Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ brand was still on their hide. Some of these people were determined to resolve the conflict between their sense of who they were now and the demands of their childhood religious beliefs. They challenged these beliefs, changed them into beliefs which gave them courage and optimism, and ended their depression. Others dared not challenge their childhood beliefs and so remained depressed.¹³

      Religion might have had its origins in the search for justice, but it was justice for the tribe, not for all human beings. Religious groups, like all groups, define themselves in terms of who is excluded. Matt Ridley in his study The Origins of Virtue wrote,

      The universalism of the modern Christian message has tended to obscure an obvious fact about religious teaching – that it has almost always emphasized the difference between the in-group and the out-group: us versus them; Israelite and Philistine; Jew and Gentile; saved and damned; believer and heathen; Arian and Athanasian; Catholic and Orthodox; Protestant and Catholic; Hindu and Muslim; Sunni and Shia. Religion teaches its adherents that they are the chosen race and their nearest rivals are benighted fools or even subhumans.¹⁴

      The wickedness of those excluded from the religious group has to be emphasized by the group’s leaders in order to deter any of their flock from straying. During my Presbyterian upbringing I heard much about the wickedness of the Catholics. Nowadays we often hear about ecumenicalism, and in public the clerics of different religions are polite to one another. In private ideas might not have changed that much.

      At a refugee centre in London I met Father Rossi, a Catholic priest from Italy, who told me about the wickedness, not of the Protestants, but of the Italians from southern Italy. I asked him about the current situation in the debate on whether the northern states of Italy should secede from the south. He said quietly but very firmly, ‘It’s not likely but it should happen.’ He told me that he was from the north. He spoke of the south with bitterness and hatred. ‘They should be left to themselves, cut off from the north completely.’ He spoke of the corruption in the bureaucracy, politics and the police. ‘Every manager’s chair,’ he said, ‘is filled with someone from the south.’ (My parents used to talk about how a Catholic church and presbytery always occupied the best land in any Australian town.) He showed none of the tolerance and forbearance which many Christians like to think are peculiarly their own.

      I remembered my conversation with my Italian friends Lorenzo and Magdalena when they, devout Catholics, told me that Italy is no longer a Catholic country.¹⁵ I asked Father Rossi, ‘Is Italy a Catholic country?’ He replied immediately, ‘No, it is not.’ In asking him why it had changed I spoke of how the school system was now predominantly a state system where religion was an optional subject. I saw this as part of the explanation why Italy was no longer a Catholic country, but he saw this as the effect of a deeper cause, which was the work of the Devil.

      I asked him if he was speaking literally or metaphorically. His answer was quite unambiguous. The Devil is real, and the Italian people had been seduced by him. The Devil, he said, cannot make people do things but he can suggest things, and people can be too weak to resist these suggestions. He hated the Devil and he hated southern Italians. His defence against the Devil was exorcism. ‘I am an exorcist,’ he said. So the Devil must be exorcized and the southern Italians driven from the north and confined in the south. Italy should be two nations, north and south.

      The schools, he explained to me, had ceased to teach history, philosophy and religion, and instead taught frivolous subjects like screen printing. Without a knowledge of history, philosophy and religion people were rendered vulnerable to the blandishments of the Devil. I thought, but politely did not say, that the history, philosophy and religion he wanted taught in the schools would be those versions which are approved of by the Catholic Church. In his view, not believing what the Catholic Church teaches is evidence of being seduced by the Devil.

      Implicit in Father Rossi’s definition of Catholics and non-Catholics are ideas which clearly relate to national groups. Indeed, our religious and our national groups can overlap markedly in the characteristics we give them and in what we want to get out of them. Chiefly what we want from our groups is support for our meaning structures. According to Jean Said Makdisi, being forcibly labelled as belonging to a certain group is a terrible insult to a person’s individuality. Mamphela Ramphele found sustenance from both her political and religious beliefs through her darkest days as a political activist under apartheid, but she saw a similarity between religious and activist communities. She wrote,

      As in the case of religious conviction, political activists are moved by something greater than themselves – a belief in a future which might be better than the present, a desire to be engaged in the establishment of a better order, and compassion for the underdog. Secondly, they share a sense of fellowship with others who are similarly committed. The need for renewing such fellowship in ritualized meetings – church services or political gatherings of the faithful – is also a common feature …

      Then again there is a common desire of individual members of such communities to conform to the group. The more fundamentalist the tendency, and the more insecure the community feels, the more likely conformity will be enforced …

      The willingness of individuals to sacrifice or subordinate their personal ambitions or goals for the sake of the group is also a notable similarity. This tendency is often closely tied to a willingness to engage in communal sacrificial acts, either symbolic or involving actual physical violence. Such sacrificial violence is sometimes justified as an important and necessary act to contain communal violence by focusing it on a sacrificial victim. Some of the most gruesome necklace murders [killing a victim by setting alight a motor-car tyre filled with petrol which is placed around the person’s neck] committed by political activists in the 1980s involved the sacrificial death of fellow activists suspected of disloyalty.¹⁶

      Whenever we identify with a group we immediately put ourselves in jeopardy of being expelled from the group. As children we discovered how painful this could be when other children refused to play with us, or when our parents, in order to discipline us, threatened that we would be expelled from the family. In our teens our peers became very important to us, and our happiness depended on being accepted by them. A pair of shoes or a certain haircut could put our meaning structure under threat because we had failed to conform to our group.

      Because the group demands conformity individuals must adapt their meaning structure to what the group sees as the correct set of ideas. For some people this is a serious threat to the integrity of their meaning structure, while for others just about any change is acceptable because they value the security and support which the group gives them above all else. However, the group itself might not be secure because it is under attack from other groups. Then, as Mamphela Ramphele pointed out, conformity is likely to be enforced.

      In such a situation the fear of being prey comes to the fore. The group then can create a defensive solidarity, not just against the outside enemy but against a member of the group. Coming together to sacrifice a scapegoat can produce in the group what Barbara Ehrenreich called ‘a burst of fear-dissolving strength’.¹⁷

      The choice of a scapegoat is never random though it might be mistaken. The scapegoat is someone who is considered to have betrayed the group; the punishment will serve as a warning to those group members whose loyalty to the group might be less than absolute.

      To many whites in South Africa necklace murders were simply utter barbarism, acts of mindless violence which showed that the blacks were incapable of governing themselves. Such an interpretation maintained the whites’ sense of superiority and thus their own meaning structure, but it failed to take account of how all СКАЧАТЬ