I was six or seven years old, and I was filling out a school registration form, and I came to the disquieting question, which seemed to visit me from a different world. I ran into the hall and shouted up the stairs, “Mum! What religion are we?” There was a long silence, then: “Uh…Church of England!” Yes, thank God for the Church of England: it didn’t commit you to anything at all. In truth, though, “Church of England” was a mortal lie. We weren’t even that.

  Still, I felt an unwelcome distance from the families of my churchgoing friends (this was South Wales, in the 1950s). And I also developed a passion for my religious-knowledge mistress. It was an obscure passion: she was very nice, but she looked like an average witch in the picture-books I was then growing out of, complete with moles, warts, and facial hair of striking luxuriance. I didn’t go to church but I did go to chapel (a soft-drinks party with the occasional parable); and I became a determined collector of Bibles. What you got, so it seemed, was a community and a language. My apostasy, at the age of nine, was vehement. Clearly, I didn’t want the shared words, the shared identity. I forswore chapel; those Bibles were scribbled on and otherwise desecrated, and two or three of them were taken into the back garden and quietly torched.

  In my house, it would please me to claim, God just never came up. But that’s not quite true. Later—we were now in Cambridge—my father spent a day with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, during which there was the following exchange. YY: “You atheist?” KA: “Well, yes, but it’s more that I hate him.” And in the home, when things went wrong, there was a certain amount of hating God, who was informally known as BHQ, or Bastards’ Headquarters. At Cambridgeshire High School for Boys I gave a speech in which I rejected all faith as an affront to common sense. I was an atheist, and I was twelve: it seemed open-and-shut. I had not yet pondered Kant’s rather lenient remark about the crooked timber of humanity, out of which nothing straight is ever built. Nor was I aware that the soul had legitimate needs.

  Much more recently I reclassified myself as an agnostic, or left-agnostic or weak-agnostic; in any event, not quite an atheist. Because atheism, it turns out, isn’t strictly rational either. The sketchiest acquaintance with cosmology will tell you that the universe is not, or is not yet, decipherable by human beings; we are ten or twelve Einsteins away from understanding it. Cosmology will also tell you that the universe is far more bizarre, prodigious, and chillingly grand than any doctrine, and that spiritual needs can be met by its contemplation. Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands. Indeed, our isolation in its cold immensity seems to demand a humanistic counterweight—an assertion of human pride. One contemporary manifestation of this need can be seen in our intensified reverence for the planet (James Lovelock’s Gaia and other benign animisms). A strategy with a rather longer history centers on an intensified reverence for art—or, in Matthew Arnold’s formula, for “the best which has been thought and said.”

  Literature—the aggregate of written works—has always been the most persistent candidate for cultification, partly because it nonchalantly includes the Bible and all other holy texts. It also has an advantage over conventional faiths in that there is, after all, something tangible to venerate—something boundless, beautiful, and divinely bright. But of course there is an excellent reason why the unacknowledged legislators of mankind are going to remain just that: unacknowledged and unfollowed. Literature forms a single body of thought, yet its voices are intransigently and unenlargeably individual. And the voice of religion, to reposition a phrase often used by that great critic, the Reverend Northrop Frye, is “the voice of the lonely crowd.” It is a monologue that seeks the validation of a chorus.

  In my lifetime there have been two attempts to ideologize and communalize literature. The first was the one undertaken by that grizzled relict,F.R. Leavis. Arnold wanted literature to occupy the spaces opened up by the weakening of faith and the unmoorings of the Industrial Revolution. At the outset (in the 1930s), Leavis called for the formation of an academic elite to oppose the vulgarisms of mass communication. His ideas were later systematized as follows: literature lives on only if there is someone around to evaluate it; the judgments the literary critic is concerned with (and this is the big leap) are judgments of life; so every judgment is an act of “moral responsibility” in the essential continuum. To put it another way, no good person likes the literature disliked by Dr. Leavis. It may be objected that literary value judgments are partly the products of emotion, and can never be arrived at by rational means alone (I. A. Richards and William Empson wasted years of their lives trying to systematize the separation of the excellent from the less excellent). But we do see that such an approach—the claim to central moral responsibility—wonderfully magnifies the national role of the English Literature don.

  The Leavisite canon, never extensive, was fiercely defended and regularly purged. When I was at university you could always identify the Leavisites by the sorry dilapidation of their bookshelves. Conrad, James, George Eliot, some Austen, one Dickens (Hard Times), Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Hopkins, and a couple of vanished mediocrities like L. H. Myers and Ronald Bottrall. Left to itself, Leavisism might have ended up with a single text; and that sacred book would have been the collected works of an obvious sociopath—D. H. Lawrence. It had all gone wrong: they were supposed to be judging literature, but literature was judging them, and raucously exposing their provinciality and humorlessness. When Leavis died, in 1978, his clerisy collapsed in a Jonestown of odium theologicum. It left nothing behind it.

  Leavisism was top-down, owing all its sway to the scrawny charisma of its prophet. The current ideology, known to us by the wearying clunk of its initials, is bottom-up, working through the mass and not away from it. There is a vague feeling that PC, having made its gains in the restriction of the sayable, is now in modest retreat. And it is true that the expansionist phase, with its denunciations, its invigilations, its organized execrations, seems to have run its course. On the other hand, PC now occupies the preferred territory of all ideologies: it is among schoolchildren. The language and literature papers in our national exams are becoming implicit invitations to ideological conformity; and everyone knows that there are few marks to be had for bucking the earnest line on, say, Maya Angelou. The weaker pupils will take the false comfort of belonging to a consensus; the stronger will simply receive early training in the practice of hypocritical piety.

  We recognize this mental atmosphere, and its name is antiintellectualism. Noticeable, too, is the re-emergence of sentiment as the prince of the critical utensils. Commentators respond, not to the novel, but to its personnel, whom they want to “care about,” in whom they want to “believe.” Such remarks as “I didn’t like the characters” are now thought capable of settling the hash of a work of fiction. This critical approach will eventually elicit what it fully deserves—a literature of ingratiation. And we will then have reached the destiny that Alexis de Tocqueville predicted for American democracy: a flabby stupor of mutual reassurance. The simultaneous consolidation of “dumbing down” is not an accident. PC is low, low church, like the Church of England; it is the lowest common denomination.

  And so we return to the writer’s study, and mid-September 2001. The television, when you dared turn it on, showed Americans queueing for anthrax hosedowns, or the writhing mustaches of Pakistan, prophesying civil war and other unknowable sequelae. I remember the bad-dream feeling, and the dismaying inability to look with any pleasure at my children. Outside, the tinny city seemed to admit that its strategy of reason had been exploded. Even the plodding logic of the traffic lights looked obsolete. Why drive on the left? Why drive on the right?

  The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman-haters; they are also misologists—haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. And, like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of clichés, of inherited and unexamined formulations. This is the thrust of one of the greatest novels ever written, Ulysses, in which Joyce identifies Roman Catholicism, and anti-Semitism, as fossilizations of dead prose and dead thought.

  After September 11, then, writers faced quantitative change, but not qualitative change. In the following days and weeks, the voices coming from their rooms were very quiet; still, they were individual voices, and playfully rational, all espousing the ideology of no ideology. They stood in eternal opposition to the voice of the lonely crowd, which, with its yearning for both power and effacement, is the most desolate sound you will ever hear. “Desolate,” as it happens, provides the dictionary with one of its most elaborate poeticisms. “Desolate: giving an impression of bleak and dismal emptiness…utterly wretched…from L. desolat-, desolare ‘abandon,’ from de- ‘thoroughly’ + solus ‘alone.’”

  JUNE 2002. The Guardian

  The Wrong War

  We accept that there are legitimate casus belli: acts or situations “provoking or justifying” a recourse to arms. The present debate feels off-center, and faintly unreal, because the U.S. and the U.K. are going to war for a new set of reasons (partly undisclosed) while continuing to adduce the old set of reasons (reasons which in this case do not cohere). The new casus belli are a response to the accurate realization that we have entered a distinct phase in history. The coming assault on Iraq may perhaps be the Last War of the Ottoman Succession; it will certainly be the First War of the Age of Proliferation—the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The new casus belli are also shaped by September 11.

  September 11 has given to us a planet we barely recognize. In a sense it revealed what was already there, largely unremarked, since the collapse of the Soviet Union: the unprecedented preponderance of a single power. It also revealed the long-established but increasingly dynamic loathing of the West in the Islamic nations, a loathing much exacerbated by America’s relationship with their chief source of humiliation, Israel; this is a relationship that many non-Muslims consider unnatural, the present writer included (but for rather different reasons). In addition, like all “acts of terrorism”—easily and unsubjectively defined as organized violence that targets civilians—September 11 was an attack on morality: we felt a general deficit. Who, on September 10, was expecting by Christmastime to be reading unscandalized editorials in the Herald Tribune about the pros and cons of using torture on “enemy combatants”? Who expected Britain to renounce the doctrine of nuclear no-first-use? Terrorism undermines morality. Then, too, it undermines reason.

  Osama bin Laden is an identifiable human type, but on an unidentifiable scale. He is an enormous stirrer—a titanic mixer. Look how he’s shaken us up, both in the heart and in the head. One could say, countervailingly, that on September 11 America was visited by something very alien and unbelievably radical. A completely new kind of enemy, one for whom death is not death—and for whom life is not life, either, but illusion, a staging-post, merely “the thing which is called World.” And, no, you wouldn’t expect such a massive geohistorical jolt, which will reverberate for centuries, to be frictionlessly absorbed. But the suspicion remains that America is not behaving rationally—that America is behaving like someone still in shock.

  The notion of the “axis of evil” has an interesting provenance. In early drafts of the President’s State of the Union speech the “axis of evil” was the “axis of hatred,” “axis” having been settled on for its associations with the enemy in the Second World War. The “axis of hatred” at this point consisted of only two countries, Iran and Iraq, whereas of course the original axis consisted of three (Germany, Italy, Japan). It was additionally realized that Iran and Iraq, while not both Arab, were both Muslim. So they brought in North Korea.

  We may notice, in this embarras of the inapposite, that the Axis was an alliance, whereas Iran and Iraq are bloodbespattered enemies, and the zombie nation of North Korea is, in truth, so mortally ashamed of itself that it can hardly bear to show its face, and is not a part of anything. Still, “axis of hatred” it was going to be, until mature consideration turned the tide toward “axis of evil.” “Axis of evil” echoed Reagan’s “evil empire.” It was more alliterative. It was also, according to President Bush, “more theological.”

  This is a vital question. Why, in our current delirium of faith and fear, would Bush want things to become more theological rather than less theological? The answer is clear enough, in human terms: to put it crudely, it makes him feel easier about being intellectually null. He wants geopolitics to be less about the intellect, and more about gut instincts and beliefs—because he knows he’s got them. One thinks here of Bob Woodward’s anecdote. Asked by Woodward about North Korea, Bush jerked forward saying, “I loathe Kim Jong-Il!” Bush went on to explain that the loathing sprang from his instincts, and added, apparently in surprised gratification, that it might be to do with his religion. Whatever else happens, we can infallibly expect Bush to get more religious: more gut-instinct, more theological.

  When the somnambulistic figure of Kim Jong-Il subsequently threw down his nuclear gauntlet, the “axis of evil” catchphrase or notion or policy seemed in ruins, because North Korea turned out to be much nearer to acquiring the definitive WMDs, deliverable nuclear devices, than Iraq (and the same is true of Iran). So why single out Saddam? It was explained that the North Korean matter was a diplomatic inconvenience, while Iraq’s non-disarmament remained a “crisis.” The reason was strategic: even without WMDs, North Korea could inflict a million casualties on its southern neighbor by flattening Seoul. Iraq couldn’t manage anything on this scale, so you could attack it. North Korea could, so you couldn’t. The imponderables of the proliferation age were becoming ponderable. Once a nation has done the risky and nauseous work of acquisition, it becomes unattackable. A single untested nuclear weapon may be a liability. But five or six constitute a deterrent.

  From this it crucially follows that we are going to war with Iraq because it doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction. Or not many. The surest way by far of finding out what Iraq has is to attack it. Then at last we will have Saddam’s full cooperation in our weapons inspection, because everything we know about him suggests that he will use them all. The Pentagon must be more or less convinced that Saddam’s WMDs are under a certain critical number. Otherwise it couldn’t attack him.

  All U.S. presidents—and all U.S. presidential candidates—have to be religious or have to pretend to be religious. More specifically, they have to subscribe to “born-again” Christianity. Bush, with his semi-compulsory prayer-breakfasts and so on, isn’t pretending to be religious: “the loving God behind all life and all of history” “the Almighty’s gift of freedom to the world.” “My acceptance of Christ,” Bush has said (this is code for the born-again experience of personal revelation), “—that’s an integral part of my life.” And of ours, too, in the New American Century.

  One of the exhibits at the Umm al-Maarik Mosque in central Baghdad is a copy of the Koran written in Saddam Hussein’s blood (he donated twenty-four liters over three years). Yet this is merely the most spectacular of Saddam’s periodic sops to the mullahs. He is, in reality, a career-long secularist—indeed an “infidel,” according to bin Laden. Although there is no Bible on Capitol Hill written in the blood of George Bush, we are obliged to accept the fact that Bush is more religious than Saddam: of the two presidents, he is, in this respect, the more psychologically primitive. We hear about the successful “Texanization” of the Republican Party. And doesn’t Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?

  The present Administration’s embrace of the religious right also leads, by a bizarre route, to the further strengthening of the tie with Israel. Unbelievably, born-again doctrine insists that Israel must be blindly supported, not because it is the only semi-democracy in that crescent, but because it is due to host the Second Coming. Armageddon is scheduled to take place near the hill of Megiddo (where, in recent months, an Israeli bus was suicide-bombed by another kind of believer). The Rapture, the Tribulation, the Binding of the Antichrist: it isn’t altogether clear how much of this rubbish Bush swallows (though Reagan swallowed it whole). V. S. Naipaul has described the religious impulse as the inability “to contemplate man as man,” responsible to himself and uncosseted by a higher power. We may consider this a weakness; Bush, dangerously, considers it a strength.

  Even a cursory examination of Saddam’s character suggests that he will never fully disarm, any more than he would choose to revisit his childhood and walk shoeless and halfnaked through the streets of Tikrit. Saddam respects WMDs: they averted defeat in the war with Iran. He started as he meant to go on when, in 1991, he appointed his younger (and less feral) son, Qusay, to the chairmanship of the Concealment Operations Committee. The assault on Iraq is expected to cost America 0.5 percent of its GDP; Saddam’s wars, and the subsequent sanctions, have cost Iraq about twenty years’ worth of GDP, according to The Economist. Such are his priorities. It has been in Saddam’s power to alleviate the immiseration of his people. Instead, he has settled into a pattern of paranoia, gangsterism, and chronic kleptomania.

  It is important to remember that Saddam, despite his liking for medals and camouflage outfits (and for personally mismanaging his armies), was never a military man. He came up through the torture corps in the 1960s, establishing the Baath secret police, Jihaz Haneen (the “instrument of yearning”), and putting himself about in the Qasr al-Nihayah (“the Palace of the End”), perhaps the most feared destination in Iraq until its demolition, after an attempted coup by the chief inquisitor, Nadhim Kazzar, in 1973.