Charlie Rose Interview with Karen Armstrong

[Guest fountainhall]

I had never heard of Charlie Rose until a few months ago when his programmes began to be aired on True. Now, I am a convert to his quiet, probing style of questioning and the quality of many of his guests.

 

Yesterday he did an illuminating interview with the author Karen Armstrong which I found fascinating viewing. Ms. Armstrong writes about religion, a subject she knows pretty well having been for some years a nun, a called which failed her as, she said, she could never find God! In her writing, she has the knack of making historical religious figures come alive as real people. Her books include “A History of God”, "Jerusalem” and her short histories of Buddha and the Prophet Mohammed.

 

The interview was split neatly into two parts. In the first centring on religion, she surprised me by saying,

 

“I don’t set much store by belief.” The reason, as she explained, is partly “because the word belief has changed its meaning. The word “beliven” in Middle English meant to love, to commit yourself. It is related to the German “liebe” meaning beloved, and the Latin “libido”. It was only in the in the late 17th century that Newton started to use the word “belief” as meaning 'intellectual assent'. So when Jesus is asking for faith in the gospels, it means commitment. He is not asking people to believe he is the incarnate Son of God. He’d be rather surprised by this. He was asking for people to work heart and soul for the kingdom – and work so that rich and poor could sit together at the same table.”

 

After comparing the great difference in our knowledge about Jesus and Mohammed, the more interesting section deals with the world today. Charlie Rose asked what she did not like about our world.

 

“We have our pet hates and we depend on them for our sense of self. When we utter a cleverly wounding brilliant remark, we have a buzz of triumph – but it also poisons us, as an addiction does. It poisons ourselves and our intellectual and social atmosphere.

 

“(I don’t like) things that are unkind. Over the years, I have become sensitised to clever unkindness – to cruelty – people are judgemental and puritanical and condemnatory – and I hear a lot of it today. Cruelty and sophisticated dismissal of certain things - a sense that we know all about someone or a particular culture on the basis of having read an op-ed article or seen a television programme – the arrogance of ‘I know better’.

 

“It’s essential that we realise we know very little about one another – when we speak in gossip about ‘the trouble about so and so is’ – what arrogance! I know I am a complete puzzle to myself most of the time. Every single one of us represents that kind of mystery.

 

“Socrates, for example, the founder of the western rational tradition, who founded the dialogue form, said the unexamined life is not worth living. It is important to examine every single one of your received opinions. The people who came to speak to him always thought they knew what they were talking about, but after half an hour of Socrates relentless questioning, they found they knew little of courage or justice or goodness – and the Socratic dialogue always ended up with the participants scratching their heads and saying ‘we don’t know anything!’ At that moment, it’s the beginning of learning and understanding, because you know you seek wisdom but you haven’t got it.”

 

In the wake of the Tucson killings, Charlie Rose asks a question about senseless violence and the extraordinary use of levels of unimagined violence we now see.

 

“Increasingly, small groups are going to have powers of destruction that hitherto were the preserve of the nation state. That is why unless we learn to apply the golden rule globally so that we treat all nations and all peoples as we would wish to be treated ourselves and develop a global democracy where we listen to all voices, not just the rich and powerful, and take their aspirations as seriously as we take our own, more and more disaffection will grow, and more and more despair. And when people despair and feel they have nothing to lose, we see what happens.

 

“Fear creates fundamentalist movements. When people are under threat, they can lash out violently. The more people see violence on a daily basis, it affects everything they do – and it affects their religion. Every single fundamentalist movement I have studied is rooted in fear, a profound fear of annihilation. Even in this country. People in small town America feel they have been colonised by an alien ethos of Harvard, Yale, Washington.

 

“In many quarters that fear has been hardened into rage. We need to listen to those fears, because a lot of these movements are expressing, often in a very distorted way, fears and anxieties that no rational society can ignore.”

 

The quotes above are slightly shortened versions of Karen Armstrong’s own words. The full interview is presently available at http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11407

[Guest Astrrro]

Charlie Rose is an exceptional interviewer, skilled at drawing a guest out in a very gentle manner. His curiousity is a big asset. He can be sen on Bloomberg in Thailand.