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The problem lies elsewhere: tales of repression in recent fiction.

Article Excerpt
One of Slavoj Zizek's favourite jokes tells of the village drunkard who has lost his keys and searches for them under a street lamp. When it is suggested that he might want to expand his search into other areas, the drunk replies that he is searching under the light because he is better able to see. This joke is often used to illustrate the strategy of displacement that occurs in political and social analysis, situations where rational solutions are offered to problems that actually lie elsewhere. The revival of militant atheism is a case in point. The bestseller list is full of texts by Dawkins, Hitchens, Onfrey and the like, whose critiques of religion rarely contain any form of social analysis. Here words like 'reason' and 'science' have an aura that enables them to function like the streetlight, confusing commentators who take the illuminated part for the whole and remain unwilling to venture into the darkness.

The actual politics of the religion debate have generally remained muted. The degree to which a society can function purely around abstract principles of reason and science has generally escaped scrutiny. Where there is a politics, it concerns the question of Islam and the role of the West in the war on terror. In the United Kingdom especially, this question has generated heated...

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