plentiful. 

Mr Draghi recently urged union pay bargainers to stop looking backward at inflation rates of the past when they negotiate wages, in a move that used to be unthinkable for a central banker. The problem with this explanation is both the self-serving reasoning and the fact that inflation expectations cannot be measured. 

“Over my time at the Fed, I came to worry that inflation expectations are bearing an awful lot of weight in monetary policy these days, considering the range and depth of unanswered questions about them,” says Mr Tarullo. 

The Bank of Japan, meanwhile, frets that companies are cutting employees’ hours and raising productivity rather than paying more, which is hampering its ability to push up inflation despite extremely low unemployment. 

If it was not bad enough that the link between the economic cycle and inflation has broken down, the second fundamental problem in central banking is that estimates of the neutral rate of interest — seen as the long-term rate of interest that balances people’s desire to save and invest with their desire to borrow and spend — appear to have fallen persistently across the world. 

The Fed’s central estimates of the real neutral interest rate has declined by nearly two-thirds in five years, from 2 per cent to 0.75 per cent. But the figures are again little more than guesswork. As Ms Yellen said, “[the neutral rate’s] value at any point in time cannot be estimated or projected with much precision”. 

Whether it is because ageing populations want to save more or because of a global “savings glut”, as former Fed chair Ben Bernanke said, low rates no longer have the same impact, limiting the effectiveness of the medicine central banks want to administer. 

Regardless of the terminology, the two problems combined suggest central bankers cannot easily determine whether their economies need stimulus or cooling and do not know whether their monetary tools are helping them do their job. And there is increasing concern, even expressed by Ms Yellen, that the underlying theoretical model might simply be rotten to the core and attempts to tweak it are futile. 

“Essentially you are setting policy on things you don’t know and can’t measure and then reasoning after the fact,” says Mr Tarullo. His core argument is that central banks maintain an absolute faith in the model with absolutely no evidence to support it. 

At a conference last month to celebrate the BoE’s 20 years of independence, Christina Romer, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, urged central bankers to have a more open mind. 

New research is needed to question whether current thinking is deficient, she said, “and if such research suggests our ideas explaining how the economy works are wrong or need to change, then central bankers need to embrace those ideas”. 

The most aggressive critic of the consensus is Mr Borio of the BIS. He accuses central bankers of misunderstanding the drivers of inflation and their effects on the economy. His argument is that global forces of trade integration and technology are more convincing than concepts of domestic slack in explaining the absence of pricing power among companies and employees. 

He asks: “Is it reasonable to believe that the inflation process should have remained immune to the entry into the global economy of the former Soviet bloc and China and to the opening up of other emerging market economies?” 

His concern is that by keeping interest rates low, central bankers have no effect on inflation or the economy other than to increase the level of debt. The result is that it will be harder “to raise interest rates without causing economic damage, owing to the large debts and distortions in the real economy that the financial cycle creates”. 

It is not a popular view, but it is no longer dismissed out of hand. Ms Yellen justified her stance on continuing to raise interest rates gradually in the face of persistently low inflation by appealing to concerns about debt. 

“Persistently easy monetary policy might also eventually lead to increased leverage and other developments, with adverse implications for financial stability,” she said. 

With central bankers credited for keeping the economic show on the road over the past decade, it will come as a shock to many to hear how little confidence they have in their models, their policies and their tools. 

One question posed by Richard Barwell, a senior economist at BNP Paribas, is whether they should let on about how little they know. “It’s rather like Daddy is driving the car down a hill, turning round to the family and saying, ‘I’m not sure the brakes work, but trust me anyway’,” he says. 

For now, the public still trust the women and men who work in the marbled halls of central banks around the world. But that confidence is fragile. Central bankers might have been the masters of the universe of the past decade, but they know well what happened to the previous holders of that title.

Pakistan asks - Is ISIS really bad and unIslamic?

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn


PAKISTAN’S military and government have proscribed the militant Islamic State (IS, aka Daesh aka ISIS) group and declared it an enemy organisation. They have never explained why. Of course, IS’s atrocities — which include beheadings, crucifixions, suicide bombings, and intimidation of civilians in captured territories — have been condemned by many. It is also a fact that IS has killed many more Muslims than non-Muslims. But is IS to be faulted for bad tactics or is its goal to create an Islamic state in Pakistan itself wrong? Should attempts to make a global caliphate be condemned or, instead, assisted?

Our generals and politicians would rather bomb IS than argue logically against it because they know IS’s stated goal resonates with millions of ordinary Pakistanis. Through its internet machinery, IS declares it will establish God’s principality (mumlikat-i-khudadad) headed by a righteous caliph who would govern by God’s law. For this to happen territory must be seized and secured, idolatry and heresy eliminated, and the immoral mixing of men and women stopped. This is sweet music to many Pakistani ears.

IS literature claims that Muslims can properly practise their faith only in an Islamic state. This also resonates perfectly. The leader of Kashmiri separatists and a member of the Jamaat-i-Islami, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, put it succinctly: “It’s as difficult for a Muslim to live in a non-Muslim society as it is for a fish to live out of the water.”
More support comes from Allama Iqbal, Pakistan’s celebrated poet-philosopher who declared that the ultimate goal of Muslims is to create a caliphate. In his influential 1934 lectures The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Iqbal said: “In order to create a really effective political unity of Islam, all Muslim countries must first become independent: and then in their totality they should range themselves under one caliph. Is such a thing possible at the present moment? If not today, one must wait.”


Pakistan’s generals and politicians would rather bomb IS than argue logically against it.

With such a powerful voice advocating the caliphate as an eventual goal, should one then accept IS’s vision as authentically Islamic? Does IS genuinely represent Muslim thought and Muslim aspirations today? For two strong reasons — the ones that generals and politicians fail to articulate — I think not.

First, IS claims its legitimacy through Islam. But this is futile. IS’s takfiri Islam is definitely not mainstream Islam. This one particular strain must be contrasted against countless gentler, differently reasoned, more humane forms that reject IS’s harsh interpretations. To say which one of these is the truer Islam is irresolvable since Islam does not have a central authority like the pope.

But IS wants ‘purification’ and so those Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims who disagree with its version have been declared apostates, stoned, killed, and had their hands and feet cut off. Like the Afghan Taliban, IS delights in destroying humanity’s common heritage. It despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. Even if some Muslims agree with IS’s deeds, most reject them.

Second, IS’s claim that Islam insists upon a caliphate is not supported by the Holy Quran. Every Islamic scholar has to agree that the Quran does not mention a territorial Islamic state. In fact, there is no word for a territorial state in classical Arabic. That which comes closest today is dawlah but this word acquired its current meaning well after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, when the European concept of a geographically defined nation-state was born.

Islam’s greatest sociologist and political scientist, Ibn-i-Khaldun (1332-1406), had emphatically rejected the concept of an Islamic state and opposed using religion in politics. Others such as al-Mawardi (earlier) and Syed Abul Ala Maudoodi (later) thought otherwise, but all agree that the holy texts are not governance manuals.

Quarrels among scholars would have been stilled if the Quran or hadith had defined even the broad outlines of statehood. However these texts provide no hint of an executive or of government ministries. How should administrative units be determined, and the police or army organised. Would there be jails?

Most tellingly, the holy texts leave us guessing on how an Islamic state’s ruler is to be chosen and what might be legitimate cause for his removal. To this day there are furious disagreements as to whether Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) did or did not specify his successor — or even a procedure for determining one. This created an enduring schism on how to select the next leaders of the faithful. So, for example, is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi acceptable as the present caliph or should it be someone else?

There can surely be hugely different opinions on religious and political matters, including whether a caliphate is desirable or possible in a globalised world. These are tolerable, arguable differences. But what Pakistan absolutely must not tolerate is messianic radicalism that encourages the killing of innocents after labelling them kafirs. Whether a group is anti-Pakistan (IS, Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan), or pro-Pakistan (Afghan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad) is irrelevant. Every group that calls for violence against civilians inside or outside national borders should be banned. A victory of religious fanatics would ensure limitless suffering and the destruction of every Muslim society on this planet.

So far ideologically unchallenged, IS is now fast increasing its presence across Pakistan and particularly in Balochistan. Even as it loses territory in Iraq and Syria, its propaganda units are trying to create new generations of religious extremists, much as they have done in Europe. Decrying IS as a rogue movement is insufficient to reverse this trend. It is also futile to claim that IS has nothing to do with Islam because its leadership carefully quotes supportive holy doctrines to justify every major atrocity. Therefore IS must first be defeated on ideological grounds — military action can come later if necessary.

Counter narratives to radicalisation do exist within the Islamic paradigm. A meeting of ulema called by the National Counter Terrorism Authority that I attended earlier this year cogently argued that radical takfiri groups depart from Islamic tradition and that their interpretation of Islamic sources is incorrect. But these wise recommendations, like many before them, have met obscurity. No Pakistani civil or military leader of significance has had the courage to endorse or own them. Extremism can breed rapidly in this climate.

When it comes to meat, the kitchen is a battlefield – and conscience is a casualty

Ian Jack in The Guardian


When he was a schoolboy, the great polymath Jonathan Miller won a reputation as the finest chicken impersonator in north London.

The pleasure his friends and family took in his performance had encouraged him to get the linguistics absolutely right. Rival impersonators at his school were happy to make do with “buk, buk, buk, buk … bacagh” but the future satirist, actor, opera director and neuropsychologist noticed that the noise chickens made wasn’t so regular, that “chickens liked to lead you up the garden path”, as he wrote in Granta magazine in 1988.

“They would lead you to expect that for every four or five ‘buks’ there would be a ‘bacagh’ … What I noticed, after prolonged examination, was an entirely different pattern of chicken speech behaviour. Thus: Buk, buk, buk, buk, buk, buk, bacagh, buk, buk, bacagh, buk, buk, buk, buk, buk, buk, buk, buk, buk … BACAGH, buk, buk …”

There was a war on – rationing, a shortage of eggs. Miller knew chickens intimately because his father, a military psychiatrist, kept them, and towed them in a trailer behind the car as the family moved from one hospital posting to the next.

My own family’s chickens, perhaps kept a little later than Miller’s but for similar reasons, weren’t so well travelled. They merely moved out of their shed in the daytime and back again at night, through a little door that could be lowered and raised like a shutter in an old-fashioned railway booking office.


The industrialisation of the meat supply, which began in the 19th century, worked both for and against compassion

When we got rid of the chickens this sliding door was nailed shut, to survive until the shed’s demolition 50 years later as a mysterious architectural feature that made sense only to those of us who’d seen the creatures stalking cautiously through it – “buk, buk, buk” – in those faraway days of cod liver oil and powdered egg.

What happened to the inmates? My memory is inexact, but I remember a scene in the kitchen: a hen fluttering and squawking (“BACAGH”), my father laughing and half-crying at the same time. “I cannie do it, I just cannie do it.” The hen was a favourite of his called Betty, and what he couldn’t bring himself to do was wring her neck. I don’t know what happened next, or what became of Betty’s four or five companions – perhaps they were sold or given away, or had their necks successfully wrung.

I also don’t recall eating any chicken, and chicken on the menu would have been rare enough to be memorable then, and in our house and many other houses would remain so into the 1960s. All that remains is an image: a frightened hen and its frustrated would-be killer.

Two weeks ago, when the Guardian and ITV published their undercover investigation into dubious work practices at a West Midlands chicken factory, that memory prompted a fantastical calculation. The plant’s owner, the 2 Sisters Food Group, kills and processes 6 million chickens every week. Other firms in the UK kill another 11 million chickens, which means the country contributes about 875 million chickens every year to the global total of more than 50 billion that are reared and killed annually for food.

If only a tiny proportion of these birds were looked on affectionately by the people who killed them, the distress added to humankind would still be considerable: my fantastical calculation imagined that kitchen scene of 60-odd years ago multiplied many million times, like frames in a very long film, each flickering with remorse.

Of course, the ever-moving production lines of the industrial food system spare workers no time to reflect. And they’ve come after all – from 36 different countries, in the case of 2 Sisters – to make money rather than campaign for animal rights.

And of course, the point of the Guardian-ITV story was to raise concerns on the consumer’s behalf rather than the animals’, with footage showing chicken pieces being retrieved from the factory floor and thrown straight back on to the production line, and evidence that packets contained chicken older than the sellby dates suggested.

But while these malpractices may threaten human health, they carry much less emotional weight than the sight of the slaughtering and cutting process itself, no matter how hygienic or well run. They seem like small breaches of discipline in the corner of a gory battlefield that we usually take care to avoid any sight of.

The industrialisation of the meat supply, which began in the 19th century, worked both for and against compassion. On the one hand, it broke the relationship between the animal and his human keeper by taking slaughter out of the farm and the butcher’s shop and confining it to the municipal abattoir, where beasts were literally poleaxed by slaughtermen whose only business was killing. On the other hand, it made a later generation uneasy about the invisible cruelty in their midst. In an increasingly urban and technological society, where animals were sentimentally attractive, the notion of “preventable suffering” grew.

Under the banner of its irreconcilable title, the Humane Slaughter Association campaigned for the humane mechanical killer – the stun gun – that was already used in parts of continental Europe when the association was founded in London in 1911.

By 1913 a Birmingham company, Accles & Shelvoke, had come up with something rather better – the captive-bolt Cash pistol, named after the animal welfarist Christopher Cash, who first had the idea. Since the Slaughter of Animals Act in 1933, Cash pistols have stunned most of Britain’s cattle, calves and sheep and made the fortune of Accles & Shelvoke, which surprisingly still exists to make them.

Poultry are not prepared for death that way. The big processing plants have two methods. In the older, the birds are hung by their legs from a moving line that swings them head-first into a bath of electrified water, which according to the strength and frequency of the current can either just stun the birds (if religious tradition insists they be kept alive for bleeding), or kill as well as stun them. In the newer method, using gas, the birds pass through a machine with a controlled atmosphere that makes them first unconscious and then dead.

If consumers knew how farmed chickens were raised, they might never eat their meat again



These aren’t pleasant facts, and yet in most cases they represent a kindness – a quick and sure death – that has been absent in a typical chicken’s life until that point.

Felicity Lawrence, the Guardian’s writer on the food industry, has vividly described the effects of the genetic research that has gone into finding the most economically efficient bird. Fleshy breasts are particularly important in the broiler chicken. “By day nine, the broiler’s legs can barely keep its oversized breast off the ground. By day 11, it is puffed up to double the size of its [egg-laying] cousin … By day 35, it looks more like a weightlifter on steroids … bones, hearts and lungs cannot keep up. A large proportion of broilers suffer from leg problems … Birds that sit in foul litter suffer more skin disease. Deaths from heart attacks or swollen hearts that cannot supply enough oxygen to their oversized breast muscles are also common.”

Poultry now accounts for about a half of all meat eaten in Britain. It’s cheap. The cruelty that goes into the making of it is unconscionable.

Will India get over its obsession with godmen?

K N Pannikar in The Hindu

The recent revelations about the ‘divine preoccupations’ of godmen in the sacred precincts of their ashrams have been appalling, not because they were bereft of such qualities in the past. From the time of the Maharaj libel case (1862) through the intrigues of Chandraswami and Dhirendra Brahmachari, to the contemporary saga of Dera Sacha Sauda and Asaram Bapu, the list is unending. But this time the incidents of sex, murder and mayhem, which were reportedly enacted in their ashrams, are lurid and startling. That the godmen were able to pursue their interests for years without attracting the attention of the state is perhaps not surprising, given the nexus between political power and religious establishments, but it is reprehensible.

The unflinching faith of the followers in the divinity of godmen is the latter’s main capital, which is assiduously constructed over time. Under coercion or consent, the devotees appear to submit to the extortion or exploitation of godmen. Contemporary India looks like a modern country with scientific establishments, and high-speed trains and expansive highways, but set in a social situation reeking of medievalism, caste discrimination, religious obscurantism, gender inequality and superstitions.


Modernity and irrationality

The coexistence of modernity with irrationality and obscurantism, which has often been dismissed as a passing phase of a society in transition, has been a (the?) hallmark of independent India. The ruling elite pinned their hopes on economic development to overcome this impediment, but economic development has not been all-embracing. Facing the crisis thus generated by the apparently elite character of development, it was not surprising that a large segment of the population succumbed to the temptations of an unreal world which godmen proffered.

Yet another constituency of the godmen were the members of the burgeoning middle class of the post-Independence era. The hallmark of this class was the intense cultural and social crisis for which they sought a solution in other-worldliness advocated by the godmen. They were led to an island of liberation where all social inhibitions could be shed, and peace and salvation promised, through the medium of the godmen. The mindless support godmen thus elicit from their unsuspecting followers is used to garner social, political and economic power.

In recent times, the increasing number of godmen (and women) are spotted in State governments and corporate board meetings, educational institutions, and all other important places. They are not spiritual men but ambitious con artists who purvey deception, falsehood and religiosity in the name of god.


Education not enough

Rationalists and liberals looked upon education which promoted scientific temper and rational thinking as the antidote to what they conceived as a result of cultural and social backwardness. But education has not adequately fulfilled this role. After all, the substantial following that godmen command is not from the illiterate masses, but from the well-educated middle class that tends to celebrate the irrational in the name of culture.

Popular media, either consciously or unconsciously, promotes and reinforces irrationality and superstition. The reading material available in almost all Indian languages is replete with accounts of the charismatic personae and spiritual qualities of godmen. Not only religious channels, but some secular channels too telecast programmes eulogising their qualities and achievements. From these popular representations, and patronage they seem to enjoy from the state, they derive considerable legitimacy.


The godmen are here to stay, until social consciousness undergoes a qualitative change.

IMF: higher taxes for rich will cut inequality without hitting growth

Analysis supports tax strategy of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour in UK – and undermines that of Donald Trump in US

Larry Elliott in The Guardian


The IMF said tax theory suggested there should be ‘significantly higher’ tax rates for high earners. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images


Higher income tax rates for the rich would help reduce inequality without having an adverse impact on growth, the International Monetary Fund has said.

The Washington-based IMF used its influential half-yearly fiscal monitor to demolish the argument that economic growth would suffer if governments in advanced Western countries forced the top 1% of earners to pay more tax.

The IMF said tax theory suggested there should be “significantly higher” tax rates for those on higher incomes but the argument against doing so was that hitting the rich would be bad for growth.

But the influential global institution said: “Empirical results do not support this argument, at least for levels of progressivity that are not excessive.” The IMF added that different types of wealth taxes might also be considered.

Labour seized on the report, calling for higher taxes on the rich, citing the IMF’s intervention as evidence of the need for a fairer tax system.

In its election manifesto, Labour proposed a new 45% tax band on those earning more than £80,000 and a 50% rate for those on more than £123,000.

John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said: “The IMF support the argument we made in the General Election for a fairer tax system. There is no evidence to support those who scaremonger about the effects of making the rich pay fairer tax.”

He added: “ Not only have the Tories slashed the top rate of tax, they still plan billions in tax giveaways to the super rich and big corporations over this parliament.”

Despite claims from ministers that Labour’s tax plans would be both politically and economically damaging, McDonnell believes higher taxes for the rich would be both workable and popular.

“With every day that passes the case for a change of direction at the Treasury grows. Instead of engaging in infighting in his own party the chancellor should listen to Labour’s calls for fairer taxes and increased investment, so we will build an economy for the many not the few.”

Theresa May has repeatedly attacked Labour’s approach as extreme, claiming in prime minister’s questions on Wednesday that Corbyn and McDonnell are on “planet Venezuela”.

But the prime minister conceded at a fringe meeting at her party’s conference in Manchester that public opinion appears to be more favourable to some of Labour’s economic ideas than Conservative strategists had assumed in the run-up to June’s general election.

“We thought there was a political consensus,” she said. “Jeremy Corbyn changed that”.

With Philip Hammond due to deliver his budget next month, it is unclear whether the government will press ahead with promised tax cuts for higher earners, including plans to increase the higher rate threshold for income tax to £50,000.

The fiscal monitor does not mention any country by name and does not specify at what level governments should set the new higher rate for top earners. But the report stressed that cutting tax for the top 1% had gone too far - a strong hint that the IMF has doubts about the pro-rich tax plan proposed by Donald Trump for the US.

Instead, the IMF said higher tax for the rich was necessary to arrest rising income inequality – the argument used by McDonnell and the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The fiscal monitor said most advanced economies in the West had experienced a sizeable increase in income inequality in the past three decades, driven primarily by the growing income of the top 1%.

Traditionally, governments have sought to make their societies less unequal by levying higher income tax rates on the rich and using the proceeds to help those less well off either directly or through public services.

But it found that income tax systems had become markedly less progressive in the 1980s and 1990s and had remained stable since then, even though growing inequality raised the need for a more progressive approach.

In an IMF blog, the head of the IMF’s fiscal affairs unit, Vitor Gaspar, said the average top income tax rate for the rich country members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development had fallen from 62% in 1981 to 35% in 2015.

“In addition, tax systems are less progressive than indicated by the statutory rates, because wealthy individuals have more access to tax relief,” Gaspar said in the blog co-written with Mercedes Garcia-Escribano. “Importantly, we find that some advanced economies can increase progressivity without hampering growth, as long as progressivity is not excessive.”

IMF research found that between 1985 and 1995, redistribution through the tax system had offset 60% of the increase in inequality caused by market forces. But between 1995 and 2010, income tax systems failed to respond to the continuing increase in inequality.

It also said inequality should be tackled by giving a more pro-poor slant to public spending.

“Despite progress, gaps in access to quality education and healthcare services between different income groups in the population remain in many countries,” Gaspar and Garcia-Escribano said, adding that in rich countries men with university education lived up to 14 years longer than those with secondary education or less.

“Better public spending can help, for instance, by reallocating education or health spending from the rich to the poor while keeping total public education or health spending unchanged,” they added.

In its separate global financial stability review, the IMF said it would take several years for central banks to return interest rates to more normal levels due to the risk of aborting recovery.

But the report also highlighted the risk that prolonged monetary support could lead to the buildup of further financial excesses. Too much money was chasing too few assets offering a yield, the IMF said.

A Treasury spokesperson said: “A fair tax system is a critical part of our plan to build a fairer society. Today, the richest 1% pay over a quarter of all income tax while 4 million of the lower earners have been taken out of income tax altogether.”