The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization by Mohamed Amer Meziane

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization by Mohamed Amer Meziane https://amzn.to/4bkJ2oc How the disenchantment of empire led to climate change While industrial states competed to colonize Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century, conversion to Christianity was replaced by a civilizing mission. This new secular impetus strode hand in hand with racial capitalism in the age of empires: a terrestrial paradise was to be achieved through accumulation and the ravaging of nature. Far from a defence of religion, The States of the Earth argues that phenomena such as evangelism and political Islam are best understood as products of empire and secularization. In a world where material technology was considered divine, religious and secular forces both tried to achieve Heaven on Earth by destroying Earth itself.

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The Chris Voss Show. There you go. This is done with Aaron. Ladies and gentlemen, that makes it official. Welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate having you guys. As always, we have the most amazing minds on the show. The CEOs, the billionaires, the White House presidential advisors, the Pulitzer Prize winners,

the great authors who study the world, who teach you everything there is to know, the stories, which we call the owner's manual life, etc. As always, just the most smartest minds on the show. And of course, none of them are me. I'm just some idiot with a mic. We have an amazing minds on the show and of course none of me i'm just some idiot with a mic we have an amazing author on the show with us today he is the author of the new book that's come out april 9th 2024 it's called states or i'm sorry the states of the earth and ecological and racial history of secularization muhammad amr Mezian is on the show with us today.

We'll be talking to him about his new book and what's inside and why you should buy it, read it, and reread it again and again. He is a philosopher, performer, and professor at Brown University after teaching for four years at Columbia University. He's the author of the latest book, which won the Albertine Prize for Nonfiction in 2023. His second book is titled At the End of the Worlds, Towards a Metaphysical Anthropology. Welcome to the show, Mohamed. How are you? I'm fine, thank you, Chris.

There you go. And then, did I get that right in the bio? The bio says that the recent book that came out in April won the Albertine Prize. Was it the paperback, maybe, that we're reviewing right now? Yeah, it's this one won the prize. Yes. There you go. Congratulations.

I just wanted to make sure because I was like, there's a second book. Yeah, there's a second book, yeah, but it's not translated into English yet. Oh, okay. I see where we're at then. There you go. I was like, wait, did we need this thing put? It's a quote from your PR agent, so there you go. So welcome to the show. Congratulations on the new book.

Tell us any dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? I have my Instagram account. It's M-O-H-D-D-A-M-E-R-M-I-Z-I-A-N-E. And then I have my profile on the Verser website and on the Brown website as well. There you go. So, if you would, give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside your new book. Wow. The States of the Earth. Let's begin with the title, right?

The States of the Earth means two things. It means the state in which, the physical state in which the earth is, which is a way of talking about the climate catastrophe and the multifaceted flood crises we're in. And it's also, of course, it also means the states of the earth in terms of the states that is to say the states that govern the earth, right? Nation states, basically. So basically by playing with these two words by the you know on the polysemy and the two meanings of the word

states you can in fact see of the first layer of the argument which is that these states that govern the earth actually are partly responsible in our climate crisis. And now the main idea is basically to say that there are states of the earth and not states of heaven because they were trying, instead of looking at heaven as their goal or as the justification of their power as you know we used to do in the middle ages, they actually don't need to claim heaven to exercise power on earth. What they do is that they make people think that we can achieve heaven on earth. And by trying to achieve heaven on earth, they destroy the earth. That's the book.

We're the consumer, locust sort of consumers that destroy the earth. And, you know, you can certainly see what's going on in climate change right now. I mean, it's really hard to deny it when you're seeing like hurricanes or tornadoes landing, landing in, in California and you know, a hundred year events and stuff like this. Now it's really kind of crazy what's going on. So you, you break down basically how these nation states, religious states and different governing powers have helped led to climate climate change. down basically how these nation states, religious states, and different governing

powers have helped led to climate climate change and and and you know how basically how we got here given a history of that. Yeah absolutely. And you mentioned racial as well so there's some racial issues there into that I imagine economies of race and things of that nature as well right yes um you know i guess it's about race and ecology because the point of departure of the book is a rewriting rereading of the history of Orientalism. So Orientalism, for maybe those who are not familiar with this word, refers to how the West has perceived the Eastern world, what it would call the Orient,

which is basically a very large category that is supposed to describe what goes from Morocco, so North Africa, to Japan, as it was a coherent whole. In fact, you know, as we know, it isn't, but it's basically, you know, Afro-Asia, you know, parts of Africa and Asia. And I'm trying to show, you know, many scholars have shown, post-global studies and so on, have shown that this was an imperial imaginary, a discursive construction, you know, like fantasies, racialized, sexualized representations of the other, which I agree with. But I was trying to analyze the environmental consequences of Orientalism.

And what struck me is first that, of course, if you go back to, you know, like later on, if you go back in history, if you go back in time, you can say begin with the sense that, you know, it's just like an attempt actually to do some sort of imperial intervention for very religious reasons in what we call now the Middle East, but it's very different from even colonialism as such, as it appeared later on. And what happened is that since the late 18th century, beginning of the 9th century onwards, Orientalism becomes very important as an ideology of both colonialism, European colonialism, and European capitalism.

So the question is why and how. First thing is that colonialism for centuries was organized around the transatlantic slave trade, and it was sort of west towards the west, right? With, of course, you know, the trade functioning, so to speak, or extracting, in fact, labor forces on the western coasts of Africa and, you know, submitting millions of bad people to slavery. But the thing is that since the late 18th century, the structure of colonialism changed. And this is what I'm trying to describe. It changed for different reasons.

The first one, you see a geographical change, it goes towards the east precisely, also because of the decline of Muslim powers such as the Ottoman Empire, right, which prevented European powers to enter these regions. And the second thing is that they stopped wanting, they stopped to convert colonized people to Christianity. They say they need to be converted to civilization, to modernity,

to industrialism. And the third thing, and precisely this is also why European hegemony really becomes a global hegemony it's because of fossil fuels that is to say they use steam engines as war machines and these three changes come together actually and this is what i describe in the book it's interesting how that how how all those ends tie together i never really given a much thought until you talked about it because mine this is the reasons why people like you write great books to educate us and show us the history of what we do because a lot of people don't pay attention.

The one thing I always say is the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. We go round and round. So this is very interesting. What motivated you want to write the book well that's a good question we do that on the show yeah yeah you know i often say that and if you go on the youtube channel you'll see an interview where i play music and so on because i'm first a musician actually and what happened to me is that I discovered philosophy and it just made sense. It made more sense that I abandoned music, but it was a language where I could make sense of my own trajectory

and the trajectory of my family. Because, you know, I was born in London. My parents are from North Africa, Australia, spent early childhood in Kuwait. Then we lost everything because of the Gulf War. Oh, really? We're in Algeria. And then eventually, because there was a civil war, we went to France. So I was trained, you know, in France for that reason. And philosophy helped me to understand what was the West, by which I mean, you know, not neither saying it's great, nor saying it's bad, just understanding. History. Like an anthropologist, right, who comes in whatever community outside his own culture. And I understood something of, so to speak, the values and principles of the West. And the second reason why, I mean, more specifically led to this book is that, and this is something I share with a generation of anti-racist activists in Europe, and more specifically in France,

is that there was this law in 2004 on the banning of the veil in public schools in France, which was very strange because, you know, many people describe that as racist, but for the French state and many, many French leftists who were my friends, this was not racism. It was just the defense of freedom and secularism, right, over religious anarchism, so to speak. And then there were so many debates, I mean, you know you know of course connected to what was happening after 9-11 also in the u.s the same kind of discourse right that is to say look at these people they can't separate politics from religion they're you know they're a threat and so on we have to defend ourselves against that and i began instead of trying to respond to that directly, I tried to do the history of these discourses, right? Where does it come from that the West presents itself as a place where politics and religion have been separated?

It's not really the case, right? So I wanted to, you know, sort of rewrite the history of the West from another point of view, from a migrant point of view. I love your perspective on it. It sounds like, you know, growing up in London and kind of Western thing and then traveling around to different Middle Eastern states, or is that probably the right name to call it? I mean, it gave you some different perspectives. So you have a world history or a traveled of of these sort of cultures and environments and

you can see the differences a lot of people you know especially here in the west they never get out of america so they just have a very slanted view which may explain our you know white nationalism we have going on here and some of the radical stuff we have going on the right and it in and you're i totally agree with you on the on the on the premise that you know we we have going on the right and it in and you're i totally agree with you on the on the on the premise that you know we we have this fantasy that we we've separated church and state but it's really always been there religion is a as a thumb on the scale if you will i mean we we even put in god you could trust on our money in the 50s we're not that advanced really when when we think about it we're just assholes the american the american asshole so that's what we do best but you know it's it gives us something to do

with our spare time but so how the when you when you write about this stuff what do you what do you why why is climate change important in in in is there a way that we can take a look at the history of what you write about your book and start addressing those sort of underlying issues of religion and different things to maybe stop the spread of climate change? Is there a way or did you pretty much mark down, you know, here's where we're going and if you don't fix things soon, folks, it's not going to change. No, no, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I guess, yeah, there are different questions, I think, in your question, but the first thing I would say is that most climate activists I know either blame, you know, for climate change. Other people blame

colonialism. Some, of course, just say, you know, it's humanity, which, you know, I think is too abstract, because it's not, you know, it's not the whole of humanity. It's, you know, before the 19th century, you know, there was, there was no use of fossil fuels. So it's difficult to say that it's just humanity in general. And of course, the global North has much more responsibility than the global South. But even if you, so my argument is that, of course, capitalism and colonialism play a role, and actually they play a role together. But what climate activism has been, in my view, mostly incapable of making sense of is the way in which states are not only part of the solution but also part of the problem.

So this is what I call the fossil state, right? People have been talking about fossil capitalism, and I talk about fossil states and fossil Orientalism, which means that it's not to blame the state as being, you know, all states are bad, right? Sometimes you need sovereignty to defend yourself. And, of course, there is the history, glorious history of independence, you know, against colonialism that led, you know,

to the formation of nation states. So there are states and states, right? And in the book, I talk about the, in the 19th century before, you know, America became the United States of America became a superpower. You have this triarchy, right? So three powers, basically, Britain, France, Germany and you see how the competition between the three of them is so central in making the entire humanity at risk of self-destruction. So you see that it's

inter-imperial competition that lead them to capitalist accumulation and colonial expansion right and this is what i call imperiality which of course comes from empire which is this drive to territorial expansion but that is and this is my argument in the book, which is structured, in fact, by, if you will, a secular form of Christian fundamentalism in terms of trying to represent God on earth, right, which is also something that comes from the very long history of what empire means in Western Europe. That is to say, I'm the emperor, I have absolute sovereignty,

and as an emperor, I represent God on Earth, right? And so these states historically have been shaped by, if you will, this religious and political tradition, which, despite the fact that it has a religious dimension, has been secularized, that is to say, it becomes secular. And now we talk about the security of the nation, freedom, and so on. We don't mention God, but in the end, there is this legacy at stake behind that. There you go. And what would you call the, you know, one of the things you talked about is, you know, not all of humanity is consuming the world there are tribes i guess in the world that that you know they're still operating in the in sort of the old world thing

they're they're kind of isolated from the world but i mean who wouldn't want to be at this point but you know they're they they were able they're they're still surviving today i guess as tribes and doing their thing they didn't have to build skyscrapers and pave everything what would you call the the arms race that i imagine had huge impact on climate change between the russias and russia and the us you know all the building we did and military crap we did and all that stuff yeah very good point i don't mention this directly in my book because it's focused on the roots which really happened in the 19th century. But you're absolutely right, it does prove, it does show that what, you know, began, basically, France and Britain, you know, during

the 19th century, has been globalized. I mean, these empires, you know, became much more marginal during the next century, the 20th century. And global powers, of course, have been, these global powers have been replaced, more or less, of course, as you said, by the United States and Russia. And, you know, what should be said, I guess, about the USSR is that, of course, it was a communist state, but it was also state capitalism, right? It was not something else than a capitalist economy, but it was also state capitalism right it was not something else than a capitalist economy but it was not liberal capitalism right so it was another form of capitalism and so of course as you said these were these powers were fueled by fossil fuels no doubt right and it also shows that it's very difficult to separate the economic capitalistic use of coal, oil, gas, fossil fuels from the military use.

Right. I mean, both go together. And this is why the state is an economic actor of capitalism as such. Doesn't mean to say that the state is just the instrument of the capitalist class or ruling class or bourgeois class, which I don't agree with. So this is what I would say. The second thing, I guess, I would also emphasize to show that to some extent states or superpowers are not in competition for world power if they don't share something. You don't enter in war if you don't want something that is the same thing, right? There is no competition if there is not an identity of goal or desire. So there is a similarity between, if you will, both these states also because of what I was calling the desire of heaven on earth, right? So there was a promise even in

certainly, you know, through this idea of growth, you know, accumulating riches and communities and so on, as if this was going to create a form of earthly salvation. But in the meantime, if you look at Marxism, there is a similar impetus, that is to say, this notion that via socialism we will overcome the alienation of capitalism and so on and so forth, and religions will disappear, because really we will have created heaven on earth, and therefore religious illusions will just disappear. Have they met people? What did you say? Did Marxists meet people? That's a good question. Because I've seen people and yeah, I don't think that was ever going to happen.

You know, your book really helped me explain for, I mean, for most of my life, I've watched the Republican right wing, religious right wing here in America decry and deny climate change. And, you know know there was a time really on where you're like you know i'm not sure about everything seems to be working right now but definitely you know when you look at weather patterns and these 100 year 150 year events and you know all sorts of craziness going on and and it seems to be getting on a scale worse you know it's really hard to deny but your book helped explain why why the christian right has gop has always held that because i always was like how come they do that on their side they do the climate denier thing

like why is that a big deal for them but your book really kind of explains that right yes i think there is part actually of the book where I show also historically the connection between evangelicalism and this kind of imperial geopolitics, right? And once again, I'm talking about a moment where Europe, Western Europe, was in fact emerging as hegemonic. And the United States was really not even the federal state yet, right?

So we're not really talking about the foundations. But if you look at the influence of Germany and German theologians on British, but also very presently, very overwhelmingly on American Protestantism is really striking. And what happens is that, and this is also part of what I call secularization, which I mean by that, not the decline or the disappearance of religion, but how religions sort of transform themselves and adapt to, if you will, capitalist and fossil also modernity. And then in this specific case of Protestantism and evangelical Protestantism, what you can

see is that there is a nationalization of Christianity. That is to say, you know, from a purely Christian point of view, we're all part of humanity, right? It makes no sense to say my nation is, you know, I'm German or I'm French or I'm American and we're better than the others and so on and so forth, which has more to do with an imperial conception of oneself, right? But if you're just a Christian, of course, you know, humanity is humanity and we're all equal for Christ, right?

It doesn't make sense. But what happens is that as nation states sort of become more and more, I mean, the dominant form, so to speak, as they construct, as they centralize power, Christianity becomes an identity more than a spirituality, so to speak. So it's like we, for example, germans are christians and christianity is this religion of the west which is going to become religion of white people and so on and so forth which goes completely against i think the spiritual essence also of christianity even though i'm not myself a christian and evangelicalism participates in this and in the meantime tries to construct

a sort of internationalism of Protestant nations basically between Prussia and England, Britain, Great Britain. But also it's something the ideology is going to spread and this is also connected to missions in the Middle East but also in Africa. And so the missionaries go there and so on. And this ideological matrix also is connected to changes, in fact, as it's connected to how, in fact, they conceive of fossil fuels. And there are very interesting archives I found where you really have theologians saying inventions such as the steam engines are God-given.

And if there are fossil coal deposits beneath the earth, it's because God gave it to us to exploit them and basically exploit the earth. And there is this spiritual, even among secular industrialists, there is this spiritual dimension to the fossil economy. This was made for us, right? And we have the right to use it and to govern the earth, right? Yeah, I've seen a lot of that on living in America here for 30 years.

I grew up in a lot of that on living in america here for 30 years i grew up i grew up in a religious cult that was christian or i wouldn't call it christian it was fabricated christian but and then so that led me to study why people believe what they do all their life and and so i've seen that throughout our politics you know what one thing one concept you you made me think of when i was talking there is is how how Christians and religions and secular stuff that you talk about wraps themselves in the flag. We saw some of that during the George W. Bush administration where they had this imperialism sort of, I forget the thesis that they had written and who wrote it but basically they saw that as as their operational manual for you know we need to go save the the people in iraq from themselves you know that's kind of what we've always kind of done you know especially with we've always kind of pushed our thumb on democracy but

really you can see the hand of religion being behind that and probably some of that proselyting that you talk about where let's send in the missionaries. I'm sure everything will be fine. It's kind of like when the government knocks on your door and says, we're here to help. It's not good. You know, and Russia had the Russian Orthodox Church. So, you know, you've got that.

Even with the Ukraine war, you know, they got the kiss on the hand of the Russian Orthodox billionaires, one of the oligarchs under Putin. So, yeah, it's really interesting how all this plays into the right wing and religion and everything else. What about the Islamic religion and stuff? Is that doing the same thing in its own way, or is it exempt from this? Well, that's a big question. I'm an atheist, so I'm throwing everybody under the bus. Yeah, I know.

I mean, it's difficult in the sense that it's complex, but I maintain that the forms of the political today, so of our political life, by which I mean a state, a nation, a capitalist economy, right? Which, you know, division between urban centers and rural areas in this context, right? So these forces, these three forces, two forces, you could say, nation, state, and capital, they form our environment

and they determine our lives much more than you think, right? I believe two things which i think you know i describe in the book the first one is that this model has been globalized but its root lies in medieval western europe, right? Of course, it has changed. I mean, it has transformed. There is a permanent metamorphosis, but there is something distinctively Western and Christian about, if you will, this model, even though it doesn't appear as Christian anymore, right, which is what we call secularization.

It doesn't mean to say that it has not been globalized and therefore adapted to different contexts. But what you have to look at is instead of saying, for example, claims that it's religious or Islamic, for example, it's not because a state claims that it represents anything essential about Islam. And I would say the same, by the about you know certain christian states or christian nations they don't represent the essence of christianity america doesn't represent the essence of christianity right so there is no state of the earth so to speak that can claim this is the essence of whatever Christianity, Islam, and so on and so forth. More precisely, the reason why I'm saying this is that the model of the modern state is not Islamic as such, right?

So, of course, you know, if you go back to Prophet Muhammad, for example, there was a political dimension to his prophecy but the problem is that what was political at that time has nothing to do with what is political today. There was no modern state, there was no nation state, there was no capitalist economy, all this did not exist. So therefore it means that trying to take this and to adapt it to a modern state or a modern nation capitalist state is something that is doomed to fail and has no theological authenticity in my view. And of course for the exact same reason saying, look at what they are doing these Muslims with these states and so on and so forth is also completely misplaced because this is really something that has nothing to do

with anything essentially, so to speak, Islamic. If you say the opposite, you're a very bad social scientist and a very bad historian because you claim against, in my view, rationality, that religions, what people believe, forces them or is something that can explain how they will behave. No. People are human beings and they belong to a society in a given time, in a given place. And these material forces influence them much more than what they think they believe. Can't we just blame the boomers for everything?

I mean, that's kind of what we've been doing lately. What did you say? Can't we just blame the boomers for everything? I mean, that's kind of what we've been doing lately. What did you say? Can't we just blame the boomers for everything? I don't think so. I think it goes way back. A lot of millennials and Gen Zs are doing these days. It's the boomers that ruined everything and consumed everything in the earth.

But it's probably good that you wrote this book so you can give the boomers off their backs you know what about atheists are we i'm an atheist um are we doing anything to to cause climate change do we need to clean up anything in our yard you know atheism in my view is not the same as secularization or or or i i don't you know i think this think this is a philosophical position. I mean, you know, I studied, read, read, and of course I write philosophy. And I know atheist traditions as much as I know religious traditions. You know, I read Nietzsche, Marx, Freud for hours and so on.

And, you know, this, of course, is a tradition I respect. And actually, you know, as much as what happens with religious texts, they can be interpreted in very exclusionary ways and problematic ways. The thing about being an atheist, we don't have any systems or whatever. We just don't believe in anything. So that's just it. There's no... I wouldn't say that.

I think there are certain assumptions that make many versions of atheism possible. But it depends if it's a negation of anything that's divine, if it's simply that one doesn't care, it's already, you know, very different. And also, you know, I've been following lately and briefly, you know, this polemic around,

what's his name? Richard Dawkins, right? He said he was culturally Christian and so on. And, you know, of course he represents. So this kind of self-proclaimed atheism, which, you know, they call themselves new atheists, which is, in my view, a bit funny because really this is good old atheism.

That is to say, they just repeat what people say since the 17th, 18th century. And, you know, basically they, and I have no problem with people being atheists, but the problem is that when it becomes this notion that all of a sudden they're superior to most people in the world, because all of a sudden they have a monopoly of a reason in science, then this, you know, this becomes, I think, problematic, especially if in the end what you're going to say is that Christianity is really better than Islam

because it's Western. Yeah. We're not killing anybody who doesn't believe in us, I don't think, are we? I don't know. We'll have to check the record. But, yeah, I don't know. It sounds from what you've put forth in your book, though,

that I'm able to say, since I'm an atheist, I'm helping the climate a little bit better. I'm even helping because I'm definitely a consumer of goods that scour the earth and probably don't help pollute the earth. But, you know, maybe I'm contributing less than the Christians or something. But, no, I get it. There's a lot of variations probably of atheism. There is vegans. I once said I went vegan one time because I just started eating salads and eating clean. And boy, did I get an earful from 100,000 different variations of veganism that were very militant too.

But no, it's interesting to me how, how these things work. And you mentioned when you said that, that, you know, there's, I, I, I recognize about 50 years old. I woke up one day and realized,

you know, I, I kind of understood territorial tribalism of humanity and why they separated into mobs and groups and religions. And, and I, it finally occurred to me one day that it's a superiority thing it's i'm better than you because i belong to xyz group and like you mentioned that we were saying and i was like

holy shit there really is like a kind of a narcissistic behavior that's built into human nature where we join these tribes not necessarily so I mean, I imagine partially because there's some sort of benefit to tribalism or we think there is a benefit to it, but there's a moral superiority to it of saying, like you said, I'm better than everyone else because I belong to XYZ club. And it was interesting to make that discovery in my mind where I'm like, what a bunch of assholes. You know, this is what sometimes, of course, is called Eurocentrism,

and this is nobody's fault individually, so to speak. Everybody's in this. But because it's historical forces, it's a form of inequality that was produced on a global scale and that we were thrown in, so to speak, at different places. Nobody decided, not anyone who is in our generation, even, of course, not one single human being who's still alive is old enough to be individually responsible for the system we created. So it's something that we inherited, right? The problem is that it's not manageable. The problem is that it governs humans much more than they govern their system.

You're talking about an invented God, right? I mean, it's as if now it was, skepticism is something we invented, but then it sort of governs us much more now. And part of the system is, of course, a form of Eurocentrism, which is also in decline, right? This is also why it becomes more and more vocal

and that there's these far-right movements and so on because it's a reaction also to the crisis of the system but in the meantime the ideology of the west you know the west is better is something that still remains right and even among some leftists and this has nothing to do with the fact that you're an atheist or a religious person and so on it really is about this thing of like our economies our mode of life western modes of life are in the end better because there's more freedom here right so of course we can we can talk about that that is to say this is what i do in the book that is to say i don't deny of course that there are some privileges

in these countries western countries but where do they come from? And they don't come from the sort of genius of Western Christianity that all of a sudden discovered a better cultural system. And even saying that the liberal democracies come from a specific culture is, in my view, already displaced. They don't come from a specific culture is, in my view, already displaced. They don't come from a specific culture. They come from how the world has been organized, how the relationship, unequal relationship, has been organized between the global north and the global south. And this has led to the foundation of these societies.

And, you know, if you talk about democracy rights, not just the election, but real democracy, right? Like the rights that people can have against monopolies, the state and so on and so forth, government. These rights have not been given. People, by virtue of protests and self-organization of workers, for example, of course, but not only, a feminist movement, anti-racist activists, and so on, they are the ones who forced governments at some point in history to respond to their protests through rights. So it comes from these kinds of history

and has much more to do with politics than any kind of culture. I agree with you. You know, America has always had this dirty sort of relationship with religion, even though it's supposed to be a spouse under a constitution that's separate. And I think the intent was to make it separate. But, you know, the analogies that people use that, you know, we're a God-given country, that God, you know, made religion, made America great because jerk-a-jerk-a-jerk-a-off. The shining city on the hill still permeates, you know, white Christian nationalism today. Reagan brought it back like a vengeance.

You know, that sort of we're better than everyone else sadly you know i i learned this when i was in my teenage you know learning about territorial nature of human nature the the moral superiority of trying to be better than each other the fact that we're all human beings when really that's that should be our flag, that we're human beings, that we're all human. We all share the same sort of design, and you can't say it's by God. Maybe we can all agree on that, maybe. It's not the best design most biologists that have come on the show have said. If somebody designed us, they did a really shitty job.

It's interesting how we destroy the world by separating ourselves into tribes and you know i always think back it's it's a just a reference i always keep my brain of what was it the movie space odyssey 2021 or whatever it was where the monkeys finally separate in different tribes and then they start killing each other you know and it just it just all starts there. You know, maybe, I don't know, I'm thinking as the atheist, maybe we need to start some crusades and see if maybe we can do stuff better on the atheist side. I don't know.

You have predecessors, you know. We have a blueprint to work from. I'm using your book. When we take over the world and start burning people alive and cutting off heads if they don't subscribe to atheism, or even if they do, we do that anyway. But no, one thing you mentioned that you were saying was the decline of the secular nation. And, you know, we are kind of seeing that right now where religion, at least in America and in Christianity, is dying off. There are more people now that don't where a religion at least in america and in christianity is dying off there

are more people now that don't believe in religion or question it deeply or don't subscribe to religion on a like we go to church every week sort of thing than ever before and it is in super decline is crashing here in america that's why we have a republican party that's trying to seize power in the most fascist authoritarian way because they're seeing that their power is dying and ending and that's why white nationalism is fighting to the death over everything and trying to cheat everything they possibly can including january 6th so it's kind of interesting how that's going to work out i guess if religion in america or christianity decline here to a point that i don't know maybe we get our wits about us or i don't know we're

probably still going to think we're great asshole americans that's kind of our thing we like to roll with it probably means means that you know america is in a is in a process of you know this is actually the classical sense of secularization that is to say there's decline in church attendance and decline in numbers at least which doesn't mean to say that the institutions do not retain a certain kind of sacredness or religiosity which is different but this is something that happened of course in in western europe you know a long time ago earlier i earlier. I think the US is in a similar process right now, but I think, you know, to go back to your joke about a new crusade, you know, I mean, I said to you, you have predecessors, but the book begins with the expedition to Egypt.

And so it's Napoleon Bonaparte, who, you know, is this very famous general and so on in France, who became an emperor. And the interesting thing about him is that he was an atheist. Oh, really? And that's why it's not just about Christianity. And his army, the French Republican Army, because in France, you know, La République, Republic, is not the same as Republicans in the U.S. It basically means a secular modern government that is not the empire or, in fact, not the monarchy. So it's opposed to the monarchy. So they were claiming the republic.

That was during the French Revolution and actually they sent Napoleon to Egypt also to get rid of him because he was becoming too influential in Paris and basically what happened is that from a historical point of view the army that was sent to Egypt is the first secular army in history probably because they were not Christians and when they came, this is also part of what I call the secularization of empires, and Orientalism plays a role in there, I'll show how. When Napoleon arrived with his army in Egypt, he said to them, don't try to convert them, right, and respect and tolerate their religion. And he said to the Egyptians at that time, we are true Muslims. Napoleon was saying that.

We are true Muslims because we have the same enemy, which is the Catholic Roman Church. Oh, wow. Yeah. And, of course, it was strategic, that is to say. No doubt, right? But in the meantime, if we were back in the 15th century, his opportunism would not have taken the same form. So it betrays, so to speak, this declaration,

the possibility of saying we are true Muslims, betrays the transformation since at least one century and to some extent the decline of Christianity among certain elites, political elites, military elites, and of course intellectuals through the Enlightenment. And it portrays that. And I'm trying to show that you can't write the history of this secularization process, for example, the secularization of France and of Europe, and how Napoleon came back to France and made this sort of first secular empire on earth, literally, and wrote the civil code.

You can't explain that without the expedition to Egypt. They are interconnected. And the civilizing mission, which is the mission civilization, as the French would say. So converting people not to Christianity but converting them to civilization is not something that is purely religious or Christian, right? Because also many atheists actually were involved in these kinds of processes. This is why as much as it's impossible to say religion is good or religion is always bad, it's impossible to say atheism is always good or atheism is always bad because depending on different configurations,

it creates different kinds of results. So this is why I think that in the end, these kind of geopolitics are much more important than, you know, the things that people supposedly believe in. And the last thing I wanted to say, because you mentioned Bush and the ideology behind the war in Iraq, or the Iraq war, I wrote a short piece in, which is published on the Verso blog called States of the Earth Today. And it connects the subtitle is the war in Iraq and the independence of Australia. And it connects the two dates because the two dates actually,

it happened on March 19th. So I was trying to make a connection between both. And I'm also trying to show in this article that, you know, and you said that very, very clearly, this notion that we're going to save people from themselves because we know people. We know what people want better than themselves. Ousso used to say, we have to force people to their own freedom, right? Force people into their own freedom. And it's interesting to see that Napoleone actually said that.

That is to say, he said to the Egyptians, we're going to liberate you from the Ottomans. We're going to liberate you from slavery and so on and so forth. And so it's this new kind of imperial ideology that claims freedom and to liberate people from themselves and not necessarily to make them into Christians, but rather saying, this is what you should be doing. And in fact, we know your culture better and we're even going to learn to you how to be better Muslims than you are, right? And this is a different kind of animal. Yeah.

I was trying to pull who wrote this. There was a Zionist, empirist document that was written at home Casper Weinberger was for Donald Rumsfeld it was somebody in the Bush administration and then Dick Cheney was barking about it too and there there was a whole kind of tie-in to where you know the we'll be greed as liberators but there was an empire building thing that america needed to start building empires again or extending our empire as it were in sort of a i say i guess in these terms man i do some sort of european colonialism sort of thing and that we were going to maybe

the concept was to do that in iraq and i forget who wrote it it It might have been Caspar Weinberger and a couple of his buddies. But they had this concept that it was time for that. And maybe it was because, you know, oil. I know that at one point Saddam Hussein, I think one of the proponents of the war was Saddam Hussein, wanted to take his oil off the dollar. And so that was a big thing. But I forget who wrote it, but someone can look it up if they're in the audience and dealing with it. I haven't been able to find it quickly.

But yeah, I think you're right. I think we need to, I've learned so much from this. This has been great, Mohamed. I think us atheists, we need to do another Napoleon. We just need to get somebody taller this time. Someone taller this time. To be our Napoleon for some sort of, I don't know, secular. So there you go. As we round out the show, what do you hope people come away from reading your book?

Wow, that's a great question. they might understand how we're all interconnected and how certain things that I think people realize more and more than what has been sold to them, that what has been presented to them as the only model possible, as something that is supposed to make them happy, better than precisely all the, precisely, you know, all the traditions or other ways of life or even spiritualities,

that, you know, one would maybe realize that this is a failure, that it comes from a very problematic history, that the so-called liberty or freedom in the West comes from the oppression of many or actually is sustained by the oppression of many people in Africa, Asia, and other places, of course, South America too.

And that this doesn't mean to say that when one lives in the West that one should just sort of feel guilty about it, even though it might be a beginning. But it really is about seeing that we are really citizens of the earth and of a planet where these borders don't make sense. And where it's not possible to just say that any kind of liberation, any kind of concrete solution to the climate disaster would come from the belief in the sort of absolute loyalty to states, you know, by any means possible. And this is what I would like, you know, people to get. But I guess more precisely also, you know, this history of

North Africa and Algeria more specifically, is something that is very central in the book. It's not the same, you know, it's not the only place I'm talking about. But I know it's a story, it's a history that in America people don't really know of. I mean, you know, many people actually don't know that Aldrea exists as a country and where it is in South Africa. And it's been a very important moment of history for global history. So I'm going to say why. It's the first Ottoman province that has been colonized by European power. So it means that what happened in Algeria after 1830

basically anticipates what will happen in the rest of the Middle East after the First World War. Same technologies, same discourse, and so on and so forth. And what Americans, including Arab Americans, but Americans in general, discovered after 9-11 is something that Algerians knew for more than a century. And there was something like a globalization of what happened in this country. And we know that, in fact, the French influenced, in fact, the policies of the British Empire

and later on of America, because it was a sort of example of what a military power could do in an Arab country. And I'm really trying to show that this neglected part of history is not just interesting for Anglophone readers, just because, you know, you're from another point of view, and this is how we can learn from each other in, you know, productive ways.

And, you know, if people could get that, that would be great too. And then I would say the last thing is that as much you know as I understand in fact the process of people being much more skeptical about what they've been told by you know religious people religious authorities I would say because you know I'm much more critical of religious institutions than religions in general and that people are becoming much more skeptical regarding these institutions i think is completely respectable but i think i also want to add a layer to that which is look at the history of that it's not because you claim to emancipate yourself from religion that you're going to create something better, or you might create something very religious without noticing it.

So don't make, I would say, not all spiritualities or metaphysical orientation is doomed to produce violence. I think this is a mythology that I don't agree with. So the book is showing that too. There you go. You know, the one thing man can learn from his history is man never learns from his history. We go round and round. So please, people, stop it. Read

history. That's why I love history. It's because it's so intertwined and the great thing about history books like yours and other historians that are out there giving more detail to the true history is so much of our history is whitewashed.

You know, I had Eddie Glaude Jr. on a couple years ago, and I think he's coming on next month. I mean, we talked about James Baldwin, his book on James Baldwin. But we talked about how when I grew up with John Wayne and, you know, all sorts of the kind of whitewashing of stuff, you know, our history that we were taught was really whitewashed. And I mean that as like white people, whitewashed. And there's so many stories that got left out of history books that weren't detailed, that weren't talked about. And as you said, history is much more complex than some sort of simple story

or some of the things were kind of fed for pr reasons or were fed because you know there's the niceties we shouldn't talk about the bad things we did because well there's some shame involved that's the whole point of shame is letting you know that you did some bad shit and maybe you shouldn't do it again do better be better so there you go thank you very much mohammed for coming on the. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, as I said, I'm on Instagram. I post things, Mohamed Amarmetian, M-O-H-D-D-A-M-E-R

M-E-Z-I-A-N-E on Insta and that's the main thing. There you go. Brilliant discussion, folks. Study history, learn history, read your stuff, and study from people who actually are modern, not cavemen. I don't know.

That's an atheist thing of mine. I'm like, you're believing what pre-science people wrote in a book when they were in caves? Going, oh, no. Read modern science, folks, and history. There you go. Thanks, Thanks Mohammed for coming by the show We really appreciate it Great discussion

Thank you very much Chris Order up folks Wherever your fine books are sold The States of the Earth An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization Available April 9th, 2024 Thanks for tuning in Go to goodreads.com

Fortresschrisfosslinkedin.com, FortressCrispFoss, ChrisFoss1 on TikTok, and all those crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.