Free Not in God's Name by Jonathan Sacks Page A

recorded their failures. It is what the Mosaic and prophetic books are about.
    But it is not easy to see God as the source of bad as well as good, judgement as well as forgiveness, justice as well as love. The rabbis did this by understanding the two primary names of God in the Bible,
Elokim
(E) and
Hashem
(J), as referring respectively to God-as-justice and God-as-compassion. Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist, said that he came to his Theory of Complementarity when his son stole something from a local shop. He found himself thinking of his son as a father would do, then as a judge would do, and realised that while he had to think both ways, he could not do both simultaneously. He had to ‘switch’ from one to the other. That is what monotheism asks of its followers: to think of God as both a father and a judge. A judge punishes, a parent forgives. A judge enforces the law, a parent embodies love. God is both, but it is hard to think of both at the same time.
    That explains the human tendency to lapse into dualism even when you belong to a monotheistic faith.
Dualism resolves complexity
. In a recent research study, two American psychologists, Richard Beck and Sara Taylor, found that a belief in Satan as an evil force helps Christians feel more positively about God and less likely to blame him for the pain and suffering in the world. It resolves their ambivalence. 5 But what if monotheism
requires
the ability to handle complexity?
    —
    Dualism is a dangerous idea, and the mainstream Church and the Synagogue were right to reject it. Pathological dualism, though,is far more serious and appears as a social phenomenon only rarely and under extreme circumstances. It is a form of cognitive breakdown, an inability to face the complexities of the world, the ambivalences of human character, the caprices of history and the ultimate unknowability of God. It leads to regressive behaviour and has been responsible for some of the worst crimes in history: those committed during the Crusades, the pogroms, the witch-hunts, the mass murders in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. When confined to small sectarian groups, it may not pose a danger. But when it catches fire among larger populations, it is a prelude to tragedy of world historic proportions.
    Pathological dualism does three things. It makes you dehumanise and demonise your enemies. It leads you to see yourself as a victim. And it allows you to commit altruistic evil, killing in the name of the God of life, hating in the name of the God of love and practising cruelty in the name of the God of compassion.
    It is a virus that attacks the moral sense. Dehumanisation destroys empathy and sympathy. It shuts down the emotions that prevent us from doing harm. Victimhood deflects moral responsibility. It leads people to say: It wasn’t our fault, it was theirs. Altruistic evil recruits good people to a bad cause. It turns ordinary human beings into murderers in the name of high ideals.
    To understand how it works, it is worth taking an extreme example – Germany from 1933 to 1945. The Nazi ideology was not religious. If anything, it was pagan. It was also based on ideas that were thought at the time to be scientific: the so-called ‘scientific study of race’ (a mixture of biology and anthropology) and ‘social Darwinism’, the theory that the same processes operating in nature operate in society also. The strong survive by eliminating the weak.
    The point of using it as an example is to show how beliefs that seem from a distance infantile and absurd can be held by very intelligent people indeed. The people who gave Nazism its intellectual gravitas were among Germany’s outstanding thinkers:among them figures like Bible scholar Gerhard Kittel, philosopher Martin Heidegger and legal-political analyst Carl Schmitt. 6 Joseph Goebbels, mastermind of Nazi propaganda, had a doctorate in German literature from the University of Heidelberg. Josef