March 2003 Archives

I just finished watching two intriguing programs on television that mix, at least in my mind, notions about religion and politics. The first was tonight's Charlie Rose. This was the most pessimistic assessment of the Iraq war I've seen so far on Charlie Rose. Last week's episode with William Kristol was the complete opposite - oh how things have changed in a week, how the propaganda of a decapitating victory and the cheering crowds of Iraqi's seems to have disappeared in a single week. Although I know full well that a week is far too little time to judge such a vast enterprise as regime change and rebuiliding in Iraq, I do so love it when the media suddenly discovers that the world is far more complex than they have portrayed it, or that chance rules human affairs far in ways we can rarely comprehend.

After watching Charlie Rose I turned to the Discovery Channel special report by Thomas Friedman "Searching for the Roots of 9/11." I admire Friedman a lot and I felt this documentary was one of best I've seen about the roots of terrorism. Although Friedman clothes many of his ideas in neologisms and metaphors that sometimes seem too trite for their own good, there is a real sense of subtlety to what he says about the resentments of the Arab-Muslim world for America. America has long acted in the world with a double standard. The entire cold war was a long struggle between the rhetoric of freedom and the realpolitik need to contain the Soviet Union by whatever means were necessary. In the Middle East this meant supporting a large number of cruel dictators, including Saddam Hussein. It is no surprise to me that we are now feeling the blowback of those actions.

All of this links to my recent post that cited some commentary by Fred Clark and Richard Dawkins on the religious dimensions of the current war, especially from George Bush himself. What offends me most about Bush is his lack of subtlety. And I begin to wonder how much of this simplemindedness comes from religion, especially the evangelical religion of Bush.

A lot of simplifications occur in religious faith. Friedman cited many of them in his documentary when he acknowledged that there are strains of Islam struggling to create a holy utopia in which a master race is replaced by a master religion. In such a belief system the individual becomes merely a martyr for the cause, just like the hijackers of 9-11. The movement seems to be from a simple black and white view of the world to a black and white view of the person.

Evangelical Christianity seems to make the same move, but in reverse, from a simplified individual to a simplified world. The relationship of the individual with God is all that matters for the evangelical believer. And as long as that person has a "Good Heart," and faith then they can never be wrong or led astray. Fred Clark puts it thus

The dangers of such an approach are obvious. All considerations of consequence and outcome (including respect for the potential of unforeseen consequences) become secondary to the matter of intent. For Mr. Bush, if someone has a "Good Heart," his intentions are pure and he can do no wrong.

This is what makes me so worried about George Bush and the current war; there is no public acknowledgement in the current administration of subtlety or doubt. Hussein is evil and therefore must be eliminated. Such attitudes strike me as religious instead of political. A religious war, at least on the basis of history, seems guaranteed to be far more dangerous than a political war. If we are fighting a religious war for democracy in the Middle East then we have inflated our risk by measures that can hardly be measured. The cynic in me says it would be better to be fighting for oil then to fight for the grand wave of democratization some of the neoconservative advisers to George Bush seem to expect to arise out the ashes. When gambling with such stakes the chances of falling into the same double standards we perpetrated during the cold war seem massive. If we build up the expectation for democracy too much the blowback will be that much greater in the future.

My ultimate question is why does religion fall into these traps of simplfying the world. Personally I am an atheist. But I admire the possibilities of religion. I know that religious belief is as diverse as individuals, just as there are some atheists who want to eliminate religion there are some theists who wish to coexist with the faithless. A month ago there was a conversation on a few of the weblogs I regularly read. It started with Steve at One Pot Meal talking about the appeal of monasticism to an atheist. From there comments were made by AKMA and others. The points made by AKMA that are most interesting are about how the community constrains the belief of the individual. It seems to be a truism in American Protestantism that a personal relationship with God is the only way to be faithful and that the traditions of Catholicism stunt the personal relationship. Although I strongly support the individual's journey toward faith I wonder if Bush and other evangelicals need to acknowledge the community around them. And that community cannot be confined to other believers. If it is confined then it is like standing inside a hall of mirrors.

Although I disagree with almost everything my coworker Larry has to say about religion I admire his willingness to engage in conversation. The problem is that it is merely talk - there is no risk for the evangelical believer. Larry is never going to become an atheist. Yet I feel that I might become a believer. If there is no risk of changing another's mind then the cost of the conversation eventually seems to become too large. This is the way I now feel about the war debate - the cost of resistance seems too large, the blindness of faith too strong. How can such a beautiful impulse as religion fall into such twisted despair?

Ty Burr, film critic for the Boston Globe, has a lengthy essay about the changing perceptions of what makes a film a classic. He contrasts the deciennial poll of Sight and Sound, which when last conducted in 2002 didn't contain any movies made in the last 30 years, with an informal poll of young movie students. The informal poll results start with Pulp Fiction and end with The Matrix.

Still, if there's one thing a kid in 2003 knows about, it's navigating a universe of images: Our children have grown up in a world more purely mediated than most of us can even begin to grasp. It's not just the video store but 500 channels coming through the wall and DVDs with additional footage, alternate endings, and director's commentary and a million Web sites and pirate video and audio streaming down the wires from Kazaa and 37 instant messages pinging madly on your teenager's cellphone. Says Tom Tykwer: "This is the first generation to be surrounded by moving images literally from birth. Of course I grew up with TV, but when I was a kid [in Wuppertal, Germany] we had two channels. Now there are so many films you can consume and channels to choose from, and TV treats them differently. Casablanca comes on at 9:30 a.m., because it's for older people. You're at school, so you're not meant to see it; it's not being made important by the media. What's being made important is The Matrix."

How do you ride this endless fractal wave of media? There are a number of coping strategies, and most of them involve disassociation: maintaining shallow-range focus, withholding emotional involvement, indulging in brief self-conscious passions, fluidly shifting tonal gears, using irony as both a shield and a weapon, juggling multiple frames of reference. A professor might call this quintessentially postmodern behavior. You call it channel-surfing.

For anyone younger than 30 - in other words, for those Americans who became culturally conscious only after the launch of MTV in 1981 - this is the natural state of affairs. And for more aware members of the population - the kind of kids who 30 years ago would have been grooving on Bogart and Antonioni - an overriding mistrust of the image is also business as usual. Why should it be trusted when the entertainment economy decrees that every frame of film and snippet of sound come with a price tag? Who wouldn't resist being sold to on a 24/7 basis?

My recent experiments with Tivo have given me a new appreciation for Turner Classic Movies. I setup a season pass to catch all of the Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis movies I could find. I'm that person who actually did rent a ton of Davis' movies from the video store. But do those movies actually have a major influence on me, would I put them into my own personal top 10?

I think I may be watching those classic movies because I like the sense of estrangement they create for me, living 60 or 70 years after they were made. Some of them do resonate and stick in my mind. I laughed like crazy when I finally sat through Arsenic and Old Lace with Cary Grant. I still like Casablanca even though it has become a cliche. I have no idea where that puts me in Burr's cinematic scale of appreciation, but the article was an interesting read.

So I avoid commenting on the war by commenting on religion, in particular the points of view of Richard Dawkins and Fred Clark of Slactivist.

Dawkins opines thus:

Bush seems sincerely to see the world as a battleground between Good and Evil, St Michael's angels against the forces of Lucifer. We're gonna smoke out the Amalekites, send a posse after the Midianites, smite them all and let God deal with their souls. Minds doped up on this kind of cod theology have a hard time distinguishing between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Some of Bush's faithful supporters even welcome war as the necessary prelude to the final showdown between Good and Evil: Armageddon followed by the Rapture. We must presume, or at least hope, that Bush himself is not quite of that bonkers persuasion. But he really does seem to believe he is wrestling, on God's behalf, against some sort of spirit of Evil. Tony Blair is, of course, far more intelligent and able than Bush. But his unshakable conviction that he is right and almost everybody else wrong does have a certain theological feel. He was indignant at Paxman's wickedly funny suggestion that he and Dubya pray together, but does he also believe in Evil?

Like sin and like terror (Bush's favourite target before the Iraq distraction) Evil is not an entity, not a spirit, not a force to be opposed and subdued. Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do. There are nasty people in every country, stupid people, insane people, people who should never be allowed to get anywhere near power. Just killing nasty people doesn't help: they will be replaced. We must try to tailor our institutions, our constitutions, our electoral systems, so as to minimise the chance that such people will rise to the top. In the case of Saddam Hussein, we in the west must bear some guilt. The US, Britain and France have all, from time to time, done our bit to shore up Saddam, and even arm him. And we democracies might look to our own vaunted institutions. Are they well designed to ensure that we don't make disastrous mistakes when we choose our own leaders? Isn't it, indeed, just such a mistake that has led us to this terrible pass?

Dawkins concludes with the pertinent question of how a nation with people as brilliant as the people of the United States could elect such a ridiculous person as Bush. Good question for which I have no answer.

Fred Clark adds these points in a recent post:

The dangers of such an approach are obvious. All considerations of consequence and outcome (including respect for the potential of unforeseen consequences) become secondary to the matter of intent. For Mr. Bush, if someone has a "Good Heart," his intentions are pure and he can do no wrong

This sentimental approach is also aggressively individualistic, producing idiosyncratic and novel ethical positions that may, in fact, contradict longstanding, catholic (small "c") Christian tradition. These positions are not held in deliberate opposition as a challenge to the tradition, but rather in blissful ignorance of that tradition. After all, if you've got a Good Heart, all that tradition is just an unnecessary distraction.

This evangelical sentimentalism also explains Bush's impatience with the cautious, disciplined ethics of the Christian just war tradition. It did not matter to the president that the papal emissaries pleading against a "pre-ventive/emptive" war of aggression could cite 2,000 years of Christian thought. For evangelicals like Bush, all that Christian teaching just showed that these people were spending a lot of time reading and writing books other than the Bible -- the meaning of which, he believes, is self-evident and unambiguous to anyone with a Good Heart. Apostolic traditions, systematic theologies and the like are seen as barriers between individual Christians and the Jesus who lives in your heart.

This approach also explains why evangelicals -- including George W. Bush -- can get so angry and aggressively personal in any political or ethical dispute. If you believe that the only (or at least the primary) reason you hold political opinion X is because you love Jesus, then you will also come to believe that anyone holding opinion Not-X must therefore not love Jesus. Thus evangelicals who disagree will quickly move to accusing one another of not loving Jesus, which -- for an evangelical -- is about the worst thing anybody can accuse you of (except, of course, for homosexuality or voting for Clinton).

This is what prompts President Bush's angry indignation when any initiative or position of his administration is questioned. He interprets all such questions as challenges to the Goodness of his Heart. Thus his response is usually to angrily reassert that he has a Good Heart, without ever responding to -- or hearing and considering -- the substance of the critique.

I don't have anything to add. I thank both Dawkins and Fred Clark for expressing my thoughts so clearly.

Interesting report on the strident atheism of Francis Crick and James Watson the discoverers of DNA. My favorite anecdote is this:

The antipathy to religion of the DNA pioneers is long standing. In 1961 Crick resigned as a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, when it proposed to build a chapel.

When Sir Winston Churchill wrote to him pointing out that "none need enter [the chapel] unless they wish", Crick replied that on those grounds, the college should build a brothel, and enclosed a cheque for 10 guineas.

"My hope is that eventually it will be possible to build permanent accommodation within the college, to house a carefully chosen selection of young ladies in the charge of a suitable Madam who, once the institution has become traditional, will doubtless be provided, without offence, with dining rights at the High Table," he wrote.

Watson described how he gave up attending mass at the start of the Second World War. "I came to the conclusion that the Church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead."

This interest in ornithology led to a glittering career in science - and the discovery of the double helix.

Lee Harris and Robert Dreyfuss have written intriguing articles about the world historical gamble that George Bush and his neoconservative, hawkish advisers are taking with Iraq.

• Robert Dreyfuss, "Just the Beginning," The American Prospect vol. 14 no. 3, March 1, 2003


• Lee Harris, Our World-Historical Gamble, Tech Central Station

Although the gamble is huge and the downsides could be massive I find the arguments for reshaping the world more persuasive than the pallid arguments made by the Bush administration up to this point. Tentative links to terrorists and uncertain proof of weapons of mass destruction seem pale by comparison. Perhaps this means I'm an idealist who hopes we can actually change the world instead of resigning ourselves to the status quo. What a surprise that the conservatives who once were so dismissive of liberal attempts to enforce human rights are now defending an interventionist foreign policy on a scale undreamed of before?