It is easy enough to dismiss the response of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh to Israel’s assassination of his three sons as the words of a deranged fanatic. Upon being informed that Israeli missiles had killed them, Haniyeh thanked God that they had been martyred. Whatever one might think about Haniyeh at a personal level, philosophy has to try to understand the logic at work in any expressed position and not indulge in dismissive ad hominem. Haniyeh’s response is important because it lays bear the moral structure of fundamentalist thinking. Note that I say “fundamentalist” and not “religious fundamentalist.” I leave out that qualifier deliberately because I want to focus on the genus and not the species. While Haniyeh’s brand of religious fundamentalism situates human history as a minor drama in an unfolding divine narrative, the secret to understanding fundamentalism and its moral irrationality is to tease out the way in which it absolutizes the purposes that orient it.

All political struggles are contests over the way in which institutions organize and govern human social life, determine resource distributions, set the relationship between public and private spheres, legitimize the division of labour, and set general boundaries to the formation and pursuit of individual goals. Fundamentalists, whether religious or secular, abstract the end– their preferred configuration of social institutions– from the well-being of people living here and now. Hence fundamentalism always coincides with maximalist and perfectionist programs that value the purity of the goal over the actual well-being of the people that the goal is supposed to serve. To paraphrase Jesus’ critique of the rabbis, the fundamentalist forgets that principles are made for human beings, not human beings for principles.

Because the principle is everything for the fundamentalist, the loss of life in pursuit of the complete realization of the principle is not only a necessary sacrifice, it is a supreme value. Haniyeh gives us a particularly vivid example of this form of thinking, but its is only an example, not an archetype. The real problem is the absolutism of the goal, its elevation above the maintenance and improvement of life–the only ultimately coherent goal of political struggle because life is the material condition of all enjoyment.

The question of whether social institutions are or good or bad can only be answered by examining the quality of life of the people whose lives are shaped by the norms the institutions impose. One cannot abstract the institutions from the practical matter of how people govern or are governed, work, relate, reproduce, and shape their individual life-horizons. The fundamentalist does just that: they abstract the goal– national independence, socialism, the glory of the motherland, whatever– from the lives of the people whose existence is a material presupposition of that goal’s goodness. Lying at the root of fundamentalist thought therefore is not god but the abstraction of regulating values as ends in themselves from the lives of human beings that give those values material substance and meaning.

Dying for the cause is never good for the person who dies, because they can never experience the better state of affairs for which they struggled. If individuals have only instrumental value as objects of sacrifice for the cause, then loss of life not only does not equal loss of value, loss of life would be gain of value as the number of martyrs soars. Haniyeh implies as much when he thanked God for the honour of having his children martyred. But Haniyeh forgets the most important question: what good does their martyrdom do them? Their life-value is reduced to a mere instrument of the lives of future people who will enjoy what they can no longer experience. “Their pure blood is for the liberation of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa, and we will continue to march on our road, and will not hesitate and will not falter. With their blood, we bring about hope, a future and freedom for our people and our cause.” But dead people have no future on earth, which is the stage on which political struggles play out. If real value exists only in the other world– in eternal life with the Divine– then struggle for something as comparatively ephemeral as a nation-state is pointless. Political values can only be realized in secular time frames.

Religious fundamentalist thought is always incoherent as a basis for social criticism and justification for political struggle because it locates true value in the eternal. Secular fundamentalist thought is incoherent as a basis for social criticism and justification for political struggle because it demands the perfect realization of ideals. The absolutization of the value of either version’s principles reduces people to tools of the ideals. For the fundamentalist, therefore, not the heavens, but everyone alive may perish unless justice is done. But unwillingness to compromise, refusal to consider the interests of the other side, and insistence on a struggle to death in pursuit of a perfectionist version of a maximalist agenda ensures only on-going sacrifice of life, not the concrete improvements in its lived reality which alone explain the purposes of political struggle. Conflicts between two fundamentalist movements such as we see between Israelis and Palestinians today cannot be resolved: either side’s maximalist agenda could only be realized through the complete defeat or destruction of the other sides, but the numbers are too evenly matched to allow total victory.

Even if Hamas in its present form is thoroughly routed (which I still think is the most likely scenario, especially now that Iran has undermined the baby steps that Biden had been taking to reign in Israel’s onslaught in Gaza) new movements will arise until some form of Palestinian nation state has been created. But that will not be a single secular state encompassing all the lands of historical Palestine, because Jewish Israelis are not going anywhere, international law recognizes the legitimacy of the pre-1967 borders, there is no serious movement within Israel in support of a one-state solution, and there is no scenario concretely politically and militarily imaginable in which such a solution could be forced on them. The only way forward is some sort of compromise.

Compromise is anathema to fundamentalists, tantamount to failure, and thus never willingly entertained. Thus Iran, after committing what seems to me to be a colossal tactical and strategic mistake in attacking Israel in response to Israel’s strike on its generals in Syria, warns of an even more “devastating” response if– as is almost certain, given the adolescent posturing that passes for foreign policy today– Israel responds to the response. Immediately after the attack Ben Gvir was arguing that Israel should “go crazy” (exactly what it has been doing in Gaza). A strategically rational reaction would be to use the political capital Iran handed back to an Israel that was politically weakened on the international stage by doing nothing. But such is the nature of the “leaders” of existing nation states that the current Israeli government will most likely mindlessly enact the typical schoolboy script and feel the need to punch back.

On and on and on it goes, people dying, infrastructure destroyed, intellect wasted in the production of weapons systems, everyone chanting death until victory– but no one can win, because winning means concrete improvement in life conditions, a goal which can only be achieved when the value of political principles and goals is interpreted in concrete, life-valuable terms. A principled goal is good to the extent that its realization improves the lives of the people who will live under it, by: a) increasing access to the resources, relationships, and institutions that satisfy fundamental natural and social needs, and b) thereby allowing individuals and self-organizing collectivities to more widely and deeply develop, express, and enjoy their life-capacities for experience, imagination, scientific understanding, productive and creative work, mutualistic relationship, meaningful connection to the wider world, and all-round enjoyment of our finite time on the planet.

Since we are all crowded together but still divided into nation-states and would-be nation states, the realization of these generic goals requires mutual understanding and accommodation between peoples not just people. Real leadership understands the need for mutual accommodation and compromise, both for the sake of solving immediate conflicts and as a step towards a future world in which, perhaps, the narrow horizons of national identity are transcended.

But in order to take that step we must not abstract our principles from lived time. Our feet must be anchored on the ground where our lives play out, not in a fantasy of eternal life or the unsullied perfection of a mere idea. Religion is the heart of a heartless world, true, and principle can expose the contradictions of practice but value, as Nietzsche knew, must be lived here and now or not at all.

“It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this confusion of streets, of necessities, of voices: how much enjoyment, impatiences, and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life here every moment. And yet it will soon be so still for all these shouting, lively, life-loving people … How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all about the idea of death! I would fain do something to make the idea of life even a hundred times more worthy of their attention.” (The Thought of Death, Book Four, Aphorism 278, The Gay Science)

God, Asleep at the Switch, Again

Every time that fundamentalist lunatics appeal to their conception of the Divine to justify their very secular slaughters, I call to mind the thunderous poetry of the Book of Job. After listening to Job lament the injustice of the losses that God had inflicted upon him, Jehovah bellows: “Who darkens my design with a cloud of thoughtless words? Confront me like man; come, answer my questions. When I formed the earth, where were you then? … Who measured out the earth … who stretched the builders line?” (Job 38 1-7) I read the Eternal One’s diatribe as an object lesson in the radical difference between the understanding of a finite, earth-bound being and a divine omniscience. If there is an unbridgeable gap between the way in which an all-powerful intelligence understands the universe and the ways in which human beings see it, then humility would suggest– I take it that this is the point of the Book of Job– that humans not assume that they can see things as God sees them. If that is so, then they ought not assume that God assigns them divine missions that entail the indiscriminate slaughter of fellow humans.

If you pull the trigger, you and the leaders that ordered the attack are responsible.

Imagine the dismay an Eternal intelligence would feel at being invoked as justification for such a futile, murderous rampage as was unleashed against Russia by the four ISIS-K operatives in March? How is it possible for people to convince themselves that there is some coherent link between unbridled slaughter of the unarmed and advancing the political cause they purport to be serving? It is long past the time that the holy warriors of all sects, denominations, and religions stop appealing to their divinity as justification for their actions. The Divinity in which they claim to so ardently believe might not be interested in the human sacrifices that they offer up in its name.

But the problem is not, as secular critics of religion argue, the irrationality at the core of religious belief as such but a general unwillingness to accept personal responsibility for the pain and death one’s decisions cause. Secular politicians are also quick to off-load their responsibility for the blood that their strategies and tactics shed to political or military “necessity,” to the intransigence of the enemy, the demands of history, the need to protect the revolution or the homeland. The enemy of peace is not fundamentalism or fanaticism per se but the inability to feel the depth of pain that violence causes to fellow human beings. The function of an appeal to a necessity beyond individual or collective human control, the reduction of human beings to, on the one side, executors of the demands of cosmic or historical forces and, on the other, obstacles to the fulfillment of the goals of those forces is the ultimate enabling condition of mass homicidal violence.

Being and Feeling Responsible

Camus understood this depth enabling condition which unmatched clarity. Reflecting on Ivan Karamazov’s horrified exclamation that if there is no God, “nothing is true and everything is permitted,” Camus notes, calmly, wryly, that everything is permitted whether God exists or not, but that it does not follow that nothing is forbidden (The Myth of Sisyphus, p.50). Believers and unbelievers are criminals and that when it comes to social values, nothing is true save those principles to which we commit ourselves. Genuine commitment to a principle means assuming responsibility for the outcomes of actions undertaken on its basis. People who accept responsibility for their decisions are honest: they are “ready to pay up.”(p.50) They do not blame the enemy for their tactics, nor God, nor History: the person who acts is responsible. Therefore, if you order an airstrike that kills babies, you are responsible for their screams before they die and the ailing of their parents forever after. Therefore, if you order an attack that kills teenagers gathered to dance or listen to a concert, you are responsible, not the occupying forces, not the God in whose service you believe you are acting.

Mass killing as a political tactic will never stop until those who order it and those who carry it out stop deflecting, stop treating themselves as mere links in a mechanical causal chain, start thinking of themselves as agents who can think and deliberate about what the best course of action is when action is called for, and feel the consequences of their decisions. Those invested with political authority make decisions in a context, but if the decision is really a decision, it is part of the causal nexus that produces an event. The Hamas leadership could have decided on a different course of action than October 7th, and Israel could also have responded differently. Putin could have re-assessed his strategy in Ukraine after it became apparent that the West was calling his bluff: you can fold your hand and live to play another round or you can push in all of your chips.

The other side of invoking transcendent or historical necessity in order to deflect blame is the suppression of consciousness of the lived reality of fellow human beings by subsuming them under a category: occupier, terrorist, Nazi. Since categories do not have families, do not laugh or cry, have no goals or hopes, nothing valuable is lost when they are attacked. The members of the set cease to be living beings and become things, mere tokens of a type. But the responsible politician has to see that behind the category are people. And this recognition must be reciprocal. And when one realizes that struggles are conducted against people and not categories, and this recognition is reciprocal, it becomes possible to imagine the people who formerly treated each other as enemies stop and open their ears and listen to each other. And then it becomes possible to imagine that the two sides begin to discover the reasons why the other side acts as it does. And then it becomes possible to imagine that both lay their cards on the table, stop appealing to gods and historical forces and reified values and say: “this is what we need, how can we work it out?”

The belief in dialogical reciprocity would be utopian if there were not always people in the combat zones screaming over the explosions that the other side has a point, that ultimately everyone must sit down and talk, so better to do it sooner rather than later, when the body pile is higher the generation who will demand vengeance is larger as a consequence. They are responsible to a deeper principle, one which can also find religious or secular expression: each living being is a an unrepeatable singularity which, once gone, cannot be replaced. Thou shalt not kill because thou lackest the power to reproduce the life you take. New life does not make up for the loss of old life: we mourn the elderly even as we celebrate the birth of a baby.

Everyone who pauses even for a moment can understand that there is no casual connection between terrorist murder and the solution of deep structural problems, no road that leads from mass homicidal bombing to peace with justice for everyone concerned. While our collective intelligence encompasses the universe that we formerly appealed to gods to explain, politically we remain hostage to the illusion that gods and borders decide whose life is valuable and whose may be sacrificed for a greater good. But the only good worth struggling for is the maximal flourishing of the lives of each and all, and maximal flourishing, if one thinks through the logical implications, rules out mass sacrifice of present life for the sake of future life.

We who are not in uniform and watch in dismay also have responsibilities. Those responsibilities are not to cheerlead wars as if we were watching a sporting event, not to mindlessly chant slogans or demonize the other side. Our responsibilities are to understand the causes of the problem, criticise strategies and tactics unlikely to solve it, and, perhaps, above all, to stop putting people in charge who will not accept responsibility for the death and sorrow the execution of their orders cause.

We have a responsibility to expose contradictions between principle and practice. Putin said in response to the terror attack, that “We must never forget that we are a multinational, multi-religious country. We must always treat our brothers, representatives of other faiths with respect, as we always do — Muslims, Jews, everyone.” But in the Second Chechen War he ordered this, the complete destruction of the Muslim city of Grozny.

We have to call out the hypocrisy of people who claim to lead a moral army and are fighting for a righteous cause and ordered this, the systematic destruction of the life conditions of 2 million people.

And we have to call out the hypocrisy of people who claim to be fighting for the liberation of their people when they pursue that end by means of adventures like this, that lay waste to the lives of people who are going to be their neighbors in any imaginable future political arrangement:

We can learn from the poetry of religion as we can from the experiments of scientists and the arguments of philosophers. We can learn from books and we can learn from experience, from stories and from formal deductions. What matters is not the source of the truth but the truth itself: we are ultimately responsible for the lives we live. When the practical implications of this truth sinks in– intellectually and emotionally– perhaps we will stop repeating the mistakes of the past over and over and over.