China Miéville a été interviewé par International Socialist Review.

Il parle de Kraken, son dernier roman. Extrait :

Citation:

THE FIRST thing I wanted to talk about is Kraken, since it’s your latest novel and a number of people here in the states are still reading through it. The big question I want to ask is about the power of belief—you might even say faith—in the book. It’s central to both the cosmology and the thematic content of Kraken, and what’s really striking is the way that you look at the various cults, gods, and magics that populate this mystical version of London without falling into the sneering attitude of some of the fashionable new atheism. Can you talk about all this? China Miéville :IT’S INTERESTING the formulation you use, because I would definitely say faith. I’m not even wholly convinced that belief and faith are exactly coterminous, but I would have to think about that. As you probably know, I’m an atheist, and have been for most of my conscious adult life, but I’ve always been very, very, very interested in faith. I see it as quite a specific thing and not necessarily solely reducible to belief. I’ve always been very interested in it as a sociological phenomenon, and as an aesthetic phenomenon. For example, a lot of the poetry that I like most is informed by, driven by, and is indeed an expression of faith. I’m quite an admirer of a lot of ecstatic religious poetry. People like Christopher Smart, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Francis Thompson, and others. So I’ve always been interested in faith from that perspective. I’ve also been interested in it from a sociological perspective, the way that faith intersects with political action and rationality and the faux opposition between faith and rationality. This is where we lead into the thing that you’re talking about with the currently fashionable new atheism. I have extremely little sympathy for the au courant style of crude atheism associated with people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I suppose it’s based on several things. Above all my antipathy is based on the fact that it seems to be extremely bad sociology. It’s also bad and ignorant theology. I’m not interested in theology in and of itself, although their views on theology are very ignorant, but it’s mostly their bad sociology. It’s all predicated on this notion that religious faith is founded on an intellectual error, and that to me is just staggeringly wrongheaded. No matter what else you think about faith, that is not what it is. So to criticize it on those grounds is wildly missing the point. Now obviously religions do make truth claims, and those truth claims can be evaluated, so it’s not totally divorced from the issue of rationality. But the idea that that is what it’s essentially reducible to, and therefore you can criticize it on those grounds, just strikes me as a willfully naïve or stupid way of understanding the way that faith and religion intersect with everyday life, with perceived reality and political reality and so on. For me it’s also a question of courtesy. I’m a very polite boy. I don’t think there is any contradiction between being a radical and being courteous. Except with outright enemies. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t my major drive, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t understand why we should be unnecessarily rude to people that haven’t done anything to us. It seems that there’s a kind of swashbuckling to the new atheist posturing that likes the performance, and likes to pitch itself as a kind of embattled minority striking a blow for intellectual freedom. I just don’t think that’s what it is. This courtesy issue comes in when you see, for example, things like the “Draw a Muhammad Day” that was on Facebook. Loads of people were involved with that—and you’ve got your hard Islamophobes, your hard racists who were around things like the “Ground Zero mosque”—but this “Draw a Muhammad Day” involved an enormous number of people who were not hard racists. A lot of liberals and civil libertarians were involved in this. Obviously if you’re a socialist you have an analysis of Muslims being particularly the target of racism at the moment and it being a sort of political exigency to stand alongside of them. But even if you strip that out, and you take it on its own terms—the terms of that kind of attack—they’re still like, “Oh these people are trying to stop us from drawing Muhammad.” My response is kind of like, “Were you doing a lot of drawing Muhammad? Has this really fucked with your day?” I don’t want to suggest that it should be illegal to draw Muhammad, but I do think it’s reasonable to act like a civilized person and say—everything else being equal—if you don’t have an urgent need to do something which is going to unnecessarily offend your neighbor, why do it? Again, that’s not my primary political motivation, but I think it’s a baseline kind of decency that’s missing from the debate. I’ve kind of veered from the subject, but I’m fascinated by faith. I find it very interesting. But there’s also a more meta-textual component in Kraken. One of the standard tropes in SF/fantasy—particularly fantasy for a long time—has been the strange cult. And so, as much as being an examination of real religion, it was intended to be an affectionate investing in that trope of the weird fantastic cults. It’s as much a reference to the Cthulhu cult as it is to do with any sort of religion.