All major religions establish a hierarchy between the sexes, thereby devaluing women. Anyone who now objects that there are female bishops in the Protestant Church and that there is an Islamic female imam preaching in Berlin should consider the old cliché that “exceptions prove the rule” and its great inherent wisdom.

The central religious texts of the book religions speak a clear language: in the Ten Commandments, women are placed in the same category as property and livestock.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife or his slaves, or his animals, or anything of thy neighbour

In the Koran, the situation is only slightly different:

Men are in charge of women by [right of] what Allah has given one over the other and what they spend [for maintenance] from their wealth. So righteous women are devoutly obedient, guarding in [the husband’s] absence what Allah would have them guard. But those [wives] from whom you fear arrogance - [first] advise them; [then if they persist], forsake them in bed; and [finally], strike them. But if they obey you [once more], seek no means against them. Indeed, Allah is ever Exalted and Grand.

In Islam, the veiling of women is an expression of patriarchal control. The self-liberation from headscarves, for example in the protests by Iranian women, is a courageous and revolutionary act of self-determination. This makes it all the more contradictory when the burqa, niqab, hidjab, etc. are celebrated as a sign of empowerment in Western societies. In Judaism, too, women are subject to religiously prescribed forms of head covering in the form of wigs. These practices of subjugation are not fundamentalist fringe phenomena, but expressions of religious norms. They are the normal religion that we in our enlightened societies often frame as radical misinterpretations of a well-meaning belief system that is only being politically abused. In fact, any interpretation of a modern, egalitarian religion is the real deviation.

Girl x Religion

Feminist activist Inna Shevchenko became internationally known a little over ten years ago with the Femen movement. She attracted worldwide attention in 2012 when she felled a wooden cross in Kyiv in solidarity with Pussy Riot. As a result of this motorized show of force against religiously legitimized oppression, she had to leave Ukraine. She continues to explore the role of women in religions in a screenplay for the documentary film “Girls & Gods,” which she made together with Verena Soltiz and Arash T. Riahi. Shevchenko guides the viewers through the film and talks to individual women and groups from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam who are believers, apostates, reformers, and converts.

The documentary shows how women within their religious communities fight for basic rights and for recognition (from men) that will probably always be denied them and which they confuse with self-determination. Their strategies range from conformity to silent resistance to attempts to reform religions from within in a way that attracts public attention. Watching the film, I am left with ambivalent feelings: regret for those who try in vain to change centuries-old systems of patriarchal order, and perplexity at those who try to rationalize and defend their own oppression instead of turning their backs on the obvious madness of religion.

Shevchenko does not judge these women. She calmly points out the contradictions and leaves it to the audience to draw their own conclusions.

I spoke with Inna Shevchenko for the Materie podcast.

Listen

Deliberate public confusion through contradictory, overwhelming, and unreliable content is nothing new. Steve Bannon, former advisor to Donald Trump and head of the right-wing populist platform Breitbart, coined a special form of discourse destruction calling this tactic “flood the zone with shit”. By saturating public discourse with misinformation, he sought to create mass confusion and undermine rational debate.

1, a selective history of media mediation

However, the struggle for interpretative sovereignty over nature and history has always been waged at the expense of a truthful representation of events.

Our perception of reality primarily depends on our direct personal experience of our environment. Our sensory organs are limited in their resolution. We rely on technological aids such as microscopes, gas chromatographs, thermometers or glasses to make the invisible visible, to find our way around better or to describe our world in values, to measure, record and pass on changes. Because the processing of environmental stimuli in our brain can be unreliable — as we know from various optical, acoustic and psychological illusions — we generally deceive ourselves before we can be deceived by the information that is culturally conveyed to us via the media.

The term medium is broad and covers everything from spoken language, text, physical carriers to digital mass media. Media transport a record of events and enable their delayed perception. Oral storytelling for example is not only prone to error, but also difficult to verify because not even the identity of the transmitted statement can be recorded: “Imagine, I saw a guy who turned water into beer!” The next time the story is told, the beer may have turned into wine. Only by writing it down does the volatility of the information coagulate into a basis that can be better verified. This in no way guarantees that the written information matches reality. No one can turn water into wine, even if it was perhaps beer.

The Bible exemplifies this. It stands out from all early written records of traditions, if only because it remains the best-selling book even today. The stories of the Old and New Testaments are not factual accounts and were not written down for the purpose of faithfully reproducing historical events, but rather to provide a moral basis and philosophy for living together, in short, to make policy. The inclusion of individual text in the biblical canon took place under the aspect of expediency. This gatekeeper function of media is still essential today — regardless of whether humans or machines maintain this algorithm in the selection process. The veracity of the events described was never a condition; it is enough that the audience classifies the information as true, which is astonishing in view of the contradictions in the stories of the New Testament, which ostensibly tell of the same events.

As holy scripture the Bible is also central for social order. As a structural medium its function goes far beyond the transmission of information and, among other things, also influences the individual’s ability to grasp the truthfulness of information. Simply to believe, having to believe, to identify belief as a virtue instead of encouraging skeptical questioning, makes critical thinking more difficult.

2, the emergence of the public

The invention of the printing press in the 15th century using movable type by Johannes Gutenberg transformed knowledge dissemination. Before then, books were rare, and most written content was religious. With mass printing, literacy spread, creating a culture of documented discourse. More books meant more scrutiny and debate. arguments could also be presented in a comprehensible manner in a proto-pluralistic media market.

Jürgen Habermas refers to the space in which these arguments are exchanged, evaluated and categorized in equal, free discourse as the public sphere. It is based on transparency and leads to a shared view of reality through collective forming of opinion. Naturally, this does not mean that all participants perceive reality in the same way and even less that they have the same opinion, but there is at least a similar understanding of the veracity of events. It is no coincidence that the emergence of this — initially bourgeois — public sphere correlates with the Enlightenment of the late 18th and 19th centuries and the secularization of society. Biblical myths without a relevant connection to historical truth had completely lost their power to legitimize worldly power. The strength of this partnership between state and religion can easily be seen from the fact that even today — over 200 years later — this connection has still not been severed in many countries.

Nevertheless, against a free society that creates a public sphere through discourse, a distorted or manufactured truth has little lasting power. Later attempts by totalitarian systems to take over the role of religion by curating perceived reality also failed quite quickly on a historical scale. The bourgeois public sphere also survived the fascisms and communisms of the 20th century. In the late 1980s, Francis Fukuyama famously declared the “end of history,” believing that liberal democracy had triumphed as the ultimate political system. Little did he know.

3, the automated public sphere

Whether the age of mass media ended with the emergence of large social networks in the new millennium, or has merely been further transformed, does not need to be clarified at this point. Platforms such as Tiktok, X or Linkedin can be seen as new mass media though. They enable global exchange — even if this is subject to many practical and political restrictions — at least in principle and thus create a universal communication space and public sphere in a universal media dispositif, the Internet as a macro-medium. If we want to single out one social network that has ideally fulfilled the requirements of a mass medium with regard to the constitution of the public sphere, then it is Twitter, the predecessor of X, once embodied the ideal of an open public sphere, where anyone could engage on equal footing. and it is basically only up to the independent curation of sources how perceived reality is formed. Practice deviates from this idealized picture because not only can various settings be made to control the flow of communication, but above all because the sheer volume of information shared cannot be managed. This network lacks the benefit of editorial selection, which is replaced by algorithmic selection, as is also known from other platforms that pursue the maximization of audience attention. The effects of this distortion are well known: Among other things, popular content entails similar content, boring content is displaced by exciting, emotionalizing content, and commercial content is preferred. This doesn’t mean that disinformation is deliberately favored algorithmically, but fragmentation into individualized realities and an affirmative view of the world can lead to a lack of balanced discourse in a shared public sphere. Criticism is not hidden, but neither is it included. There is no reality check or barriers to discourse.

Precisely because the perception of reality — one could note whether a “so far” should not be inserted here — is individualized by nature, the distinction to the concept of the public sphere becomes important. It is more than just a space for open discourse; it is the foundation for a consensual reflection of reality that is confirmed by fellow human beings. This may sound overly important or even pompous, but if we consider that Galileo Galilei’s heliocentric view of the world in the 17th century collided with the official doctrine of the Catholic Church because the Bible identifies the Earth as the center of the universe, then it becomes clear that only an exchange of information under the condition of free expression of opinion makes the falsification of this and many other interpretations of power possible.

Until a few years ago, the public sphere was so much taken for granted that even the inventor of the term cyberspace, William Gibson, delivered this description of a digitally networked information sphere in “Neuromancer” in 1984: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, […] A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.”

Embedded in a confusing future characterized by AI and biohacking, billions of people are supposed to have a “consensual hallucination” (in this sense: perception of reality)? Especially under these circumstances, the disintegration of a shared public sphere into divided public spheres in conflict with each other, as we are currently experiencing, would be more likely. In the political sphere in particular, the focus has shifted from discourse to the consolidation of certain perceptions of reality into partial public spheres (or public bubbles, analogous to filter bubbles). The polarization of society is rooted not only in differing opinions, but also in different foundations that are considered to be true. For example, if a third of the American population firmly believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election, this is not compatible with a consensual view of events that have taken place. If no clarity can be established about major events of a geopolitical nature, then there is no longer a common public sphere. In a globalized world, coexisting truths are obviously cultivated in a way that conserves resources.

The development of large language models (LLM) and generative AI has massively accelerated this trend towards managing the sovereignty of interpretation in a partial public sphere over the last three years. Today, it is easier than ever before to fabricate a large amount of content that gives the impression of truly reflecting reality. It starts with the fact that the texts that are generated via the requests to ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek and all the other popular LLMs, which, as we know, do not necessarily have to be congruent with reality, can themselves end up as contributions that can be used to further train these services. The same of course applies to images, audio, video and all other media types. The old coder’s dictum of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) takes on a new quality of self-reinforcing loops with machine learning and AI. Added to this are the manipulation campaigns we are familiar with from the political sphere, which litter the digital sphere with misleading information and other processes that give rise to memes whose orientation towards reality is no longer recognizable.
The sheer volume of content — whether deliberately intended to suppress or overlay reality — can and will lead to a surplus of fabricated non-fiction. A crowding-out effect is to be feared, in which a factual reproduction of events and circumstances is either difficult or impossible to find, partly because trust in content that is actually trustworthy is replaced by skepticism. Flood the zone with shit is becoming real.

4, the year 4891

While in the 2010s the scenario of a surveillance state and the accompanying erosion of privacy was still perceived as a major or perhaps the greatest threat of digitalization in the political debate, a tsunami of irrelevant information is currently piling up in which the truth is watered down to a homeopathic dose. George Orwell’s Big Brother no longer observes, but prompts. Searches for Orwell’s novel “1984” have declined worldwide over the last ten years. His anti-utopia combines the rewriting of history (fabricated non-fiction), control, surveillance, punishment and torture in a totalitarian state and appears comparatively clear and orderly. Even if we cannot rule out the possibility that liberal democracies are developing in the direction of authoritarian regimes in these aspects, so that there can no longer be any talk of democracy, it seems more plausible to me that the negligent overloading of the information sphere is causing even more damage to the perception of reality and society. The only positive news in this comparison of negative scenarios is that they cannot both occur at the same time. A totalitarian armored official truth cannot coexist with a kaleidoscope of fragmented contradictions of reality. History today can no longer be rewritten to a new controlled truth, it is expanded to many truths. Therefore, in a free society, there is no real danger of ending up in a “1984” with a single curated reality, but rather in one of 4891 public spheres as a reversal of this into the opposite.

Speculative fiction not only describes this dilemma, or rather polylemma, of multiple publics, it also sometimes offers solutions. In “Fall”, Neal Stephenson fights fire with fire. His characters use expensive AI applications to navigate reality in the sea of data, a trusted identity ensures that digital communication takes place between humans and not bots, and consensus reality networks and the interaction of independent, trustworthy sources create a shared view of reality. The latter would then form the basis of a civic public sphere as described by Habermas — but in a protected area that is comparatively difficult to access.

Access with as little interference as possible and critical thinking as a humanistic ideal play a central role in the perception of reality. Technology can help or hinder this. The task is to recognize and avoid negative externalities at an early stage before they take on a life of their own and limit people’s freedom.

Circa from Jersey to Pittsburgh

Traversing a the Unites States cross-country is a major challenge in the 21st century. If you want to avoid public roads, permanent interference with property is unavoidable; railroad tracks that could easily be followed are almost exclusively privately owned and may not be entered. In his essay "Freedom" (2021), the American writer Sebastian Junger describes his march through several north-eastern states.

Junger and his companions walk along railroad lines, sleep under bridges and in the open air, drink from rivers and streams and light fires under the cover of darkness that has become so ineffective. The romanticized image of a hiking day with the Junior Woodchucks is quickly supplanted by descriptions of scorching heat, nightly downpours and unpleasant encounters with other people. In Junger's essay, however, the description of the march only forms the framework for a reflection on the tension between individual and collective freedom, which are in irreconcilable conflict. His examples are based on the topology of his route. He tells of the way of life of American natives, Apaches, Iroquois, their freedoms, their conflicts with each other, with European migrants and their descendants. Junger traces an arc to the founding of the United States and the writing of a constitution that remains largely unparalleled worldwide in its standardization of individual freedoms. Even the best constitution can only ever be a compromise between the collective and the individual. Political power in a democracy is temporary. The votes aggregated in representation are only borrowed.

January 6, 2021

"If democratic power-sharing is a potent form of freedom, accepting an election loss may be the ultimate demonstration of how free you want to be. History is littered with fascist leaders who have rigged elections and tortured or killed critics, but their regimes are remarkably short-lived."

Sebastian Junger does not use the term "fascist leaders" to describe either Venezuela's socialist president Nicolás Maduro or Donald Trump, but their determination to accept the reinterpretation of democratically achieved election results with fraud and coups d'état is not much inferior to this attribution.

"At the heart of most stable governments is a willingness to share power with people you disagree with-and may even hate. That is true for small-scale societies like the Apache and Iroquois as well as for large-scale democracies like the United States. When American legislators granted unions the right to bargain as equals with the heads of industry, they were effectively saying that the people who owned the machines would have to start sharing power with the people who ran them, and that values like fairness and human dignity were going to determine at least some of the rules of the game."

Junger's insight that politics is a permanent space for negotiation and not a temporary dictatorship may be banal. However, it is also hardly to be found in the supposedly politically interested public. Maintaining the greatest possible freedom in a socio-political system that sees the balancing of interests of equal individuals as a tool for this requires a willingness to compromise and tolerate - but not accept - dissenting or opposing opinions and a certain degree of restriction of personal freedom.

This basic attitude can also be considered part of a set of values that bears the unfortunate name of Leitkultur (German for guiding culture). At this point, I would like to take the liberty of bringing out the Böckenförde dilemma, which is usually used by Catholic politicians to explain in a fallacious manner why religion (always and exclusively Catholic religion) is necessary to constitute socially shared basic values.

“The liberal, secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself.”

As a rule, the quote is cut off here, which also makes it clear why the political-conservative view of the concept of Leitkultur is directed towards Christian values and tradition. The hypothesis is that Christianity creates and guarantees these values.

Democratic risk

But the quote actually continues:

“This is the great adventure it has undertaken for freedom's sake. As a liberal state it can endure only if the freedom it bestows on its citizens takes some regulation from the interior, both from a moral substance of the individuals and a certain homogeneity of society at large. On the other hand, it cannot by itself procure these interior forces of regulation, that is not with its own means such as legal compulsion and authoritative decree. Doing so, it would surrender its liberal character (freiheitlichkeit) and fall back, in a secular manner, into the claim of totality it once led the way out of, back then in the confessional civil wars.”

Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde thus stands in the tradition of the Enlightenment, which rejects any moral over-shaping of democracy and - thus closing the circle to Sebastian Junger - takes the risk of maximizing individual and political freedom to such an extent that freedom itself is endangered by placing power in hands that do not handle it with care. As long as this power can be voted out of office, freedom remains in the dry. The problem often lies more in the fact that even the sovereign (i. e. the voter) has little interest in defending his freedom.

PS: In May this year Sebastian Junger talked about his most recent book “In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife“ on Sam Harris’ podcast: Episode 369: Escaping Death

The world of work is full of advice on how Ramadan can be more or less skillfully integrated into the daily routine of companies. My personal experiences with the Islamic month of fasting are limited, but as we all know anecdotes also have the potential to falsify existing attitudes.

So I'll start with a little field report:

Soon after I sold most of the shares in my company (Super-Fi) in 2013 and we in our small local admin team in Vienna were no longer able to cope with the accounting requirements of the buyer - the international media company Vice - we looked for a CFO.

The number of candidates for this position was quickly reduced to the three people we actually wanted to talk to. Among them was a man who had for this purpose come to our office on a hot day in early summer. Right at the start of the appointment, he seemed a little tired and not entirely focused - not surprising given the temperature. Nevertheless, he declined the offer of coffee and water. It was Ramadan.

He would have been halfway suitable for the job despite his condition, but we later gave preference to a much better qualified applicant.
I would have hired the fasting person, if only for lack of alternatives. What am I supposed to do with a chief accountant who can't do his job properly for a month of the year because he is unfocused and tired? But maybe I'm doing him an injustice because he wasn't feeling well that day? I wouldn't want to draw the inductive conclusion that it's due to Ramadan based on a single data point, especially as I wouldn't have noticed this self-induced reduction in cognitive performance in other Muslim colleagues.

Black Swan

I don't know how many Muslims are only able to work to a limited extent during Ramadan. However, there are indications that at least some are unable to perform adequately due to strict observance of their rituals. This is clearly evident in sport: In some football leagues, players are suspended from the squad during the fasting month because they do not drink during the day, and lately matches are also interrupted shortly after the astronomical sunset so that footballers can drink in a manner pleasing to a god. There is nothing wrong with that - sports associations set their own rules and the public can decide whether they accept them. Conversely, however, the associations and clubs would also have to accept it if the fans do not want to tolerate these interruptions as supernatural special exceptions.

Football is a physically demanding sport. Perhaps fasting does not restrict the pursuit of other professions at all, or perhaps the applicant was simply the one black swan that is enough to falsify the hypothesis that Ramadan is not an obstacle in the world of work?

But that type of general consideration is not particularly relevant anyway, because only the individual case counts. It is the voluntary decision of every adult to subordinate their fitness for work to a religion (or intermittent fasting), even if this undermines their own career. The situation is different for children who fast during Ramadan and often experience school classes unfocused and dehydrated. A condition that is not only harmful to health, but which teachers complain about, but which is obviously not being counteracted in the public debate or by the authorities. Perhaps I will go into this in more detail elsewhere.

And what about religious freedom?

A qualitative classification of the health, social and professional effects of magical fasting does not per se conflict with the exercise of religious freedom. Not wanting to employ a person because their religiously motivated behavior does not comply with the requirements of the workplace is not directed against a specific religion or even against religion in general.

Going back to my example: Of course, the prospective CFO's beliefs in themselves would not have been a problem for the collaboration. I've hired hundreds of people in my life - mainly in my own companies - and I've never been interested in their personal beliefs. There was certainly a lot that I didn't agree with and a lot I noticed without asking and nevertheless tolerated - including astrology, Islam, Catholicism and communism. However, atheists and agnostics got an extra day's vacation with me and I have no idea whether this form of positive discrimination against my affirmative activism was legal or not. I didn't care then any more than I do now.

Laïcité

Living together in a polycultural, multimoral society is reality. I can easily accept this without reluctance because it makes life more exciting as long as the negotiation processes about the still undivided values remain within certain limits of rationality. These discussions are not much fun only with those who are morally stuck in the dead ends of the labyrinth of evidence-free thinking and place feelings above data. They cry out for help like "Free Palestine" because they can no longer find their way out of the maze into which they have wandered without an ethical and intellectual compass.

We can be as different as we want as long as we agree on an ethical foundation that we share, says Italian philosopher Cinzia Sciuto: "The more complex a society becomes, the harder and more unquestionable this core of values must become, otherwise there is a risk that belonging to the political community will fade under the centrifugal aspirations of identitarian demands, with the result that parallel societies emerge in which the rights of individuals lose their binding force." (p. 141 Sciuto, Cinzia. Die Fallen des Multikulturalismus. Laizität und Menschenrechte in einer vielfältigen Gesellschaft [The traps of multiculturalism: laïcité and human rights in a diverse society] Rotpunktverlag. Kindle Edition.) This core also includes laïcité (which is not the same as secularism) as a pre-political prerequisite for democracy. The consequence of this republican disposition is a state that does not categorize its citizens according to external characteristics, with only a few restrictions such as biological age. The state has as little interest in ethnic origin, sexual identity, skin color or sexual orientation as it does in the political, religious and ideological views of its members.

Implementing this simple idea of equal rights has no dramatic consequences. In addition to the abolition of discrimination and privileges with regard to the retirement age and general compulsory military service, the preferential treatment of religion as such and individual specific religious communities would also be abolished. I will not list them here because I can assume that my audience is familiar with them. But I will mention one for the sake of argument.
When religious street decorations are financed with taxpayers' money as Muslim advertising spaces during Ramadan as the city of Frankfurt did, the state's neutrality requirement is once again violated. Belief in magical fasting is a private matter, can be put into practice, can be tolerated in working life or not, but religious rituals must for the ideologically neutral state not become the basis for preferential treatment. The same applies to other religious communities and, by analogy, to Christian markings (cross, crucifix) in schools and official buildings.

Nota bene: It is a completely different matter if this advertising for Islam is paid for privately - especially if the state, provinces and municipalities otherwise administer the proper separation of republic and religion. There is enough room for religion in the public sphere, as there is for other traditional forms of expression. It should just not be sponsored by the general public.

I’m in the process of writing my second book “Deus Est Machina” which will be published in German later this year (yes, 2024). This time I want the English version to be released very soon afterwards.

Here you can follow the process. I might publish a few excerpts in advance or other texts relating to that topic.

Godspeed!
Niko

PS: Please subscribe if you haven’t already.

Subscribe now