The Pope has reaffirmed that the Catholic Church is the one true church - beware counterfeits, especially if bought on eBay. It confirms his right to pontificate on so many things affecting life and death. And of course Islam is the one true religion, Buddhism leads you on the path to complete enlightenment and Pol Pot was the incarnation of the one true communist ideal, or was it Marx or Mao Tse Tung? Based on such absolutist views, whether ancient or modern, societies are run and peoples' individual views are trampled under foot. Absolutism is a wonderful thing for those who believe its claims. It avoids the need to wrestle with the reason why something may be true. It just is. And indeed, the churches have become less full where the certainties of religion are not emphasised. Obviously many people like being told by a higher authority how to live their lives.

But absolutism can also promote an ‘us and them' mentality. By following the precepts you become part of an ‘in-crowd' and so more important. And the more firmly (fanatically?) you believe in and live by those precepts, the more important you are in that group and the more you see others as outsiders, with all that that implies. Some believers may indeed have an importance which they would never achieve in the real world.  And this can feed on itself. It can lead to the terrorism we now have, particularly when combined with a belief in conspiracy theories. Within a few hours of Diana's death a conspiracy theory web-site had been posted on the net. Conspiracy theories abound for every head-line grabbing event even if, in reality, it has an obvious or banal explanation. Clearly, important events in life, like the shooting of JFK, should have explanations that could have been written by Ian Fleming.

It seems that in general the poorer you are and the more part of a minority, the more likely you are to believe weird explanations for the things which happen. But according to all the surveys, when it comes to conspiracy theories, the Muslim community as a whole is at the forefront. All the Western governments and big businesses are conspiring against them. Unsurprisingly, we are told by former jihadists that they are trained deliberately to encourage such beliefs in the wider community. The spreading of disinformation is as much a tool of terrorism as it is for conventional wars. It keeps the imagined grievances alive and with them the wish to overturn the ‘oppressive' order, even if that is a democracy.

The thug in the street behaves badly in the expectation that he can fight his way out of problems. He may take on political attitudes, such as those held by the bully-boys of the National Front. What he will be unlikely to do, however, is commit suicide attacks. That is not a part of his mentality, as you have to be willing to behave altruistically - selflessly to die for a cause - in order to do that and thugs aren't generally altruistically inclined. But religious zealots are. And those who are more intelligent than normal, including doctors and engineers (and some who wrongly simply believe they are very intelligent), fuelled by an absolutist view of life can actually be far more dangerous than thugs. Even if they have not in reality been sufficiently educated in logic to justify it, they are more likely to possess the intellectual confidence, born of carrying out their ‘day job', both to ‘know' that the beliefs they have accepted are right and then to follow the demands of those beliefs to their inexorable conclusion. Someone who believes himself to have less mental ability, on the other hand, may be wary of making a life or death decision based solely on his own opinions. Of course, the intelligent can and often do persuade the less intelligent to do the dying instead, by persuading them of their certainties.

This demonstrates the danger of treating something as axiomatic, which in reality is, and can only ever be, an opinion. There is no logical basis on which any opinion or belief, however strong, can be said to be correct simply because someone says so. We have to look for evidence to justify what we say - evidence for example that the steps we propose will be for the good of mankind and that they command general acceptance in a democratic system. We have to accept that our first thoughts are not always right and that our opinions benefit from debate and then review in the light of the consequences they actually bring about. Like many other people, my own opinions have certainly changed over the years, in the light of evidence which I have seen and other views I have encountered. Mind you, my wish to tell people what my opinions are doesn't seem to have changed. So then does this mean that, in general, as we grow older we grow wiser? Well we can - and obviously I have - but I'm not so sure about the Grand Ayatollahs and the Pope...

Paul Buckingham

5 August 2007