*  *  *

NS: What exactly do you mean by the sacred in All Things Shining?

SK: Usually when we talk about the sacred, we punt the question and kick it off to Nietzsche. He said that the sacred is whatever you’re not allowed to laugh at in a given culture. One of the ways that you might characterize our age is to say that there’s almost nothing left that people aren’t allowed to laugh at. You can take a kind of ironic distance with respect to almost anything. That gives us a certain kind of freedom, of course. You might think of that as progress over what we had before. On the other hand, it also destabilizes lives, because it makes it very difficult to know on what basis one should make decisions. In a sense that I think we owe to Charles Taylor, we call this a secular age, an age without a notion of the sacred. That doesn’t mean there are no religious believers in it—obviously there are a lot of religious believers in America, for instance. Instead, it means that the role of religious belief in a person’s life today is different than it was in earlier epochs in the history of the West.  Our commitments, including our religious commitments if we have any, seem to take place in the general social context of what is always and essentially retractable, and for that reason they cannot ground our lives in the way they might.

NS: How does it differ, would you say, beyond everything being potentially funny?

SK: As a matter of caricature, for instance, you could say that in the Middle Ages, if you came across someone who didn’t share your religious beliefs, then it was socially justified for you to think of them as less than human. This was a justification for all sorts of religious wars. But this move doesn’t seem to be socially sanctioned in the modern West. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who make that move, but we call them fanatics. I think this is a kind of progress. But such progress has an undermining effect. If it’s true that you have to take seriously the possibility that someone who doesn’t share your religious beliefs is nevertheless living a life worthy of your admiration, then you can’t think that the life that you aspire to live is a life whose principles can be gotten from your religious beliefs alone.

NS: Then is the kind of polytheism that you call for structured by the condition of pluralism?

SK: Yes, I think it is. But this polytheism is importantly different from relativism. It is not the view that any set of values is equally good as any other set of values. Rather, it’s the view that there’s a plurality of possible good lives that people could aspire to live—some of which are incommensurate with others. It leaves open the possibility that some lives are just objectively bad and not worth living. But we’re not in the position, and don’t want to be in the position, of identifying what the objectively bad lives actually are.

NS: Does this polytheism address the existence of gods?

SK: That’s a really good question. And a hard question. I think the book is neutral with respect to that question, at least on one interpretation of it. What the book is against is the idea that the only source of meaning in life is the individual. That’s the view that we think ultimately leads to a kind of destructive nihilism, of the sort that we find in David Foster Wallace, say. In a certain way, we’re against the Enlightenment ideal that the most basic characterization of us is as autonomous agents who can freely give meaning to our own lives. You can’t make something be meaningful for you just by deciding that it’s going to be meaningful. There’s something psychologically plausible about this. If you’re going to experience certain aspects of your life as mattering more than others, you can’t expect that to happen just by deciding it will be so on your own.

NS: But you can expect it from gods? Are your gods really there in some sense?

SK: It would be silly for us to say, for instance, that Athena really exists. Almost nobody would accept that. But there’s a genuine phenomenon that Homer understood, which is the phenomenon of human excellence taking place in the context of masterly, skillful activity, which, when you perform it, isn’t experienced as having you as its source.

NS: Such excellence has to be, even in a vague sense, given to us?

SK: That’s right. Especially if a culture is in danger of nihilism—that we’re going to experience nothing as having any more meaning than anything else—then the conception of human beings that characterizes us essentially as autonomous is going to be inert. We need to look somewhere else. And no other epoch prior to our own was characterized so centrally by the threat of nihilism, precisely because no other epoch rejected so totally the importance of experiencing the meaning of a situation as in some sense given to us. So the question is, is there something in earlier epochs that we could appropriate, consistent with the progress we want to hold on to, that would give us the resources for resisting that threat?  One thought in the book is that it may be worth retrieving and appropriating from our history the various accounts it offers us of how one might cultivate in oneself the capacity to experience the demand for a certain type of excellence as given to one in a life or a situation

NS: It’s common for Western philosophers to go back to the ancient Greeks to answer these sorts of questions, but it’s less common for them to turn to Homer, rather than to Plato. Why do you turn to Homer?

SK: The Homeric age was one in which people stood in wonder at the amazing things—and awful things—that could happen to them in their lives. That’s something like the opposite of the nihilistic threat that many say characterizes our contemporary age. This led us to ask what is operating in the background of Homer’s understanding of the world that motivates him to emphasize this mood of wonder. One thing seems especially important for him: that human beings can’t be acting at their best unless they’re in a situation that is drawing them to act, in which the gods are present in their acting. In the Odyssey, at any rate, in example after example, when the heroes do something extraordinary, it is explained by Homer as involving the work of the gods in the agent’s activity.  That doesn’t mean that the gods are responsible for the agent’s action, but it doesn’t mean the agent’s action was performed autonomously either.  The two need to come together in a kind of Homeric middle-voiced action for human excellence to emerge.  Even when characters are acting at their worst, Homer seems to explain it in terms of characters having provoked the gods to abandon them. This runs directly counter to our age, in which being at one’s best is understood as making free decisions, rationally and autonomously. Of course, we can’t endorse everything Homer said. There are ways in which our culture has made progress over Homer’s culture—abolishing slavery, for instance—and that make us want to hold it at arm’s length. A long arm’s length.  But there’s something interesting in this central thought of his culture nevertheless.

NS: So where does that leave the thinker? You mention passages like—quoting the Odyssey—“Be silent; curb your thoughts; do not ask questions.” Isn’t this antithetical to the very philosophical task you’re engaged in? How does one think about not thinking?

SK: It’s true that thinking of the sort that is central to Western philosophy doesn’t seem to play a central role for Homer. He was interested in a paradigm of human excellence that happens in skilled activity, in one domain or another. When you’re at your best in that domain or activity, you don’t experience yourself as the source of the activity. That’s the phenomenon that we’re interested in. Now, I think you could say that this kind of masterly, skillful activity can happen in the context of thinking. Homer doesn’t say that; his paradigmatic characters are characters of action, not contemplation. But when the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century French mathematician Poincaré talks about the moment of insight, he talks about working really, really hard on a problem, and banging his head against it for days and weeks on end, until some moment when he’s not thinking about it at all and the answer finally comes. He doesn’t experience it as having himself as its source, but as having been given to him. That’s parallel to what Homer was talking about.

NS: How does one cultivate this kind of orientation toward the world, if not by just rationally assenting to it?

SK: In order to put yourself in the position of being able to experience these moments of excellence, you have to acquire certain skills that allow you to navigate certain domains. Whether it is Achilles’ domain of being a great warrior, or Odysseus’s domain of being a great adventurer, or the domain of being a great pianist, there’s some kind of skill—often a bodily, physical kind of skill—that you need to perfect before you have the experience of being drawn to do what the domain demands. I think we’re with Pascal on this. He realized that even if you’ve come to be convinced by his Wager—his argument that it is better to believe in the existence of God than not—it doesn’t mean you’re a believer yet. You can’t make yourself a believer by deciding you should be. Rather, you need to find people who are believers and cultivate in yourself the skill of doing the things that they do. Partake in their rituals; learn their skills. Through that, you at least open yourself up to the possibility that you’ll experience some non-identical authority that leads you to act in certain kinds of situations.

NS: How, then, do you choose which domains are worthy of cultivating?

SK: That’s a difficult question, and I don’t think there’s any general answer to it. We don’t have a substantive proposal in the sense suggested by the question. But what we do think is that, insofar as you’re a human being, you’re the kind of being that already cares about particular domains. One way that you could try to figure out what those domains are is by asking yourself whether your life would be as full if you gave up a certain practice for another one of equal functional value. If you think you could make that substitution without loss, then the domain isn’t really one that you care about. But if you feel somehow that it wouldn’t be right to make that substitution, then you’ve discovered that it’s a domain you care about, and that there’s more you could uncover by developing the skills for navigating it.

NS: So, it’s a process of discovery.

SK: It’s a process of discovery, that’s right. We’re the kind of beings that already care about stuff. But we can fail to recognize that about ourselves by taking an ironic distance from everything. To the extent that we’re successful in achieving that kind of distance, it will eventually become the case that nothing matters for us. It’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. But it also means that we’re the kind of beings that can undo that by coming to recognize what we do care about and allowing ourselves to rediscover the distinctions of worth that are already there.

NS: The subtitle of the book speaks of “rereading the Western classics.” But it also seems like a lot of the classics get tossed out, or at least harshly criticized—everything from the advent of Greek philosophy to Herman Melville is stricken with a kind of blight in this account.

SK: Well, Melville is the savior.

NS: That’s what I mean. So, how would one go about reading Western literature on this account? What do we do with the thousands of years in between? What do we do with Shakespeare?

SK: We don’t talk about Shakespeare in the book, of course. It would take another whole book to talk about Shakespeare.

NS: What, then, are we to get out of the authors you do consider?

SK: On our reading of the history of the West from Plato forward, there’s an increasing emphasis on seeing people as rational, autonomous agents, until it finally becomes the central characterization of ourselves in the modern age. But to the extent that earlier works of art still have in them a sense of us as beings open to an already-given meaning, we think they’ve got something important. Interestingly, different epochs in the history of the West articulate this kind of openness in radically different ways. The wonder Homer has in describing the beauty of Odysseus when he encounters Nausicca, or in describing Helen’s beauty, is a completely different way of being receptive than the sort you find in Dante. Dante thinks that what you’re receptive to is God’s love, which grounds a very different kind of conception of how to live an admirable life than the one we find in Homer. Indeed, their views about the life worth aspiring to are so different that in Dante’s account of the universe Odysseus is consigned to one of the lower circles of Hell. Yet despite this difference, Dante shares with Homer the idea that trying to give meaning to our lives autonomously is what makes things likely to go awry. For him, the people inside the city of Dis are full autonomy freaks, so to speak. They really believe—and Satan is the worst of them all—that the meanings in the world come from the decisions they make rather than from God. Some aspects of Dante’s story are hard to be devoted to, on our view, but he got this really right.

NS: What do we do with the ways in which they fundamentally differ, though? Do we have to choose one over the other—Homer’s Olympians over Dante’s Christ?

SK: The polytheism of the book is a polytheism that runs across Western history. In it, there are lots of different modes of receptivity, and some are incommensurate with each other, but each might nevertheless ground a life that’s worthy of our admiration. It’s up to you and me and every one of us to ask ourselves whether there is anything in a given story that we can appropriate. Each represents a possible way for us to resist the threat of nihilism.

NS: Might this kind of polytheism threaten to bring us around full-circle? You call for “a life attuned to the shining things,” yet this sounds to me suspiciously like a really good description of modern consumer culture.

SK: Those are shiny things, not shining ones!

NS: What, then, is the difference between shining things and shiny things?

SK: David Foster Wallace, for one, was concerned about all the shiny things. He was concerned about the massive amounts of entertainment that we find in our environment, things which won’t let us stop looking at them, and yet looking at them undermines our ability to be at our best. Those are shiny things. Shiny things attract us to themselves, but make us less worthy of people’s admiration in the end. Shining things, as I take it, are the opposite. They’re the kind of things it takes work to be attracted to. You have to cultivate in yourself a skill for recognizing them as attractive. Once you do, they draw you to act in ways that are worthy of admiration.

NS: One of the great aspirations of modern, autonomous reason is to universalize ethics, to agree on what is valuable and what we reject. How does one go about thinking about ethics in your view? There’s a worry among people reading the book that you don’t quite give us what we need to stay away from Hitler rallies. Maybe they see the ghost of Martin Heidegger in what you’re doing.

SK: The Hitler rallies are an important issue; we don’t underplay that. But it’s true that the book doesn’t offer a prescription one can follow that will allow us to distinguish between rhetoric it’s worthwhile to allow yourself to get caught up in and rhetoric it’s dangerous to allow yourself to get caught up in.  We don’t think there is any general rule that will distinguish these cases from one another, and so we don’t think there’s a general principle to apply.  Still, we’re committed to the idea that there is such a distinction, and that one darn well better learn to develop the skill for recognizing it—just as a wheelwright can recognize the distinction, through his skill for working with the wood, between a piece that’s worth using and one that should be thrown out. This might sound risky. It might sound safer to just avoid rallies altogether and stick to just dispassionate rational discourse. But if you are worried about the threat of nihilism, then dispassionate, rational discourse is never going to help. Besides, it really seems as though progress wouldn’t have been made on various issues of social importance if people didn’t allow themselves to get caught up in the passionate rhetoric of an articulate leader devoted to the cause of change.  The example we use in the book is civil-rights legislation.  If there weren’t lots and lots of people who allowed themselves to get caught up in the passionate rhetorical discourse of Martin Luther King, Jr., then it seems likely that the important social changes he provoked would never have occurred. The danger of never allowing yourself to get caught up in those kinds of situations, therefore, is that it keeps changes for the better from happening. That’s the danger that our critics have to confront.

NS: But I don’t think you necessarily have to choose between a King rally and dispassionate, rational discourse. You could think of someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose response to Nazism was by no means cool and rational, but was still predicated on a kind of universalism. He felt that the one God was speaking to him through history, telling him to assassinate Hitler. Could you claim Bonhoeffer as representing what you propose as well? Or even King himself?

SK: Universalism might be a red herring in this case. In a secular age like ours, nobody really wants to deny that, at least on the surface, there’s an apparently incommensurate range of admirable lives. Universalism, in this context, is just committed to the idea that there is a single, unifying principle that brings them all together. But this is a kind of eschatological hope that I think we can step back from, at the moment. Given that we’re not at the end of time, how are we supposed to live in the context of apparent plurality? It seems to me that even somebody who is committed to an ultimate universal story has to deal with this question. So, yes, maybe Bonhoeffer is the kind of figure we could appropriate.

NS: So, to be clear: you’re not requiring people to abandon their monotheism to partake in your polytheism?

SK: I don’t think our position should require anyone to give up their commitment to monotheism—though it puts pressure on monotheism when it’s interpreted in a particular, fanatical way, and most people in our culture can agree that such fanaticism is something more or less to be avoided anyway. Take, for instance, Ishmael in Moby-Dick. He confronts the character of Queequeg, whose way of life is radically different from his. He’s a cannibal! He eats fifty people before breakfast, he’s tattooed all over, and he’s perverse in all sorts of ways—as far from the Christian way of life as you could possibly imagine. Yet Ishmael, who says he was “born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church,” concludes that he needs to take seriously what he finds to be admirable in Queequeg’s life. It’s Queequeg’s coffin that finally saves Ishmael. Melville seems to be describing a kind of Christianity open to what is admirable in other ways of life.  This kind of open Christianity may still be committed to the idea that, in ways we cannot fathom from here, there is a kind of unity to the apparently incommensurate goods with which we are confronted.  We have nothing to say against that kind of monotheism.  But we are against Ahab’s idea that the meaning of a life cannot be grounded except in an ultimate understanding now of that eschatological unity.

NS: I’m curious about your reflections about how the book has been discussed and received. What do you think was at stake, for instance, in the vitriolic response from Garry Wills?

SK: It’s a good question.  I’m afraid I don’t really understand Wills’s personal background well enough to know what’s at stake for him. It seems to me clear that something rubbed him the wrong way early on in his reading of the book.  Sometimes when that happens a person loses interest in finding out what the book is really about and starts reading it instead for whatever examples he can find of how to win points against it.  I think that something like that must have happened, since that’s the only way I can explain the huge range of mis-readings that the review promulgates.   I will say that on our blog, Charles Spinosa has written an essay analyzing Wills and David Mikics’s responses as motivated by the very commitment that the book is trying to diagnose as what leads to the danger of nihilism.  That seems to me an interesting possibility.

There are a range of other interestingly motivated responses to the book as well.  I recently discovered, for example, that some people are misreading our appropriation of the Homeric Greeks as something like what Nietzsche did: admiring nobility and strength instead of weakness and humility. Nietzsche thought that the noble warriors of the Greeks were worth admiring because they were noble warriors. But that’s not our position at all. We’re admiring them for almost the opposite reason. We’re interested in the idea that you can’t become noble on your own, that there’s a sense in which we require for our excellence non-self-identical authority, and that, in moments of excellence, we experience that what is not-us as drawing us to act in the way we do.

NS: Since we started on Nietzsche, maybe that’s a good place to end.

 *  *  *

NS: Can you say a bit about what you’re hoping to tell us with Religion in Human Evolution?

RB: The purpose of the book is to show how deeply historical—beyond what we normally think of as history, or even prehistory—and how biological human religion is. We have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution. And evolution never stops. The notion that human evolution at some point stopped and “history” took over is absurd, though it is widespread among various social scientists and humanists.

NS: Reaching so far back in time, how did you go about marking your story’s beginning?

RB: The advent of helpless infants who require intensive, long-term parental care as long as 200 million years ago is an absolutely critical first step. I don’t say that religion appears there, but without it the religious culture that appears much later just isn’t possible. Think about it. The central icon of Catholic Christianity is mother and child. That motif is so deep in not just our human experience but in our animal, biological past. For much of evolutionary history, the period of helplessness was very brief. Most animals become autonomous and able to fend for themselves very quickly. Reproduction comes in a matter of months for many mammals. In larger and more complex mammals, the period of parental care grew longer and longer. There was a quantum leap among the great apes, and with us it became really long. Imagine, an animal that can’t take care of itself until age 21! It’s a weird thing, biologically. But it allows for the development of what the ethologist Gordon Burghardt calls the “relaxed field”; relieving the more brutal pressures of the struggle for existence and opening the possibility for a great deal of experimentation, creativity, and innovation.

NS: And what about the story’s end?

RB: The book actually ends two thousand years ago, and some people may wonder why I would do that. Christianity and Islam aren’t even in it. Between you and me, I’m so glad they’re not, because I don’t have to fight any stupid battles of the culture wars. But the real reason it ends there is that life is finite. I just couldn’t get through the last two thousand years without writing two volumes, and that was more than I could imagine, but I hope to write a smaller book dealing with the recent past.

NS: Still, you insist, almost as a refrain, that “nothing is ever lost.” What does that mean about the connection between this distant past and the present?

RB: “Nothing is ever lost” means that what we are now goes all the way back through natural history. We are biological organisms and not simply computerized brains. By focusing totally on the present, thinking only about science and computers, and forgetting four billion years of life on this planet, we are losing perspective on who and what we are. We’re running great risks of doing things that will not be good for us. The cost can be very high indeed if we reach the point where we can’t adapt to our own increasingly rapid adaptations. We run the risk of early extinction. So this certainly isn’t a triumphalist story, but it is trying to get at what, in the very long run, leads to the amazing creatures that we are.

NS: How would you characterize the progress of your own thinking between the 1964 “Religious Evolution” paper and Religion in Human Evolution?

RB: Well, that paper was one of the first things I ever wrote. Actually, the first draft of it was written when I was a postdoctoral student at McGill around 1955. In the back of my mind, religious evolution was the thing I cared about most. It always structured my most frequently-given and most well-received undergraduate course on the sociology of religion. I referred to evolution from time to time, but between that 1964 essay and this book, although I was thinking and learning about religious evolution, other things became more urgent. I finally retired at 70 in 1997, and for the first time in my life I could devote myself to this book as I have for the last thirteen years.

NS: How did those other more urgent concerns present themselves?

RB: I was pulled by external forces. The whole preoccupation with America was particularly ironic because it was the one society I didn’t want to study. I chose to be a Japan specialist in graduate school to get as far away as I could! But once the “Civil Religion in America” paper came out in 1967, all kinds of nonacademic groups wanted to hear from me. I thought, well, this crazy country is all mixed up, and if I can help clarify things I should respond. That led to The Broken Covenant, and then the Ford Foundation asked to fund Habits of the Heart. They were worried about what was happening to the American middle class. I didn’t ask for money for Habits; they pushed it on me. I found four really amazing younger colleagues who did most of the fieldwork. In that way, I got distracted by various things that were intrinsically important—so important that I gave them high priority—but that kept me from doing what my life’s work was meant to be.

NS: What has occupied you most during the last thirteen years that you’ve been working on this book?

RB: I was learning an enormous amount. All my life I have been deeply interested in ancient Israel and ancient Greece, and my graduate degree was in sociology and Far Eastern languages, so I knew a lot about ancient China. Back then I read Confucius and Mencius in their original classical Chinese. Since, I’ve had to catch up with current research in each of those fields. India, though, was the one place where I really started almost from scratch, like an undergraduate. That turned out to be utterly fascinating. I knew a lot about Buddhism because Buddhism is important in East Asia, particularly in Japan, but I didn’t know early Buddhism, and I didn’t know much about what we call Hinduism. Then I discovered the cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald’s notion that human culture, in evolutionary terms, moves from episodic, to mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic—that made all kinds of sense. To some extent, ontogeny repeats phylogeny, because children go through something like the same thing. So it’s a deeply interdisciplinary study. I’m drawing on biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and child-development researchers all in order to understand the deep roots of what would ultimately become religion. I’ve learned so much. It has been a deep pleasure to write this book.

NS: What about Jaspers’ notion of the “axial age,” that crucial period in the first millennium BCE when each of these civilizations flowered? Has it been framing your thinking since the beginning?

RB: It’s already there in the 1964 article. Benjamin Schwartz, a leading scholar of ancient China, organized the first discussion of the axial age in American academic life, I think, in an issue of Deadalus quite early on. Ben was my teacher and my colleague, and I was very influenced by his reading of Jaspers. So Jaspers goes all the way back, but of course I never really applied his insights in detail until I wrote this book. More recently, there was a conference in 2008 at the Max Weber Center at the University of Erfurt in Germany, for which my axial age chapters were provided as a base for discussion.

NS: Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation has recently helped renew public interest in the axial age concept too. What do you think of that book?

RB: I’ve been with her up on the platform, and I know she’s a very intelligent person. But she doesn’t know much about the axial age. For her, it’s all about compassion. Compassion is a great thing, but that just won’t do! When she ends up excluding Greece from the axial age because there was no compassion there, I thought I would pull my hair out. It’s so simple-minded. In terms of the big picture, I don’t see any other book that does anything like what I’m trying to do.

NS: Comparisons like axial theories can allow differences between cultures to be obscured by ostensible similarity. How do you address the danger of such universalism?

RB: The problem of the universal is difficult in every case. The universal and the particular can never be separated; they always go hand in hand. But if you read my four axial chapters you would never think that these cultures are all the same. They are very, very different. I never want to talk theory without giving really detailed ethnographic examples. Here, I learned from my friendship with Clifford Geertz. From our graduate school days on, I always admired Cliff as an ethnographer. Do you know Talal Asad’s essay about Cliff?

NS: The one in the Genealogies of Religion volume?

RB: It’s full of things that are just plain false. It attacks Cliff as an Orientalist and cites Edward Said. I went back and looked carefully at Orientalism. Cliff Geertz is one of the few people whom Said completely exonerates, but you wouldn’t dream that this was the case by reading Asad. I’ve actually been warned by former students not to make Geertz so important in my preface because Geertz is in the doghouse now. Well, I want to bring him out of the doghouse! Cliff always insisted on the really deep detail—the “thick description”—and there’s a hell of a lot of that in this book. I had to educate myself on every one of these societies, both theoretically and in terms of ethnographic details.

NS: Religion in Human Evolution is an incredibly broad and ambitious work, so unlike much of the scholarship being done right now. Do you think there is too much pressure to narrowly specialize in the academy today?

RB: Tell me about it. The pressure to have articles in the primary reviewed journals of your profession in order to get tenure is really awful. The economics of the academic world today makes it all the worse. Who can take thirteen years to write a book like this? Fortunately, I’ve been in good health. But Cliff died at 80. I was very angry at him for that—I wanted him to read this book!

NS: I wonder if you have an opinion of journalist Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, which offers, in some ways, a comparable story about the development of religion in evolutionary perspective.

RB: I think Wright is a very bright guy, and he has some interesting things to say. But he’s very hung up on the notion of gods and, particularly, God. His book overwhelmingly focuses on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. You would hardly know that half the world is not there. Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism are huge traditions of enormous importance, and they aren’t monotheistic. Again, this reflects the fact that our preconceptions about what religion is are so influenced by Protestantism—either real Protestantism or the secularized Protestantism that dominates our culture—and its assumption that beliefs are the most important thing. But it’s clear all the way through history that practices are primary and beliefs are secondary. I’m not saying that you can’t learn something from Wright and other journalists like him—Nicholas Wade, for instance.

NS: Yes, Wade’s latest book is The Faith Instinct. You’ve read it?

RB: I read that in advance for Penguin. I told the editor that I admire a lot in the book, but there’s so much I can’t agree with. Wade says at some point that Christianity is the first universal religion. Yet Buddhism is four hundred years older than Christianity, and if it’s not a universal religion I don’t know what a universal religion is. There’s also a strong focus on selectionism and the notion that religion plays a functional role in the evolutionary process. But religion is dysfunctional all the time, as well as functional. It’s not so simple. One of the important things about religion is that it is a sphere which is partially protected from selection. Religious creativity occurs when people pull out of the whole selectivity issue. Becoming celibate—obviously you couldn’t be less selective that that. Yes, selection is always in the background. But it’s not always there in the foreground. If you don’t understand that, you’re missing a lot.

NS: As someone trained in the social sciences, how did you go about engaging with scientific material? How did you weed through the current research and find insights that could help your project?

RB: In part it goes back to the fact that I became a major in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations in the second year of its existence. My whole undergraduate and graduate training brought me into clinical and social psychology, and anthropology. I’ve never been one of these boundary-guarding sociologists who thinks that if something isn’t sociology I can ignore it. This is also very much the spirit of Talcott Parsons; he was the quintessential sociologist, but he never drew any boundaries. Jerome Bruner, a developmental psychologist, was an important early influence. More recently, I did it just by finding who the best people are and reading their books. I’ve had colleagues who helped steer me, but it has really been self-help all the way.

NS: It is rare to see someone lately so informed by both the humanities and scientific research. You seem to be doing very much what Barbara Herrnstein Smith is calling for in her Natural Reflections.

RB: It’s a wonderful book that came just at the right moment for me.

NS: Say more about how it impacted you.

RB: Well, she makes the strong case that an explanatory science and an interpretive science are not incompatible, that they’re working at different levels, that they are revealing different kinds of truths, and that we can learn a lot from each. I wouldn’t say that this was totally new to me. Again, this was very much a part of Cliff Geertz’s thinking too. He wrote an early essay on the evolution of culture and the brain in the 1960s, before most people were talking about it. But Smith writes so eloquently. It’s really more the way she said it. She isn’t interested in bitter diatribe or polemic, and of course neither am I.

NS: Over the course of your career you’ve been able to do a unique kind of public theology within social science. Do you think that that kind of role is still open to younger sociologists?

RB: Christian Smith is an example of a younger person doing that. At one point I very much wanted to bring him to Berkeley, but it was precisely that side of him that my colleagues didn’t like, and he wasn’t brought. Nonetheless, he’s certainly one of the two or three most influential sociologists of religion today, so he hasn’t been excluded from the discussion by any means. Even Bob Wuthnow—though you could hardly call him a public theologian—has a very sensitive ear for religious reality, and his writings are always full of sympathetic understanding of the things he’s writing about. I think it’s possible. But whether I should have included three sermons in The Robert Bellah Reader is still an open question, because I think it did foster a degree of prejudice against a book that has a lot of other things in it. I did that partly deliberately.

NS: To what do you attribute that prejudice?

RB: The academic world is one of the few places where prejudice is supposed to be totally banned, and we’re politically correct on everything, but it’s still a place where you can attack religion out of utter, complete, bottomless ignorance and not be considered to have done anything wrong. It’s astounding to me to hear what some people can say with the assumption that everyone would agree with them, based on nothing whatsoever.

NS: An important part of your message has been the famous concern expressed in Habits of the Heart about “Sheilaism”—the kind of individualistic spirituality that you and your colleagues saw at work in the United States. Some have suggested recently, including your former student Harvey Cox, that some of these nontraditional spiritualities are finding a place in social and political life in a way that wasn’t quite recognized before. Is the way you think about new kinds of spiritualities evolving?

RB: I certainly think that so-called spirituality can have social and even political consequences. I’ve seen this among environmental activists, who often have some kind of eco-spirituality and who are very organizationally loose. They switch from one group to another, and if one group isn’t pure enough they go to another. And yet they spend a long period of their lives doing good work in a cause. In the end what I feel is most problematic about “I’m spiritual but not religious” is: what the hell are you going to tell your children? I’m allergic to the notion that so-called institutional religion—by which people mean organizations such as churches and synagogues—is bad. Institutions are very important and if you think you can get along without them, you’re putting yourself on the wrong line; you can’t.

NS: So your conclusions in Habits of the Heart stand?

RB: If you think about what has happened in American society, or even just today with what is going on with the Tea Party movement, Habits of the Heart was so right on. Radical individualism is even more evident today than when Habits was published twenty-five years ago. It describes the default mode of this deeply misguided society beautifully—horribly, but beautifully.

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NS: I know you have been following the events in Egypt and have even been back a couple of times since the overthrow of the Mubarak regime. How would you describe the situation?

SM: I think this is an incredibly interesting time in Egypt. The country is involved in a historic and heady process of political transformation. The stakes are very high, and it is unclear whether the kind of changes—political, social, and economic—that the January 25 Revolution envisioned will, in fact, be possible. Like any other revolution in modern history, this one faces immense challenges from both within and without.

NS: What exactly are those challenges, in your view?

SM: Well, after the overthrow of the Mubarak regime, as one would expect, the movement became divided over what the collective future of the country should be. Old differences that had been set aside to topple the Mubarak regime have come to the fore again—differences of class, ideology, and religion, all of which affect the vision of what a just society should be. Second, there is the issue of transforming the political system from within to create a democratic structure—which entails, not only promulgating new electoral laws and procedures, but also forging laws that address the demands of a democratic society. Then there is the challenge of how to dismantle the much-despised state security apparatus, with its bloated and corrupt bureaucracy of surveillance and vengeance, and the Emergency Law—in place for over twenty years—that has facilitated its operations. In recent months, protestors have taken to the streets again to demand an end to the military trials that have continued since the overthrow of Mubarak. (Some report that more than 10,000 people have been tried in military courts since the revolution.) These military trials are a symbol of the old system that is still intact, and which the protestors of the January 25 Revolution had sought to dismantle. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there are economic issues that are systemic, and that are not simply Egypt’s but belong to the international system of finance and capital. Egypt, like any other Third World country, is hostage right now to the global economic crisis and the immense pressure put upon those countries by international institutions (like the World Bank and IMF) and geopolitical powers (the US and Western Europe) to resist the demand for socially progressive economic reforms. The Egyptian military is part of this system and has benefitted from it immensely. I cannot see how the military, as the primary institution in charge of this “transition,” is going to set aside its economic interests to yield to the popular demand for economic justice. This is in part why Egyptians from various walks of life continue to stage sit-ins and protests across the country.

NS: How do you think these challenges might be overcome?

SM: Well, I have faith in the Egyptian people and their thirst and desire to transform the status quo. None of us expected or predicted what the Egyptians were able to achieve on February 11, 2011, with their determination and political will. The unimaginable became imaginable. The same powers are in play right now, and I suspect we all will have a lot to learn from the developments that unfold in Egypt in the coming years.

NS: Without a doubt. But let’s back up a bit now. I first read your essay on “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual” when I was a freshman in college, and it had a big influence on how I came to think about the practice of religion. I still look back to it. In that vein, I wonder if you, too, had an experience early on that reoriented your own thinking.

SM: One thing that had a decisive impact on me was Talal Asad’s “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” I was a graduate student at Stanford at the time, and I was working on issues of religion at a moment when there was little interest in the subject within the discipline of anthropology. This was pre-9/11, and people didn’t think that religion was of great importance. I was reading a lot on my own, and this essay came up in footnotes. Our library didn’t even have a copy of it, so I had to request it through interlibrary loan. I sat down, and I distinctly remember reading and then rereading it several times. I was really challenged by the questions that the article forced the reader to ask, not just of Islam but of religion in general. It’s a very well-circulated paper now, and most students of religion and Islam tend to read it, but at the time, it was a buried treasure.

NS: Tell me about what brought you to anthropology in the first place. You were an architect before that?

SM: Yes, I practiced architecture for four years. At the time I was also involved in activism against U.S. foreign policy in Central America and the Middle East. When the first Gulf War broke out, I realized that there were many pressing questions, which the war had brought to the fore, that I hadn’t really resolved for myself. These were questions that had to do with the transformed political and social landscape of the Muslim world, the ascendance of Islamic politics and the challenge this posed to those of us who grew up believing in the promise of secular nationalism to forge a different future. Following the Iranian Revolution, in 1979, Islamic movements had become the primary expression of political dissent in a variety of Muslim countries. In order to think about the transformations this ascendance had caused in the social and political landscape of Muslim societies, I resolved that I would go back to graduate school. At the time, I did not really know much about anthropology; so I enrolled in a political science graduate program, which I found to be very Eurocentric. I realized that this discipline would not help me explore the kinds of questions that I was interested in. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to anthropology at the time, and it has been my disciplinary home since.

NS: Have you found anthropology to be a discipline in which questions that concerned you as an activist can be addressed?

SM: My activism would probably have been accommodated in any discipline. But what anthropology has allowed me to do in a serious way is pursue the question of difference. The traditional aim of socio-cultural anthropology was to study the primitive other in order to reflect upon the peculiarity—and often superiority—of Western cultural and social norms. In the late 1980s, anthropologists and others launched a robust critique of the essentialized and ahistorical notion of cultural difference that had served the discipline for so long. One important result of this critique was that the discipline moved to think critically about the question of difference—not just cultural difference but how different histories, traditions, and arrangements of power force people to live and experience life in heterogeneous ways. In general I find anthropology’s commitment to thinking critically about difference unique in the human sciences and worthy of engagement and exploration. So, in answer to your question, it is not so much that anthropology is especially open to activism, but rather its insistence that we engage with difference, while being attentive to relations of power that hierarchicalize and essentialize differences, that has enabled me to work productively in the discipline.

NS: On your website, you also say that your experience in architecture influenced your work as an anthropologist. Can you say something about how?

SM: That’s probably overstated! But when I was practicing architecture, I realized I wasn’t very happy with the elitist and technological bent of the profession. I started working instead with the homeless, designing, financing, and constructing housing for people who couldn’t afford to pay rent or mortgage. The work I did was mostly in dense, urban communities, both in the U.S. and, briefly, in Pakistan. This experience left me with an appreciation for the grit of urban life, the challenges it throws up to people, and how they manage them. In a sense, this is what Politics of Piety is about, too—people trying to make sense of a world that has completely undone the possibility of a wholesome life, but in which people still try to recreate that possibility through suturing various kinds of disparate practices and habits.

NS: Why did you choose Cairo as the site of your fieldwork?

SM: At first I went to Algiers, but it was in the throes of a civil war, which made fieldwork impossible. I also went to Fes and Casablanca but found that political debate was very guarded and muffled, making it difficult to pursue the kinds of questions I was interested in. In Cairo, however, I found a place that was very vibrant and alive with debates about the importance of secularism, Islamism, and what it means to live as a Muslim in the contemporary world. The city streets pulsated with these debates, and Egyptians generally did not feel restrained in expressing their religious and political views. I found the public culture of the city very conducive to the project I wanted to pursue, and so I stayed.

NS: What brought you to the theoretical tools that would help you interpret that experience in Politics of Piety?

SM: By the time I went to do fieldwork in Cairo, I was already very critical of how the existing literature analyzed Islamist movements, largely in functionalist and reductive terms. It seemed to subscribe to a hydraulic conception of politics: you squish something down in one place and it bubbles up in another. Islamic politics, in other words, was a displacement of something more fundamental—economic frustration, lack of democracy, and so on. But I was far less prepared to think about the range of embodied religious practices I encountered and how these inform or undergird politics. It was really a challenge for me to think about people’s preoccupation with the minutiae of bodily practices and not to read them as misguided or misplaced religiosity. Like countless other scholars, I initially tended to view them as inconsequential both to politics and to the substance of religion. It was really only after doing the fieldwork, when I came back and started writing, that I began to think more deeply about these issues and my own inadequate response to what I had observed in the field. This process of reflection and writing brought me to rethink the distinction drawn between ethics and politics in liberal political theory, as well as the centrality of affect and embodied praxis to political imaginaries and projects.

NS: In the preface to Politics of Piety, you speak very eloquently about the relationship between that project and your experience of coming of age in Pakistan. Does Pakistan continue to inform the questions that you pose and the ways in which you think about them? The country has certainly come to play a different role on the world stage in recent years. . . .

SM: The developments in Pakistan have been quite tragic. The Pakistani military has mortgaged the future of the country to fight a series of proxy wars for the U.S.—wars that have methodically destroyed its infrastructure, not to mention social and political life in the country. Politics of Piety is an analysis of a different kind of Islamic movement, in Egypt, that is transformative of social and political life but not destructive of its very possibility. In Pakistan, Islamist movements have largely played a very destructive role, especially with the ascendance of jihadi movements that have made a Faustian bargain with the Pakistani military, on the one hand, and U.S. strategic interests, on the other. It’s quite different in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood—the largest Islamist political organization in the country—has eschewed militancy at least since the 1950s, and the network of da’wa groups that I analyze in my book are reformist in nature, focused largely on proselytization and social welfare activities. The career of Islamic militants in Egypt was short-lived, and they do not command the kind of power that they do in Pakistan. As a result, the social and political profile of Islamism in Egypt is radically different from its counterpart in Pakistan. In my current project, I have begun to take up the question of how geopolitics transforms the ways religious coexistence is managed, produced, and transformed. But, while geopolitics has certainly transformed Pakistani life, in my current work I’m not thinking about it particularly in the Pakistani context.

NS: Can you tell me more about the project you’re involved in now?

SM: Well, I am engaged in a couple of related projects. My personal project focuses on how Christian-Muslim relations have been historically transformed through the introduction of the concepts of minority rights and religious liberty in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Egypt. Aside from this, I am also working on a three-year collective project with three other colleagues (Elizabeth Hurd, Peter Danchin, and Winnifred Sullivan), funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. It focuses on how religious freedom is being transformed through legal and political contestations in a variety of countries in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and South Asia. It’s called “Politics of Religious Freedom: Contested Norms and Local Practices.” Most of the scholarly work to date tends to treat religious freedom as a singular and stable principle, enshrined in international and national legal documents. Others tend to focus on how different religious traditions are either amenable or resistant to the incorporation of liberal conceptions of religious liberty. Our project is distinct in that it asks whether religious liberty can indeed be treated as a singular or stable principle aimed at achieving shared goals and objectives, given the diversity of historical and political contexts. We will track the variety of claims made in the name of religious liberty, with the aim of mapping out modular disagreements that occur in a variety of national and international political contexts. We are interested in this because we believe that, in order to reach any sort of agreement in the human rights community, it is important first to understand what is really at stake in battles over religious freedom. It is also important to ask whether religious freedom, given its manifold deployments and limitations, is the best way to achieve co-existence for the variety of actors involved.

NS: A thread that seems to connect the earlier work with what you’ve been doing more recently is the issue of freedom—from freedom as personal autonomy, in Politics of Piety, to religious freedom in international law, now. Has the one informed how you think about the other?

SM: That is an interesting question. I agree that liberty and freedom are at the center of both of my projects. The right to religious liberty is often conceived in individualist terms—whether in the First Amendment, the European Convention on Human Rights, or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet the right to religious liberty has also been imagined in collective terms as the right of a group to practice its traditions freely, without undue intervention or control. This latter conception has been very important to religious minorities in claiming a place of autonomy and freedom from majoritarian norms and state interventions. In my current work, I am trying to think through how these alternative conceptions of religious liberty stand in tension with each other and the sorts of impasses it produces.

NS: What kinds of methods are you using? Are you doing fieldwork again?

SM: Fieldwork is an important part, but the project has historical, geopolitical, and legal dimensions as well, since I’m interested in tracking how notions of religious liberty travel across time and history, and also across the divide between Western and non-Western. So, I’m looking at the UN charter, the UDHR, international laws and treaties, as well as particular legal precedents in Europe that have traveled to the Middle East and have gained particular traction there.

NS: Tell me more about what the fieldwork is like. After all, I imagine that the usual way of studying international law is primarily textual. How does fieldwork inform these kinds of questions?

SM: I’m interested in the social life of the law, especially since many court cases about the right to religious freedom in the Middle East are fought, not just in courts, but through public campaigns launched on the cultural-political terrain. People’s sense of what constitutes religious liberty is shaped by how human, civil, and minority rights organizations end up contesting and arguing over it. Part of my fieldwork in Egypt entailed working with human rights practitioners, particularly those who are using international human rights protocols in their legal strategies and public campaigns.

NS: Can you say a bit, in turn, about how Is Critique Secular? came about and the kinds of problems that framed it?

SM: It emerged out of an event organized at UC Berkeley to announce the establishment of a new teaching and research unit on critical theory. This inaugural symposium generated a lot of interesting debate and discussion—not only on the Berkeley campus but here on the Immanent Frame as well. The Townsend Center for the Humanities, where the event was held, approached me and other participants about putting some of the papers together in book form. As we could not pull together all the papers from the symposium, we focused on the ones about the Danish cartoon controversy. Wendy Brown, Talal Asad, Judith Butler, and I decided that we would try to organize the book around this question while also retaining some of the original impetus for the symposium.

NS: More recently, the cartoon controversy seems to have repeated itself all over again with the Park51 complex in Lower Manhattan, or the so-called “Ground Zero mosque.” And long before that, there was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses.

SM: Well, I think there are substantial differences among the issues involved in each of these controversies. I think the latter is quite straightforwardly about the right of a much-maligned minority to build a place of worship near a site invested with patriotic-national fervor, while the former controversies centered upon Muslim objections to how the prophet Muhammad was portrayed.

NS: What is wrapped up for people in these portrayals of the prophet?

SM: It’s not an accident that with both the Satantic Verses and the Danish cartoon controversies, what was at stake was the particular kind of affective and religious connection pious Muslims (but certainly not all Muslims) feel to the figure of Muhammad—to his iconicity and his exemplariness. This relationhip forces us to think about religiosity in more complicated ways than as privatized belief, or as a system of rules, regulations, and taboos. Both Muslims and non-Muslims must think critically about whether the sense of injury that derives from this sort of religiosity is translatable into a language of rights, and whether understanding this sense of injury is something worthy for the ethical and political life of a religiously diverse society. I think that there is an increasing tendency within the U.S. and Europe—on the part of the majority and minorities alike—to resort to the law and the state to settle ethical and moral issues. At the time of the Danish cartoon controversy, both sides wanted to defer to the law to settle their claims. But I think that such a turn to the law, or legislation, freezes positions and allows the state to intervene in domains toward which it claims to be neutral. My contribution to Is Critique Secular? lays these issues out in more detail than I can do justice to here. In sum, what I am suggesting is that struggles over religious difference cannot simply be settled by the heavy hand of the law. Insomuch as these struggles entail competing religious sensibilities as well as deep prejudices and intolerances, they must be engaged on other—cultural, ethical, visceral—grounds. This may not yield immediate or definitive results, but it is a necessary and important step in the creation of a multi-religious polity.

NS: So how do you think this plays out in the case of Park51?

SM: There, of course, even though the personage of Muhammad was not involved, the language of injury and offense dominated the debate. If you recall, in the Danish cartoon controversy, the claim was that the right to freedom of expression is also a right to offend anybody and anyone—and that this is a characteristic of an open, pluralistic, and democratic society. Some even argued that the cartoons served as an instrument to create offense, so as to engender a critical dialogue among Muslims about Islam. In contrast, in the Park51 controversy, it was argued that the complex should not be built because, even though Muslims have a right to do so by virtue of the First Amendment, building one so close to the World Trade Center would offend American sensibilities. The claim to offense and injury in each instance was being marshaled for very different purposes.

NS: And the players’ roles have been reversed, haven’t they?

SM: Right. I do think, however, that what is at stake in all these debates is the status of a religious minority within self-avowedly liberal societies, which claim to have in place the most robust mechanisms possible for accommodating the concerns of majority and minority alike. And yet, what we find is that the rights of minorities are actually framed by the norms of the larger community; it’s against those norms that minoritarian claims are judged and contested, and that is where the idea of religious liberty and freedom of expression as an individual right remains inadequate to grasping the situation. We have to start thinking in terms of how groups are weighted both demographically and politically, and how this conditions the context in which certain claims are made or heard. It’s not enough to refer to a right that exists in constitutions—such as the right to free speech or to religious liberty—and to track when it is applied or not. Far tougher questions are at play. One has to think about how the ethical, cultural, and social norms of the majority structure the possibility of the exercise of individual and group liberties differently for minorities. I should make clear that this structural problem characterizes all nation-states (premised as they are on the demographic calculus of minority and majority populations), and is not simply particular to Euro-American societies.

NS: When you approach these issues today, are you still coming to them as an activist as well as a scholar?

SM: No, I would say that I come to them more as a scholar than as an activist. My intellectual work has often led me to challenge and complicate my political stances—to complicate the very ground on which politics can be imagined and conducted. Politics, in my opinion, demands a certain closure of thinking, in order to judge and to act. Intellectual work requires a different kind of labor. In one sense, of course, all arguments are political when you’re thinking about such controversies, but I don’t start with a political position and then see how the argument unfolds. For example, during the Danish cartoon controversy, I was puzzled by the fact that the kind of injury expressed by ordinary pious Muslims did not find any voice in the polemical debates in either the Islamic or the European press. I tried to make sense of this silence, and it led me to suggest that the kind of religiosity expressed by most Muslims in response to the Danish cartoons was incommensurable with the language of rights, litigation, and boycotts that came to dominate the debate. And it was precisely because this religiosity could not be contained within the language of identity politics that it found no expression in the public debate. Needless to say, this argument did not win me friends in either one of the two camps.

NS: Is there something in particular that you think the West needs to know about the Muslim world, or about Islam, or about Muslim minorities? Is there some message that, above all, you think needs to be definitively stated—or is the questioning enough?

SM: I don’t think questioning is enough. But I do think that there is a desperate need to challenge the current way of framing things, as a civilizational stand-off between Islam and the West. This way of thinking is not only dangerous but also unsustainable in the long run. Those of us interested in stepping out of this overheated polemic have a responsibility to make people realize why this framing is inadequate and problematic, even dangerous. Despite important differences among political ideologies and religious traditions, I believe that we have the historical language and analytical skills to think differently, to imagine a future in which Islam and the West are not locked in some zero-sum game. To take a simple example, when I speak of the kind of relationship that many pious Muslims feel toward Muhammad, which was partly at stake in the Danish cartoon controversy, surely it is recognizable to scholars of Christianity (with its long and rich tradition of the Eucharist and Corpus Christi), Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and late Antiquity? Surely we can think together about different conceptions of religiosity and what space they have in, and what effects they may have on, our political present without descending into the abyss of civilizational incomprehension and incommensurability?

NS: What about the concerns of Western feminists in particular? There sometimes seems to be especially little hope for common ground on women’s issues.

SM: Once again, feminism has a rich and varied tradition of thought and praxis. The current tilt toward painting an essentialized picture of feminism and Islam—as quintessential opposites—is inadequate to the complexity of both traditions. There are no doubt historical reasons for the great suspicion with which some Islamic symbols are treated in Euro-American societies, but I would hope that thoughtful people would be able to think through this history critically. Take the example of the current obsession with the veil in Europe: colonial discourse had long cast the veil as the essential symbol of the civilizational inferiority of the East, and of Islam in particular. It is not a surprise, therefore, that anti-colonial movements took up this symbol precisely to reverse the colonial judgment while embracing the practice—in the process, reifying the importance of the veil to Muslim identity. The current discourse is, in a sense, a re-enactment of this history. What is new, however, is the way in which the European and Turkish bans on the veil have been held up in the name of secularism, wherein secularism is equated with the principle of gender equality. For example, the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights that uphold the headscarf ban in Turkey and France rest on two interrelated claims: one, that the veil is a symbol of women’s oppression; and two, that insomuch as secularism is for gender equality France and Turkey, as secular states, cannot condone this practice. But, historically, secularism has hardly been on the side of women’s rights—otherwise French women would have been granted the vote long before 1945, and the separation of church and state would have yielded gender equality in the nineteenth century, when European states adopted this principle. Secularism and women’s rights have always had a troubled relationship, which is important to think about from within the history of feminism. This does not mean, of course, that one has to denounce secularism and embrace religion or vice versa. One has to be able to see the mutual imbrication of religion and secularism to even diagnose the problem correctly. Otherwise, I think we run the risk of dulling the critical edge of feminist thought.

NS: I found your essay about the mobilization of feminists behind the invasion of Afghanistan very powerful. I remember being so struck at that time by how American women were identifying with women in Afghanistan under the Taliban, which made some eager to support our military adventures over there. But is there a better way to ally ourselves with women in the Muslim world?

SM: The entire social fabric of Afghani society has been torn apart as a result of, first the war between the United States and the Soviet Union, between 1979 and 1989, and then the U.S. war against the Taliban and now al-Qaeda. There are civilian casualties reported almost every day—the vast majority of whom are women, children, and the elderly—as a result of U.S. bombs and drones. This violence exceeds and parallels the violence unleashed by the Taliban on the Afghanis.  We read about these casualties in the media, but I do not see any mobilization by major U.S. feminist organizations to demand an end to this calamity. This silence stands in sharp contrast to the vast public campaign organized by the Feminist Majority in the late 1990s to oust the Taliban. I am often asked by American feminists what they can do to help Afghan women. My simple and short answer is: first, convince your government to stop bombing them, and second urge the US government to help create the conditions for a political—and not a military—solution to the impasse in Afghanistan. It is the condition of destitution and constant war that has driven Pakistanis and Afghans to join the Taliban (coupled with the opportunistic machinations of their own governments). Perhaps it is time to asses whether diverting the U.S. military aid toward more constructive and systemic projects of economic and political reform might yield different results.

*  *  *

NS: Since you’ve just been in Egypt, I wonder if we can start by talking about some of your reflections on the Arab Spring. How would you characterize what has changed in the Middle East, and in the world?

TA: I wouldn’t say that I’m competent to talk about the whole world, but I think it’s an extremely encouraging development in the Middle East. The bravery and courage and idealism of the people was really something to watch and to listen to. It is quite true, as everybody says, that, whatever happens, we’ll never go back to square one in Egypt. But a lot of the other things that people want, I suspect, may not be realized. There won’t be social justice—there won’t be all sorts of reforms that the pro-democracy activists called for. Currents and forces both inside the country and out will ensure that it doesn’t proceed as many people had hoped at the beginning. It’s much more complicated than accounts in the media would lead us to believe. I’ve been trying to make sense of it myself ever since I arrived in Cairo. But, you know, I’m a pessimist about all sorts of things—politics included.

NS: What was it like to be there in the midst of a revolution?

TA: Even before my wife and I went, people kept saying to us, “Are you sure it’s safe?” Our Air France plane was actually cancelled. We were due to go on the 29th of January. We eventually left on the 12th of February, via Paris. We weren’t even able to go directly to Cairo, either. We had to go through Beirut. Then, all sorts of people starting ringing, again asking, “Is it safe? Are you sure you’ll be safe? We’ve heard all sorts of frightening things.” Remember the stories circulating early in the uprising about the prisons that had been opened and the police being withdrawn from the streets? That was what the fear was about. People wouldn’t believe me, but I was there for four months, almost, and I went all over town and never encountered any violence. I didn’t have any friends who could attribute violence to the uprisings—which isn’t to say it didn’t happen. Cairo contains eighteen million people, so it has always had its fair share of criminality. But ordinary life, actually, continued. Cafes were open, and shops, restaurants, and so on. You’d often hear that foreigners were in danger, or that ordinary life was impossible, but that is really not true.

NS: Impossible, that is, without the control of the state and the police?

TA: Exactly. There are elements in Egypt that were quite happy to circulate stories of unrest. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces talked again and again about the fact that we must have stability, which is then linked ominously to questions about the state of the economy. Since the economy suffers from the political instability in the country, they say, we shouldn’t have more demonstrations or strikes. But one of the things that emerged for me there, and which I’m trying to make sense of, was the constant flow of speculation, of suspicion, about who’s saying and who’s doing what. Why are they doing this? Are they really doing it for good reasons? Is it the army? The Muslim Brothers? Is their presence or absence significant? Do they mean what they say?—You know, that sort of thing. I can’t claim to have made good sense of it yet, but, to me, this seems very important.

NS: The fault lines of Egyptian society definitely seem to be shifting, and maybe suspicion is a consequence of that. We saw lots of images here of Muslims and Christians watching over each other in Tahrir Square, for instance.

TA: I was very pleased to see these expressions of solidarity.

NS: A lot was made of the fact that their demands were economic and political rather than explicitly religious. Did you see, or did you sense, that this suspicion was part of a novel form of secularity emerging on the streets there?

TA: My own work has questioned the mutually exclusive categorization of the secular and the religious, and I think there is lots of evidence, empirical and analytic, to show that the way in which secularity has been thought of conventionally won’t do to understand all that has occurred in recent history. Just recently, I saw scenes on Democracy Now! of people carrying placards with slogans for the camera, in Arabic, which said, “We insist on the trial of such and such,” but which started off with “Allahu akbar!” These utterances were not seen as inconsistent. I saw this myself in Tahrir Square. Egyptians use these expressions, like inshallah—God willing—all the time. As far as expressions are concerned, there was such spillover in all sorts of ways.

NS: But does that linguistic spillover go so far as to affect how institutions are being transformed?

TA: They may, to the extent that language use carries sentiment, hopes, and fears about social changes. There is discussion about whether the new Egypt will be a secular state or not. Many among the Muslim Brothers and those who are sympathetic to them have said, of course, that they are against a secular state. But they’re not saying they want a religious state either. Instead, they’re talking about having a dawla madaneyya, which literally means a “civil state.” What that implies isn’t entirely clear yet. But the insistence by people that they want neither a religious state nor a secular one has appeared again and again in all sorts of discussions.

NS: Such ambiguity might be disappointing to some secularists watching from the West.

TA: But it isn’t a straightforward question, in any event, of unambiguous “secularism” arising in that context. What will emerge in Egypt, in terms of both practical politics and thinking about politics, and the role of religion, is still very open.

NS: Do you think something had to change in the minds of people to build this kind of movement? Take the assassination of Anwar Sadat, compared to the uprising against Mubarak. One had machine guns and grenades, and the other had millions out in the street, mostly peacefully. What accounts for the difference?

TA: Well, it isn’t as if the recent events were totally without precedent.

NS: No, there had been decades of organizing—and, of course, there was the example of Tunisia.

TA: There had been strikes and demonstrations for a long time, and there was the Kefaya movement, although it was rather limited and somewhat elitist. But peaceful protests in the past have not attracted much attention from the Western media. I do think things have changed, but I don’t think it was quite like a conversion, so to speak, nor was it all pre-arranged and carefully thought out as a revolution. In some cases, people discover that they’ve got some power they didn’t think they had—even a technique that they don’t intentionally develop, but which they suddenly find themselves with and begin to understand. Maybe one needs to think of the uprising as more than a technique for getting rid of a despotic regime, but as a mode of existence, almost. The novelist Alaa Al Aswani said in an interview with The Independent that being part of this revolution is “like being in love.” I don’t think it’s quite like that. You might say, actually, that it’s more like a religious experience.

NS: Does the sense of suspicion that you were talking about fit into those comparisons? Is it like jealousy in love, or doubt in religion? How uniquely Egyptian is it?

TA: I’ve been thinking of it as something intrinsic to revolutionary situations. If you look back even to the French Revolution, and certainly to the Russian Revolution, that’s exactly what always happens. The revolution eats its own children, as the saying goes—partly because there’s so much at stake. There are so many enemies, and you don’t know who they are or who will do what. I see it simply as part of such a situation, which can never be resolved by final answers because it is always generating new questions on one side or another. No revolution is ever finished.

NS: Can you say more about how that suspicion took form in Cairo?

TA: I had a discussion with some friends of mine just before the March 19 referendum, and all the left-wing ones were saying that they’d be voting no. I remember thinking that it doesn’t quite add up. To say no would be to say that there would be no elections in September for the national assembly as originally planned, and that the army would stay on ruling the country for another year and a half. And yet these same people had already said that they didn’t trust the army! “Yes,” they said, “but we want the army to be replaced by a committee of three civilians.” But you know that’s not going to happen, I said. So there seems to be a certain inconsistency here: one becomes so suspicious about some possibilities that where one should be suspicious one isn’t.

NS: Since coming back to the United States, have you noticed a shift in how the West perceives the Muslim world?

TA: Well, I don’t read newspapers regularly—so you might be in a better position to answer that than I.

NS: Really? Why don’t you read newspapers?

TA: It’s not that I have any sound reason for it. I haven’t read newspapers for thirty years because I find that, for some reason, they tend to break up my mind. They write about so many different things, and you’re always going from one thing to another, and then on to another, unrelated to the last. I like to read journals—weeklies. I also watch Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! and some of the news programs on Russia Today. Listening to TV newscasts is less disruptive, strangely. So I’m not sure I can adequately answer your first question as to whether there has been a change in Western depictions of the Muslim world or not.

NS: I suppose I’m thinking about the difference between the images we saw of the “Arab Street” in Tunis and Cairo and, say, those during the Danish cartoon controversy—

TA: Shouting, and the rest.

NS: Yes, shouting, and burning flags, intense violence, people getting killed and killing each other—this sort of self-immolating fury. And then, suddenly, we have this other set of images, where two dictators get knocked off in the space of a few months, in a relatively orderly and impressive way.

TA: I think one should distinguish between the cartoon affair, which mostly involved Muslim immigrants in Europe, and the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere. Western media haven’t been interested in the long history of political protests and strikes in Egypt, say, as they have been in the sexy cartoon affair. The significance of the current uprisings is not just that they are peaceful. It’s that they indicate a major unsettling of a region strategically crucial to Western powers.

NS: What do you think made the Danish cartoon incident such a crisis?

TA: I’ve written about this at length in several places a couple of years ago. I think it was partly the continuing obtuseness of liberals, especially in Europe—liberals who are almost never consistently liberal. That particular scandal was unfair to the immigrants, and somewhat hypocritical. Liberals like to say that everything should be up for criticism. But we know it isn’t. And now in the US we have a state that is increasingly invading our privacy, and there seems to be very little resistance to that from liberal intellectuals. Anyway, shouldn’t we be more disturbed by the intellectual undermining of things we think of as eminently rational and decent? We should be ready to ask ourselves whether perhaps they’re not quite as rational or decent as we thought. But instead of learning how to deal with immigrants as part of our society we think of them as invaders.

NS: It sounds like the revolutionary suspicion that you were talking about earlier—seeing enemies everywhere except where it matters most.

TA: Normally, the element of hypocrisy in itself is not terribly interesting. What interests me more is that the cartoon scandal raises questions about how we think of freedom, including religious freedom, and about the language that is used to defend some of the things we think of as most valuable, if not sacred, to us.

NS: In the case of the cartoon controversy, for instance, free speech.

TA: Yes, if you want to put it that way.

NS: What’s being asserted, then, when Western, secular liberals claim that a cartoon about Muhammad is free speech and shouldn’t be apologized for? What is encoded in that claim?

TA: I think one thing that’s encoded there is a certain attitude toward religion in general, toward Islam in particular, and also the attitude that nothing is sacred. But there is also a sense of “these wretched immigrants who don’t understand our culture.” The encoding in this whole cartoon affair was a secularist one, which categorized the cartoons as free speech, even if they were deliberately provocative—not just deliberately provocative, but insulting. Why do it? What’s the motive? I’m talking about speculation and suspicion; what is the motive for wanting to attack Muslims? Why not just say, “If you riot in the streets or kill somebody, I’m afraid you’ll have to suffer the consequences under the law”?

NS: Well, wasn’t there a principle at stake: the right to provoke if one so wishes, and to criticize religious beliefs?

TA: Yes, but why do we want to exercise that right in some cases and not in others? I’m not just after prejudice, but the morphology of our provocative choices. There was much talk, sentimental and romantic, of a duty to fight for the right to free speech. As soon as an incident like this happens, we’re immediately regaled with stories about Bruno at the stake, and the Catholic Church, and so on. One doesn’t quite have to think in these terms. Our problems are not medieval problems. The challenges are not the same. For God’s sake, let’s think clearly! All this complaining about religious dogmatism—we know very well that some of these secular critics are about as closed-minded as you can get on all sorts of issues. Even as eminent a theorist as John Rawls says that certain kinds of reasoning should not be allowed into the domain of politics because all they do is create irresolvable conflict, so that only what liberals deem rational can be allowed to enter public space. Is it the case that religion always produces conflict that can’t be resolved peacefully? Doesn’t secular provocation—“fighting words”—lead to violent conflict? Does every conflict in society have to be “resolvable”? Of course there have to be limits on provocation.

NS: What about the election in the Palestinian territories of Hamas, or even the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood right now in Egypt? There’s this incredible suspicion right now in the West, which views these factions as unpredictable and uncontrollable, and we’ve taken political measures to suppress them. Is that a kind of censorship, too?

TA: Yes, I think you’re right. The need to control and predict non-Western movements is what it’s partly about. But let me give you an example of what I think happens, mistakenly, in the explanations secularists give of the Muslim Brothers. The Brothers’ ideas are really, in many respects, in a state of flux. The younger members often contest or disobey the directives of their leaders. There are different currents within the movement itself. Their present situation is also an expression of the fact that—and most people in the West don’t know this—the Muslim Brotherhood was savagely repressed by past Egyptian governments for 60 years. They have been put in prison, hanged, tortured, exiled. I say this not because I think one should be sympathetic to them because of what they’ve suffered, but because, like so many people who have suffered, they have developed an instinct for mere survival. In my view, having talked to some of them, simply how to survive politically, as an organization, is what their leadership has learnt best over time. Their minds are focused on that aim and have become rigidified. They’re not able to think freely enough yet—about freedom of thought, speech, and action—to take advantage of the new situation.

NS: Perhaps, when repression is involved, suspicion can turn to paranoia.

TA: Yes, for both persecutors and persecuted. Because the Muslim Brothers have contradictory positions and are in many respects confused, my friends in Egypt say, “Ah, you see? They say one thing and mean another! One member says this and another says that!” What could quite reasonably be seen as fluidity, uncertainty, and disagreement on their part gets represented as speaking with a forked tongue. I’ve heard so often the remark: “This is just a game that the Muslim Brothers play.” This makes me wonder whether anybody else in politics plays games! Liberals? Socialists? Conservatives? Don’t they say one thing and then do another, or compromise on their principles for the sake of practical ends? That is, in part, how an obsessive suspicion closes off the mind to any serious attempt at understanding what’s going on. For most of my left-wing friends, the Muslim Brotherhood equals hypocrisy and the hidden determination to establish a totalitarian state. I think this a priori suspicion is wrong. I don’t think, by the way, that there’s even a danger of anything like that happening. In comparison to other groups, like Hamas and Hezbollah—with whom, I should say, I do have sympathies—the Muslim Brothers do not have a militant wing. This hasn’t been sufficiently recognized. In the past they were involved in violence, but for many decades now they’ve moved away from it toward a more or less parliamentary line—like Eurocommunism—rather than a revolutionary one.

NS: But isn’t the concern about what could happen if they were voted into a position of power over the police and the military in Egypt?

TA: Yes, but the point is that they would have to get into that position of power in the first place, and the military isn’t their instrument. There’s always a possibility, of course, that they might become a dominant force in government and that they might use the police repressively, like the Mubarak regime. But would that mean a totalitarian government was imminent? For God’s sake, even in the United States the police are used to harass various kinds of movement—peace movements, ecological movements. The security measures now in place here have deeply invaded our liberties and privacy. Still, the United States is not (yet) a totalitarian state, it’s a secular state and it’s highly unlikely that its secularism will be abandoned anytime soon. In Egypt the Muslim Brothers would have to have a very substantial presence in the national assembly before they could do anything really significant, and I doubt that they will have that. In any case we don’t even know what policies the Muslim Brothers would support as members of a government, because the policies haven’t been sufficiently formulated and agreed upon yet. Let’s bear in mind the difference between the promises made by Obama the candidate and the decisions taken by Obama the president. They tell us that democracy is all about compromise and being realistic.

NS: Consider someone who would oppose a right-wing, religious party in the United States. Is there any difference between opposing such a thing in one’s own country, where one understands what’s at stake and what’s at play, and opposing an ostensibly similar party in a foreign country, just by saying, “I wouldn’t want that myself”?

TA: Yes, I can understand that—

NS: Or is there something different that we have to understand about the other society that makes the two incomparable?

TA: I can understand why many people would equate the religious right here and the religious movements there. But I don’t think that they’re directly comparable. There is a difference, and I think part of it comes from the savage repression in Egypt of the Muslim Brothers, which the religious right in the U.S. has not had to undergo. This doesn’t justify anything in particular, but it’s something that one has to think about. And, connected with that, there’s the fact that the Brotherhood is a movement that has been resisting what I would call Western imperialism, whereas that isn’t true of the religious right in the U.S., which, on the contrary, very often supports it. Now, I don’t want to be understood to be saying that simply because the Muslim Brothers oppose imperialism they’re beyond reproach. What I’m saying is that it’s more complicated. During the Brotherhood’s rise in the 1930s, it was strongly anti-British. And the United States has been constantly intervening in Egypt after the British left—even supporting Mubarak right until the very end—and that’s not going to be lost on the Muslim Brothers, although it’s still an open question as to whether they and the U.S. government will now regard each other as implacable enemies.

NS: How much does the fact of their being religious fuel the suspicion leveled against them in the West and among liberals generally? Should it?

TA: I don’t think, in principle, that just because a movement declares itself to be religious, it should be made the object of special suspicion. In my view, one shouldn’t trust anyone who hankers after state power, whether they call themselves religious or secular. The modern state is at once one of the most brutal sources of oppression and a necessary means for providing common benefits to citizens. Whether it is secular or religious seems to me much less important than the fact that it is a state. If we look back over the twentieth century and this should become obvious.

NS: How does having grown up and having been educated on both sides of the colonial divide affect how you look at situations like this? You often see colonialism where other people are blind to it, it seems.

TA: Yes, but I’m also sometimes irritated by people who would like to explain everything in terms of colonialism. That is just so crude. I also find myself resisting people who say that colonialism has nothing to do with the present situation because colonialism is dead and gone. My own feeling is that what people assert or deny is due to colonialism should be constantly interrogated. In our world, external intervention by strong powers, superpowers, or the superpower, is a fact of life. The United States has been intervening in the Middle East for a long time—it would be surprising if it didn’t!

NS: Is such intervention the same as the old colonialism? Or can it be better than that?

TA: It’s neither better nor worse, but it’s certainly not the same. I recall something Hillary Clinton said, in some conference or other, to the effect that in the end the government is concerned not with promoting democracy, as such, but with promoting America’s national interest. That would have to come first. At the same time, she said she would be the happiest of persons if the two things converged—which of course makes the ideal of democracy into an instrument, not an ideal. But I can understand that. I can see why she would say that, because power is what the modern state is about. I can see why the US would want to have what it calls “stability in the region,” a region in which the US has such immense interests—in its oil, in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in the confrontation with Iran, and so on. I can see that they would want to have, in every country, some kind of influence, if possible. I might want to attribute everything to colonialism or imperialism, but I think that won’t do. But then nor would I want to say, “Don’t blame imperialism, it’s all your own fault really!” It’s not a question of fault, it’s a question of the way in which various forces collide and intervene and shape what are regarded as national interests.

NS: It’s interesting that you seem so accepting of this interventionist order—

TA: No, I am not accepting of it, certainly not. I’m trying to see things as they really are. But, at the same time, I’m aware that this means not being able to invoke one’s own moral position very easily. Perhaps that’s why I said, early on, that I am a pessimist. I have felt for a long time now that we have gradually—and when I say “we,” I mean everybody in the modern world, and I’ll say more about that—worked ourselves into a situation that is truly tragic, in the Greek sense of having no real resolution. There are the most awful prospects before us, with the kind of technological warfare we now have, with the fantastic extension of consumerism and money, with the consequent growing gap between the very poor and the very rich, with the destruction of the environment, and with the ramifications of climate change and nuclear energy. I really hope that this is simply a sign of my being old. It may well be, because I don’t see things in the way that a younger person would, I’m sure. I see it all as being absolutely disastrous. But people will try to resist, and they should.

NS: How? I think of the Human Terrain Teams that were dispatched in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which anthropologists and other experts in local culture and language would be embedded with military units. Should an anthropologist, someone with a more textured view of what’s happening on the ground, be a part of that process of intervention so as somehow to improve it?

TA: No, certainly not—absolutely not. That’s not resistance, that’s collusion. I remember talking once a long time ago with Edward Said about empire and how it might be defeated. We were just sitting and having coffee, and at one point I responded to some of his suggestions by saying, “No, no, this won’t work. You can’t resist these forces.” So he demanded a little irritably: “What should one do? What would you do?” So I said, “Well, all one can do is to try and make them uncomfortable.” Which was really a very feeble reply, but I couldn’t think of anything else. But it doesn’t follow from a pessimistic outlook that one just has to accept things as they are and ask fellow anthropologists to do the same. In any case, I’m very much against the kind of involvement you mention, making things smoother for empire.

NS: What was it you wanted to say about the “we”?

TA: Oh. When I was a young man, I used to hear and read about the marvels of European civilization, about how Europe had achieved so much, and how the Muslim world, and others, hadn’t. Even China was nowhere then. It was Europe that led the world. People used to speak about “European civilization,” you know, at one time. Then the language gradually shifted, and it’s interesting to trace some of those shifts in language. Now, more and more, one hears people who are very sensitive to our impending disasters talking about how mankind will destroy itself, how mankind has brought itself to a position where it will destroy itself. I find that to be an interesting shift, the move from praising one’s distinctive “civilization” when one thinks of positive things, in order to be able to say to others, “You haven’t been able to achieve these things.” And then, when you’re in a bloody mess to which there may be no solution, you talk about “mankind” having brought itself to the brink of disaster.

NS: “We’re all in it together.”

TA: And in a sense we are—it’s true. But maybe we aren’t all equally responsible. People in villages in India, or Africa, or Latin America—they’re not responsible for climate change. There’s an interesting way in which one says, not only, “We’re all in this together, so let’s work together,” which is fine. But “It’s everybody’s fault”? That’s different. As one used to say in school, trying to spread the blame around, “It’s not only my fault, sir! All of us, we all made this mess!” It’s that kind of cowardly reaction I’m referring to.

NS: Whose fault is it, then?

TA: Again, it’s not a question of fault. There’s a long history of human choices that is leading us all, unintentionally, to where we shall soon be—at a dead end. Some of these choices were more momentous, affecting far more people, than other choices. Some of us now are in a more powerful position to choose than others are. “Mankind” is not an agent.

Azza Karam

This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC project on Religion and International Affairs. Karam here speaks only for herself, not for any institution, organization, or board.—ed.

*  *  *

NS: Before we get to your work at the United Nations, let’s start with recent events in Egypt, your home country. How, in your view, is the Egyptian revolution of a few months ago proceeding? Has it been betrayed yet?

AK: It sounds as though you’re waiting for it to be “betrayed”!

NS: No, not at all. I’m wondering what exactly it would mean for the revolution to be betrayed. It seems to be assumed that, somewhere along the way, all revolutions are.

AK: The revolution is proceeding with the hiccups associated with any comprehensive transformation entailing the political, social, economic, and legal overhaul of an entire country. Is the revolution over? On the contrary, we have but begun. Are there disappointments en route? Definitely. But is there a sense that no change is taking place? Not at all. Are we going backwards? Impossible, given the enormity of what has transpired in the consciousness, not only of Egyptians, but of all Arab people. This revolution is, first and foremost, about crossing the Rubicon of fear, about reclaiming dignity, and about the youth being engines of political and social transformation on an unprecedented scale. None of these dynamics are reversible. We are living through the enactment of a new collective consciousness.

NS: Maybe in that sense it can’t be betrayed. But the enactment won’t be easy.

AK: Well, there are the grimy realities of entrenched, interest-based politics; an economy struggling to recover from being on hold while the revolution was taking place, in a global financial environment that is itself struggling to stand on its feet; and a legal system that needs to be overhauled—all while maintaining security and stability in a region being christened, by fire, into freedom.

NS: What was going through your head during the uprising? Were you afraid of what might happen?

AK: I was afraid for the safety of the youth demonstrating so courageously, creatively, and with so much passion. I was afraid for the millions left in the clutches of a government that deliberately instigated instability for the first four days of demonstrations.

NS: And then?

AK: My fear was gradually replaced by several other emotions, starting on January 29, when a series of events began to take place: I allowed myself the first thin line in the crescent of hope when I heard the rumblings of discontent within the Egyptian army itself—rumblings that were articulate and deliberate, and that echoed the people’s demands for both dignity and systemic change. I began to allow myself to smile—and then to grin—when, at the very same time, an Egyptian sense of humor asserted itself in the various venues where demonstrations were taking place—in slogans, attire, and much more. I shook my head in utter disbelief at the camels and horses that were brought in—and felt sorry for them, because of the five-hour journey from the pyramids to Tahrir Square that they had had to endure under whips and ill-treatment. But I wept like an orphan for the people who were dying. I clenched my fists and invoked hell upon those who were deliberately causing the loss of life. I stayed awake night after night, with Egypt’s time defining that of my own life, calling friends and family in Egypt and everywhere else in the world, exchanging information about events, analyzing, hoping, and arguing. Above all, and throughout, I—and every single Egyptian I know, Muslim and Christian—prayed and prayed and prayed. On February 10, when we all expected Mubarak to announce he was stepping down, I literally cursed him—and threw my shoe at his image on my computer screen—as did most Egyptians listening to him across Egypt.

NS: What was it like for you when he finally stepped down?

AK: On February 11, 2011, I was born again as a proud Masriyya—Egyptian—deeply humbled by those ten or twenty years younger than I, but a thousand years more courageous. I kissed my computer screen—the very same one that had just suffered the indignity of having a shoe hurled at it—when Al Jazeera aired the announcement and displayed the unadulterated joy of Egyptians at Mubarak’s resignation. I was amazed, beyond words, at the images of people cleaning up in Tahrir Square. There and then, I prostrated myself in thanks to the Almighty for the beauty of the spirits of the people whom He had enabled. And on the streets of New York City, I held my head up and greeted the Egyptian coffee vendors, hot dog vendors, and commuters loudly, in Arabic, and joked and laughed and shook their hands—for the first and only time in the ten years that I have lived here.

NS: Have you been to Egypt since then?

AK: No, but the enormity of the transformation does not require one’s physical presence within the national boundaries to be appreciated. The Arab awakening in the neighboring countries is itself an indication that the change that has taken place is very much ongoing, and that it is reshaping the identity of the entire region.

NS: Some observers heralded the apparently secular quality of the Egyptian revolution. Do you think that religion will be less on the lips of leaders in the Arab world now than it has been in recent decades?

AK: Secularism comes in many shades and varieties, but it has never manifested—not even here in the United States—in the manner of a total repudiation of religion. A famous Egyptian nationalist leader in the early twentieth century, describing his nationalist aspirations and the struggle against British colonialism, once said: “I am a Copt by religion, a Muslim by culture, and an Egyptian by both and much else.” This multitude of identities, which includes different religious-cum-cultural contexts, has and shall always characterize Egyptians and, indeed, all Arabs. Are we likely to hear less religious talk in Egypt today? I doubt it. After all, why should religion not continue to feature in a country that believes itself to have invented religion in the time of the pharaohs?

NS: How is religion being talked about and thought about at the United Nations? Are there ways in which it is, perhaps conspicuously, not being talked and thought about?

AK: Religion, as an ingredient of culture, has always been part of the business of human development. In the last decade or so, especially after the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent reconfiguration of geopolitical dynamics, discussions about religion have begun to occupy a more prominent role in the discourse within and among the various UN agencies. The last two Secretaries-General have referred specifically to the role of faith in several of their speeches, in terms of both culture and faith-based service organizations. More and more UN agencies, beginning with UNFPA, have started to identify faith-based partners in social development, on issues of health, education, child care, nutrition, and the environment. The United Nations system today is more aware of the fact that religious communities, and their affiliated organizational entities, are some of the oldest, most deeply rooted, and furthest reaching social welfare networks and providers known to humanity. They are increasingly recognized as part of the partnerships for development at the United Nations.

NS: How do you help others at the UN to become better attuned to the importance of religion in development work?

AK: What I do is provide technical support to my colleagues at UNFPA, so that they are able to discern the appropriate faith-based partners for our reproductive health, gender equality, and population and development work. My job, then, is to facilitate strategic engagement with the world of religion, as part of the broader culture, in order to further the realization of our human rights mandate. In 2008, many of UNFPA’s faith-based partners were convened to launch the Interfaith Network for Population and Development, a unique human rights-oriented initiative within the United Nations. Several of our UN colleagues joined the deliberations and attended the launch, which took place in Istanbul. Today, there are over 500 member organizations, with a legacy of partnering not only with UNFPA but also with several of its UN sister agencies on a range of development issues. The UNFPA also currently chairs an Inter-Agency Task Force on partnerships with faith-based organizations around the Millennium Development Goals. We come together to share information, coordinate activities, and share experiences and lessons learned.

NS: What lessons has this process taught you?

AK: One thing I’ve learned over time is that these FBOs (faith-based organizations) and “religion” are not one and the same thing. The world of religion is vast and difficult for us to quantify and categorize into neatly distinct entities. Religion and faith do not lend themselves to the usual normative frameworks of development praxis, which means that engagement with religious communities has to be sustainable, built upon common goals, and mainstreamed into broader civil society and government partnerships. This is critical to establishing and maintaining the trust that is required for any such engagement, and for facilitating the co-ownership of national development processes among all the different partners involved.

NS: How do you choose those partners?

AK: The United Nations cannot afford to—nor should it—work with only one faith tradition, or with only one FBO, or with the same religious leaders on all issues. We are obliged to work with varied representatives of different religious organizations and communities on addressing a multiplicity of human development needs. And we have to maintain the same respect and appreciation for the respective strengths and modus operandi of each partner, as long as there is agreement on the basic goals of human development, that is, human rights, peace, and security for all. But we have also learned that the responsibility for cultivating and maintaining these partnerships lies on all sides. Just as we hold ourselves accountable to our intergovernmental boards, mandates, and civil society partners, we expect our FBO partners to do the same with each other, and with us.

NS: Religion seems especially relevant—as a source of controversy, I mean—to the issues of gender, reproductive health, and population that the UNFPA deals with. Do you find the organization’s work to be constrained by religious concerns?

AK: It is not really possible to speak of religious constraints as such. Religious concerns, positions, and services vary significantly according to the religion itself, as well as per country, region, and situation. Issues of reproductive health vary enormously, too. What I can say, almost unequivocally, is that it is virtually impossible to embark on any issue relating to sexuality, women’s rights, and gender relations without coming across particular cultural dynamics. But it would be wrong to assume that particular cultures are unchanging obstacles. If there is one lesson we keep learning from history, and that has been highlighted of late by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, is that people change their own cultures from within all the time.

NS: Do you think the revolution represents a sea change in the role of women in Egyptian society?

AK: In my opinion, and contrary to popular (and largely ethnocentric) beliefs, the revolution could happen only because women’s roles in Egyptian society—and Arab societies as a whole—have already been undergoing a sea change. Anyone who has studied Arab societies in the last thirty years will attest to how socially active, politically informed, and economically engaged women have been. The magnitude, scope, and diversity of their participation in the revolution is itself a testament to how intrinsic to the social, economic, legal, and political fabric they already are—and have been. What is now transpiring with women’s rights in Egypt—and elsewhere in the Arab region—is a continuation of the struggle for gender equality within the emerging political framework, which is part and parcel of the larger effort to safeguard all human rights in the new polity that is now being collectively fashioned.

NS: What can people in the West do to help advance the cause of women in the Middle East? Or would it be better to butt out?

AK: Arab women have made it clear they are perfectly capable of activism and of articulating their own needs and aspirations. If and when these women need the assistance of “people in the West,” they will let that be known in no uncertain terms. After listening, the “people in the West” can then decide whether and how best to respond. And it would be wise to do so in consultation with the same women who made the request.

NS: Many have expressed concern that conservative groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, will gain power in Egypt—one assumption being that that would be deleterious to the cause of women’s rights. Is there a chance, then, that things could become worse for women?

AK: It is seriously myopic to assume that the Muslim Brotherhood is “anti-women.” I first started studying the Brotherhood, as part of a range of Islamist formations around the world, back in the late 1980s. Even within the organization itself, there are diverse perspectives on women’s rights: there are extremely active, very well-educated, cultured, and articulate women members of the Brotherhood, just as there are some members who are deeply conservative when it comes to women’s roles in public. Bear in mind that revolutions are happening within almost every group, party, and institution in Egypt today: the army, political parties, universities, professional associations, media, NGOs—you name it. So, even within the Muslim Brotherhood, a revolution continues to unfold among its diverse members—young and old, men and women, and so forth. The journey of these different revolutions is, for everyone concerned, a process of acquiring wisdom, and I believe strongly that we have little to lose and a great deal to gain.

NS: What do you think is the cause of all this upheaval? Why now?

AK: We are living in the context of a generation of youth—which is over 60% of our populations—that has grown up as part of a global youth culture equipped with mass communication technologies and amid huge challenges to established powers. I mean, who would have thought the Soviet Union would collapse; or that religion would re-emerge so strongly after decades of attempts to keep it out of politics; or that a woman and former guerilla fighter would be elected president of the largest Latin American country, and a black man would be elected as president of a country that once went to war with itself over racism? This generation is growing up at a time when even what it is to be a man or a woman is being radically redefined.

*  *  *

NS: I know there have been some pretty calamitous misreadings of your work in the past, so I’ll let you say it, not me: what is Authors of the Impossible about?

JK: Most simply, the book is an attempt to tell the story of how the technical categories of the psychical and the paranormal migrated from the academy, where they were carefully created and widely celebrated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, into popular culture and the media, where they now sit in intellectual disregard and confusion. The book is also an attempt to make sense of paranormal experiences from the perspective of the humanities. I read the paranormal as a semiotic event that plays out on both the mental/subjective and material/physical planes as a bridging sign or mediating story between two orders of experience: one conscious and constructed, the other not. Such a project, of course, violates our Cartesian epistemologies involving an interior, solipsistic, illusory subject looking out onto a real but dead, indifferent, and inert objective world ruled entirely by math and mechanism. It is this same useful Cartesian mistake that renders such events “impossible,” even though they happen all the time.

NS: Is the meaning of the word “happen” at issue here? Mistakes, after all, happen too.

JK: I am saying that you cannot read genuine paranormal events as simply subjective occurrences, as “anecdotes”—talk about an intellectual cop-out or sleight of hand!—but neither can you read them as stable, predictable, replicable, measurable things “out there,” unrelated to subjective states of consciousness. They are both subjective and objective. Or, if you prefer, they are neither. I am sure some will now perform calamitous misreadings of this work, concluding that I am ignoring the material, biological, sociological, historical, and neurological dimensions and arguing for some kind of simplistic idealism or total transcendence. Let’s just get this out of the way: I am not.

NS: And why “impossible”? Are you influenced by Derrida’s use of the term?

JK: My graduate student Chad Pevateaux keeps telling me how Derridean I am. I don’t know whether to be pleased or offended by this, as, frankly, I don’t understand Derrida. He was never a major influence on my thought. I would very much like to read more of him, though, particularly because of what Chad has taught me. I certainly will not make the mistake of misreading someone I myself do not understand.

In my own mind, by the impossible, I mean to signal a both-and logic, a dwelling in the middle of two possible readings, neither of which are really adequate and satisfying. I mean to signal a refusal to land or close the question. In terms of possible philosophical influences, I have read and absorbed a good share of Bataille since my graduate days at Chicago, where I studied Christian mysticism with Bernie McGinn. So maybe that is the closer source. Bataille, yes; Derrida, no—not yet, anyway.

NS: How did you come upon your impossible authors? Where does one look for this sort of thing?

JK: I came upon them researching my history of the human potential movement, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. For example, my first author of the impossible, Frederic Myers, who coined the term “telepathy” in 1882, was a major influence on Michael Murphy, one of the two founders of Esalen. But it was much more than that. There was a consistent ethnographic dimension here, too. I kept encountering fantastic stories, obviously heartfelt and honest, about precognition, clairvoyance, remote viewing (read: Cold War psychic espionage), and UFOs that fit into none of my academic models. Honestly, I was boggled, not just because of the stories themselves, but because I now realized that the usual “rational” explanations—that these are all delusions, perceptual mistakes, tricks, or coincidences, that these people are lying or stupid, etc.—are not rational at all. They are dodges. And they are propaganda. Then, one day, the folklorist and expert on supernatural assault traditions, David Hufford, said something to me to the effect that my writing reminded him of Charles Fort. “Who the heck is Charles Fort?” I asked in so many words. So I picked up Fort’s The Book of the Damned. I was hooked. That was the beginning.

NS: What does Charles Fort mean by the “damned”?

JK: By the damned, Fort meant all those strange events in our lives that cannot be explained by the “Dominants” (we would say “epistemes”) of Religion or Science and so are viciously shamed, explained away with fake explanations, or, more often, simply and politely ignored. Fort, I should add, neither “explained” nor “believed” these stories. Explanation and belief, after all, represent the epistemologies of the previous Dominants of Science and Religion. Rather, he read them as “expressions” of, well, of something. He didn’t know what. He called this way of expression the New Dominant, turned to disciplines like parapsychology and quantum physics for his best models (in the late 1920s and early ’30s, no less), and jokingly wrote of the coming Era of Witchcraft. He was only half-joking.

NS: What do you think would fall under Charles Fort’s idea of the “damned” today, for instance?

JK: Fort wrote pages and pages on what he called “superstructures in the sky”—spaceships—which were commonly reported in his primary sources: the English and French newspapers of the time, which he voraciously read each afternoon in the New York Public Library. Of course, we now call these “UFOs.” Here we have an impossible stew of fraud, propaganda, secret military projects, paranoia, science fiction, a modern technological angelology and demonology, mystical illuminations, psychical experiences, out-of-body experiences of various kinds, and occasionally some very convincing sightings by multiple reliable witnesses. Definitely damned. There’s lots more, of course, none of which we talk about anymore in the study of religion. We don’t talk much about miraculous healings, for example, or supernatural assaults. Ever read David Hufford’s The Terror that Comes in the Night? We don’t talk about monsters either. Ever read John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies? Or Colm Kelleher and George Knapp’s The Hunt for the Skinwalker? Go read them. Then let’s talk. Definitely damned. Way, way damned.

NS: Should I expect some kind of evasion if I were to ask what you really believe?

JK: I don’t believe anything. And I believe everything. I am not being evasive or cute here. I am being precise. I don’t believe anything, in the sense that I think religious experiences are symbolic or semiotic—speakings across a gap, as it were—and so should not be taken literally, ever. I believe everything, in the sense that I think that extreme religious experiences express, through image, symbol, and myth, some revelation of the real, some very dramatic contact with the sacred, always, of course, filtered and constructed through the body-brain in a particular place and time.

NS: But what, then, counts as real? What are we dealing with here, behind the symbols?

JK: I suspect that we are. But who is this “we”?  That is the deepest question we can ask, I think. If there is anything I believe, it is that we are not who we think we are. “Mind” or “consciousness” is not some neurological froth or emergent property of the computer brain, much less some ethnic or religious ego. Rather, it is a non-spatial, non-temporal presence of proportions so vast and so fantastic that there is really no way to exaggerate it, and there is certainly no way to “explain” it with either the absolute contextualist and relativist epistemologies of the humanities or the objectivist epistemologies and naïve realisms of the sciences. Basically, I am suggesting that the human form is a hidden presence of truly mythological proportions. A recent dissertation, by Jason Kelly at the University of Ottawa, has attempted to capture my thought under my own early rubric of “mystical humanism.” I accept that. Everything religious can indeed be reduced to the human, but it turns out that the human is not at all what we thought. That is very close to “what I believe.”

NS: Are you gratified that Catherine Albanese calls you “no fluffy believer” on the dustjacket? Is that a relief?

JK: Cathy Albanese can call me anything she wants. Besides, she’s just trying to protect me from the usual knee-jerk idiocies. I appreciate that.

NS: Do you think that the pro-paranormal subcultures—UFO theorists, for instance—will be vindicated someday?

JK: Not in the way they think they will be. I think much of this is philosophically naïve, as it keeps relying on science, science, and more science to “prove” something that is not an object at all, that escapes all of our objectivist ways of knowing. There are, of course, more sophisticated forms of science being developed, forms that recognize first-person narratives and subjectivities as real dimensions of the real world. I have been working for years now with enlightened neuroscientists, biochemists, quantum physicists, and philosophers on these very themes at Esalen’s Center for Theory and Research. They have convinced me that there is real hope here, that there are open-minded scientists at the highest levels that know better. I think any future way of knowing that might “vindicate” anything paranormal will have to combine and move beyond what we now call the sciences and the humanities. It will have to be more than “science” and more than the “humanities.” It will have to be, in effect, a new epistemology and ontology, a new way of knowing and being.

NS: Let’s turn back to religion. Can the “impossible” encompass what Mircea Eliade called the “sacred,” or the “transcendent”? Can this term, which you use to describe the paranormal, be used to refer back to the religious supernatural?

JK: There is an interesting story that speaks to this. My original subtitle for the book was “Reading the Paranormal Writing Us,” which gets at the wildly reflexive and hermeneutical nature of the paranormal that I am trying to explore. But when the University of Chicago Press and my editors—who know me very well—got a hold of the thing, they wanted to change the title to “The Paranormal and the Sacred.” When I asked why, they invoked the Chicago School and, by implication, Eliade. I thought to myself, “Well, okay. They are onto something here.” It stuck. So, yes, there is some fundamental resonance between what I call the impossible and what earlier theorists called the sacred. I am definitely writing in that “history of religions” lineage.

NS: I can imagine why that original subtitle would scare an editor. But say more about writing and authorship. What does writing about the paranormal require?

JK: A truly open mind. An attempt to think in terms of paradox rather than binary logic. A willingness to entertain the possibility that materialism, objectivism, constructivism, and naïve realism may not have a total purchase on all of cosmic reality, including, and especially, the human form. And, most of all, an impish delight in the weird and wonderful. It also requires a willingness to be tricked from time to time and an understanding that the truth can be hidden in the trick, that the two are not always mutually exclusive, as with a placebo. The paranormal, after all, is a trickster through and through.

NS: How much does one’s willingness to take the paranormal seriously depend on one’s direct experience with it—for you, at least?

JK: I think this is key, actually. I know it is not PC to say this, but I think it is true. If you have experienced the paranormal, then you know—well, you know that it is real, in the simple sense that it happens. If you have not, well, then you have two choices. You can leave that door open and do all sorts of interesting work—look at its historical genealogies and influences, for example, or its cognitive structures, or its social functions, etc. Or you can shut that door and deny, debunk, and deconstruct. Sorry, but Rudolf Otto was right: if you have not experienced the sacred (or the impossible), you are missing a very important key. It is not the only key. But it is most definitely a key.

NS: Must one wait for those experiences to happen? Or can one make them happen?

JK: I am of the opinion that you can’t. This, of course, is a well-worn trope in comparative mystical literature: The ego can do nothing to transcend the ego. To use the Christian categories, grace is grace. It has nothing to do with works. Or to use the Hindu categories, karma can never get you to moksha. Liberation is liberation. Nonduality is nonduality. It has nothing to do with karma, that is, with act or ritual. And trying to do something is precisely what gets in the way of anything really happening, for every conscious effort simply reinforces that which you need to get beyond: the left-brain ego structure. What we have in the academy are a bunch of very fine left-brain methods that essentially deny the existence of right-brain forms of consciousness. This is understandable. It is also kind of silly, at the end of the day. Again, why either-or? Why not both? We, after all, are both.

NS: What, then, would a right-brain method look like?

JK: Technically, there are none. The whole notion of “method” is a left-brain strategy. Remember, more “work” or “reason” can’t get us there. What we could do, if we were really brave and wanted to make real progress here, is select for altered states in those we choose to train for the field, much like we now select for linguistic capacity or philosophical training (which, of course, we should also continue to do). I mean, if a person has had a dramatic out-of-body or telepathic experience, that person is going to read accounts of ecstasy, near-death experiences, or clairvoyance very differently. I also cannot help recalling here a proposal that has been in the air for a very long time but has, for legal reasons, never really been integrated and institutionalized: the careful, controlled use of psychedelics among professional intellectuals and artists. I am not advocating this, unless the legal situation changes dramatically, but it is another example of how I am thinking here.

NS: That would make for a very different kind of graduate school application.

JK: Yep—real X-Men stuff.  But, again, let me be very clear: none of this frees us from selecting and training for all the rigors of intellectual work and philosophical precision. It’s both-and, not either-or. I suppose what I am advocating here is not another “method” but an “openness,” a radical openness to the impossible.

NS: How far, then, must one go to take the paranormal seriously? Does it really mean just openness? Or is building an alternative metaphysic necessary?

JK: I definitely think we need a bigger, broader, bolder, and, above all, more positive worldview. Otherwise, we will just keep damning the paranormal, and it will keep appearing, like the return of the repressed that it is. The simple truth is that our reigning metaphysics—materialism, constructivism, contextualism—are grossly inadequate to the data of the history of religions, which is just full of this stuff. Until we shift our metaphysical commitments, we are doomed to just keep repeating the usual solipsisms and relativisms. And no one outside our little clan will listen. Why should they? We have nothing to say. And when we do say something, it is inevitably depressing. That’s where pure materialism and solipsistic contextualism get you. That’s what happens when you completely erase sameness for pure difference. That’s where you go when you deny the comparative project and the shared human nature at its base.

NS: How much of our curiosity can we expect to be satisfied—about UFOs, for instance? I would really like to know what they are.

JK: The book is designed to excite, enthuse, and re-ignite the comparative project. It is not designed to satisfy. I am not satisfied with it. So I keep writing.

NS: Don’t you feel just a little bad about pulling an ancient astronaut trope as a surprise ending? Like the new Battlestar Galactica, or 2001: A Space Odyssey—or even the last Indiana Jones movie. Still, for me, it works every time.

JK: Nope. I think it works just fine. And that’s my point. Why does it work? Don’t you think that’s just a bit weird?

NS: It’s completely weird. It’s like a part of us is always waiting to have our worlds turned upside down, to discover one little fact that flips the whole gestalt. I’d chalk this particular case up to the fact that extraterrestrials now seem somewhat more plausible to us than Olympus-type gods. But I’d assume that’s because they’re more materialistic an explanation, not less.

JK: Yes. I’m deeply skeptical of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, interpreted literally at least. I like to employ the alien hermeneutic to destabilize the older religious hermeneutics (and this is what I think the whole UFO phenomenon is about, on one level—a massive deconstruction of our religious histories and their sky gods). But I also think we should use the older religious hermeneutics to destabilize the current alien hermeneutic. Let’s not be naïve. Let’s not assume that our present Cold War sci-fi mythology just happens to be the true one into which we can stuff everything else. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe anything.

*  *  *

NS: Some commentators have said that the uprisings now taking place are remarkable for being secular in nature. Do you think it’s helpful to speak of them that way?

JB: Well, I am not at all sure why they’re saying that. In Cairo, it was clearly the case that secular, Christian, and Muslim people were in the square, and that it was an impressive mixture. I would be interested to know who has access to the groups involved in Libya to know with certainty that they are secular. Perhaps some of us impose our ideological dreams on concrete situations that we either fail to investigate or have trouble finding out about.

NS: How relevant are these ideological dreams? Do you think that the question of whether these movements are secular is worth caring about?

JB: I myself do not care, and I wonder why people do. It seems to me that the secular/religious debate has not been at the forefront of these uprisings. They have been against censorship, military control, graft, and outrageous class differences, and they have been for various kinds of democratization. And we have seen women in these movements, veiled and unveiled, working together. It is clear that demands for democratization of various kinds are articulated through religious and secular discourses and practices, and sometimes a combination of the two.

NS: But isn’t that precisely what seems so secular about these events? That those religious divisions are no longer the central issue?

JB: Well, you could say that religious difference is not central, or you could say that religious difference is ever-present. Perhaps both are true.

NS: Let’s take a specific example. Would the revolution be “betrayed,” in your view, if, say, the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in Egypt? Or if something comparable to the regime in Iran were to emerge?

JB: If the Muslim Brotherhood is elected to positions in government, and the elections are free and unconstrained, then that is a democratic outcome. Whether or not one wishes for that outcome, it cannot be contested as undemocratic if it follows from open and free elections. Democracy often means living with results that we find difficult, if not abhorrent. But I have been somewhat shocked that, in the face of this most impressive of uprisings, the “specter” of the Muslim Brotherhood is raised time and again as a way of diminishing and doubting the importance of this mass movement and revolutionary action. I think those biased against Islam will have to get used to the idea that demands for democratization can and do emerge within Muslim lexicons and practice, and that democratic polities can and must be composed of various groups, religious and not. Islam is clearly part of the mix.

NS: Do these popular uprisings affect how we should think about power and sovereignty, as armed dictators are being coerced by nonviolent movements?

JB: I understand the desire to come up with theoretical generalizations. I spend a good deal of my time doing precisely that. But even though nonviolent practices have been important in some of these uprisings, we are also seeing new ways of interpreting nonviolence, and new ways of justifying violence when protestors are under attack from the military. The events in Libya are clearly violent, and so I think we are probably left with new quandaries about whether the line between violent and nonviolent resistance ever can be absolutely clear.

NS: Where in particular do you see that line blurring?

JB: We have to be careful to distinguish between nonviolence as a moral position that applies to all individuals and groups, and nonviolence as a political option that articulates a certain refusal to be intimidated or coerced. These are very different discourses, since most of the moral positions tend to eliminate all reference to power, and the political ones tend to affirm nonviolence as a mode of resistance but leave open the possibility that it might have to be exchanged for a more overtly aggressive one. I am not sure we can ever evacuate the political frame. Moreover, it is important to think about how one understands violence. If one puts one’s body on the line, in the way of a truck or a tank, is one not entering into a violent encounter? This is different from waging a unilateral attack or even starting a violent series, but I am not sure that it is outside the orbit of violence altogether.

NS: President Obama sometimes seems to be policing that distinction in his rhetoric about these uprisings: demanding that protesters and regimes both remain nonviolent, and then bringing U.S. military force to bear in Libya when the state turns to military force. But I would think the difference between how the movements in Egypt and Libya have progressed actually reaffirms that the line between violence and nonviolence is a useful one.

JB: Well, it is interesting that the U.S. affirms that the anti-government forces in Libya are resistance fighters and seeks to provide aerial bombing support to their forces on the ground. So it seems that even liberal public discourse makes room for justified armed resistance. What is most interesting is to figure out when certain forms of violence are considered part of an admirable struggle for freedom, and when, on the contrary, violence is understood as the terrorist activities of non-state actors. Do you have an answer to that?

NS: I certainly can’t think of a consistent rule that would apply to all cases, and probably for good reason. The case of Israel-Palestine comes to mind.

JB: Indeed, it does.

NS: What do you think the Arab uprisings mean for Israel, surrounded by them on all sides as it is?

JB: We can only hope that the movement toward greater democratization will affect Israel as well, so that we can finally see widespread public demands for Israeli Palestinians to be treated on an equal basis, widespread public acknowledgment that the occupation is illegal according to every standard of international law, and a similar affirmation of the right to self-determination of Palestinians. The public acknowledgment of these obvious truths would, in fact, constitute one of the most remarkable advances in the democratic revolutions underway. I think as well that any legitimate democracy would have to provide restitution to those inhabitants whose lands were confiscated. So let us hope that democratization finally comes to Israel and Palestine.

NS: If I may raise the question again, does the religious or secular character of these movements affect how Israelis perceive them?

JB: Israel, of course, is asking its Palestinian citizens to swear loyalty to a Jewish state, which is hardly a very secular thing to do. So, though Israel seems to support secularization in countries where Islam is predominant, it seems to except itself from that standard. This leads to a question of which religions are set in opposition to secularism and which are not? It seems to me that those who call for a secular state in Israel, which would mean separating citizenship from religion or religious status, are often accused of trying to destroy Israel. So we have to watch these debates carefully to see when and where secularism is treated as if it were the very sign of democracy, and when and where secularism is treated as if it were equal to genocide. Public discourse has yet to arrive at very consistent positions here.

NS: In The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, you find reasons to critique Israeli state violence in a kind of Jewish thought articulated by Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. Yet this seems far from what seems to count as Jewishness in public discourse today. Do you think those thinkers can be made to matter in public?

JB: I have no idea. Let’s remember that we are also in the midst of a paroxysm of anti-intellectualism within the U.S., coupled with an attack on public education and the academy. So your question implies these broader issues.

NS: What, then, would you say anti-intellectualism is keeping people from realizing?

JB: In order for democratic principles to have a chance in Israel-Palestine, there has to be a recognition of the ways in which Zionism, though understanding itself as an emancipatory movement for Jews, instituted a colonial project and the colonial subjugation of the Palestinian people. In order for this contradiction to be understood and effectively addressed, we have to be able to tell two histories at once, and to show how they converge, and how the claim of freedom for one became the claim of dispossession for another. Benjamin made use of Jewish intellectual resources to criticize the kind of progressive narrative that underwrites Zionism, and he concerned himself with the question, avant la lettre, of how the history of the oppressed might erupt within the continuous history of the oppressor.

NS: Asking people to remember two histories at once does seem like a public-relations challenge. And what can we learn from Arendt?

JB: Arendt was herself involved in public politics, actively defending notions of federated authority for Palestine in the 1940s, prior to the catastrophic founding of Israel on the basis of Jewish sovereignty in 1948. Her own views were problematic, often racist, and yet she knew that the production of a new stateless class would lead inevitably to decades of conflict.

NS: Why do you turn to Jewish sources like Benjamin and Arendt to criticize Israeli militarism? Why not appeal to something more universal?

JB: One doesn’t need to turn to Jewish sources, and I’ve never argued that one should. One could criticize not only present-day Israeli militarism but the occupation, the history of land confiscation, or even Zionism itself, without any recourse at all to Jewish sources. One could do it on the basis of universal rights, human rights, a history and critique of settler colonialism, a politics of nonviolence, a left understanding of revolutionary struggle on the part of the stateless, legal rights of refugees and the occupied, liberal democracy, or radical democracy. In fact, if one only used Jewish sources for the critique of Israeli state violence, then one would be unwittingly establishing the Jewish framework, again, as the framework of reference and valuation for adjudicating the competing claims of the region. And even if such a framework were Jewish anti-Zionism, it would turn out to be effectively Zionist, producing a Zionist effect, since it would tacitly hold to the proposition that the Jewish framework must remain dominant.

NS: I also see how some Jews in turn could perceive those claiming to speak in “universals” as potential oppressors. But—among Jews, at least—does it make sense to have the discussion within the framework of Jewish tradition?

JB: It depends on whether you are working within an identitarian Jewish framework or a non-identitarian one. One could argue that the obligation to the non-Jew forms the core of any Jewish ethic, which means that we do not sustain obligations only to those who are also Jewish, but equally to those who are not. This means that one is under an obligation, even a Jewish obligation, to displace the exclusive Jewish framework. Otherwise, one’s ethic is bound by nationalism, sameness, even xenophobia.

NS: Do you think it’s necessary for Jews around the world to feel somehow responsible, or especially concerned, for the actions of the Israeli state?

JB: It’s strange that you ask about “necessity.” It assumes that if we could show that, logically, it isn’t necessary for Jews around the world to have such a reaction, then Jews would be freed from the grip of such a conviction. These forms of identification are, fortunately or unfortunately, more profound and less logical than that. Indeed, it would be great if we could all be liberated through reason, but I think it only gets us part of the way. After all, someone may have a very logical view, but for other reasons we may still fail to hear what that person says, or we may turn their words around so that they are understood to say the opposite. The task is really to find ways of addressing deep-seated forms of fear and aggression that make it possible to hold to manifestly inconsistent views without quite acknowledging them.

NS: Where do you see logic breaking down in this case?

JB: For instance, my view is that many liberal and radical democrats, leftists, socialists, and progressive people are willing to name and oppose colonization, to name and oppose illegal occupation, even to name and oppose forms of racism in all parts of the world—except in Israel, for fear that to speak out against those injustices will somehow implicate one in anti-Semitism. We have to ask how this lockdown of thought and politics became possible, and why the world believes that Palestinians should pay the price for the Nazi genocide of the Jews. This is nonsense, and yet it persists. For those of us who emerged from within Jewish and Zionist backgrounds, criticism of Israel was regarded as nothing more than an excuse for anti-Semitism. And if Jews voiced such positions, then they were regarded as self-hating. My belief is that public discourse in general will not be able to express the same outrage over the colonization of Palestine and the ongoing violent occupation of its lands and people until we are able finally to separate anti-Semitism, which is in every instance wrong and must be opposed, and the colonial subjugation of the Palestinian people, which is in every instance wrong and must be opposed.

NS: But what strikes me is that many more of these “progressive people” in the U.S. feel compelled at least to take a stand about Israel-Palestine, as opposed to, say, various conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa or the dispute in Kashmir. And the difference seems much more than merely secular. Do you think Israel-Palestine would be better off if, as in Egypt’s uprising, religious divisions became subsumed in more worldly goals?

JB: I am not sure I agree that religious divisions have been subsumed in worldly goals. It sure seems that religion is very worldly at the moment. But the idea that a religious attachment to the land is what finally fuels Israel is, I think, probably wrong. I understand that it is part of the rationale and legitimating discourse for land confiscation and ritual expulsion, but we are dealing with a savvy military state, a reformulation of settler colonialism, an institutionalized form of racism—and we cannot derive all of these, or, perhaps, any of these, from religious grounds alone.

NS: How implicated do you feel personally in what Israel does, compared to any other country?

JB: I only feel implicated and enraged when Israel claims to represent the Jewish people, since there are myriad strands of diasporic Judaism and Jewishness that have never felt represented by Israel, that no longer feel represented by that state, and who dispute the legitimacy of that state to represent the Jewish people or Jewish values. Those who insist on the representative function of the Israeli state are trying to make it true. They know it is not true, but they are battling to deny and dispute those fault-lines. But even as one opposes such formulations, it is important not to become identitarian or even communitarian in response. After all, the point is to live in a complex world, not in an enclave, and not in separatist polities. If we are looking for signs of democratization, then surely we are looking as well for forms of living on equal terms in and among cultural differences. Many religious and non-religious traditions point to this possibility.

NS: While others point away from it. What do you think will make people choose, in the terms you draw from Arendt, to “cohabit the earth” with each other?

JB: It does not matter whether or not they choose it. Remember, Arendt claimed that Eichmann erred when he sought to choose with whom to inhabit the earth. The populations with whom any of us inhabit the world precede our existence and exceed our will. It has to be that way if we are committed to an anti-genocidal position.

*  *  *

NS: What was the first thing that crossed your mind when you heard that President Mubarak had fallen from power in Egypt?

GS: That it can be done. In past years, there have been a lot of misconceptions about nonviolent action. People used to think that it was very weak and that only the violence of war could remove extreme dictators. Here was another example that shows this myth isn’t true. If people are disciplined and courageous, they can do it.

NS: Did anything surprise you about how the events unfolded? Did it teach you anything new?

GS: One thing that surprised me were the numbers, and the spread of people participating—that’s just amazing in itself. A second thing was that, in Egypt, people were saying they had lost their fear. That’s a step Gandhi was always calling for, and one that even I thought was a little too hopeful. But that seems to have been what happened in Egypt. When people lose their fear of an oppressor’s regime, the oppressor is in deep trouble. A third thing was how well they maintained nonviolent discipline. We heard reports on television that, when there was an area where things were getting a little difficult and might break out into violence, people were chanting among themselves, “Peaceful, peaceful, peaceful.” That was quite amazing too.

NS: How direct an influence do you think your ideas had on the organizers of the protests in Tunisia and Egypt?

GS: I would like to know! I don’t.

NS: Were you in any kind of contact with organizers there?

GS: No.

NS: Or with people who were in contact with organizers there?

GS: We might have—years ago—met with somebody. But no direct contact.

NS: To what degree do you think these revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia were spontaneous and unexpected, as opposed to being planned and orchestrated in advance?

GS: One of my colleagues has been doing a study of the Tunisian case, so I know a little bit about that. It happened as a result of courageous action by somebody who died and inspired others to protest, and that aroused more protest. It spread from the poor areas far away from Tunis until it finally got up to the capital, without advance planning and apparently without too much detailed knowledge of nonviolent struggle. It appears that in Egypt it may have been a very different situation.

NS: Do you have a sense of what made the Egyptian people choose a nonviolent approach? Do you think it was necessity of the moment, or a prior commitment?

GS: It should have been a necessity. If a dictatorship or highly oppressive regime has all of the troops and weapons, and you’re in the opposition, it’s stupid to try fighting them on their own ground, with their own weapons. You must choose something else. But people don’t always do that—they sometimes try to use violence anyhow, which usually produces disasters.

NS: Were you concerned about the outbreaks of violence among protesters, like the throwing of stones and the burning of police stations?

GS: Yes. I think there has been a lot of mythology about stones—that they’re largely nonviolent. But they’re likely either to verge over into greater violence, which would be self-defeating, or to intimidate people back into passivity, because their stones didn’t bring down the walls of Jericho.

NS: Do you think that other governments in the Middle East—say, Bahrain, Yemen, and Jordan—will be able to adapt to these tactics and prevent them from being as effective?

GS: They will try, inevitably. And those governments will be consulting among each other, probably with the governments of Iran, China, and other places where they don’t like this kind of resistance. I would expect that there will be a lot of sharing of information about how they can get rid of this disease of people power.

NS: How significant a factor is internet technology? Do you think it has been over-emphasized by the media?

GS: I don’t know very much about technology, unfortunately—I’ve been busy with other things instead! All of the reports are that it’s played a major role in both Tunisia and Egypt. What matters, though, is not the technology itself, which is a tool of communication. It’s what you communicate. That’s where my work has been focused.

NS: How has media coverage in general about the revolutions seemed to you?

GS: It seems that it played a very large role. But there are still some problems with the journalism. For example, if there has been a violent repression, or if somebody gets killed, they call it a violent demonstration. But it wasn’t the demonstration that was violent—it was the regime that was killing people. Also, sometimes, they say something is a riot when it is actually a disciplined, nonviolent demonstration. The terminology is very important.

NS: While watching the coverage, many of us were struck by the images of Muslims and Christians protecting each other while praying. Do you think religion was a significant factor?

GS: Not from anything that I have found so far.

NS: Nonviolence and pacifism have often been historically associated with religions, like Jainism and Christian “peace churches”—

GS: Yes, that’s right.

NS: Is religion at all essential to motivating nonviolent movements, or can the ideas transcend their religious origins?

GS: It’s not even a question anymore. They have transcended religious boundaries. If people come from any particular religious group and are inspired to be nonviolent and to resist—not just to be nonviolent and passive—that’s fine. But don’t claim that they have to believe in a certain religion. Historically, for centuries and even millennia, that has not been true. Nonviolent struggle, as I understand it, is not based on what people believe. It’s what they do.

NS: But don’t cultural differences make some societies more likely to act nonviolently than others? Or is everybody equally equipped to do so, independently of their culture?

GS: Setting culture aside for the moment, not everybody is equally equipped to do anything. But when The Politics of Nonviolent Action was first published in 1973, the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead said in her review that what I was maintaining—without saying so, in so many words—was that this is a cross-cultural phenomenon.

NS: There have certainly been stereotypes suggesting that Muslims couldn’t do something like this, that they can only use violence.

GS: It’s utter nonsense. In the North-West Frontier Province of British India, the Muslim Pashtuns, who had a reputation for great violence, became even braver and more disciplined nonviolent soldiers than the Hindus, according to Gandhi. It’s a very important case. And when my essay “From Dictatorship to Democracy” was published in Indonesia, it carried an introduction by Abdurrahman Wahid, a Muslim leader who later became president.

NS: Are you concerned about whether Egyptian Islamist factions will be reliable partners in bringing about a more democratic society?

GS: I don’t really know Egyptian society, much less Egyptian Islamists. But I do know that the Muslim Brotherhood is interested in nonviolent struggle, and several years ago it became—to my knowledge—the first organization in Egypt to put “From Dictatorship to Democracy” on their website in Arabic.

NS: How about the military, which has now taken control in Egypt?

GS: Again, I would have to know the Egyptian military. I don’t.

NS: But, historically, when a military has taken control, has this purveyor of violence become a trustworthy caretaker of nonviolent revolutions?

GS: Not reliably. There’s always the risk that when they get control of the government, they’ll stay, thinking that they know better than the rest of the people. That’s why it’s really important to be prepared for the contingency that there will be either a military or political coup. We have a small booklet on how to prevent coups d’état, and how to resist one if it’s attempted: “The Anti-Coup.” It’s on our website. I’d strongly recommend that people worried about a military or political coup study that and act on it.

NS: What do you think the pro-democracy activists in the Middle East need to do now to ensure that the transition really happens as promised?

GS: Anyone in that situation would need to keep their eyes out and identify what might be danger signals—ways things are moving that are not good in terms of developing and protecting what democracy they’ve gained. They have to figure out in advance what to do when that happens. But we don’t give more specific advice than that.

NS: Why don’t you give advice?

GS: We don’t know these other societies in depth and, therefore, if we gave advice, it would probably be wrong. We do give a kind of advice about the need to think things through ahead of time. We have another booklet on our website, “Self-Liberation,” which is a guide for how people can become competent to plan their own strategies. They have to know their own society in depth: What’s the nature of the regime? Where is it strong, and where is it weak? That’s more complicated than it sounds. They have to know nonviolent struggle in depth, or they can’t plan competently. And, finally, they have to be able to think strategically. Like military strategists, they must plan carefully how to conduct their campaign—not just a battle, but a campaign, in the long term. Mostly, people don’t know how to think strategically, but they need to learn.

NS: How widely disseminated do you believe these ideas have to be? A large percentage of the population in Egypt, for instance, is illiterate.

GS: Sometimes people who are literate are a problem, because they can become tools of whatever propaganda is printed and circulated, and the people who are illiterate are not going to be able to read the propaganda. They’re a little safer!

NS: But do you think that a whole society has to know about nonviolent action before they’re able to undertake it, or can just a small group of leaders have that expertise?

GS: It’s basically very simple: either you do something you’re not supposed to do, or you don’t something you are supposed to do. It’s based not on turning the other cheek, but on basic human stubbornness. Anyone can do it. People don’t have to have a Ph.D. or anything like that to participate. But if you’re going to be planning a strategy for a whole nation, it requires you to know more than that simple principle. We have books that are very long and detailed, and heavily footnoted, and we have things that are maybe ten or fifteen pages, with very simple points. You’ve got to speak to various levels of interest and education.

NS: What do you think is going to be the legacy of the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia for nonviolent action elsewhere in the world?

GS: I don’t know. I really don’t. Things spread, especially in the days of technology. But I really don’t know. We don’t have people doing research on the spot. We should have had researchers working full time on this for all these days and weeks, but we don’t have the money to do that, unfortunately. We’re not well-funded. We may have been attracting the world’s attention, but we’ve barely been able to scrape by and do our basic work, for lack of money. There have even been these rumors around that we’re CIA or something, but people who’ve visited our office hear that and burst out laughing—our office is so obviously poverty-stricken! This phenomenon needs more major research.

NS: What do you envision this research would like like? What questions would it take up?

GS: Can people power and nonviolent struggle consistently bring down dictatorships and other oppressors—and, if so, how? What are the key things they need to pay attention to and what are the key ways of acting? What must they avoid? It’s my research into this phenomenon that has enabled me to do all these things and write more practical treatises, like “From Dictatorship to Democracy.” Interdisciplinary studies of this phenomenon and of dictatorships and oppression are very important, and I hope that organizations like the SSRC will give grants to people to do that kind of study. Time after time, I’ve come across people who really want to do work in this field and are competent to do it, but they can’t because they can’t get support. If the SSRC could make this a priority for research, it would get the eternal gratitude of the future.

This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on Spirituality, Political Engagement, and Public Life.—ed.

*  *  *

NS: Tell me about what brought you to the study of Oprah. Was it fandom, or irony, or what?

KL: Undergraduate irony. As a student at the University of Chicago, my dorm had a communal room with a television, and Oprah repeated late at night on the local ABC affiliate. I would be sitting with a group of friends who were, because of the Common Core, all reading the same high-brow social and political theory and applying it colloquially to The Real World: Boston. Few were as captivated as I was by Oprah; I think it reminded them of their moms. But to me it was an intellectual playground, hitting on everything I was reading while also queering, contesting, and troubling those readings. Then, in graduate school, it became a dorky parlor trick for me to connect Oprah with almost any aspect of U.S. religious history, from Wovoka to Carrie Nation. As I began to teach courses in religious studies, I found she was a great way to test theories of myth, ideology, and ritual for students new to religious studies abstractions. So, since the early nineties, I haven’t been able to get her out of my head—she seemed pervasive in the world and persuasively central to any given narrative of the West.

NS: Speaking of ritual, of what did working on the book consist? Was it a lot of TV-watching?

KL: Starting in 1998, I began to take notes when I would watch. I have those notebooks, and they’re comic exercises in scientism. I started doing a very ordered appraisal, using different-colored pens for different kinds of claims that were being made. If she said “This I believe,” or “What I know for sure,” those would be in purple. If she complimented someone, I would put that in a different color. If she interpreted a text or something that was said, I would put it in another color. It was a rudimentary study of her language, as well as of the ways that other women she spoke with became converted to her language games. I have five solid years of notes for every episode and a ten-year archive of topics that the show covered, with key transcripts for the episodes that I thought were particularly emblematic. Meanwhile, I was reading along with the book-club, buying her magazine, and consuming her celebrity scat from tabloids.

NS: What is it about how American religious history is studied now that has left Oprah not well-enough understood?

KL: I would say that the “how” of what we study is less problematic than the way we cordon our topics, which is very much an inheritance of our role as seminary church historians. I want to see more books written about objects that seem unlikely for religious studies, such as those seemingly in the purview of pop culture, but also those from economic and political arenas. Moreover, I think our disposition toward our subjects is often too tender for our own good. If, on the one side, we’ve been formed by our seminarian genealogies, on the other, we inherit an abused mentality, one that flinches constantly at the possibility that elsewhere in the humanist ranks we’re being mocked for proximity to the religious subject. And so we appear, I think, often too defensive of our topics, believing they need caretaking before exposure to the imagined Marxist menace. So, if there is a critical edge to the book, it is to goad us to be less worried about explaining our subjects to their cultured despisers, and instead to pursue the mediations of their belief systems, the multiple functions of their ritual reiterations, and the social systems to which they reply and in which they participate.

NS: You made Oprah’s message and its delivery your focus. But what about the believers—in this case, the viewers?

KL: I briefly toyed with the idea of doing an ethnography, where I would look at how women consume and conceive of Oprah, particularly in the context of their religious lives. I thought I would then explore the sort of complicated descriptions of agency offered by Marie Griffith in God’s Daughters or Saba Mahmood in Politics of Piety.  I decided not to do that, though not because there aren’t a lot interesting things one could learn from that kind of study. Ultimately I decided that the interesting thing about Oprah was that such ethnography of her consumers was incorporated into the commodity itself, as lay piety (its failures and successes) is the central subject of her exhibitions. What I thought was intellectually and politically needed was a concise examination of her precisions and consistencies, of how Oprah explained a normal for her audience despite their possible idiosyncrasies. In an era in which mass mediation is the primary format for encounter with difference and experience, knowing what that mediation mediates seemed pretty exigent to me.

NS: As an American woman, do you feel some responsibility to confront what Oprah represents, in the form of an active, engaged social critique?

KL: It is incredibly important that we—women, men, believers, heathens, citizens—think, and think critically, about the female complaint, especially as it takes this specific form in the public sphere. Oprah is not just Oprah—she represents what has come to be a naturalized logic for women’s suffering. I would be lying if I didn’t say that writing this book was, for me, an act of feminism. But I would say that it is more important to me that it be understood as an act of criticism connected to the deep tissue of our national political and economic imaginary. So, yes, this is an act of social critique. For as much as the solo striving hungry female is the object here, it is the silence of her sociality—all the while making commodity of her social receipt and struggle—that disturbs me. On her message boards, everyone testifies, but they don’t form social communities, social insurrection, or social protest. The social is incredibly absent from Oprah, even as she praises the idea of girlfriends, of groups, of clubs. The social is a rhetorical formulation leaving women exposed in their extremity without any public held accountable.

NS: Oprah’s broadcast TV show is ending and now she is going on to her own cable network. Is this another symptom of fragmentation and over-individualization?

KL: One thing that’s said about Oprah is that she uses media so well. No, I don’t think that’s quite enough—she invents the medium. Now she is conjuring the very network that will represent, I would argue, the future of the way networks will be construed. Even as her physical self slowly evaporates, she becomes increasingly an icon, a brand. One Oprah will fade, and another Oprah will strengthen and redact, with her physicality dissolving to an eventual brand “O.” That kind of programming for the self—which seems highly particularized, but of course prescribes its own particularization—is the genius of Oprah Winfrey.

NS: Something that’s striking in your book is her insistence, always, that she’s going by her gut, that she’s not letting herself be bought, and that she’s putting herself right there in front of you. But if she becomes a brand and a caricature while she’s still alive, how much control could she actually have?

KL: Her first-person is always authentic in its anxieties and authoritative in its total control. Despite the fact that she hasn’t gone to business school, she leads one of the most successful companies in modern America and is the first black billionaire. All of these things testify to acumen, but her answer is, “There is no calculation. There is no logic. There is no plan.” It’s a very typical maneuver of the neoliberal moment, eschewing the monolith you maintain with smiling billboard nonchalance. She is inventing systems for women’s lives constantly: schedules, to-do lists, and prescriptions for everything from how you order your bedside table to your backpack to your child’s lunchbox. All the while, she’s chanting, “Girls, I’ll guide you to your total originality.” There are episodes where she goes behind the scenes, where she shows us Oprah in her natural state, without makeup. It’s tacitly revealing the marionette strings of her production, suggesting she’s all-access-to-you, but what access do you have to that natural state being broadcast? Cost is only one of the barriers, as she holds up her specific racial self, gendered self, psychological self as the only one who can really be Oprah.

NS: Do you think that when she moves to cable, among the Rachel Maddows and Bill O’Reillys, she might become more overtly political?

KL: No, I don’t. Barack Obama has had to move away from the vague generalities of campaigning, but Oprah never has to make those compromises; that’s why she never seeks political office. Notice Sarah Palin has finally come on Oprah’s show—and when? When Palin begins working for Fox News, adopting the very media gambit in which Oprah herself participates. She becomes acceptable once she too is forced to become formatted (however polemically still) for the masses. In her interview with Palin, Oprah definitely put Sarah through the ringer, but she gave her plenty of time to restate her memoir, to become irreducible and easy-to-consume—“Ladies, we all know her, the Working Mother.” When Palin comes on the show now, they can talk about hair and shoes and kids. Our practices of consumption are a universal form that allows us to discover other things we share. We love children. We want peace for mankind. We’d prefer if people didn’t starve. These values don’t have a particular party orientation, for Oprah would not allow herself to become exclusive to any ethnic or political marker. She speaks for women and children, which for her is a language of peace that should break down congressional impasses.

NS: We’re certainly in a time of congressional impasses. The president is calling for strength and pragmatism. Is the spirit of Oprah’s politics, which catapulted Obama during the campaign, able to stick with him? Does she offer a viable politics for passing health-care reform? Or does she throw up her hands and leave that business—I hate to say it—to the men?

KL: I would probably press back and say, who in the sphere of popular culture—who with her mass appeal and consumption—is, actually, politically consequential? Characters like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are in some ways allowed more extremity, more particularity, but they too become caricatures in that particularity, and thus again some sort of generic disenfranchised populist. These are two different forms of gargoyle, and neither one is more or less misshapen than the other. If the question is whether or not reformist politics are still best purveyed by a certain form of male embodiment—probably, but that doesn’t mean that women can’t ascend to it. Indeed, Oprah is a political formatting some women use—Sarah Palin is an Oprah kind of woman in a lot of ways. If the question is sustainability, Oprah’s politics are sustainable precisely because they aren’t contingent upon any legislation. They rest upon the discursive experience of pain and difficulty. Palin’s rallying cry as she enters the public sphere is, “I am a mother who made hard choices, I didn’t abort my child.” Hillary Clinton—less of an Oprah woman, but one corrected over time to become one—rides upon the coattails of marital misery. As long as the success of women in the public sphere depends on that narrative of personal discomfort, Oprah continues to control the game.

NS: Recently there has been a flurry of polemics fixing blame on the prosperity gospel and positive thinking in American culture for the financial crisis and much else, like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided and Hannah Rosin’s denunciation of prosperity preachers in The Atlantic. Do you locate Oprah in that milieu? Do you think the kind of neoliberalism she preaches is basically delusive, even dangerous?

KL: Oprah is a passionate advocate for a kind of prosperity gospel, insofar as she believes in a correlative relationship between one’s disposition and one’s materiality. However, to conflate her with the current market crisis would be to oversimplify the knotty doctrines of her empire. Her advice is ruthlessly pragmatic, even if it’s wrapped in mystical dreams of the miraculous Secret. Suze Orman appears in every other episode about money, a wry voice about balancing a budget, warding off credit card compulsion, and sensible planning for the independent woman. The liberation of women from economic ties that bind is an incredibly important message of the show and, I would argue, for the broader discourse of liberal economics. Women in particular are struggling over the issue of consumption, which was a key part of the economic crisis. But the brilliant wickedness of Oprah is that she’s simultaneously telling you how to save and how to spend. At the end of an episode, once a couple has gotten control over their credit cards, there has to be some way of finding a reward for them. Peace of mind is one thing, but wow, much better if they get to take a road trip with their new Hyundai! Whatever the counsel is, the glamorous and the visual are the conclusion, creating a tableau of success even amidst practices of austerity.

NS: So all else becomes subservient to the commercial?

KL: Her reply would be that, no, all else becomes subservient to the spirit. The first question everyone should ask is, “What is my spirit telling me to do?” How do you tap into your spirit? How do you re-enchant your spirit after being pulled upon, tugged upon, by the false pragmatism of men, family, work? The replies to that are frequently flattered by the commercial, but not solely comprised of it.

NS: And religion? Is she “spiritual but not religious”?

KL: Oprah is a hearty critic of religion, and her criticisms of religion echo a lot of people who self-identify as “spiritual but not religious.” She worries in particular about all the ways women are structured and institutionalized, religious and otherwise. Against such straps, she insists on “spirit” as some liberation from those strictures. I think, in the end, that my book is in part a study of the commercial contours of that sort of discourse—for Winfrey and, I argue, much of American religion. In the language of spiritual liberation I think a lot of other prison houses are encoded. “Spirit” silences almost every other kind of structural thinking. Not just religious thought, but also political, sociological, racial, and gendered thinking. For Oprah’s critics, she often comes across as this nouveau-riche spiritual mountebank: the endless decadence, the soft pillows, the candles, the overwhelming brocade. But what I’m more interested in is why this soft place?

NS: Your prose reads as scholarship inflected with rhapsody, as if you’re acting out—or even experiencing—the effect of Oprah. Does rhapsody count as scholarship?

KL: For me, the scholars that have been the most exhilarating and maddening have been these who were absorbed enough by their material to communicate its logic to the reader with an equal commitment to discipline and affective disquiet. I think, here, of Lauren Berlant’s astonishing trilogy on national sentimentality; of Robert Orsi’s intimate articulations of Catholic piety; and of the fiction and nonfiction of David Foster Wallace. While I could speak academically about a lot of academics, on the subject of Wallace I’ll probably quickly become obsequious. Suffice it to say that I think the best humanism pursues some version of what he accomplished in his Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. So, to answer your question, I think rhapsody—passion—is something obsessively detailed, careful, and devotedly disturbing. If rhapsody is another way to describe the orgiastic demographer, then yes, I think it is scholarship, and I’m signed on. I will always cajole students to map their own objectivity as an important conjure, and to find ways to invite their imagined readers into the real, systematic, trickster-work of knowledge production.

NS: What would Oprah think of your book?

KL: This is not the sort of book she reads—or, rather, this is not the sort of book that the product Oprah endorses—since it neither prescribes a better reality nor posits an alternative reality to which you could escape.  If she and I were talking, though, the first thing she’d want to know is how this book fit into the first-person journey of my life. Then I’d find myself quickly formatted into her production as a signifying woman of one sort or another. This is her real legacy. After Oprah, what first-person iteration is not a commodity?

*  *  *

NS: What is at stake in the questions of time and consistency that you’re probing through your inquiries into ancient philosophy?

PLM: If you’ve ever lost someone you loved, or ever deeply regretted something you’ve done, then time is a problem for you. We’ve all longed for the past, whether to be with someone or to be without some deed. Nietzsche expressed this very clearly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where his hero says that our impotence before “greedy time” makes us resentful of it. To cope with this resentment, we dream of hinterworlds outside of time, eternities that promise to redeem us from its greed. There, everything will be made whole, every beloved will live again. So goes the dream. The sort of rationality pioneered by Parmenides—consistency—makes time impossible, and so when Plato combined it with the philosophical religion of Pythagoreanism, the result was a moralized rejection of time. We can cope with greedy time, for Plato, by seeing it as not only unreal, but evil. Our real life is not here, but there, among the Forms in eternity. If that’s so, however, why not commit suicide and get there immediately? This is a serious problem for Platonism. To avoid its nihilism and affirm our life in this world, we need a way to understand time as fully real. I argue in the book that Heraclitus offers this way.

NS: To what extent do you consider your work constructive philosophy, and to what extent is it of what I’ve sometimes heard philosophers call “antiquarian interest”?

PLM: That dismissive attitude you’ve noticed toward “antiquarian interest” stems from several sources, but the main one nowadays, it seems to me, is the confusion of philosophy’s method with that of natural science. In the sciences, after all, there is a genuine distinction between those who do experimental science and those who study its history. Thinking of philosophy as a sort of natural science, some analytic philosophers make a similar distinction between those who try to solve philosophical problems directly and those who merely study the solutions of predecessors. But that has always seemed to me to be a false dichotomy. I was fortunate to have two teachers early on—first Charles Taylor, then Alasdair MacIntyre—who expose it as such by philosophizing in a way that solves philosophical problems by recounting philosophical history.

NS: How have you applied the method you learned from them in Becoming God?

PLM: The book tells a history of ideas, explaining how certain philosophical theses came to seem inevitable after Plato. There’s some purely antiquarian stuff in there, particularly in the sections on the Pythagoreans, whose numerological views are pretty weird. But I found it crucial to include that weird stuff in order to understand how the history of early Greek philosophy turned out as it did. I tried to show how entangled Plato’s philosophy is with Pythagoreanism, but more importantly the Parmenidean notion of reason—that is, consistency. This notion of reason is still the dominant one among philosophers, so my effort to present and defend the Heraclitean alternative was constructive, or at least tried to be. That said, I doubt the significance of this alternative could be appreciated without a historical approach. I myself couldn’t appreciate Heraclitus until I saw, first, how consistent reason failed to accommodate time, and then how the Heraclitean alternative both succeeded and put its rival’s failure into clear focus.

NS: Could you say more about why time leads to inconsistency? Philosophers today find ways of upholding consistency as well as time, don’t they?

PLM: Time is inconsistent if it is composed of moments. Thanks to the paradoxes of Zeno, Parmenides’ student, Aristotle saw this very clearly. If time is composed of moments, each one must come into being and then pass away. But when? A moment cannot be born in itself, nor can it die in itself, without violating the principle of non-contradiction. Neither can a moment be born or die in another moment, for that, too, would be contradictory. So, the principle of non-contradiction forbids moments, as Aristotle saw, yet it also requires them—a consequence he did not recognize. “The same thing,” he writes, “cannot both be and not be in the same respect at the same time.” Now, referring to fire’s relation to its fuel, Heraclitus called it “need and satiety.” Consistency demands that we analyze this apparent contradiction by distinguishing the duration of fire’s burning into different times. But no matter how finely we do so—ultimately, to the point of moments without duration—the contradiction persists. And likewise for other temporal processes; fire is just a particularly vivid illustration of the problem.

Although philosophers today overlook it, Hegel thought this problem serious enough to develop a new logic. British Hegelians were thus also worried about it. Bertrand Russell began in this tradition, but later rebelled against it to found analytic philosophy—which would venerate, not coincidentally, a logic without tense.

NS: In the ancient world, who won the debate, Heraclitus or Parmenides and Plato?

PLM: The stock answer is that the winner was Plato. This was Nietzsche’s point in his clever parody of Marx: “Christianity is Platonism for the masses.” But that’s too simple. Christianity blends the eternity of Platonism with the temporality of the Hebrew Bible. Time can be holy. Think of the liturgical calendar: there is a whole Week called Holy. That’s a departure from Platonism wide enough to have prompted Augustine, otherwise so deeply indebted to this philosophical tradition, to devote a whole book of his Confessions to rehabilitating time. Like all subsequent Christian theologians, moreover, he had to depart from Platonism’s logic of consistency in order to make sense of the Incarnation, among other paradoxical mysteries. So, in a way rarely recognized, Christianity preserved Heraclitean reasoning about time and its relation to eternity.

To answer your question, then, I don’t think anyone won out exclusively. There are quarters of our culture—analytic philosophy comes to mind, as do mathematics and the natural sciences—where the principle of non-contradiction is a shibboleth. But there are other quarters—continental philosophy, as well as Christian theology—where tolerance, and even celebration of contradiction persists. Come to think of it, that’s what a Heraclitean should expect: conflict about truth, yet truth in that conflict.

NS: Does Heraclitus represent, somehow, a more modern—even secular—view in his affirmation of time?

PLM: Well, it depends what you mean by “modern” and “secular.” No easy task, as The Immanent Frame makes clear! If “secular” means the separation of the divine from ordinary time, then Heraclitus is far from secular—the operation of time is for him the divine itself. “Modern” is a very difficult notion to apply here, which isn’t to say we should give up trying. After all, there are Greek philosophers who seem eerily modern. Many historians of philosophy locate the beginning of the modern era in philosophy with Descartes and Hobbes, who self-consciously revived the ideas of ancient Greek Atomists, Sophists, and Skeptics. But if you locate the high modern in the nineteenth century, as some others do, then it’s significant that the great German philosophers of this period spoke of Heraclitus reverently, presenting him as the inspiration for their own philosophies. “There is not a single aphorism of Heraclitus,” wrote Hegel, “that does not appear in my Logic.” Nietzsche added, “The world will always need the truth, hence the world will always need Heraclitus.” This is an influence historians of philosophy are only now beginning to appreciate. Heraclitus’s best days may be ahead.

NS: Is Heraclitus reminding us—as some might chastise—that secularity carries in it the arrogant, even dangerous aspiration to become a god?

PLM: If he is reminding us of this, then so too is nearly every other pagan Greek philosopher. Many of them saw philosophy as a quest for divinity. First, though, we have to be clear what we mean by “secularity,” as before, reminding ourselves of the threat of anachronism when we’re using it to discuss ancient Greeks. With that proviso, though, we can ask something like this: Was Reason untethered to traditional religion liable to promote megalomania? There were certainly advocates of traditional Greek piety who said so. Pindar, for example, wrote: “Do not, my soul, strive for the life of the immortals.” Such a warning could explain the story of Bellerophon, who plummeted to his death after attempting to reach the dwelling of the gods on his winged horse.

The Greek philosophers largely ignored the warnings of the poets. Their arrogance—which we see reflected in modern philosophers such as Nietzsche or Heidegger—makes us nervous, and rightly so. We become still more nervous when we detect it in our political leaders. The French revolutionaries substituted a statue of Reason for the altar in Notre Dame, right around the time that heads started to roll. That said, there was a parallel arrogance in the Divine Right of Kings, which arguably caused as much suffering as did the revolutionary zeal, so I’m not so sure the secular version is any worse than its religious counterpart.

NS: Couldn’t there also be dangers in embracing contradiction, as you do? How can one be both rational and, when necessary, contradictory?

PLM: Carefully! For one thing, we should not ignore the principle of non-contradiction and accept contradictions whenever we like. Aristotle was right that such logical insouciance would forfeit rationality. But neither should we revere this principle as “the firmest of all things,” as he called it, anticipating many philosophers who have since shared his reverence. Paying close attention to time and any process in time, we have to acknowledge that it is contradictory at every moment. There should therefore be a higher-order logic that accounts for the operation of reason whenever it thinks about time or itself. This is what I call chiasmus. Consistency and analysis are still important components of this higher-order logic, but they must be united with their opposites, synthesis and inconsistency, to complete accurate thinking. For most practical purposes, this higher-order logic isn’t necessary; the limited logic of consistency often suffices. Analogously, for most engineering purposes, Einsteinian relativity theory is not necessary; the limited mechanics of Newton will do. But there are occasions when physicists need Einstein, just as there are occasions when philosophers need Heraclitus. Whenever we wish to understand anything as temporal, including ourselves, chiasmus is needed.

NS: What does Heraclitus tell us about chiasmus?

PLM: The short answer is that it is how we should think and speak, because it’s the way the world is. Many of his best aphorisms have the structure of this literary figure (A : B :: B : A). For Heraclitus, this crosswise structure is shared by accurate thinking and the world contemplated by our thought. All three of these domains—speech, thought, and world—come condensed in one difficult and obscure aphorism that stands at the summit of Heraclitean philosophy. In my book, I call it the “principle of chiasmus”: “wholes and not-wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one all things.” Focusing on thinking, we can see in this aphorism two movements of thought: one brings the objects of thought together (wholes, convergent, consonant, from all things one), the other takes them apart (not-wholes, divergent, dissonant, from one all things). In cognition, taking things apart is the activity of analysis, whereas bringing them together is the activity of synthesis.

NS: What is the significance of chiasmus for you?

PLM: Chiasmus, for me, is a way of thinking, as it is for Heraclitus, but I’ve tried to broaden this to include emotional intelligence as well as logical rigor. The emotions perform the activity of synthesis, whereas consistent reason performs the activity of analysis. The higher-order activity of chiasmus, then, is the joint performance of both. That’s a sketch of the ethics I have in mind: not the separate excellence of reason on one hand and emotion on the other, but their joint activity.

NS: Why did you decide to open the book with a poem which has that as its title?

PLM: The poem was my first effort—unconscious though it was—to communicate this chiasmus. That wasn’t its title when I wrote it in 2008. In fact, until I decided to include it in the book, just before sending in the manuscript in 2010, I called it “Sic et Non.” It’s full of oppositions—starting with a No, for example, and ending with a Yes—inviting you to analyze them rationally as inconsistent. Stepping back from those basic oppositions—between thinking the difference in time and feeling the summons of eternal unity—you might even experience the higher-order unity that is chiasmus itself. But I didn’t see this when I wrote the poem. To be honest, I didn’t really know what I was doing then, beyond procrastinating on the book I was supposed to be writing! Later, though, it helped me to structure the book’s contents and, finally, to distill its conclusion. It’s no exaggeration to say that the poem expressed the idea of the book long before I knew consciously what that idea would be.

NS: You often refer to Nietzsche as a faithful Heraclitean. But, considering how much changed in the millennia between the two, how faithful could he be?

PLM: Nietzsche shared Heraclitus’s most distinctive feature: a respect for time that refused to denigrate it as an inferior derivative of eternity. Moreover, Nietzsche’s most famous doctrine, the eternal return (or eternal recurrence of the same), first appears in Greek philosophy with Heraclitus. The meaning of this doctrine is not at all clear, neither for Nietzsche nor for Heraclitus, but I believe they share the same interpretation of it: each thinks that eternity is present at every moment of time; there is “eternity in an hour,” as Blake put it. There are other doctrines shared between these two philosophers; also, Nietzsche uses Heraclitus’s aphoristic style.

With these similarities in mind, you are nonetheless right that much changed in the millennia between them. The biggest philosophical rupture, in my view, was Christianity. Of the many novelties it introduced into the Greek philosophical tradition, I find the deepest to be this set: the value it places on the emotion of love, the insoluble individuality it grants to every human being, and the injunction to direct this love toward a human individual (who is also divine). Both Heraclitus and Parmenides—who together pose the most basic conflict of early Greek philosophy—agree that the best life is purely rational, and that whoever achieves it surpasses individuality to become divine reason itself. Christianity changes that. Augustine funnels these novel ideas into the subsequent tradition of European philosophy. His revolution is so successful that even anti-clerical philosophers, such as Nietzsche, who openly despises Augustine, are unimaginable without him.

NS: The Immanent Frame is mentioned in your acknowledgements. Can you tell me about what part the site had in the development of your thinking?

PLM: It was essential. The book was not originally even going to include Heraclitus. But after I’d finished the poem you asked about, I found a better way to procrastinate on the book: I wrote some posts for The Immanent Frame. The first was on psychoanalysis and took issue with Taylor’s denial that it is a spirituality. This led to another, contesting his assertion that death frustrates our quest for meaningful lives. Lurking in the background of both of these posts was Heraclitus. I wasn’t sure that readers of this site would be interested in him, but the kind editors here gave me the chance to present his spirituality nonetheless. William Connolly read these posts, and he wrote to thank me for them, adding that he’d decided to incorporate some Heraclitus into his forthcoming book, A World of Becoming. This got me thinking afresh about my own book. Why not include Heraclitus in it too? He didn’t fit into the story it was supposed to tell, but maybe I could change the story. Whereas, before, I was recounting a uniform tradition of pure reason from Parmenides through Plotinus, I decided instead to present a rivalry between two main traditions, showing that there was an early alternative to Platonism in Heraclitus.

Thanks no doubt to my immersion in The Immanent Frame, I saw this rivalry as one between transcendence and immanence, a rivalry that characterizes much of the writing here, just as it frames the narrative of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. But as I reworked the Heraclitean spirituality posts into a Heraclitus chapter, and thus came to understand this obscure philosopher better, I saw that his notion of reason—chiasmus, again—managed to synthesize immanence and transcendence. In this way, the book was no longer just about a rivalry between two irreconcilable options; it now argued for the superiority of the Heraclitean option because it sublated these antitheses. In the terms of your earlier question, the book went from largely antiquarian interest to offering some constructive philosophy as well.

NS: It was only after finishing Becoming God—and here on The Immanent Frame—that you explicitly go into the Christian theological consequences of these ideas: the “Crosswise Christ.” How much were these concerns in your mind all along?

PLM: Not one bit—that is, not until I edited the final proofs. A friend who had read a draft of the Heraclitus chapter pointed out that, although I discussed chiasmus throughout, and even made it the main idea of the book, I never once explained what the literary figure was. Not every reader would be familiar with it, so I decided to illustrate it with some canonical examples from English literature. The ones I found were from Shakespeare and Milton. Gradually, I came to appreciate that Milton’s example has theological significance. It’s about the Incarnation: “Love without end and without measure Grace.” The literary figure of chiasmus got its name from the Greeks, whose letter “Chi” is shaped like our letter X, and thus exhibits the crosswise pattern of the figure itself. For Christians, this was a potent symbol not only because of the crucifixion but also because the first letter of “Christos” is “Chi” (which appears in the venerable English abbreviation for Christmas, “Xmas”). From antiquity, then, chiasmus has been used as a symbol of Christ.

As I put it in my introduction—with gratitude to my indulgent typesetter, who allowed me to make the comparison explicit after the proofs were already done—Milton uses chiasmus to communicate his God. But that’s exactly what Heraclitus is doing with his aphorisms! Could the God be the same? I decided to write a series of posts here, “Crosswise Christ,” to test the possibility. So, what began as a convenient way to explain a literary figure evolved into the idea that Heraclitean philosophy could underwrite a new Christology. It’s new for me, at least, and I’m eager to see how it’s received by readers of The Immanent Frame. That’s one of the great things about this site—scholars can test ideas, getting instant feedback from a much wider readership than we could hope for from our specialized journals.