You Ain't No True Scotsman, Bruv!

Maybe I've missed it, or blocked it out, but we seem to have been spared the regular pieties in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks - the ones trotted out by all mainstream politicians about how the true Islam is tolerant and peaceful, and terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.  That line doesn't seem to have had much of an airing.

For this, I am grateful.

Let's be honest: it's not true that jihadi or Islamist* terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.  It plainly does have something to do with it.  This in no way means that Islam is, or has to be, a violent religion; and I do believe that most Muslims are horrified by what's being done in the name of their religion.  There's a #notinmyname hashtag that testifies to this.  I don't think that people using it are liars, and I think also that the overwhelming majority of Muslims who haven't used it are likely to be in agreement with it.  But, howsoever tenuously, it is something to do with Islam.

In just the same way, witch-burnings have something to do with Christianity.  The Westboro Baptist Church has something to do with Christianity.  Neither is not the whole of Christianity, by any means.  Not even most, or a significant part of it.  But it is there.

It does noone any good in the long term to pretend otherwise, and denying this seems to be a version of the No-True-Scotsman fallacy:

N claims to be a Muslim
N commits some crime in the name of Islam
N turns out not to have been a true Muslim after all.

So when a witness shouted at the attacker in Leytonstone that "You ain't no Muslim, bruv", and it became a slogan for showing opposition to religiously-informed violence: well, it's an admirable sentiment, but... behaving violently in the name of a religion doesn't disqualify one from membership thereof.  A bad Muslim is still a Muslim, and its disingenuous to insist that Islam can be separated from reprehensible acts as a matter of principle in something like the way that being a Scot can be separated from taking sugar on your porridge in principle.

Actually, it's more than that.  It's empty dogmatism to insist that Islam as a matter of principle must be beyond criticism, and therefore anything that is liable to criticism must have nothing to do with Islam.

But I don't want this to be a post about Islam; my concern is more general, and it has to do with the rhetoric of being a "true" adherent to whatever the creed under consideration is.  Let's talk about it in terms of Pastafarianism, just to be as neutral as possible.

What is it to be a "true" Pastafarian?

Here's the problem.  Either Pastafarianism is reducible to the beliefs, actions, and opinions of people who claim to be Pastafarians, and who (at least sometimes) may act in the name of Pastafarians, or it isn't.

The first horn of the dilemma is quite sharp, and implies that "You ain't no Pastafarian, bruv" is false.  If Pastafarianism is simply what people think and do in the name of Pastafarianism, then whatever people think or do in its name will help define what it is.  The implications of that for the real world should be clear: we couldn't say that some people had misunderstood what it is to be a part of that faith, either because there would be nothing to misunderstand, or because the thing to be understood would be partially constituted by what those people think and do.

But the other horn of the dilemma is, in a way, even sharper.

Imagine that there is a true core of Pastafarianism, such that it is possible to misunderstand it - indeed, to have a perverted view of what Pastafarianism demands and "is".  But what's the criterion for making that judgement?

One temptation might be to say that the true nature of Pastafarianism is some formalisation of however most Pastafarians behave.  But that won't do, because it means that the "true" nature might conceivably change from one day to the next, and there'd be nothing we could say about that.  In effect, we'd find ourselves back on the first horn.

No: to avoid that, we'd have to opt for something a bit harder - to say that there is a core, that obtains irrespective of what people think.  Moreover, on the basis that humans are fallible, that "true" core would have to be stable irrespective of the interpretation that a given human had of the faith.  That is: the true nature of Pastafarianism would have to be something to be discovered, rather than created or grown; and inasmuch as that we know that humans might be mistaken, we ought to be wary of saying with certainty that the definitive interpretation has been settled.  Indeed, it would have to obtain irrespective of what any actual Pastafarian thinks, if we're to avoid the possibility of a collapse like that in the previous paragraph.

But now we have to be alive to the possibility that no actual human would have got to grips with the core of the doctrine.  It might be, that is, that there is no true Pastafarian (bruv).

Could there be degrees of being a true Pastafarian?  It might be that we'd admit that humans are fallible, but that there's a sort of morality of aspiration at play: we define Pastafarianism in terms of our highest ideals - ignoring for the moment reasonable disagreement concerning what they might be - but admit that noone is a perfect match although they still warrant the epithet "Pastafarian", and that some people might fall so short of the standard that it wouldn't make much sense to call them Pastafarians at all.

Fine.  But how do we identify that standard?  And what fallings-short disqualify a person?  Is shooting someone in the name of spaghetti sufficient to have you thrown out of the Pastafarians?  Eating rice or potatoes?

The worry would have to be that, if we want to keep our faith pure, we'd end up possibly excommunicating everyone, because everyone may turn out to have deviated from "true" Pastafarianism in some way.  If we don't want to excommunicate everyone, we'd have to admit the possibility that people might be Pastafarians - true Pastafarians - even though we disapprove of their version of it.

Simpler - and more honest - not to try to purify the creed at all, no?  To admit that it is messy, and to work out what to do on that basis?

Which means ditching the pieties about "the true" faith, and to stop attempting to define problematic followers out of existence.



*Whether and where to draw a line between jihadism and Islamism is not a question I can answer.  My sense is that there is a distinction, but it's not central to what I'm up to here.