The World Order is About to COMPLETELY Change—Aaron Bastani Meets Rana Dasgupta

Although the personal politics of Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) are utterly despicable—he is often described as the ‘Crown Jurist of the Third Reich’—he wrote something in his 1922 book Political Theology that, since I first read it some thirty years ago, has continued to influence all my thinking about religion and politics:

‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts not only because of their historical development... but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.’ (Political Theology: Four Chapters on Sovereignty, MIT Press, 1985, p. 36).

It is for this reason that throughout my career—whether as a free-religious/Unitarian minister and chaplain, during my work in the field of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim relations with the Woolf Institute, or whilst chairing a number of public meetings and conferences on religion and society (including a 2007 event at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst on ‘Engaging with Religion for Building Peace: The Experience of Afghanistan and Iraq’)—I have argued that we cannot hope to understand what is happening in our world (particularly post-11 September 2001) unless we recognise that secular liberal democracies have silently, and often unknowingly, inherited the systematic structures of religion. Their entire discourse has been ineluctably shaped by religious belief.

My job, at which I suspect I have mostly failed, has been to attempt to reveal to secular people—those who ‘didn’t believe in any of that religious nonsense’—precisely how important it was to take religious belief seriously and how necessary it was for them to become religiously literate. My argument was always that, should they fail to do so, they would find themselves ill-prepared and in deep trouble in the near future. Well, that ‘near future’ has arrived, as the current religious war between the ethno-religious-nationalist governments of Iran, Israel, and the USA so eloquently and horrifically reveals.

Anyway, there is little point in writing an ‘I told you so’ piece; it gets neither me nor you anywhere. However, I can alert you to an interview with Rana Dasgupta on the Novara Media YouTube channel regarding his new book, After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order. In this interview (which I embed below)—especially during the first half—Dasgupta speaks eloquently about the vital role religion played in the creation of the nation state. I found the section on ‘Islamic Critiques of the Nation-State’ (between 19:22 and 25:22) particularly powerful and enlightening. I highly recommend watching it.

Ultimately, this interview has reminded me of the profound need to help so-called secular people realise just how ‘religious’ secular democracy has always been. In my opinion, secular societies and liberal democracies (and, by extension, liberal democratic nation states) must somehow reconnect with their long-sublimated religious characteristics. This is why I am so interested in the work of the Japanese educator and free-religionist, Imaoka Shin’ichirō because he offers a way to achieve this without descending into supernaturalist, sectarian forms of religion. I tried to explore one possible way to begin this process in my piece for the journal AI & Society: ‘A secular spiritual pilgrimage around the Res publica’, and I put it out into the world once again in hope that, one day, it might eventually land somewhere fertile ...