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    Jonathan Miller on being Jewish, the Holocaust, and religious belief. Archived Message

    Posted by Morrissey on December 3, 2019, 4:52 am

    This transcript starts at the 24:36 mark of Norman Lebrecht's 2009 interview with Sir Jonathan Miller, who died on 27th November.

    NORMAN LEBRECHT: Just coming back to your, your upbringing. During your teenage years when you say your mother is withDRAWing from being Jewish, and your father is probably DEEPENING his involvement a bit, this is during the period of the HOLOCAUST---

    JONATHAN MILLER: Yes, I---

    NORMAN LEBRECHT: ---the period of, of, of the GREAT annihilation.

    JONATHAN MILLER: Yes, I suspect that---

    NORMAN LEBRECHT: How can you withDRAW from that?

    JONATHAN MILLER: Well, I never withdrew from the identification, simply because it mattered so much to anti-Semites to the point of actually inducing them to commit the Holocaust. But I feel Jewish only in the presence of anti-Semitism, and then I don't feel subjectively Jewish, I feel subjectively enraged by the fact that people can commit these appalling acts in the name of their hatred of Jews. But I suppose, as time's gone on, I cannot help seeing it in the context of other, often unrecognized, Holocausts which took place over the last hundred and twenty years. You see, for example, the massive destruction of people by the Belgians in the Congo, where nearly eight million people were killed. And they've got away with it. No one ever talks about that.

    NORMAN LEBRECHT: Yes, but that wasn't the culmination of, of, of CENTURIES of hatred between the Belgians and---

    JONATHAN MILLER: Well---

    NORMAN LEBRECHT: ---Africans.

    JONATHAN MILLER: No---

    NORMAN LEBRECHT: It was a CASUAL annihilation.

    JONATHAN MILLER: Well it was---

    NORMAN LEBRECHT: A horrible, but...

    JONATHAN MILLER: It was part and parcel of an ethnic contempt which goes back as long as Europeans had a relationship to black Africans.

    NORMAN LEBRECHT: Mmm.

    JONATHAN MILLER: Human beings have a curious capacity for developing deeply rooted hatreds of what, for one reason or another, they think of as "otherness" or "lowness." Now, it happens in the case of anti-Semitism to have a very long connection with the history of Christianity, and so they're visualized as the killers of Christ, and they're visualized as greedy money-hoarders, and money-lenders, and as contemptible in one way or another. Well, I don't feel that as a Jew, I simply feel it because I am morally outraged that people can THINK these thoughts and then put, deliberately, into motion something like the killing of the Jews of Eastern Europe. So I'm a Jew only for anti-Semites. I have no interest in being Jewish at all. It doesn't mean anything to me. I don't know how far back I have to see my ancestors as "my people". I'm actually, also, in addition to being Jew-ish, I suppose I'm chimpanzee-ish as well.

    NORMAN LEBRECHT: Only if you accept Darwin.

    JONATHAN MILLER: Yes, which I do; how can I possibly not? I mean all I see is---

    NORMAN LEBRECHT: Because part of that is a suspension of disbelief as well, which we can call faith.

    JONATHAN MILLER: Well---no, no, no. It's father than the suspension of disbelief, it's the application of intelligence.

    NORMAN LEBRECHT: Ha ha ha!

    JONATHAN MILLER: And what I---

    NORMAN LEBRECHT: When, when did you reject God?

    JONATHAN MILLER: I've never had---

    NORMAN LEBRECHT: Was there a time when---it never entered your life?

    JONATHAN MILLER: ---a religious thought in my life. Unlike many people I know who have become atheist, I'm reluctant even to call myself an atheist. Hardly worth having a name for not believing in something as dotty as that.

    NORMAN LEBRECHT: Ri-i-i-i-ight...

    JONATHAN MILLER: I mean I don't believe in witches but I haven't got a name for it. I'm not an a-hexist. It never occurred to me that there might be a disembodied intelligence that, mumbling in the darkness, once said, "Ooooohhh, I don't know, Let there Be Light, whatever that is", followed by a little shrill voice saying "No problem!" It always seemed to me to be totally absurd, the idea of a disembodied intelligence that could, by simply uttering a fiat, bring things into existence.

    NORMAN LEBRECHT: But then how do you establish and hold a system of ethics without the whole history of religion and without the formation of society through a common belief, or as you would say, a common delusion?

    JONATHAN MILLER: Well, I think you do it by virtue of the fact we are socially cooperative and that actually, as part of game theory, it is more prudent to be a cooperator than a cheat. That in the long run, a cheat may win by two or three moves, but after more than two or three moves, is discoverable as such, and rejected.

    ……..

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000cqhy

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