Reflections

By Mehru Zaffer 

Vienna-born US sociologist Peter Ludwig Berger had once forecast that the entire world would eventually embrace secularism. Today, Professor Berger, who is also a Lutheran theologist, admits with a smile that he was wrong. Although a large part of the world is attracted to secularism, religion remains a powerful force in many societies.
However, what is also true is that the individual experience of faith in today's multicultural and globalised world is shifting. A lot of individuals today seem to prefer a more personal spiritual path than top-down authoritarian religious institutions.
Throughout history, religion has been the glue that held society together. In today's world, however, people are increasingly traveling away from home, trying to forge fresh unities in the midst of new neighbours with unfamiliar habits and values in strange lands. In such situations, strangers strengthen their bonds with each other when they agree upon objective truths or universal values.
Very often, Berger says he tries to imagine if the moral values closest to his heart will also vanish if he woke up one morning to discover that religion no longer exists in the world. He has a strong suspicion they will not. Human beings do not need to take anchorage in God to be decent. He feels that matters of social justice are not theological issues.
Berger had recently returned to Vienna to speak on ‘How Christian can a Democracy be?' before a large audience at the Institute for Human Sciences.
Berger believes having robust confidence in one's own moral convictions is enough. He gives the example of Charles James Napier, the nineteenth century British general in India who forbade sati, or the burning alive of Hindu widows on the husband's funeral pyre. When a group of influential Hindus complained about the prohibition of sati, an ancient tradition, Napier's robust self confidence made him reply that the British also follow an ancient tradition. He said that when men burn a woman alive, the British tie a rope around their neck and hang them.
"You may follow your custom, and then we will follow ours," Napier warned.
Berger warns against both ‘multicultural masochism' and ‘secular militancy'. If he were a multicultural masochist Berger imagines Napier having said, "So in your tradition you burn women alive. How interesting! Tell me more about this tradition of yours".
Those who forbid the practice of religion or show of piety in public are forwarded by Berger as examples of secular militants.
If people want to seek salvation from the Church then that is their choice. If others would like to treat parts of a public space as sacred there is no problem in that either, he says, as the Church accepts that in this day and age it is separate from the state. Similarly, some Muslim countries want to impose the Sharia law, but, he asks, will populations be first asked if this is the kind of law they would like to rule their life?
What a state does with people who disagree with it is at the heart of it all. It is important that a state is not just democratic but also liberal. For it is quite possible for democracies to be illiberal. By itself, democracy is neither good nor bad. And a democracy does not have to be Christian or Islamic to be good. A democracy functions on a foundation of strong institutions and a vibrant, articulate and fearless civil society.
Quoting Fareed Zakaria who writes in The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad that democracy is not inherently good, Berger adds that a democracy is a political arrangement to help keep in place human values. What makes a democracy good is the values that it practices. Regard for human dignity is at the core of a democracy and the voluntary participation of the people make it a liberal democracy.
A glaring example of democracy's deficiencies is the example of 1933 when the Germans elected the Nazis to power. It is up to us to make sure something like that does not happen again.

By Mehru Jaffer

Is it enough that Russia has a new president?
No, it is not, according to Professor Lilia Shevtsova, specialist in Russian presidential politics and co-chair of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Project at the Carnegie Moscow Center for International peace

He vanquished half the world. But from Hellespont to the Himalayas he was cheered by the very people he conquered. Colourful legends that trail the man to this day reveal one thing in common: wherever he went he was considered great. The desire to possess Alexander, also called Sikander in India, is a kind of inter-continental war in itself.

When Tariq Ramadan talks of Islam, he makes more sense than any stereotypical mullah. Yet, the 45-year-old Geneva-based Muslim intellectual is distrusted by both Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Last October turned out to be one of the most inspiring months in recent times.

This was the first time that October 2, birthday of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi declared by the United Nations as the international day of non-violence, was publicly observed in Vienna.