Confronting Violence in the Name of God

Introductory remarks

Rabbi Sacks: Thank you, Richard. Professor Burrage, Professor Flabiboloviv, beloved friends, thank you, Richard, for reminding me of that wonderfully physical encounter with Desmond Tutu. And I can't really top that except the occasion when I was in a synagogue in northeast London, delivering a lecture.

And, you know, I was delivering my lecture in my normal style, and I lectured for an hour. And at the end, when we were having coffee, the audience said, you had us on the edge of our seats. And I said, you mean the lecture, was it that interesting? They said, no, no, we weren't listening to the lecture. We were taking bets as to when you'd fall off. I hope bets are off tonight, please. There's no falling off and there's no Desmond Tutu.

But it's still a pleasure and an honour to be here. Let me first thank both King's and New York University, who are jointly hosting this lecture, to congratulate the new Principal of King's, Edward Byrne, wishing him a speedy recovery, saying what an enormous honour it is to welcome him to this country and to this institution after his extraordinarily distinguished career as head of Monash University in Australia, to say what a privilege it is to be working with the Dean, Professor Richard Burrage, a friend of many years. My thanks to you, to the Theology Department, to Claire Downing and the King's team, without whom tonight couldn't have happened.

It's been such an enormous honour and pleasure also to get to know and to work with Professor Gary Slapper and his wonderful team of NYU here in London. And it's just wonderful also to have this special guest, Janet Verne Alperstein, who is here just, I think, just for this week from New York, Deputy Director of Global Development at NYU. And it's a special delight to have my incredible students.

Are you here, guys, from King's? Anyone here from King's? Oh, the guys from King's, hi there. And from NYU. We've got the guys there.

How did you find it tonight? My GPS sent me completely the wrong direction, so you've got a better sense of direction than I have. Anyway, thank you so much. Thank you for the wonderful privilege of teaching at King's and NYU.

And a special mention and thank you to Sir Michael and Lady Morven Heller, who are here this evening, who, together with Lord Kalms, co-sponsor my chair at King's. And a special thank you in absentia, well, at a distance, to Ingeborg and Ira Rennert, who sponsor my chair at NYU. Very, very special people.

I have to say that lecturing in London here and lecturing as we do in New York does create this extraordinary problem of these two nations divided by common language. And it takes a bit of time to get used to the fact that not every word means the same in English English as in American English. And one of the words that doesn't mean the same is the word ‘momentarily,’ which in American English means ‘soon,’ but in English English means ‘briefly.’

So almost inevitably, when I am introduced in America, somebody gets up and says, “Rabbi Sacks will speak momentarily.” And I reply, “No rabbi ever speaks momentarily.”

But there is one ambiguity. Incidentally, when I was a philosophy student at Cambridge, I overheard two logicians, modal logicians. One asked the other, ‘Tell me, is ambiguous ambiguous?’ And the other replied, ‘In what sense?’ So there is one ambiguity that I want to clarify before I begin, and that is the ambiguity of the word ‘academic.’ 

The word ‘academic’ on the one hand means relating to education, to scholarship, and I hope there will be a little of that, not much, but a little in what I have to say this evening. But very often, the word ‘academic’ is taken to mean theoretical, not having application to the real world.

I do not intend my words tonight to be academic in that sense. The issue that they relate to is very real and present and dangerous in our world. The issue of violence in the Middle East, in sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Asia, far, far too many countries, where if not the cause, then at least the dividing line, seems to be along religious lines, whether that is between one religion and another, or dividing lines within religion itself, between Sunni and Shia, or different kinds of Christianity, or Judaism, or what have you.

And that is the phenomenon that I don't think many people expected we would be seeing and talking about in the 21st century, violence in the name of God. 

Why does it happen? What can we do about it? 

And I believe we can only understand what is happening in today's world if we take a multidisciplinary perspective, which will involve a little touch - not much - of biology, neuroscience, theology, philosophy, history and sociology. So what I want to ask you to do - and I know it's a big demand, but please bear with me - is to come with me tonight on what has been for me a long intellectual journey, to try and understand how we got to where the world is today. It is a journey, in seven stages, and I hope you'll stay with me. 

So let me start with stage one. In stage one, I want to talk about three routes that have arrived at the same fundamental question, which is our dilemma.

Let me begin with route one, taken by Charles Darwin. Darwin was fascinated by a clear tension within his Theory of Natural Selection. Darwin knew that if he was right on natural selection, that nature has evolved, species have evolved, through competition for scarce resources, or, as we would say now, on which gets to pass its genes on to the next generation, on Darwin's theory, ruthlessness should win.

It should be the hawks that, on average, stand a better chance of handing their genes on to the next generation than the doves. And it should be that, over time, the gene for altruism (if you'd call it something like that), should have gone extinct. Instead, as Darwin notes, altruism is valued in every human society known to humankind.

Why is that? How come that ruthlessness... How come, to put it very simply, that a bundle of self-ish genes get together to produce selfless people? 

That is Darwin's arrival at this point. 

There is another way of arriving at this point from the opposite direction, the point at which I arrived at it. Because, after all, where I began was by studying moral philosophy. And there was one question that really haunted me. For 2,500 years, people have asked, what makes us moral? And they have offered many kinds of answers. 

Plato thought what made us moral was knowledge. Aristotle thought it was habit. Repeated action produces virtue. Kant thought it had to do with reason. If we wanted to do something, we should act only for the thing we could prescribe for everyone. David Hume, Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment felt that it had to do with emotion, with sympathy, empathy and the moral sense. Jeremy Bentham - of another place that we don't talk about in this sacred company - thought it had to do with calculation of consequences. The greatest good for the greatest number. 

But there was one question that was never asked in all my years as an undergraduate. That is, that if it's so straightforward to be moral, how come that so many people at so many times have a tendency to lie, rob, cheat, exploit, humiliate and kill? 

That was the question nobody ever asked.

If knowledge, rationality, emotion, all these things lead us to be moral, how come we are so often not moral? And that bothered me indeed for many years. It led me away from moral philosophy. How come? 

And then, finally, we arrive at the same question in terms of theology, where we can put it very, very simply and bluntly.

This is the question I have been asking for the past several, many years. Why is it that people hate in the name of the God of Love, kill in the name of the God of Life, wage war in the name of the God of Peace and practise cruelty in the name of the God of Compassion? These things bother me. 

So we arrive at the same point from three different directions: biology, philosophy and theology.

There's a story told about a Jewish mystic who is wondering whether it was better to be born or not born, goes away for a year and meditates. And at the end of his year of meditation, he looks to heaven and says, ‘Thanks God, life is good.’ And then he pauses and he says, ‘But tell me, God, if life is so good, how come it's so bad?’ And that is essentially the question.

How come, if it is so easy and right and religious or philosophical to be good, that we are so often so bad? 

Or Darwin asking the opposite question. How come when we have this disposition to be hawkish and ruthless, how come we also have that capacity for altruism? The same question essentially arrived at from three different starting points. That is stage one.

Stage two is the answer to the question. And the answer turns out to be surprisingly straightforward and yet we often forget it. It was already given by Darwin himself in his book, “The Descent of Man.”

In the language of today - it wasn't Darwin's language, but in the language of today - the explanation is this. We pass on our genes to the next generation as individuals. But we only survive as groups.

Now, there's a debate raging at the moment between E.O. Wilson of Harvard and Richard Dawkins of Oxford as to whether evolution works through group selection or not. But that's a debate for biologists. However, it is simple that these two mechanisms - handing on our genes as individuals but surviving as groups - actually explain why it is that we have two sets of emotional responses basically hardwired into our brain.

They are there as a result of evolutionary pressure. On the one hand, we have all sorts of instincts that we can call altruistic. We are willing to share with others. We act for the benefit of all, and so on. And all those altruistic instincts, as Darwin saw, were necessary for the survival of any group. Any group is held together by altruism.

On the other hand, we have another set of reactions generally called the fight-or-flight reactions, which are all survival instincts in relation to a member of another group. When we meet somebody who is not of our group - especially when we meet a group who are not from our group - all of those instincts, those fears, that flush of what Daniel Goleman calls “The amygdala hijack,” those powerful emotions of fear, are activated. 

So, we have these two different sets of emotional reactions. One towards members of our group, the other towards members of other groups. And those are a result of our evolutionary heritage. They're part of biology.

In answer to the question, are we angels or are we demons? The answer is, we are both, but we are angels to the people like us, and we are demons to the people not like us. And that is part of our nature. 

That has been the reason for the failure over history of universalisms of all kinds, whether they take the form of empires or religions or intellectual systems.

All universalisms fail to recognise that humanity is this side of history, inescapably divided into groups. And the essence of any division of humanity into groups is that groups unite and groups divide. And they do so in the same moment. Every group unites many individuals, many ‘I’s’ into a collective ‘We.’ But that group is defined by being the people who are not them, the people who are not members of the other group. There is no such thing as forming a group that doesn't unite within and divide between. The unification and the division go hand in hand. 

And that tendency to form groups, for all the good and the altruism it produces, and for all the bad and the fear and the hostility and the aggression, these are to do with our groupishness. And that is part of biology.

It is also a matter of culture as well. When we move from biological groupings to larger cultural identities, and culture decides which groups we belong to and which groups we don't belong to, and that then perpetuates the biological tension. 

This failure to understand the significance, the rewards and the dangers of the human tendency to form groups, and simultaneously unite and divide is the critical weakness in all universalist systems, whether they be intellectual or religious.

It is true that if we were all Kantians, we'd all get along. Or if we were all Humeans, we'd get along. Or if we were all Benthamites, it'd be fine. And if we were all Christians or all Muslims or all Jews, we'd be... No, no. Christians and Muslims, yes. If we're all Jews, we'll have a terrible...

But the truth is, universalisms never work. They're like universal languages, like Esperanto. How many people do you know who speak Esperanto? The great thing about universal languages is nobody speaks them.

And it is... We have failed over the centuries and the millennia to understand this fundamental groupishness with all the great good it does and all the great harm it does. The things that unite us also and simultaneously divide us. That is why we are both good and bad, and that answers the theological question, the philosophical question and the Darwinian question. That's stage two.

Stage three. The question is this. When, where and why does religion enter this picture? And for that, we have to go back to the Darwinian model and some tremendous work that was done in this field from the late 1970s pretty much to today. It's really exciting work. And we have to deal here with three types of human groups. The first, and the most elemental, is kin, is immediate ties of family.

As you know, it was a famous thing, J.B.S. Haldane was asked, ‘Would you dive into a river to save your brother?’ To which he replied, ‘No, but on the other hand, I'd dive in to save two brothers, four nephews or eight cousins.’ That is the mathematics of kin selection. We share half of our genes with our siblings, a quarter with our nephews, etc., etc.

And that is the primary form of human bonding and altruism that we feel for kin. It's called kin selection. It's been analysed to a great deal of mathematical precision and it's based on genetic similarity.

Our first form of altruism is formed by that genetic similarity that happens among kin. That's stage one, and that's biological. 

Stage two, where all the activity has gone on from Robert Axelrod in the late 70s to Martin Novak in 1989 to his latest work on super cooperators. And the question is, how do people - indeed, how do the higher primates or dolphins, social animals - cooperate at a level that's larger than kin, larger than genetic relatedness? 

And this is where the fun stuff has happened, with games theory, computer simulations and something called the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. What this tells you is this, that there's a rule that says, ‘If I act nicely to you and you act nicely to me, then we both benefit from the cooperation. If I am a so-and-so to you and you are a so-and-so to me, we both suffer. But what will stop me preemptively being nasty to you before you get the chance to be nasty to me?’

What actually emerges as the best strategy for surviving among strangers, among other people whose reactions you can't guess? 

That is why Games Theory was invented to create a system for working this out. As a result of massive computer simulations in the late 70s, the best programme that won was called Tit-for-Tat. You know what tit-for-tat is? It's called, I'm nice to you and then whatever you do to me, I do to you next. And that is the best strategy that wins. It's called, nicely, “Reciprocal Altruism.” But it's actually tit-for-tat, okay? 

In 1989, a Polish mathematician now at Harvard called Martin Nowak invented a programme that beats tit-for-tat and it is called “Generous Tit-for-Tat,” which says as follows: I'll be nice to you, then I'll do the same thing to you as you did to me, but every few goes, I'll forget the last nasty thing you did to me. Forgetting is the nearest a computer gets to forgiving. Okay? So this is generous tit-for-tat.

And you can work this out, that if strangers relate many, many times, they encounter one another many, many times, eventually, however nasty they are to one another, they work out that being nasty to you means you'll be nasty to me, so I'll suffer in the long run. And eventually, if you do this lots of times, that's what iterated means, you do this lots and lots of times, eventually you learn to cooperate. 

And that is how we establish what is called trust.

Trust is what allows us to behave cooperatively with people to whom we are not related. But it depends on repeated face-to-face interaction, which is why there is more trust in villages than in cities. In a village, you can probably leave your front door unlocked. Can you? Or your bicycle unchained. I wouldn't recommend doing it in a city. Because in a village, you have repeated face-to-face interactions, and in cities, you meet as strangers.

There is a biologist called Robin Dunbar, who has worked out that human beings have very big brains, so that we can work out who to trust and who not. And he's actually done a mathematical analysis of how many people we can trust, depending on how big our brain is. And the average maximum size of the people we can know well enough to trust turns out to be 150.

I don't know what you do with this university with that. How many students did you say we have, Richard? Okay, so we'd better break those down into small classes. I was giving this lecture to the military academy at Sandhurst, and I was asked by one of the military chaplains, and I told him this story, and I said, ‘How many military chaplains are there?’ And he said ‘150, exactly.’ So Robin Dunbar's constant works quite well. 

So the maximum number of people you can trust, who are not your relatives, is 150, which gets you bigger than your immediate family, but it gets you only to the small group. 

This means that there was a crisis when people stopped being hunter-gatherers and began to move into agriculture, to move into cities with the birth of civilisation.

There was stage three, the problem of civilisation, which is how do you establish relationships of trust among strangers? That is the problem of cities. It's the problem of civilisation.

And that is when organised religion appears on the human scene. Organised religion creates a moral community. It allows us to make that second huge leap from kin to small group, from small group to city. Religions create trust across large populations by creating a shared world of meanings, rituals, a cosmic order, which is both out there in the universe and in here in the mind. And that is why when we see the birth of cities, we see the birth of organised religion.

I'm not saying that is theology, but it is a functional account of why it is that humans could not do without religion. And you cannot have large cities without religions. Those religions, of course, begat and sustained empires, and empires also clashed. So religions didn't stop the clash of groups, but they did make groups very much bigger indeed. 

Now I repeat, it's very important for us to understand at this time that conflict between groups has nothing to do with religion as such. Conflict has to do with our humanity. It is indivisible from our humanity and from our genetic predisposition to form groups. It makes very little difference if the groups we form are religions, nations, states, ethnicities, races or groups held together by ideologies like communism. It makes no difference.

The problem is our groupishness, not our religiosity. The great historian of civilisation, Will Durrant, once did a calculation and worked out that since the dawn of civilisation, from then until today, there have only been 29 years in the history of the world where a war was not being fought somewhere or other. And the great encyclopaedists of war, Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod, who actually produced the massive Encyclopaedia of Wars, where they analysed 1,800 different wars, come to the conclusion that less than 10% of those involved religion at all.

So conflict is not created by religion. It is created by groups and religion simply enlarges the scope of the group. Stage three. 

Stage four. I want to move to stage 4 by asking a single question.

What is the occupational hazard of monotheism? 

Well, if you read the Prophets of Israel, the occupational hazard of monotheism was polytheism. We're always getting terribly upset at people serving idols and this, that and the other. So as far as the Prophets are concerned, the great danger to religion, to monotheism, is polytheism.

For those who spend more of their time reading the collected works of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, the occupational hazard of monotheism is atheism. 

However, at a critical moment, a really critical moment, an axial moment, for the birth of Christianity, and for the development of what we call Rabbinic Judaism, we now know that there was a different challenge altogether. And we know this because of the two great manuscript discoveries of the 1940s.

One of them is very famous. 1947, the discovery of the text, the scrolls in Qumran, known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Another, not quite as famous but no less significant, was the discovery two years earlier in 1945 in the Sinai Desert, of a group of ancient scrolls called the Nag Hammadi Manuscripts.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were part of a Jewish sect that flourished in the 2nd and 1st century before the birth of Christianity. The Nag Hammadi scripts were, what, from the 2nd century, would you say, of the Common Era? And they include 13 so-called Gnostic Gospels, early Gospels that never made it into the New Testament and that have been thought lost forever. Now, what we discover from both the Dead Sea Scrolls and from the Nag Hammadi Manuscripts is that the occupational hazard of monotheism in those days was dualism, and this is incredibly important.

It's the most important thing I have to say this evening. 

Dualism is the view that there is not one force operative in the universe but two, a force of good and a force of evil. 

And that leads to a whole series of dichotomies between earth and heaven, between the physical and the spiritual, between body and soul, and fundamentally between God and the Devil, Satan, the Antichrist, the force of evil.

And what dualism does is that having made these huge dichotomies, it then applies them to humanity, and it divides humanity into two. The children of light and the children of darkness, the saved and the damned, the redeemed and the infidel. 

Dualism comes into Judaism and Christianity in these sectarian ways revealed by these manuscripts from the outside. It comes, on the one hand, from Iran in the form of Manichaeism, and on the other hand, from Greek mystery religions - in particular, the phenomenon known as Gnosticism, which comes into Judaism, into the Gospels, from Greece.

They are not mainstream to Judaism or Christianity at all. But what is significant, incredibly significant, is that this critical moment, when the tectonic plates of humanity were shifting, dualism entered monotheism, both Judaism and Christianity. And that was a strange and dangerous mutation.

So the question is, what leads monotheists to become dualists? 

And this, I believe, is the answer. Dualism arises at a critical moment, a moment of crisis in the history of monotheism, when the cognitive dissonance between the world as it is and the world as it was supposed to be according to the script, is just too great, and something breaks. It arises like this.

If we believe, as Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe, in the God of Abraham, a God who is involved in history, then there comes a moment when actual history diverges too far from the script of how history was supposed to turn out. 

Here are a group of believers, and they are saying, ‘We've done everything God wanted of us. We were faithful, we were pious, we followed the rules, and yet we are suffering. The bad guys are ruling, and we, the good guys, are suffering.’ And that is a major crisis of faith. 

It is a major crisis even for the heroes of faith. After all, Moses himself says something like this. So does Jeremiah, so does Habakkuk, so does Job. Jesus, on the cross, expresses this mood when he quotes from Psalm 22 in Aramaic, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” So this crisis is a crisis that is felt by the heroes of faith.

But the trouble is, not everyone is a Jeremiah or a Jesus. And then for some people, some of the time, the suffering has gone on just too long without a glimmer of hope. And that is when monotheism breaks into dualism.

Because it becomes easier to believe that there is an active force of evil in the world frustrating the purposes of God than to believe that all this bad that is happening comes from God Himself. Or the second alternative, which is, we cried out to God and He wasn't listening. That becomes too hard to bear.

And it is easier to believe that there's an active force of evil in the world that is frustrating God's purposes and afflicting God's people. And that is when dualism is born. And we can see that in those manuscripts in Qumran and Nag Hammadi.

Now, dualism was, as I say, for much of the time, marginal, sectarian. The Nag Hammadi Manuscripts and the Dead Sea Scrolls were not mainstream in Christianity or Judaism. But the significance that monotheism could mutate into dualism was immensely significant.

Because I've told you, the whole problem of the human condition is our tendency to form ourselves into groups, us and them. And dualism turns that division of humanity into groups into something total, categorical, ontological. 

There's an abyss between us and them. We are the good, and they are the bad, and there is no shade of grey between. It's no longer the Montagues and the Capulets. It's no longer the Tertullians and the Corleones. It's not even the British and French or the Kanthians and the Benthamites. It's not even Arsenal and Manchester United. This is serious, guys.

This is the children of God versus the enemies of God. It doesn't get more serious than that. Stage four, the birth of dualism.

Stage five, why is dualism dangerous? 

I have said, we all form groups. All groups unite and divide, and those divisions create conflict and violence and war. But dualism is different, and I want to explain why.

Dualism gives rise to three phenomena that are, in my opinion, the most dangerous in all of human history. And they are these. 

Number one, dualism demonises your opponents.

So, for instance, from the 4th century, from John Chrysostom onwards, Jews, to some church fathers and later theologians, become not just the people who aren't Christian, not just the people who didn't recognise the Messiah, not even the people who were involved in his death. They become something else. They become Satan, Antichrist, children of the Devil.

And the trouble is, when you demonise your opponents, you dehumanise them. And when you dehumanise your opponents, you kill all normal moral sensibilities. Once you have dehumanised your opponents, you no longer feel for them empathy, sympathy or compassion.

Dualism, danger one, demonises its opponents. 

Secondly, and here I... Forgive me, but I have to speak from the heart. Secondly, dualism defines me and my group as victims. And you and your group as perpetrators.

So, for instance, starting with the 11th century, around then, whenever something goes wrong in Christian Europe, from around 1096 onwards, it becomes the fault of the Jews. It was they who desecrate the host, they who poison wells, they who spread the Plague. If a Christian child is missing, the Jews killed him to use his blood to make matzah for Passover. The blood libel was a British invention, created, born in Norwich in 1144, and still alive and well today in the Middle East. 

The morality of victimhood is desperately dangerous because it enlists our highest sympathy. We have compassion for a victim and that is right and it should never be otherwise. But once a group defines itself as victims, it has abdicated all responsibility. 

Why do Christians murder Jews? Well, we have to because we're the victims. It wasn't us, it was them who poisoned the wells or spread the Plague. We are just the victims and that means you can commit very terrible crimes without responsibility. 

Third, and this is the real danger, dualism gives rise to the most dangerous phenomenon of them all and that is the phenomenon of altruistic evil.

Altruistic evil is what lures perfectly decent, honourable and nice and good young men and women and turns them into terrorists and suicide bombers. Why? Not because they are evil. Exactly the opposite, because they are good.

And because they are doing what they are doing to honour their people who have been humiliated or avenge their people who have been wronged, by ridding the world of God's enemies - Satan, the infidel, the Antichrist. 

And again, let me repeat, there is nothing essentially religious about this. The Nazis had the same view of their opponents, so did the Communists, so did the Hutus in Rwanda about the Tutsis. Germans were taught, German children were taught that Jews were vermin, they were lice, they were cancer, they were responsible for the German defeat in World War I, they were responsible for German hyperinflation in the 1920s, and they were responsible for Soviet Communism. Every child in Germany knew the Jews are the cause of our misfortunes. Hence, exterminating them becomes an act of courage and loyalty to your people.

That is altruistic evil and it is the most dangerous phenomenon I have ever encountered in the history of the world. And it is still alive today. 

Stage six, where are we today? Where are we today? 

The answer to that, I think, is this. The last time we in the West faced a situation like the one we do now was in the 17th century. The similarities between now and the 17th century are very real. The 17th century faced a crisis brought about by a revolution in information technology. What was that revolution? Printing. Gutenberg in Germany, Caxton in Britain. 

Immediately following that revolution in information technology, communication became faster, cheaper and more global than ever before. Before printing, large swathes of Europe were illiterate. By the beginning of the 17th century, there were more than a million Bibles in circulation in England alone. That is an extraordinary turnabout. And many of those Bibles came from Geneva. They were banned in England, so they were smuggled in from Geneva. It was global communication. 

Next, the new technology empowered the masses of people as no technology had ever empowered them before. Until then, if you were a member of the public and you wanted to know what the Bible says about this and that, you had to ask a priest. You couldn't find out for yourself. Books were too expensive. Manuscripts were too expensive. Besides which, you couldn't understand them because they were written in Latin or Greek. But all of a sudden, within a century, now you can read it for yourself.

At a cheap price, you can buy the book and you can read it in the vernacular. It was Tyndale who produced the first translation of the Bible into English in the 16th century and paid for it with his life, burned at the stake in 1536. 

The result of people having access to knowledge, that in the past had been confined only to an elite, meant that there was a challenge to all established structures of power that hitherto had been unquestionable and part of the order of nature, such as Kings, for which Charles I discovered to his cost when he got executed in 1649.

When you have a revolution in information technology that allows lots of people to communicate speedily and cheaply, all structures of power are thrown into the balance. 

Fifth, the primary expression of all this ferment in the 17th century, as now, was religions. It took the form of the Reformation in its Lutheran and Calvinist forms, very different forms.

The result was close on a century of religious wars throughout Europe, especially in France between 1562 and 1598, and then the 30-year war in Central Europe, which cost as many as one-third of the population of Europe between 1618 and 1646. Those wars were brought to an end only in 1648 by the Treaty of Westphalia that marked a new world order based on sovereign nation-states and the balance of power, the order that has lasted from 1648 pretty much to today. 

All of these transformations that took place in the 17th century have been paralleled by what has happened in the 21st century - the revolution in information technology, globalisation of communication, the empowerment of crowds brought together by social media, the overthrowing of established authorities in the whole of the Arab Spring, from Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya, etc, etc, the shaking of the foundations almost everywhere else, in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, a proliferation of wars, and - as Henry Kissinger concludes in his new book entitled “World Order”- we may be seeing the end of the Westphalian order that has held sway since 1648.

And as in the 17th century, religion has been a key element in all of this, and although the religion is usually described in terms of extremism, the really dangerous thing is that some of it takes the form of dualism and all that it entails. It becomes a war of the faithful against the greater or lesser Satan, against the Crusaders and the Zionists. 

So let me summarise the arguments so far.

Stage one, the problem. How is it that good people come to do bad things? 

Two, the answer. We form groups, and we have altruism towards the members of our group but aggression towards the members of other groups.

Three, stage three, I pointed out the three stages of human evolution, from kin-based systems to small face-to-face communities to cities and civilisations. And it was at the third stage that organised religion enters the scene as the solution to the problem of trust between strangers. 

Stage four, the emergence of dualism. 

Stage five, the dangers of dualism.

And in stage six, we brought the story to today by talking about the similarities between the 17th century and now, which leads me to the last stage, which is what is the solution?. 

Friends, I want to say quite simply this. I would like to suggest that there is one thing we can learn from the 17th century and one thing we mustn't learn from the 17th century.

The thing we should learn from the 17th century is this. That what won the wars was weapons, but what won the peace was ideas. 

They were remarkable ideas, that came from an extraordinary group of thinkers, the most famous of them Milton, Hobbes, Spinoza, John Locke. And those ideas, born in the 17th century, formed the basis of the modern world.

There were five basic ideas born in the 17th century. Number one, the idea of social contract., Number two, the idea of the moral limits of power. Number three, the concept of human rights. Number four, the principle of toleration. And number five, liberty of conscience. Extraordinary ideas produced in a time of crisis by great and very impressive thinkers.

It is weapons that win wars, but it is ideas that win peace. 

What shouldn't we learn from the 17th century? We should not conclude that the same ideas that worked then will work now. They won't.

And the reason is that what is happening today is almost exactly the opposite of what happened then. What happened in the 17th century is that people became disillusioned with religion. They didn't get disillusioned with God, they didn't get disillusioned with faith, but they got disillusioned with organised religion, and principally with the Catholic Church of the day.

And therefore, since the disillusionment was with religion and the hegemony, the control that religion had over various spheres of life, the solution was a long, four-century-long process of secularisation. 

It took four stages. In the 17th century, came the secularisation of knowledge in the form of Newtonian science and Cartesian philosophy. In the 18th century, came the secularisation of power in the American Revolution and the French Revolution, and the formal or substantive separation of Church and State. In the 19th century, it took the form of the secularisation of culture. The secular equivalents of cathedrals became art galleries, concert halls and museums. They were the secular cathedrals, and Hegel said that “Modern man, instead of morning worship, reads the newspaper.” So the press became a secular... All of this culture secularised in the 19th century. And the fourth stage, in the 20th century, beginning in the 1960s, was the secularisation of morality, the move away from the Judeo-Christian ethic.

So the 17th century on its own, it was a long, slow process of secularisation, because what people had become disillusioned with was religion. 

In the 21st century, the movement is in exactly the opposite direction. The real disillusionment today in the Middle East is with secular nationalisms, of the form that they took in Egypt, in Syria, in Iraq and elsewhere.

What we are seeing throughout the Middle East and parts of Africa is discontent with the entire system of Westphalia that divided the world into nation-states with specific boundaries based on geography rather than ethnicity, culture, religion and what have you. The Westphalian system, which worked for Europe but was imposed artificially in the 20th century on much of Africa and the Middle East - where it was not an autonomous, endogenous development - it was seen as something imposed from the outside. 

And what we are seeing elsewhere and globally is another kind of disillusionment with the liberal, individualistic, market-driven cultures of the West by people who come from traditional cultures.

The thing about today's Western secular culture is that it offers the maximum of choice and the minimum of meaning. 

And this is highly consequential, because in 1897 already, a very great French sociologist called Émile Durkheim, argued that in societies where there is what he called Anomie, societies where there is no shared moral code, you will find an increase in suicides. This was Durkheim's dazzlingly accurate intuition.

In other words, Durkheim was saying people will sacrifice their lives if the prevailing culture offers no shared universe of meanings. 

And we now know that people will sacrifice their lives, and sometimes other people's lives as well. 

In short, what happened beginning in the 17th century was a process of secularisation. What is happening in the 21st century is a process of de-secularisation. That means one thing above all. 

If religion cannot provide the solution, then religion will certainly be the problem.

The Miltons, Hobbes, Spinozas and Lockes of the 21st century, if they emerge, will all be religious thinkers, basing themselves on religious texts. And how will they be able to manage that? And the answer is simple. They will manage it if they remember, demonstrate, teach and persuade people that dualism is not monotheism.

The will to power is not the voice of religion. The will to power is the voice of Nietzsche, the first man to say “God is dead.” The principle that says it is better to be feared than to be loved. The creed of terrorists everywhere was the principle first enunciated, not by God or by a prophet, but by Machiavelli. The idea that evil in the name of God is holy is not just false, but it is a desecration of the name of God, the God of Justice, the God of Compassion and the God of Life. 

I've said a dozen times this evening, it is not religion that causes violence. It is our humanity that causes violence. However, when violence is done in the name of God, we cannot simply say that is not religion. It demands a religious response and nothing less will do.

This is the challenge of our time. 

Religious extremism demands a religious response that is strong and unequivocal and tells it the way it is. And says that if Abraham is our guide, if Abraham is our father in faith as Jews, as Christians and as Muslims, if the God of Abraham really is the God, if we are all really in his image, if we are all His children, then we must find a way of seeing a trace of Abraham's God in the face of a stranger, in the face of an enemy. 

We have to be able to say that I can see an echo of God in the voice of somebody who is not of my faith.

I must be able to say that whether it's a relationship, an interface between Jews and Christians, Jews and Muslims, Christians and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians, Sunni and Shia… if we cannot see something God-like in the face and the voice of our enemy, then we are guilty of dualism, not of monotheism. 

Monotheism is the cure to this mutation that is currently endangering our world. 

If we do not do this, if we do not stand up forcefully and with courage - Jews, Christians, Muslims, together - then we have a very real danger that we will find ourselves once again in the world of Genesis chapters 5 and 6 of the generation before the Flood, when the Bible says “The earth was filled with violence” and “God regretted that he ever made man on earth.”

This time, we cannot rely, as people did in the 17th century, on a secular government keeping the peace between warring factions, between Catholics and Protestants. 

This time, we have to listen to the voice of God Himself, refracted through our sacred texts, as interpreted through the eyes of faith, the eyes of love, the eyes of the generosity of spirit. As refracted through the great minds of the Jewish and Christian and Muslim past, that taught us to interpret every verse of the Bible in terms of the God of Love, in terms of the three loves: love of God with all our heart, all our soul and all our might, love of our neighbour as ourself, and above all, the command - repeated 36 times in the Mosaic books - to love the stranger. 

If we don't do that, we will find that in destroying our enemies, we will have destroyed ourselves.

We will have betrayed our children, dishonoured our faith, and desecrated the very name of God. 

It took 50 years of very dedicated planning and energy and money to take a small extremist interpretation of a religion and spread it until it became the dominant voice of that religion in certain parts of the world. It didn't happen by accident.

It will take no less an effort. It will take us 50 years to articulate the ideas and raise a generation of leaders - religious and otherwise - to be able to speak in another language, the real language of God, that will allow us to live together in generosity and forgiveness and love. 

Religious violence must meet in our time with the strongest possible religious response. And to do this, we must join hands across boundaries of faith and create a true monotheism to defeat the division of the world into the children of light and the children of darkness, or we will find ourselves all in the darkness. 

Friends, there is no alternative, and the time is now to bring a message of love to answer the most forceful voices of hate. May we have the courage to do so. 

And I thank you for listening so generously. Thank you. 

Concluding remarks