Rwanda's lessons yet to be learned
By Don Cheadle and John Prendergast
January 8, 2005
AT A MOMENT during the forthcoming film "Hotel Rwanda" when all hope for a meaningful international response to the 1994 genocide seems lost, the main character Paul Rusesabagina proclaims, "We must shame them into helping." Nothing else had worked. Pictures, pleas, facts, international conventions, and United Nations resolutions all had produced a cowardly retreat by a world unwilling to stand up to evil.
The point of such a scene and such a film is not just to document the story of what happened so that we can understand it better. It is much more about the future, so that the overused phrase "Never Again" might one day have some shred of meaning, some shred of truth.
The future is now. In Congo and Sudan, unspeakable atrocities are being committed in the context of civil wars which have taken the lives of approximately six million people. The parallels of this modern-day holocaust to 1994's genocide in Rwanda are stark. Militias are doing most of the killing. Specific ethnic groups are targeted and inter-communal rivalries are stoked by governments. Hardliners are threatened by peace processes and commit crimes against humanity to promote instability.
The similarities in the international response to Rwanda then and to Congo and Sudan now are equally haunting. Lines of responsibility for war crimes continue to be muddied, in order to avoid making tough political choices about intervention or confrontation. Observing cease-fires that don't really exist are still favored over the application of real force or sanctions against the perpetrators.
Deadlines and warnings continue to be issued, with little consequence. Humanitarian Band-Aids remain our tool of choice, as we cite the millions of dollars in food aid we send to exonerate ourselves for not intervening to protect people from being murdered.
The failure to act forcefully in Sudan and Congo highlights how little progress the world has made since the events of 1994. These debacles also remind us that the world body chargged with leading the response to crises of this kind -- the United Nations Security Council -- remains unwilling or unable to confront the perpetrators of mass atrocities in the world's peripheral zones. Divisions within the Security Council over whether to act remain huge, and the divisions themselves become an excuse for inaction.
The main difference, however, between 1994 and today is that we still have time to act to help save lives in Congo and Sudan. Millions of lives. The death tolls have mounted in slow motion in Congo and Sudan compared to Rwanda, where 800,000 were killed in a hundred days, the fastest rate of killing in recorded history. It is not too late to act.
Let's go back to the lessons of the Rwandan genocide. It was perpetrated with ease by the Rwandan government and its militias because there was no accountability for the killing and no protection for the targets. These two ingredients -- accountability and protection -- are precisely what are missing from today's response in Congo and Sudan.
First, accountability. The message needs to be sent to the perpetrators and orchestrators of the killing that the days of impunity are over. That can be accomplished through a number of tools: international prosecution for war crimes, arms embargos, travel bans, and asset freezes, all focused on those that are most responsible.
Second, protection. When a government abdicates its responsibility to protect its own citizens, then all international efforts must go toward protecting those people. In both Sudan and Congo, international forces have been deployed to observe tenuous cease-fires. But the real problem is predatory militias (like the Sudan government-backed Janjaweed, or "devils on horseback") that prey upon civilians and carry out the political objectives of their patrons in nearby capitals.
The African Union force in Sudan and the UN force in Congo must both be greatly increased in size and have their mandates refocused on the protection of civilian life. To do that, the militias and their sponsors must be confronted. Leaving them free guarantees a continuation of the killing, and leaves the external forces with front row seats.
How the world responds to genocide and other crimes against humanity represents one of the greatest moral tests of our lifetime. Citizens all over the United States are mobilizing to tell our government that what is happening in Darfur is unacceptable. But that is only the beginning.
Let's remember Paul Rusesabagina's plea to shame the world into acting. Otherwise, just imagine the shame of 6 million more fresh graves.
Don Cheadle plays the role of Paul Rusesabagina in the film "Hotel Rwanda," for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. John Prendergast is special adviser to the International Crisis Group. He also worked for President Clinton's National Security Council.
Saturday, January 08, 2005
Friday, January 07, 2005
From Bayles's Arts Journal blog, Serious Popcorn:
Moore
by Martha Bayles
The pundits have been intoning that Fahrenheit 9/11 will not change any minds. But they are not taking into consideration the outlook of someone like Nick Anderson, a 22-year-old resident of New York who told the Times that he "wanted to see it as soon as possible. This is easier for people to understand than reading books, reading newspapers or watching C-Span."
Michael Moore is a master rhetorician, in the ancient and not flattering sense. But his rhetorical language is not English. It is film - not narrative film, but the information-imparting kind known as documentary. There is no point in accusing Moore, as some have, of not being a documentarian because he's dishonest and manipulative. That's like saying Hitler wasn't an orator because his speeches told lies. The test of rhetorical skill is not truth but persuasion. Just ask Plato.
And Moore is persuasive. As a polemicist of film he is witty, inventive, messy in just the right way, and a master at three essential skills: timing, segue, and (not least) ironic juxtaposition. For example, he uses music brilliantly. Over a sequence of two spiffed-up Marine recruiters cruising a run-down shopping mall, he runs bright, effervescent disco. When a pumped GI says combat is more fun "with a good song playing in the background," Moore plays the soldier's favorite, "Burn" by the punk band Rancid ("We don't need no water / Let the motherfucker burn") over footage of an Iraqi man fleeing with a bloody child in his arms.
So here's a tip for pundits and (especially) politicians: Don't underestimate the power of rhetoric delivered in the crowd's native tongue, just because you can't speak it.
But Moore is a lazy thinker. Look for the ideas behind the polemic, and you will find a mind as flabby and inert as the body. Fahrenheit 9/11 contains a total of one idea and eight-tenths of a conspiracy theory.
First, the idea. It is fixed, unmovable, a regular North Star: The rich are out to screw the poor. There/s a lot to be said for this idea (as perhaps Moore understands, now that he's rich). But usually it's better to combine one idea with another, and this Moore seems incapable of doing.
Once you figure out what Moore's fixed idea is, you can negotiate what to a normal mind seems inconsistent. Take the American soldiers in Iraq. When Moore sees them as poor, hailing from economically depressed places like Flint, Michigan, then they are the ones getting screwed. But when he sees them as rich, riding around in fancy tanks and shooting at ragged Iraqis, they are the ones doing the screwing. Really, it's no more complicated than that.
This simplistic worldview causes some weird effects. For example, the sequence in which several African-American members of the House of Representatives register objections to the outcome of the 2000 election, only to be told by the Rich White Dude on the podium that without the support of at least one senator, their objections don't count. In a voice-over oozing with sympathy for the underdog. Moore sums up what the Rich White Dude is really saying: "Shut up and sit down!" The only problem is, the Rich White Dude is Al Gore.
Now consider Moore's conspiracy theory. Eight-tenths of it are the same as the conspiracy theory held by millions around the world, from European leftists to angry Muslims, who see Bush as the clueless but conniving head of a gigantic imperialist plot to take over the Middle East (not to mention the rest of the globe). But Moore's version is missing two key elements.
First, Israel. In this entire frenzied centrifuge of a movie, in which no corrupt, finagling, behind-the-scenes, back-scratching connection among presidents, princes, CEOs, sheiks, and terrorists is too tenuous to be credited, there is not one single mention of Israel. Given that millions of Moore admirers around the world believe that the rich Americans are in cahoots with the rich Israelis, why does he focus on rich Americans in cahoots with rich Saudis?
The answer is simple. Moore can do without the added PR boost that comes with being called an anti-Semite. Earlier this spring, Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ got just such a boost, but with it came widespread opprobrium. If Moore were desperate for box-office tinder, he'd probably light this match. But he's got plenty of other matches to light. Indeed, he does something very clever: he trades on both anti-Semitism and anti-Arab prejudice by casting the Saudis in the role typically reserved for the Israelis.
Still, in a film about terrorism and the Middle East, the omission of any mention of American support for Israel is not just glaring, it is (to judge from the lack of comment about it) blinding.
The second missing element is the link that, if made explicit, would complete Moore's paranoid logic: George W. Bush is responsible for 9/11. Think about it. Without this conclusion, the film's critique (if you can call it that) is strangely attentuated and unresolved. With it, everything falls into place. The Bush family, the bin Laden family, Halliburton, the Carlyle Group, the Unocal company and the rest of corporate America worked together to kill over 3,000 people on September 11, in order to provide a pretext for cracking down on civil liberties, sweeping the poor off the streets to serve as cannon fodder, and in general creating the conditions for what George Orwell called "perpetual war." All for the sake of greater profits.
If this is Moore's message, then he ought to come out and say it, instead of relying on innuendo. But that would require guts, and all this demogogue has is a big gut.
Moore
by Martha Bayles
The pundits have been intoning that Fahrenheit 9/11 will not change any minds. But they are not taking into consideration the outlook of someone like Nick Anderson, a 22-year-old resident of New York who told the Times that he "wanted to see it as soon as possible. This is easier for people to understand than reading books, reading newspapers or watching C-Span."
Michael Moore is a master rhetorician, in the ancient and not flattering sense. But his rhetorical language is not English. It is film - not narrative film, but the information-imparting kind known as documentary. There is no point in accusing Moore, as some have, of not being a documentarian because he's dishonest and manipulative. That's like saying Hitler wasn't an orator because his speeches told lies. The test of rhetorical skill is not truth but persuasion. Just ask Plato.
And Moore is persuasive. As a polemicist of film he is witty, inventive, messy in just the right way, and a master at three essential skills: timing, segue, and (not least) ironic juxtaposition. For example, he uses music brilliantly. Over a sequence of two spiffed-up Marine recruiters cruising a run-down shopping mall, he runs bright, effervescent disco. When a pumped GI says combat is more fun "with a good song playing in the background," Moore plays the soldier's favorite, "Burn" by the punk band Rancid ("We don't need no water / Let the motherfucker burn") over footage of an Iraqi man fleeing with a bloody child in his arms.
So here's a tip for pundits and (especially) politicians: Don't underestimate the power of rhetoric delivered in the crowd's native tongue, just because you can't speak it.
But Moore is a lazy thinker. Look for the ideas behind the polemic, and you will find a mind as flabby and inert as the body. Fahrenheit 9/11 contains a total of one idea and eight-tenths of a conspiracy theory.
First, the idea. It is fixed, unmovable, a regular North Star: The rich are out to screw the poor. There/s a lot to be said for this idea (as perhaps Moore understands, now that he's rich). But usually it's better to combine one idea with another, and this Moore seems incapable of doing.
Once you figure out what Moore's fixed idea is, you can negotiate what to a normal mind seems inconsistent. Take the American soldiers in Iraq. When Moore sees them as poor, hailing from economically depressed places like Flint, Michigan, then they are the ones getting screwed. But when he sees them as rich, riding around in fancy tanks and shooting at ragged Iraqis, they are the ones doing the screwing. Really, it's no more complicated than that.
This simplistic worldview causes some weird effects. For example, the sequence in which several African-American members of the House of Representatives register objections to the outcome of the 2000 election, only to be told by the Rich White Dude on the podium that without the support of at least one senator, their objections don't count. In a voice-over oozing with sympathy for the underdog. Moore sums up what the Rich White Dude is really saying: "Shut up and sit down!" The only problem is, the Rich White Dude is Al Gore.
Now consider Moore's conspiracy theory. Eight-tenths of it are the same as the conspiracy theory held by millions around the world, from European leftists to angry Muslims, who see Bush as the clueless but conniving head of a gigantic imperialist plot to take over the Middle East (not to mention the rest of the globe). But Moore's version is missing two key elements.
First, Israel. In this entire frenzied centrifuge of a movie, in which no corrupt, finagling, behind-the-scenes, back-scratching connection among presidents, princes, CEOs, sheiks, and terrorists is too tenuous to be credited, there is not one single mention of Israel. Given that millions of Moore admirers around the world believe that the rich Americans are in cahoots with the rich Israelis, why does he focus on rich Americans in cahoots with rich Saudis?
The answer is simple. Moore can do without the added PR boost that comes with being called an anti-Semite. Earlier this spring, Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ got just such a boost, but with it came widespread opprobrium. If Moore were desperate for box-office tinder, he'd probably light this match. But he's got plenty of other matches to light. Indeed, he does something very clever: he trades on both anti-Semitism and anti-Arab prejudice by casting the Saudis in the role typically reserved for the Israelis.
Still, in a film about terrorism and the Middle East, the omission of any mention of American support for Israel is not just glaring, it is (to judge from the lack of comment about it) blinding.
The second missing element is the link that, if made explicit, would complete Moore's paranoid logic: George W. Bush is responsible for 9/11. Think about it. Without this conclusion, the film's critique (if you can call it that) is strangely attentuated and unresolved. With it, everything falls into place. The Bush family, the bin Laden family, Halliburton, the Carlyle Group, the Unocal company and the rest of corporate America worked together to kill over 3,000 people on September 11, in order to provide a pretext for cracking down on civil liberties, sweeping the poor off the streets to serve as cannon fodder, and in general creating the conditions for what George Orwell called "perpetual war." All for the sake of greater profits.
If this is Moore's message, then he ought to come out and say it, instead of relying on innuendo. But that would require guts, and all this demogogue has is a big gut.
From Opinion Journal:
Tremors of Doubt
What kind of God would allow a deadly tsunami?
BY DAVID B. HART
Originally Published Friday, December 31, 2004
On Nov. 1, 1755, a great earthquake struck offshore of Lisbon. In that city alone, some 60,000 perished, first from the tremors, then from the massive tsunami that arrived half an hour later. Fires consumed much of what remained of the city. The tidal waves spread death along the coasts of Iberia and North Africa.
Voltaire's "Poëme sur le désastre de Lisbonne" of the following year was an exquisitely savage--though sober--assault upon the theodicies prevalent in his time. For those who would argue that "all is good" and "all is necessary," that the universe is an elaborately calibrated harmony of pain and pleasure, or that this is the best of all possible worlds, Voltaire's scorn was boundless: By what calculus of universal good can one reckon the value of "infants crushed upon their mothers' breasts," the dying "sad inhabitants of desolate shores," the whole "fatal chaos of individual miseries"?
Perhaps the most disturbing argument against submission to "the will of God" in human suffering--especially the suffering of children--was placed in the mouth of Ivan Karamazov by Dostoyevsky; but the evils Ivan enumerates are all acts of human cruelty, for which one can at least assign a clear culpability. Natural calamities usually seem a greater challenge to the certitudes of believers in a just and beneficent God than the sorrows induced by human iniquity.
Considered dispassionately, though, man is part of the natural order, and his propensity for malice should be no less a scandal to the conscience of the metaphysical optimist than the most violent convulsions of the physical world. The same ancient question is apposite to the horrors of history and nature alike: Whence comes evil? And as Voltaire so elegantly apostrophizes, it is useless to invoke the balances of the great chain of being, for that chain is held in God's hand and he is not enchained.
As a Christian, I cannot imagine any answer to the question of evil likely to satisfy an unbeliever; I can note, though, that--for all its urgency--Voltaire's version of the question is not in any proper sense "theological." The God of Voltaire's poem is a particular kind of "deist" God, who has shaped and ordered the world just as it now is, in accord with his exact intentions, and who presides over all its eventualities austerely attentive to a precise equilibrium between felicity and morality. Not that reckless Christians have not occasionally spoken in such terms; but this is not the Christian God.
The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities"--spiritual and terrestrial--alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him--"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not"--and his appearance within "this cosmos" is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature.
Whatever one makes of this story, it is no bland cosmic optimism. Yes, at the heart of the gospel is an ineradicable triumphalism, a conviction that the victory over evil and death has been won; but it is also a victory yet to come. As Paul says, all creation groans in anguished anticipation of the day when God's glory will transfigure all things. For now, we live amid a strife of darkness and light.
When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering--when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's--no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms--knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against "fate," and that must do so until the end of days.
Mr. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, is the author of "The Beauty of the Infinite" (Eerdmans).
Tremors of Doubt
What kind of God would allow a deadly tsunami?
BY DAVID B. HART
Originally Published Friday, December 31, 2004
On Nov. 1, 1755, a great earthquake struck offshore of Lisbon. In that city alone, some 60,000 perished, first from the tremors, then from the massive tsunami that arrived half an hour later. Fires consumed much of what remained of the city. The tidal waves spread death along the coasts of Iberia and North Africa.
Voltaire's "Poëme sur le désastre de Lisbonne" of the following year was an exquisitely savage--though sober--assault upon the theodicies prevalent in his time. For those who would argue that "all is good" and "all is necessary," that the universe is an elaborately calibrated harmony of pain and pleasure, or that this is the best of all possible worlds, Voltaire's scorn was boundless: By what calculus of universal good can one reckon the value of "infants crushed upon their mothers' breasts," the dying "sad inhabitants of desolate shores," the whole "fatal chaos of individual miseries"?
Perhaps the most disturbing argument against submission to "the will of God" in human suffering--especially the suffering of children--was placed in the mouth of Ivan Karamazov by Dostoyevsky; but the evils Ivan enumerates are all acts of human cruelty, for which one can at least assign a clear culpability. Natural calamities usually seem a greater challenge to the certitudes of believers in a just and beneficent God than the sorrows induced by human iniquity.
Considered dispassionately, though, man is part of the natural order, and his propensity for malice should be no less a scandal to the conscience of the metaphysical optimist than the most violent convulsions of the physical world. The same ancient question is apposite to the horrors of history and nature alike: Whence comes evil? And as Voltaire so elegantly apostrophizes, it is useless to invoke the balances of the great chain of being, for that chain is held in God's hand and he is not enchained.
As a Christian, I cannot imagine any answer to the question of evil likely to satisfy an unbeliever; I can note, though, that--for all its urgency--Voltaire's version of the question is not in any proper sense "theological." The God of Voltaire's poem is a particular kind of "deist" God, who has shaped and ordered the world just as it now is, in accord with his exact intentions, and who presides over all its eventualities austerely attentive to a precise equilibrium between felicity and morality. Not that reckless Christians have not occasionally spoken in such terms; but this is not the Christian God.
The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities"--spiritual and terrestrial--alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him--"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not"--and his appearance within "this cosmos" is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature.
Whatever one makes of this story, it is no bland cosmic optimism. Yes, at the heart of the gospel is an ineradicable triumphalism, a conviction that the victory over evil and death has been won; but it is also a victory yet to come. As Paul says, all creation groans in anguished anticipation of the day when God's glory will transfigure all things. For now, we live amid a strife of darkness and light.
When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering--when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's--no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms--knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against "fate," and that must do so until the end of days.
Mr. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, is the author of "The Beauty of the Infinite" (Eerdmans).
From The New York Observer:
Disaster Ignites Debate: ‘Was
God In the Tsunami?’
by Ron Rosenbaum
"Was God in the Tsunami?" I woke up to that question in my Yahoo inbox four days after the waves struck, a posting from Beliefnet, a popular discussion list I subscribe to. It was the morning when the death-toll estimates had gone into six figures for the first time. It would be interesting to calculate the number of deaths from a catastrophe that trigger the moment when people start asking "Where was God?" questions. But it seemed to me that morning marked the beginning. It was a week that would end with the Archbishop of Canterbury himself declaring that he had doubts about God.
As surely as the tsunami followed the earthquake, the questions—the perennial, never-satisfactorily-resolved questions—of theodicy followed the tsunami. Theodicy, of course, is the subdiscipline of theology devoted to the attempt to reconcile the idea of an all-powerful, just and loving God who intervenes in history—the God most Western religions believe in—with the recurrence of catastrophic slaughter from "natural" causes such as tsunamis and man-made evils such as genocides.
The same morning "Was God in the Tsunami?" arrived in my inbox, I checked on my favorite Web site, Arts and Letters Daily (aldaily.com), which links to the most notable essays and reviews of the day, and found a box that linked to no less than four articles with headlines such as "Faiths Ask of Quake: ‘Why Did You Do This, God?’" and "To God, An Age Old Question." It was just the beginning.
Let me concede that yes, there are many paths to faith, but it is an underappreciated scandal that, philosophically, the "age old question" of theodicy has not been satisfactorily answered without resort to vague evasions ("It’s all a mystery," "We just can’t understand God’s plan," "It will allow good to manifest itself in the hearts of the survivors," "We live in a fallen world," "The dead are better off in heaven"). A failure that asks us to just have faith that it’s all for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Yes, Voltaire misconstrued in Candide, probably deliberately, Leibniz’s Theodicy: Leibniz was claiming that God created the best of all possible worlds consistent with free will—the freedom to choose evil without which choosing good means nothing special. The best of all possible worlds consistent with the nature of human nature, in other words—and its predilection for choosing evil. The question Voltaire should have posed is whether a better, less murderous human nature—consistent with free will—could have been created by Leibniz’s God.
Of course, the inadequacies of traditional theodicy are not a problem for those like my colleague Jim Holt, one of the best translators of arcane philosophical controversies (Kripke on naming!) for non-specialists. Mr. Holt once wrote that the evidence suggests that "the world is not presided over by a deity who is all-good and all-powerful, but rather by one who is 100 percent malevolent but only 80 percent effective." He arrives by a different route at the answer offered by some extreme Gnostic sects who believed this world was presided over by a malevolent demiurge posing as God.
And the inadequacies of theodicy are not a problem for those who don’t believe in an all-powerful God. Harold (When Bad Things Happen to Good People) Kushner is one of those who thinks the problem of God’s tolerance of catastrophic evils is solved essentially by making God a weakling—loving, but not really in charge, despite all the boasting in the Bible about God’s powers, including the tsunami-related powers of raising and lowering the waters at will (remember that whole Flood thing?). Kushner is there on Beliefnet advising people to read the 23rd Psalm, which seems to me a wildly inappropriate choice, promising as it does that God will always be at our side to lead us beside still waters. So it’s all good, except for the 150,000 who didn’t exactly get the still waters that day.
I recall the asperity with which this easy out (Kushner’s "God is not all-powerful") was dismissed by Yehuda Bauer, the former head of the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, when I asked him about it in Jerusalem. "There’s no way there can be an all-powerful and just God," Mr. Bauer said. "Because if he’s all-powerful, he’s Satan [considering the recurrent prevalence of genocidal evil in the world]. If he’s just [meaning just but, as per Kushner, too weak to make the world just], he’s a nebbish …. I don’t need a God like that."
It’sremarkable, though, how Kushner’s cop-out has become the contemporary evasive answer to questions of theodicy. Inside my faded paperback copy of When Bad Things Happen …, I found a bookmark that had evidently been there when I bought it. It’s from the Full Circle bookstore, 50 Penn Place, Oklahoma City, Okla.
I had evidently bought the book when I went down there right after the Federal Building bombing to do a story (for The New York Times Magazine, June 4, 1995) on how the culture deals with questions of theodicy in the aftermath of catastrophe.
"Full Circle," indeed. Rabbi Kushner’s well-intended book didn’t do the job for me back then, and it doesn’t do it now, although it has become an almost unquestioned meme. Poor God—He means well, but He seems to have lost the superpowers he had in the Bible. Some sort of spiritual Green Kryptonite slipped him by Satan, I’ll bet. So He’s struggling and weak and nebbishy and we have to buck Him up.
But for those who don’t try the easy way out, the great conundrum of theodicy was recapitulated on the Arts and Letters Daily Web site by its editor, Dennis Dutton, in his lead-in to the links:
"If God is God, he’s not good. If God is good, he’s not God. You can’t have it both ways, especially after the Indian Ocean catastrophe." It’s a version of the challenging syllogism posed by J.L. Mackie in a 1955 issue of the journal Mind, an argument which contemporary theodicies have been trying, without notable success, to refute ever since.
The lack of success seems to have lent a tone of desperation to some. I was struck by the police-interrogation tone of one of the links: "Faiths Ask of Quake: ‘Why Did You Do This, God?’"
"Yeah, Tough Guy, why’d ya do it? Your prints are all over the crime scene, Big Guy. You have the right to remain silent …. " You can almost hear the late, great Jerry Orbach, who’s now presumably in a position to put the question, kicking a chair in the squad room to get the Divine Perp’s attention.
Then there was a link to "Tremors of Doubt" in The Wall Street Journal by David Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, which had the virtue of conceding that the conventional consolations of pop theodicy "about God’s inscrutable counsels" or that "all this mysteriously serves God’s good ends" are "odious banalities," and that even believers can’t assume that theologians have answered the theodicy question adequately.
It was only the beginning of the orgy of theodicy that followed, if one may use a profane term for a sacred quest. Foolish things were said by men of all faiths (almost always men, by the way; it’s what feminists used to call Male Answer Syndrome): the rabbi in Israel who pronounced the tsunami "an expression of God’s great ire with the world"; the Buddhist sage who said it represented God’s resentment of the "huge amount of pent-up man-made evil on earth"; the mullah in Indonesia who said that it was "a reminder from God he created the world and can destroy the world."
And the media kept headlining the search for answers: "Why Does God Allow Terrible Things to Happen to His People?", an essay in The Times of London asked. And there was an essay that addresses the question not to God, but to those who believe in Him: "How Can Religious People Explain Something Like This?" (Martin Kettle in the U.K. Guardian, the rare essay that suggested there were no good answers.)
And then, at the end of the week kicked off by "Was God in the Tsunami?", this shocker: On Sunday(!), Jan. 2, the London Telegraph dropped the bomb "Archbishop of Canterbury: This Has Made Me Question God’s Existence." What’s next? "The Pope Says: ‘I Am a Wiccan!’"? (It’s true that the archbishop waffled a bit and called for prayer, but he did say his faith was "upset" by the catastrophe.)
One thing a reading of these essays reminded one of is that natural disasters are both more and less problematical for defenders of the faiths. On the one hand, earthquakes and the like don’t involve man-made evils and thus the question of the depravity of human nature—and the difficult question behind that question: whether humans are at fault for their depraved nature, or whether the deity who created them could have done a better job creating humanity consistent with free will.
As my friend Errol Morris puts it: The difficulty with man-made evils is not "man’s inhumanity to man," the problem is precisely "man’s humanity to man." The wickedness of humanity is not an aberration, but more like the norm.
No, man or human nature can’t be held responsible for earthquakes and tsunamis—except in those bloodthirsty theodicies which persist in seeing the punitive hand of God punishing man’s collective sinfulness by the slaughter of innocent children not old enough to sin. A hard-to-defend but scripturally habitual response from a wrathful God for the sins of a sinful human nature He created but is somehow not responsible for.
Nor are natural disasters as much of a problem for Deists, or for those who believe in a god who stopped intervening in human affairs after the creation of the universe or the creation of man. Catastrophic evils might call into question what is meant by the "intelligent" in "Intelligent Design," but not Design itself.
But for those who believe in a God who has intervened in history, as he is portrayed in Western scriptures, a God who can raise and lower the waters, punish and save at will, has miracles at his disposal, and should be able to separate the sheep from the goats, the saints from the sinners: For that sort of God, the indiscriminate slaughter of 100,000 saints and sinners—children and parents alike—presents more of a problem.
If God is responsible for the fall of a sparrow, it’s hard to exempt him from other, more dramatic natural developments. Sure, you could say it’s not His fault: He left us in a broken world, a fallen nature to reflect our own inner Fallen Nature. A vale of tears, whose horrors better prepare us to value the heaven that awaits us (well, some of us).
But in general, in this view, we’re better off dead—or, as some respondents on the Beliefnet comments section had it, the tsunami victims were lucky, they’d received a gift: They’re in heaven ahead of time.
Let me return to "Was God in the Tsunami?", the Beliefnet missive written by Rodger Kamenetz, a Jewish Buddhist or a Buddhist Jew (it wasn’t quite clear—he had equal reverence for both traditions, it seemed). On the plus side, the author made the important point that any attempt to defend the deaths of tens of thousands of children not old enough to sin as part of "God’s Plan," as His collective punishment for man’s wickedness or some other variation on the blame-the-victim theodicy was an obscenity (my word, not his).
And he gets points for citing King Lear—not Lear himself, but Gloucester’s bitter complaint that "We are to the gods as flies to wanton boys. They kill us for our sport," It’s not the only answer in Lear, but it’s one that fits the bare facts.
But then Mr. Kamenetz (whose essay has the alternate title "Was God in This Disaster?") lets himself get distracted by the Talmudic and Buddhist mystification. Proving once again that not all "wisdom of the sages" is equally wise, or must necessarily be approached with the same reverence.
He gives us a story he says is from the Talmud that has Moses getting to heaven and learning that one Rabbi Akiba is the wisest interpreter of God’s words and actions. Moses asks God what Rabbi Akiba’s reward will be. "God shows him a vision: Akiba tortured by the Romans in the marketplace, his flesh stripped from his body." Moses asks God why this incomprehensibly horrific fate for such a wise man. "God answers with a riddle," we’re told: "It arose in thought."
Say what? "It arose in thought." That’s the best he can do? A Bill Clintonesque "because I can" boast?
Is it just me, or does this story not exactly speak well for God? I guess you could say it "arose in thought" for the Roman soldiers, so you could put the blame on them, but the way it’s told here, it seems clear it’s God showing off both his power and his self-mystifying inscrutability.
A God who encourages watching torture—as in the theology of Aquinas, who imagined that one of the pleasures that God would offer the souls He saved would be gazing down from Heaven upon the cruel and prolonged tortures of the damned in Hell. Recreational sadism from Heaven’s luxury skyboxes (Summa Theologica, Question 94).
This was one of the logical outcomes of certain orthodox Christian doctrines that used to drive William Empson crazy. Read Empson’s Milton’s God, his last, most lacerating book, almost totally devoted to denouncing the God of Paradise Lost—Milton’s massive effort at overcoming the contradictions of theodicy. And arguing from a study of Milton’s posthumously published and ambiguously heterodox De Doctrina Christiana that Milton had doubts, too. (Actually, it’s almost impossible to find a copy of Empson’s Milton’s God; someone should bring it back into print.)
But to return to "It arose in thought": That’s not a "riddle," that’s a rebuff. In cruelty, it goes beyond the God of Job with his brusque "none of your business, buddy" brush-off. I wonder if the author of "Was God in the Tsunami?" is aware of how impoverished a God this sorry "riddle" gives us?
Perhaps recognizing that this isn’t going to resolve any doubts or offer much consolation, he makes his Buddhist move. He’s met the Dalai Lama, he wants you to know, and "One time I asked the Dalai Lama how he would respond to a parent who had lost a child. And he said—these aren’t his exact words—that when you lose a child you are constantly thinking of that child in your imagination."
The implication being that the child is really not lost at all—in fact, he or she is still right there in your life, in a low-maintenance way, I guess you’d say. In the imagination, of course, but "constantly" there. Maybe more present than when he or she was alive. I wonder how well this works when he tries it out on parents who have lost children.
The comments on the listserv in response to the essay were mainly divided between atheists and believers, both factions, in their own way, absolving God from responsibility. For the atheists, if he doesn’t exist, he couldn’t have done it; for the believers, God has no responsibility for the catastrophe, just for the goodness displayed by the rescue workers in the aftermath, and the few "miraculous" stories of survival.
This is something I find particularly annoying: a God who can intervene to save a handful out of a hundred thousand and gets credit for all the goodness displayed in the aftermath of the havoc He wrought.
"Why this need to defend God?" someone (that would be me) finally posted on the Beliefnet comment board in response to the multiple alibis for God that others were posting. All so eager to rush forward and exonerate their version of God from any connection to the slaughter. It began to smack of "they doth protest too much": The disaster somehow gets transformed into a display of God’s wonderfulness. In a way, doesn’t this sort of thinking suggest a kind of Stockholm syndrome? He’s the only God we’ve got, He’s got us imprisoned in this hell of a world—so, after a while, we worship Him.
One of the most glaring instances of this sort can be found in a quote in a story the Post carried on Jan. 2.
It was the heartwarming story of a baby boy born prematurely while his mother fled upland from the waves as they hit the coast of India.
Yes, it was the heartwarming "MIRACLE OF LIFE" that the Post headline had it.
But then I have to admit that I cringed when I read the words of the baby’s father (who had given him the name "Tsunami"—I’m sure the parents of those who lost babies will think this is really cute).
But the thing that made me cringe was this quote from the father of Baby Tsunami: "It’s all God’s grace!" he said.
I can’t really blame the guy for saying whatever he says at a moment like that. He’s got his baby. But think of the implications. Either he believes that his family has special grace, and that the tens of thousands of other families who lost children suffered the torment of a lost child because they deserved it, because they lacked "God’s grace." Or he believes that God looked down and saw tens of thousands of imperiled children and decided that this one deserved the special intervention of his "grace" and the others didn’t.
If you believe that God intervened to save this one little life, you have to believe that He chose not to intervene to save the lives of all the other children. He wanted them dead.
I would propose a truce between believers and unbelievers so they can stop fighting over the credit for the goodness of the rescue workers, whether it should be assigned to God or to man, so that we can remove God—and the critique of God—from the equation entirely for a while and save our energy to support the recovery unencumbered by this perennial debate, however important and profound.
Here’s the terms of the truce: Unbelievers will stop pointing out the inadequacies of the believers’ theodicy, their justification for God. And believers will stop claiming credit for God for everything good that happens, unless they are willing to condemn Him to a perp walk for all the crimes committed on earth, many in his name.
Disaster Ignites Debate: ‘Was
God In the Tsunami?’
by Ron Rosenbaum
"Was God in the Tsunami?" I woke up to that question in my Yahoo inbox four days after the waves struck, a posting from Beliefnet, a popular discussion list I subscribe to. It was the morning when the death-toll estimates had gone into six figures for the first time. It would be interesting to calculate the number of deaths from a catastrophe that trigger the moment when people start asking "Where was God?" questions. But it seemed to me that morning marked the beginning. It was a week that would end with the Archbishop of Canterbury himself declaring that he had doubts about God.
As surely as the tsunami followed the earthquake, the questions—the perennial, never-satisfactorily-resolved questions—of theodicy followed the tsunami. Theodicy, of course, is the subdiscipline of theology devoted to the attempt to reconcile the idea of an all-powerful, just and loving God who intervenes in history—the God most Western religions believe in—with the recurrence of catastrophic slaughter from "natural" causes such as tsunamis and man-made evils such as genocides.
The same morning "Was God in the Tsunami?" arrived in my inbox, I checked on my favorite Web site, Arts and Letters Daily (aldaily.com), which links to the most notable essays and reviews of the day, and found a box that linked to no less than four articles with headlines such as "Faiths Ask of Quake: ‘Why Did You Do This, God?’" and "To God, An Age Old Question." It was just the beginning.
Let me concede that yes, there are many paths to faith, but it is an underappreciated scandal that, philosophically, the "age old question" of theodicy has not been satisfactorily answered without resort to vague evasions ("It’s all a mystery," "We just can’t understand God’s plan," "It will allow good to manifest itself in the hearts of the survivors," "We live in a fallen world," "The dead are better off in heaven"). A failure that asks us to just have faith that it’s all for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Yes, Voltaire misconstrued in Candide, probably deliberately, Leibniz’s Theodicy: Leibniz was claiming that God created the best of all possible worlds consistent with free will—the freedom to choose evil without which choosing good means nothing special. The best of all possible worlds consistent with the nature of human nature, in other words—and its predilection for choosing evil. The question Voltaire should have posed is whether a better, less murderous human nature—consistent with free will—could have been created by Leibniz’s God.
Of course, the inadequacies of traditional theodicy are not a problem for those like my colleague Jim Holt, one of the best translators of arcane philosophical controversies (Kripke on naming!) for non-specialists. Mr. Holt once wrote that the evidence suggests that "the world is not presided over by a deity who is all-good and all-powerful, but rather by one who is 100 percent malevolent but only 80 percent effective." He arrives by a different route at the answer offered by some extreme Gnostic sects who believed this world was presided over by a malevolent demiurge posing as God.
And the inadequacies of theodicy are not a problem for those who don’t believe in an all-powerful God. Harold (When Bad Things Happen to Good People) Kushner is one of those who thinks the problem of God’s tolerance of catastrophic evils is solved essentially by making God a weakling—loving, but not really in charge, despite all the boasting in the Bible about God’s powers, including the tsunami-related powers of raising and lowering the waters at will (remember that whole Flood thing?). Kushner is there on Beliefnet advising people to read the 23rd Psalm, which seems to me a wildly inappropriate choice, promising as it does that God will always be at our side to lead us beside still waters. So it’s all good, except for the 150,000 who didn’t exactly get the still waters that day.
I recall the asperity with which this easy out (Kushner’s "God is not all-powerful") was dismissed by Yehuda Bauer, the former head of the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, when I asked him about it in Jerusalem. "There’s no way there can be an all-powerful and just God," Mr. Bauer said. "Because if he’s all-powerful, he’s Satan [considering the recurrent prevalence of genocidal evil in the world]. If he’s just [meaning just but, as per Kushner, too weak to make the world just], he’s a nebbish …. I don’t need a God like that."
It’sremarkable, though, how Kushner’s cop-out has become the contemporary evasive answer to questions of theodicy. Inside my faded paperback copy of When Bad Things Happen …, I found a bookmark that had evidently been there when I bought it. It’s from the Full Circle bookstore, 50 Penn Place, Oklahoma City, Okla.
I had evidently bought the book when I went down there right after the Federal Building bombing to do a story (for The New York Times Magazine, June 4, 1995) on how the culture deals with questions of theodicy in the aftermath of catastrophe.
"Full Circle," indeed. Rabbi Kushner’s well-intended book didn’t do the job for me back then, and it doesn’t do it now, although it has become an almost unquestioned meme. Poor God—He means well, but He seems to have lost the superpowers he had in the Bible. Some sort of spiritual Green Kryptonite slipped him by Satan, I’ll bet. So He’s struggling and weak and nebbishy and we have to buck Him up.
But for those who don’t try the easy way out, the great conundrum of theodicy was recapitulated on the Arts and Letters Daily Web site by its editor, Dennis Dutton, in his lead-in to the links:
"If God is God, he’s not good. If God is good, he’s not God. You can’t have it both ways, especially after the Indian Ocean catastrophe." It’s a version of the challenging syllogism posed by J.L. Mackie in a 1955 issue of the journal Mind, an argument which contemporary theodicies have been trying, without notable success, to refute ever since.
The lack of success seems to have lent a tone of desperation to some. I was struck by the police-interrogation tone of one of the links: "Faiths Ask of Quake: ‘Why Did You Do This, God?’"
"Yeah, Tough Guy, why’d ya do it? Your prints are all over the crime scene, Big Guy. You have the right to remain silent …. " You can almost hear the late, great Jerry Orbach, who’s now presumably in a position to put the question, kicking a chair in the squad room to get the Divine Perp’s attention.
Then there was a link to "Tremors of Doubt" in The Wall Street Journal by David Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, which had the virtue of conceding that the conventional consolations of pop theodicy "about God’s inscrutable counsels" or that "all this mysteriously serves God’s good ends" are "odious banalities," and that even believers can’t assume that theologians have answered the theodicy question adequately.
It was only the beginning of the orgy of theodicy that followed, if one may use a profane term for a sacred quest. Foolish things were said by men of all faiths (almost always men, by the way; it’s what feminists used to call Male Answer Syndrome): the rabbi in Israel who pronounced the tsunami "an expression of God’s great ire with the world"; the Buddhist sage who said it represented God’s resentment of the "huge amount of pent-up man-made evil on earth"; the mullah in Indonesia who said that it was "a reminder from God he created the world and can destroy the world."
And the media kept headlining the search for answers: "Why Does God Allow Terrible Things to Happen to His People?", an essay in The Times of London asked. And there was an essay that addresses the question not to God, but to those who believe in Him: "How Can Religious People Explain Something Like This?" (Martin Kettle in the U.K. Guardian, the rare essay that suggested there were no good answers.)
And then, at the end of the week kicked off by "Was God in the Tsunami?", this shocker: On Sunday(!), Jan. 2, the London Telegraph dropped the bomb "Archbishop of Canterbury: This Has Made Me Question God’s Existence." What’s next? "The Pope Says: ‘I Am a Wiccan!’"? (It’s true that the archbishop waffled a bit and called for prayer, but he did say his faith was "upset" by the catastrophe.)
One thing a reading of these essays reminded one of is that natural disasters are both more and less problematical for defenders of the faiths. On the one hand, earthquakes and the like don’t involve man-made evils and thus the question of the depravity of human nature—and the difficult question behind that question: whether humans are at fault for their depraved nature, or whether the deity who created them could have done a better job creating humanity consistent with free will.
As my friend Errol Morris puts it: The difficulty with man-made evils is not "man’s inhumanity to man," the problem is precisely "man’s humanity to man." The wickedness of humanity is not an aberration, but more like the norm.
No, man or human nature can’t be held responsible for earthquakes and tsunamis—except in those bloodthirsty theodicies which persist in seeing the punitive hand of God punishing man’s collective sinfulness by the slaughter of innocent children not old enough to sin. A hard-to-defend but scripturally habitual response from a wrathful God for the sins of a sinful human nature He created but is somehow not responsible for.
Nor are natural disasters as much of a problem for Deists, or for those who believe in a god who stopped intervening in human affairs after the creation of the universe or the creation of man. Catastrophic evils might call into question what is meant by the "intelligent" in "Intelligent Design," but not Design itself.
But for those who believe in a God who has intervened in history, as he is portrayed in Western scriptures, a God who can raise and lower the waters, punish and save at will, has miracles at his disposal, and should be able to separate the sheep from the goats, the saints from the sinners: For that sort of God, the indiscriminate slaughter of 100,000 saints and sinners—children and parents alike—presents more of a problem.
If God is responsible for the fall of a sparrow, it’s hard to exempt him from other, more dramatic natural developments. Sure, you could say it’s not His fault: He left us in a broken world, a fallen nature to reflect our own inner Fallen Nature. A vale of tears, whose horrors better prepare us to value the heaven that awaits us (well, some of us).
But in general, in this view, we’re better off dead—or, as some respondents on the Beliefnet comments section had it, the tsunami victims were lucky, they’d received a gift: They’re in heaven ahead of time.
Let me return to "Was God in the Tsunami?", the Beliefnet missive written by Rodger Kamenetz, a Jewish Buddhist or a Buddhist Jew (it wasn’t quite clear—he had equal reverence for both traditions, it seemed). On the plus side, the author made the important point that any attempt to defend the deaths of tens of thousands of children not old enough to sin as part of "God’s Plan," as His collective punishment for man’s wickedness or some other variation on the blame-the-victim theodicy was an obscenity (my word, not his).
And he gets points for citing King Lear—not Lear himself, but Gloucester’s bitter complaint that "We are to the gods as flies to wanton boys. They kill us for our sport," It’s not the only answer in Lear, but it’s one that fits the bare facts.
But then Mr. Kamenetz (whose essay has the alternate title "Was God in This Disaster?") lets himself get distracted by the Talmudic and Buddhist mystification. Proving once again that not all "wisdom of the sages" is equally wise, or must necessarily be approached with the same reverence.
He gives us a story he says is from the Talmud that has Moses getting to heaven and learning that one Rabbi Akiba is the wisest interpreter of God’s words and actions. Moses asks God what Rabbi Akiba’s reward will be. "God shows him a vision: Akiba tortured by the Romans in the marketplace, his flesh stripped from his body." Moses asks God why this incomprehensibly horrific fate for such a wise man. "God answers with a riddle," we’re told: "It arose in thought."
Say what? "It arose in thought." That’s the best he can do? A Bill Clintonesque "because I can" boast?
Is it just me, or does this story not exactly speak well for God? I guess you could say it "arose in thought" for the Roman soldiers, so you could put the blame on them, but the way it’s told here, it seems clear it’s God showing off both his power and his self-mystifying inscrutability.
A God who encourages watching torture—as in the theology of Aquinas, who imagined that one of the pleasures that God would offer the souls He saved would be gazing down from Heaven upon the cruel and prolonged tortures of the damned in Hell. Recreational sadism from Heaven’s luxury skyboxes (Summa Theologica, Question 94).
This was one of the logical outcomes of certain orthodox Christian doctrines that used to drive William Empson crazy. Read Empson’s Milton’s God, his last, most lacerating book, almost totally devoted to denouncing the God of Paradise Lost—Milton’s massive effort at overcoming the contradictions of theodicy. And arguing from a study of Milton’s posthumously published and ambiguously heterodox De Doctrina Christiana that Milton had doubts, too. (Actually, it’s almost impossible to find a copy of Empson’s Milton’s God; someone should bring it back into print.)
But to return to "It arose in thought": That’s not a "riddle," that’s a rebuff. In cruelty, it goes beyond the God of Job with his brusque "none of your business, buddy" brush-off. I wonder if the author of "Was God in the Tsunami?" is aware of how impoverished a God this sorry "riddle" gives us?
Perhaps recognizing that this isn’t going to resolve any doubts or offer much consolation, he makes his Buddhist move. He’s met the Dalai Lama, he wants you to know, and "One time I asked the Dalai Lama how he would respond to a parent who had lost a child. And he said—these aren’t his exact words—that when you lose a child you are constantly thinking of that child in your imagination."
The implication being that the child is really not lost at all—in fact, he or she is still right there in your life, in a low-maintenance way, I guess you’d say. In the imagination, of course, but "constantly" there. Maybe more present than when he or she was alive. I wonder how well this works when he tries it out on parents who have lost children.
The comments on the listserv in response to the essay were mainly divided between atheists and believers, both factions, in their own way, absolving God from responsibility. For the atheists, if he doesn’t exist, he couldn’t have done it; for the believers, God has no responsibility for the catastrophe, just for the goodness displayed by the rescue workers in the aftermath, and the few "miraculous" stories of survival.
This is something I find particularly annoying: a God who can intervene to save a handful out of a hundred thousand and gets credit for all the goodness displayed in the aftermath of the havoc He wrought.
"Why this need to defend God?" someone (that would be me) finally posted on the Beliefnet comment board in response to the multiple alibis for God that others were posting. All so eager to rush forward and exonerate their version of God from any connection to the slaughter. It began to smack of "they doth protest too much": The disaster somehow gets transformed into a display of God’s wonderfulness. In a way, doesn’t this sort of thinking suggest a kind of Stockholm syndrome? He’s the only God we’ve got, He’s got us imprisoned in this hell of a world—so, after a while, we worship Him.
One of the most glaring instances of this sort can be found in a quote in a story the Post carried on Jan. 2.
It was the heartwarming story of a baby boy born prematurely while his mother fled upland from the waves as they hit the coast of India.
Yes, it was the heartwarming "MIRACLE OF LIFE" that the Post headline had it.
But then I have to admit that I cringed when I read the words of the baby’s father (who had given him the name "Tsunami"—I’m sure the parents of those who lost babies will think this is really cute).
But the thing that made me cringe was this quote from the father of Baby Tsunami: "It’s all God’s grace!" he said.
I can’t really blame the guy for saying whatever he says at a moment like that. He’s got his baby. But think of the implications. Either he believes that his family has special grace, and that the tens of thousands of other families who lost children suffered the torment of a lost child because they deserved it, because they lacked "God’s grace." Or he believes that God looked down and saw tens of thousands of imperiled children and decided that this one deserved the special intervention of his "grace" and the others didn’t.
If you believe that God intervened to save this one little life, you have to believe that He chose not to intervene to save the lives of all the other children. He wanted them dead.
I would propose a truce between believers and unbelievers so they can stop fighting over the credit for the goodness of the rescue workers, whether it should be assigned to God or to man, so that we can remove God—and the critique of God—from the equation entirely for a while and save our energy to support the recovery unencumbered by this perennial debate, however important and profound.
Here’s the terms of the truce: Unbelievers will stop pointing out the inadequacies of the believers’ theodicy, their justification for God. And believers will stop claiming credit for God for everything good that happens, unless they are willing to condemn Him to a perp walk for all the crimes committed on earth, many in his name.
Thursday, January 06, 2005
From The Weekly Standard:
Southern Cross
Freaks and other Christians in Flannery O'Connor's stories.
by Maria Andraca Carano
Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South
by Ralph C. Wood
Wm. B. Eerdmans, 208 pp., $22
The waspish grandfather of Hazel Motes, an old evangelical preacher "with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger," broadcasts to listeners willing and unwilling the startling news that to redeem a single "stone soul," Jesus was willing to die "ten million deaths."
That preacher's creator was Flannery O'Connor, the author from Milledgeville, Georgia, who died in 1964 at age thirty-nine--an incalculable loss to American literature. Who in the forty years since has been willing to aim fiction at the deepest metaphysical foundations of human existence? Who, for that matter, still believes fiction can aim at metaphysical foundations? O'Connor disdained to write about anything less crucial, less important than such subjects as the presence of Christ revealed in history and present in the sacraments--all through the life and death, love and hate, grandeur and pettiness of American southerners in all their peculiarity.
Perhaps that's why O'Connor has not faded away but remains a perpetual puzzle for contemporary readers of literature. The highbrow world since the early 1960s has overwhelmingly rejected the possibility of literature driven by the religious faith they believe entirely repressive and destructive. And yet, there stands Flannery O'Connor in their way: a stumbling block, an unavoidable contradiction.
Last year, in The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie outlined Flannery O'Connor's life and works in the context of her pilgrimage of faith among such influential Catholic contemporaries as Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Walker Percy.
This year, in Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, Baylor University professor Ralph C. Wood examines O'Connor's writings both to reveal that her southern background illuminated her unique vision and to expose to present-day Christians her cautionary admonitions against a flaccid practical atheism.
Not a traditional biography, Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South is a collection of essays aligning Flannery O'Connor's work with the fundamentalist Protestant Christians of the South and explaining the cultural, social, and political dynamic that formed the catapult for her writing.
O'Connor's fiction is filled with rustics, freaks, and prophets, the likes of which--Wood insists--really did populate the deep South she knew. What O'Connor saw is that these strange characters were seeking the truth behind eternity, reckless of the personal cost. As she once declared, "It seems to me . . . that all good stories are about conversion, about a character's changing."
Wood focuses on two major themes to connect O'Connor's literature to southern fundamentalist Protestantism. First, he examines the decline of traditional religious belief in and fear of an omnipotent Lord in favor of what he calls today's "civil religion," which dominates American culture save for that pocket of traditionalist believers who come from the South. Second, he scrutinizes O'Connor's application of southern speech and manners to create a world in which the themes she found worthy, indeed compelling, could be developed.
Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South examines the death of true atheism and the concomitant rise of practical atheism, typified by the character of Mrs. May in the story "Greenleaf," who had "a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true." O'Connor respected atheists such as H.L. Mencken, because they addressed the issue of God seriously enough to argue against His existence. She would affirm that she was "a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist but like someone else would be an atheist."
She despised a culture espousing a "civil religion" whose commandments mandate that all religious beliefs have equal weight and that spiritual values derive from democratic principles. Or, as her character Hazel Motes sums up the American gospel: "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified by Jesus."
As befits a professor at one of the nation's premier Baptist universities, Ralph Wood looks in Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South to align the Catholic O'Connor with the evangelical impulse--in other words, to use her southernness to claim her for the English department of Baylor rather than the English department of Notre Dame.
Is this possible? Well, maybe. As O'Connor wrote, "It is an embarrassment to our fundamentalist neighbors to realize that they are doctrinally nearer to their traditional enemy, the Church of Rome, than they are to modern Protestantism." Indeed, she added, "the Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development."
O'Connor believed that the American South constituted a region "haunted" by Christ--and thus, in however distorted a way, was able to avoid the nihilism of the modern age. If the disintegration of morals and religious beliefs into the chaos of nihilism constituted "the very air that we breathe," still, devotion to a system of manners might yield something beyond mere social convention or psychological delusions. Southern manners formed an important buttress for religious values, and so Flannery O'Connor praised the elaborate sense of manners prevalent in southern culture as being "the next best thing to Christian charity."
And yet, she knew the limits of manners as well. The narrow-minded cynics in her stories typically imagine they are exempt from southern manners, because they fail to live Christian beliefs. Meanwhile, her prophets and freaks fail to be mannerly because the religious quest at stake must be revealed in violent action.
This much is true of Wood's goal in Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South:
O'Connor's characters could not be other than Southern fundamentalists. They speak with a simplicity of language and boldness of imagery retained only in the rural areas of the South. This vivid simplicity shines in the language of O'Connor's preachers. In "The River," Bevel Summers exhorts his listeners to baptism: "Listen to what I got to say, you people! There ain't but one River and that's the River of Life, made out of Jesus' blood." In The Violent Bear It Away, Lucette Carmody intones, "Divine love cuts like the cold wind and the will of God is plain as the winter"--and shouts "The Word of God is a burning Word to burn you clean, burns man and child, man and child the same, you people!"
The southerner, O'Connor once quipped, greatly feared that he might have been formed in the image and likeness of God. She wanted her work to sound "like the Old Testament would sound if it were being written today." Laconically noting that "subject matter has more to do with region than religion, at least in fiction," she thought that universalism--a vision of the metaphysical roots of reality--was possible only by taking advantage of a narrow parochialism:
Her characters had to travel their salvation journey within the Deep South. Her prophets, like the reluctant Francis Marion Tarwater, may run from "the stink of the Cross," but the Cross will not let them go.
Wood rightly notes the link between Flannery O'Connor's literary freaks and the freakishness of southern fundamentalism. Protestant theologians and atheists alike have found it difficult to "grant cultural standing to fundamentalism," belittling Southern fundamentalists as "primitive agriculturalists . . . inclined to magic." O'Connor found this intense adherence to traditional beliefs a sincere calling and a just ordering of priorities.
AND YET, while it is undeniable that O'Connor empathized with southern fundamentalists in her stories, she nonetheless saw them as potential or unconscious Catholics--and not herself as a secret fundamentalist. Southern Protestantism is a religious place, she wrote, whose "outward forms are farthest from the Catholic and most revealing of a need that only the [Catholic] Church can fill." Her very need to write derived from her Catholicism. Wood mentions O'Connor's observance of traditional Catholic religious practices, including daily Mass and prayers. He also characterizes part of her message as "holding hard to the sacraments that evangelical Protestants are prone to neglect."
But contrast the passage where Paul Elie in The Life You Save May Be Your Own stresses O'Connor's treatment of the Eucharist ("the doctrine of the Body of Christ explained the pain in her bones") with Wood's focus instead on her dramatic depictions of the sacrament of baptism. Baptism represents a political proclamation of allegiance with Christ. It also constitutes a crucial sacrament for Protestants. For Catholics, however, baptism is a sacrament of initiation that is fulfilled in the Eucharist.
Indeed, O'Connor wrote, "the Eucharist is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable." Her admiration for fundamentalism was based in part on her pleasure "with the amount of Catholicism that fundamentalist Protestants have been able to retain."
One place that the religious reading in Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South is especially helpful, however, is in explicating the violence of O'Connor's stories. ("While a lot of folks get killed in [my] work," she once explained, "nobody gets hurt.") Wood argues that the characters' earthly physical sufferings, which include deaths by drowning, gunshot, and goring, lead to spiritual happy endings, because the characters experience the revelation of Divine love.
As she noted to her cloistered correspondents, the monks and nuns with whom she kept in contact, a Catholic joins the convent and is "heard from no more," whereas a Protestant believer enjoys no such haven and thus "must go about in the world, getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don't believe anything much at all down on [his] head." The fierce truths voiced by O'Connor's fundamentalists could hardly be spoken by a typical Catholic mystic.
For O'Connor, the violence acted out in her stories had a redemptive purpose; violence was required to make the religious point: "For the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures." Who, in the forty years since her death, has used fiction to shout as loudly as she dared?
Maria Andraca Carano lives in Houston with her husband and three daughters.
Southern Cross
Freaks and other Christians in Flannery O'Connor's stories.
by Maria Andraca Carano
Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South
by Ralph C. Wood
Wm. B. Eerdmans, 208 pp., $22
The waspish grandfather of Hazel Motes, an old evangelical preacher "with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger," broadcasts to listeners willing and unwilling the startling news that to redeem a single "stone soul," Jesus was willing to die "ten million deaths."
That preacher's creator was Flannery O'Connor, the author from Milledgeville, Georgia, who died in 1964 at age thirty-nine--an incalculable loss to American literature. Who in the forty years since has been willing to aim fiction at the deepest metaphysical foundations of human existence? Who, for that matter, still believes fiction can aim at metaphysical foundations? O'Connor disdained to write about anything less crucial, less important than such subjects as the presence of Christ revealed in history and present in the sacraments--all through the life and death, love and hate, grandeur and pettiness of American southerners in all their peculiarity.
Perhaps that's why O'Connor has not faded away but remains a perpetual puzzle for contemporary readers of literature. The highbrow world since the early 1960s has overwhelmingly rejected the possibility of literature driven by the religious faith they believe entirely repressive and destructive. And yet, there stands Flannery O'Connor in their way: a stumbling block, an unavoidable contradiction.
Last year, in The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie outlined Flannery O'Connor's life and works in the context of her pilgrimage of faith among such influential Catholic contemporaries as Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Walker Percy.
This year, in Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, Baylor University professor Ralph C. Wood examines O'Connor's writings both to reveal that her southern background illuminated her unique vision and to expose to present-day Christians her cautionary admonitions against a flaccid practical atheism.
Not a traditional biography, Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South is a collection of essays aligning Flannery O'Connor's work with the fundamentalist Protestant Christians of the South and explaining the cultural, social, and political dynamic that formed the catapult for her writing.
O'Connor's fiction is filled with rustics, freaks, and prophets, the likes of which--Wood insists--really did populate the deep South she knew. What O'Connor saw is that these strange characters were seeking the truth behind eternity, reckless of the personal cost. As she once declared, "It seems to me . . . that all good stories are about conversion, about a character's changing."
Wood focuses on two major themes to connect O'Connor's literature to southern fundamentalist Protestantism. First, he examines the decline of traditional religious belief in and fear of an omnipotent Lord in favor of what he calls today's "civil religion," which dominates American culture save for that pocket of traditionalist believers who come from the South. Second, he scrutinizes O'Connor's application of southern speech and manners to create a world in which the themes she found worthy, indeed compelling, could be developed.
Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South examines the death of true atheism and the concomitant rise of practical atheism, typified by the character of Mrs. May in the story "Greenleaf," who had "a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true." O'Connor respected atheists such as H.L. Mencken, because they addressed the issue of God seriously enough to argue against His existence. She would affirm that she was "a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist but like someone else would be an atheist."
She despised a culture espousing a "civil religion" whose commandments mandate that all religious beliefs have equal weight and that spiritual values derive from democratic principles. Or, as her character Hazel Motes sums up the American gospel: "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified by Jesus."
As befits a professor at one of the nation's premier Baptist universities, Ralph Wood looks in Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South to align the Catholic O'Connor with the evangelical impulse--in other words, to use her southernness to claim her for the English department of Baylor rather than the English department of Notre Dame.
Is this possible? Well, maybe. As O'Connor wrote, "It is an embarrassment to our fundamentalist neighbors to realize that they are doctrinally nearer to their traditional enemy, the Church of Rome, than they are to modern Protestantism." Indeed, she added, "the Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development."
O'Connor believed that the American South constituted a region "haunted" by Christ--and thus, in however distorted a way, was able to avoid the nihilism of the modern age. If the disintegration of morals and religious beliefs into the chaos of nihilism constituted "the very air that we breathe," still, devotion to a system of manners might yield something beyond mere social convention or psychological delusions. Southern manners formed an important buttress for religious values, and so Flannery O'Connor praised the elaborate sense of manners prevalent in southern culture as being "the next best thing to Christian charity."
And yet, she knew the limits of manners as well. The narrow-minded cynics in her stories typically imagine they are exempt from southern manners, because they fail to live Christian beliefs. Meanwhile, her prophets and freaks fail to be mannerly because the religious quest at stake must be revealed in violent action.
This much is true of Wood's goal in Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South:
O'Connor's characters could not be other than Southern fundamentalists. They speak with a simplicity of language and boldness of imagery retained only in the rural areas of the South. This vivid simplicity shines in the language of O'Connor's preachers. In "The River," Bevel Summers exhorts his listeners to baptism: "Listen to what I got to say, you people! There ain't but one River and that's the River of Life, made out of Jesus' blood." In The Violent Bear It Away, Lucette Carmody intones, "Divine love cuts like the cold wind and the will of God is plain as the winter"--and shouts "The Word of God is a burning Word to burn you clean, burns man and child, man and child the same, you people!"
The southerner, O'Connor once quipped, greatly feared that he might have been formed in the image and likeness of God. She wanted her work to sound "like the Old Testament would sound if it were being written today." Laconically noting that "subject matter has more to do with region than religion, at least in fiction," she thought that universalism--a vision of the metaphysical roots of reality--was possible only by taking advantage of a narrow parochialism:
Her characters had to travel their salvation journey within the Deep South. Her prophets, like the reluctant Francis Marion Tarwater, may run from "the stink of the Cross," but the Cross will not let them go.
Wood rightly notes the link between Flannery O'Connor's literary freaks and the freakishness of southern fundamentalism. Protestant theologians and atheists alike have found it difficult to "grant cultural standing to fundamentalism," belittling Southern fundamentalists as "primitive agriculturalists . . . inclined to magic." O'Connor found this intense adherence to traditional beliefs a sincere calling and a just ordering of priorities.
AND YET, while it is undeniable that O'Connor empathized with southern fundamentalists in her stories, she nonetheless saw them as potential or unconscious Catholics--and not herself as a secret fundamentalist. Southern Protestantism is a religious place, she wrote, whose "outward forms are farthest from the Catholic and most revealing of a need that only the [Catholic] Church can fill." Her very need to write derived from her Catholicism. Wood mentions O'Connor's observance of traditional Catholic religious practices, including daily Mass and prayers. He also characterizes part of her message as "holding hard to the sacraments that evangelical Protestants are prone to neglect."
But contrast the passage where Paul Elie in The Life You Save May Be Your Own stresses O'Connor's treatment of the Eucharist ("the doctrine of the Body of Christ explained the pain in her bones") with Wood's focus instead on her dramatic depictions of the sacrament of baptism. Baptism represents a political proclamation of allegiance with Christ. It also constitutes a crucial sacrament for Protestants. For Catholics, however, baptism is a sacrament of initiation that is fulfilled in the Eucharist.
Indeed, O'Connor wrote, "the Eucharist is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable." Her admiration for fundamentalism was based in part on her pleasure "with the amount of Catholicism that fundamentalist Protestants have been able to retain."
One place that the religious reading in Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South is especially helpful, however, is in explicating the violence of O'Connor's stories. ("While a lot of folks get killed in [my] work," she once explained, "nobody gets hurt.") Wood argues that the characters' earthly physical sufferings, which include deaths by drowning, gunshot, and goring, lead to spiritual happy endings, because the characters experience the revelation of Divine love.
As she noted to her cloistered correspondents, the monks and nuns with whom she kept in contact, a Catholic joins the convent and is "heard from no more," whereas a Protestant believer enjoys no such haven and thus "must go about in the world, getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don't believe anything much at all down on [his] head." The fierce truths voiced by O'Connor's fundamentalists could hardly be spoken by a typical Catholic mystic.
For O'Connor, the violence acted out in her stories had a redemptive purpose; violence was required to make the religious point: "For the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures." Who, in the forty years since her death, has used fiction to shout as loudly as she dared?
Maria Andraca Carano lives in Houston with her husband and three daughters.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
From Reason Online:
War Prospects for 2005
Give them a country, they want the world
By Brian Doherty
It's official, says the Weekly Standard, leading voice of America's brigades of pundit warriors (and, says The New York Times, "arguably the most influential opinion journal at the White House"): What America needs is more war. Never mind Mr. and Mrs. America (or Mr. and Mrs. Soldier), who may be tired of the seemingly endless bog down in Iraq, the over 1,300 dead and nearly 10,000 wounded Americans (and more almost every day).
We need more than just one more war—Americans love variety and choice, so the Rupert Murdoch-owned political mag has lately laid out a buffet of belligerence that should keep us satisfied all through the new year a-borning. In their Dec. 20, 2004, issue neocon strongman William Kristol himself calls for a smackdown on Syria, including aerial bombing and city-occupying. This comes on the heels of Nicholas Eberstadt's call for war on North Korea as a live option in Bush's second term in the magazine's November 29 issue. And, of course, Iran is still out there, and as a Nov. 28 report on the Standard's Web site reported, still needs to be dissuaded of its nuke ambitions by main force.
Whole lot-a warrin' going on in 2005 in the Standard's America. Are the private-sector voices of conflict going to get their way, as they did in Iraq? Fortunately for the rest of us, it's not looking too good for them right now. Neither Bashir Assad nor Mohammad Khatami nor Ali Khameini have graced the covers of Time and/or Newsweek with ominously shaded close-up photos and colorful sobriquets like "the Demon of Damascus" or "the Terror of Tehran." Although by the technical demands established by our invasion of Iraq, Syria certainly qualifies for bombing galore (and has since before we invaded Iraq, as I pointed out back in April 2003), a full-on assault has not yet reached even trial balloon stage from the administration. A recent National Journal profile of a would-be Syrian Chalabi named Farid Ghadry, currently a Potomac-area businessman and founder of the Reform Party of Syria who advocates U.S. invasion of the homeland he left in 1964, quotes one of his Party's communiques as saying "the military option has again risen to the surface." But that dispatch quotes no one, and the Journal's reporter doesn't even quote any unnamed administration source saying the same.
Our military at its current force strength seems unlikely to be equipped to handle any fresh wars, with 150,000 in Iraq (slightly more than the number that invaded in the first place, and who were there at the official "end of hostilities" back in May 2003). Eight out of the Army's10 active-duty divisions are now fully deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. At least 10,000 troops have had a planned six-month stay turn into a 14-month one, and "stop-loss" is now a familiar phrase for those not deeply into the stock market.
For now, neither Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, nor Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seems entirely convinced that substantial increases in troop strength are needed overall. (That's one of the many reasons that Standardites are out for Rumsfeld's neck.) And while the official Standard line on U.S. military spending has it that the full-court-press will take yearly spending of around $500 to $600 billion (a delightful margin of guesstimation of $100 billion, shows you these guys are high rollers) while fiscal 2005 spending was only (only!) $447 billion, with money allotted for only 20,000 more troops.
We've currently got 272,000 soldiers serving in 120 (yes, 120) countries, out of a total 500,000 regulars and 550,000 reservists and National Guard members; the preferred minimum "rotation ratio" is two extra soldiers for every one active in the field. Not a lot of wiggle room there for many fresh wars. And resignation requests from the Reserve have jumped from 15 in 2001 to more than 370 in the year ending in September, indicating some rumblings in the ranks about extentions of terms of service and mission. If we are to have more wars, we need many more willing men.
From this vantage point, it seems likely that, barring some unforeseen 9/11-level provocation, Kristol and his crew's martial lust will go as unsatisfied as did their pre-9/11 cruisin' for a bruisin' with China. For that, Americans, both soldier and civilian, can be thankful.
Brian Doherty is a senior editor of Reason and author of This Is Burning Man, (Little, Brown).
War Prospects for 2005
Give them a country, they want the world
By Brian Doherty
It's official, says the Weekly Standard, leading voice of America's brigades of pundit warriors (and, says The New York Times, "arguably the most influential opinion journal at the White House"): What America needs is more war. Never mind Mr. and Mrs. America (or Mr. and Mrs. Soldier), who may be tired of the seemingly endless bog down in Iraq, the over 1,300 dead and nearly 10,000 wounded Americans (and more almost every day).
We need more than just one more war—Americans love variety and choice, so the Rupert Murdoch-owned political mag has lately laid out a buffet of belligerence that should keep us satisfied all through the new year a-borning. In their Dec. 20, 2004, issue neocon strongman William Kristol himself calls for a smackdown on Syria, including aerial bombing and city-occupying. This comes on the heels of Nicholas Eberstadt's call for war on North Korea as a live option in Bush's second term in the magazine's November 29 issue. And, of course, Iran is still out there, and as a Nov. 28 report on the Standard's Web site reported, still needs to be dissuaded of its nuke ambitions by main force.
Whole lot-a warrin' going on in 2005 in the Standard's America. Are the private-sector voices of conflict going to get their way, as they did in Iraq? Fortunately for the rest of us, it's not looking too good for them right now. Neither Bashir Assad nor Mohammad Khatami nor Ali Khameini have graced the covers of Time and/or Newsweek with ominously shaded close-up photos and colorful sobriquets like "the Demon of Damascus" or "the Terror of Tehran." Although by the technical demands established by our invasion of Iraq, Syria certainly qualifies for bombing galore (and has since before we invaded Iraq, as I pointed out back in April 2003), a full-on assault has not yet reached even trial balloon stage from the administration. A recent National Journal profile of a would-be Syrian Chalabi named Farid Ghadry, currently a Potomac-area businessman and founder of the Reform Party of Syria who advocates U.S. invasion of the homeland he left in 1964, quotes one of his Party's communiques as saying "the military option has again risen to the surface." But that dispatch quotes no one, and the Journal's reporter doesn't even quote any unnamed administration source saying the same.
Our military at its current force strength seems unlikely to be equipped to handle any fresh wars, with 150,000 in Iraq (slightly more than the number that invaded in the first place, and who were there at the official "end of hostilities" back in May 2003). Eight out of the Army's10 active-duty divisions are now fully deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. At least 10,000 troops have had a planned six-month stay turn into a 14-month one, and "stop-loss" is now a familiar phrase for those not deeply into the stock market.
For now, neither Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, nor Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seems entirely convinced that substantial increases in troop strength are needed overall. (That's one of the many reasons that Standardites are out for Rumsfeld's neck.) And while the official Standard line on U.S. military spending has it that the full-court-press will take yearly spending of around $500 to $600 billion (a delightful margin of guesstimation of $100 billion, shows you these guys are high rollers) while fiscal 2005 spending was only (only!) $447 billion, with money allotted for only 20,000 more troops.
We've currently got 272,000 soldiers serving in 120 (yes, 120) countries, out of a total 500,000 regulars and 550,000 reservists and National Guard members; the preferred minimum "rotation ratio" is two extra soldiers for every one active in the field. Not a lot of wiggle room there for many fresh wars. And resignation requests from the Reserve have jumped from 15 in 2001 to more than 370 in the year ending in September, indicating some rumblings in the ranks about extentions of terms of service and mission. If we are to have more wars, we need many more willing men.
From this vantage point, it seems likely that, barring some unforeseen 9/11-level provocation, Kristol and his crew's martial lust will go as unsatisfied as did their pre-9/11 cruisin' for a bruisin' with China. For that, Americans, both soldier and civilian, can be thankful.
Brian Doherty is a senior editor of Reason and author of This Is Burning Man, (Little, Brown).
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
From Thisisthenortheast.co.uk:
Cracking the Christmas code
First published on Friday 24 December 2004:
In his seasonal message, the Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev Dr Tom Wright, contrasts the conspiracy theory of the Da Vinci Code with the stranger-than-fiction truth of the Christmas story.
THE 'hoax' theory about Jesus is big business right now. The Da Vinci Code has hit the best-selling lists on both sides of the Atlantic.
Maybe, we think, Jesus was just an ordinary man after all. Maybe, the later church just made it all up - Christmas, Easter, all that stuff about his being the 'son of God'. Maybe, after all, he was married to Mary Magdalene, travelled about, died a normal death. Maybe, the early church invented an elaborate fiction, and we've been taken in by it all these years.
Great thriller, lousy history. Like most conspiracy theories, this one thrives on the absence of evidence. In fact, some of the key elements of the 'hoax' theory, particularly the idea of Jesus's supposed marriage, weren't even thought of for well over 100 years after his lifetime, quite possibly much later still.
The Christmas story, though, was circulating within the first 60 years of the Christian movement; it was already there in two different versions by the time the gospels were written down (some time between AD 60 and 90), and must have been circulating earlier. The story of Easter, of Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection, goes right back to the beginning, to the earliest Christian traditions we have, dating to within a year or two of the events themselves (roughly AD 30).
Something in our culture today craves conspiracy theories, particularly ones which pretend to debunk the whole Christian story. If you've been keeping an eye on this scene for the last 20 years or so, you will recognise the genre.
In the early 1990s an Australian called Barbara Thiering wrote a blockbuster claiming that she'd cracked the code in the Dead Sea Scrolls and that Jesus was not only married but divorced and remarried. The newspapers gave her serious attention for five minutes; serious scholarship didn't even give her that.
Then in the mid-1990s a book called The Tomb of God cobbled together bits and pieces of recondite texts, and pseudo-archaeology, elaborate guesswork dressed up as historical research, all to make out that the Knights Templar had taken the body of Jesus and buried it in a hill in southern France (where, inconveniently, the owners won't let you dig). Again, the authors claim to have cracked a secret code and so got at the truth which the church had hushed up. Unfortunately, none of the theories agree as to what the code - or the truth, for that matter - was in the first place.
Now we see something similar with the Da Vinci twist. Once you've read one of these books you've read them all. Dan Brown, the best-selling Da Vinci author, is the best writer I've come across in the genre, but anyone who knows anything about first century history will see that his underlying material is laughable.
Truth, as often, is stranger than fiction, and makes its way not with a flourish of trumpets but with the slow, sure tread of actual evidence, accumulating like grains of sand rising into a mountain, while the conspiracy theories build houses of cards which get blown away in the first breeze.
The evidence for Jesus and the origins of Christianity is astonishingly good. We have literally a hundred times more early manuscripts for the gospels and letters in the New Testament than we have for the main classical authors like Cicero, Virgil and Tacitus. Historical research shows that they present a coherent and thoroughly credible picture of Jesus, with all sorts of incidental details that fit the time when he lived, and don't fit the world of later legend.
We are on solid ground when we talk of Jesus of Nazareth announcing God's sovereign rule, clashing with the authorities, and being executed by the most brutal method then available. Still more remarkable, we are on solid ground when we speak of him being raised from the dead three days later, with his dead body transformed into a new sort of physical life which couldn't be hurt or harmed any more. That's another story for another time.
But what about the stories of his birth? Surely (someone is bound to say) they are just the sort of things people might write up later about someone they have come to regard as a hero? Isn't the Christmas story just a mish-mash of pious legend?
That's the really odd thing. The early writers who tell the Christmas story - Matthew and Luke, to be precise - are both very much aware of misleading legend. And they are clear that they want to avoid it.
Matthew's gospel is firmly embedded in the world of Judaism, which was deeply suspicious of pagan culture with its legends of gods and heroes, some of whom of course had been born in, to say the least, unusual ways (Athena springing full-grown from the head of Zeus, for instance). Some of the pagan heroes, it was said, had been born from women without male intervention. This latter story was told of Augustus, who, significantly, was Emperor of the whole Roman world at the time of Jesus's birth. If you'd said the phrase "the kingdom, the power and the glory" around the time Jesus was born, everyone would have thought you were talking about Augustus.
Luke sets the birth of Jesus precisely at that time, playing off Jesus the King of the Jews (and therefore, for someone soaked in the Jewish scriptures, the Lord of the whole world) against the pagan emperor himself. Augustus takes a census, to collect taxes from subjects near and far. As a result, Mary is taken to Bethlehem, the ancient city of the royal house of David, and there her son is born to rule the world.
Both Matthew and Luke knew very well what people might think at the strange story of Jesus's birth. But they go ahead and tell it anyway. This is no fanciful legend, they say. At this point we are on bedrock.
Conspiracy theories are always fun: fun to invent, fun to read, fun to fantasise about. Truth is sometimes a bit bleak and harsh by comparison. That's part of the point; real life sometimes is bleak and harsh. And God came to share it, to take the worst that it could do on to himself. That's the point of the Christmas story.
Nothing Dan Brown or the other hoax-mongers have come up with can match this claim. Christmas isn't about pious legends or cobbled-together conspiracies. When we crack the Christmas code, what we find is truth at once sober and serious and mindblowing in its implications. It's about the living God being born as a baby, and growing up to conquer the world with the power of his death and resurrection.
Thrillers will last you a few days, but the excitement will soon wear off. The gospel story of Christmas, and all that follows from it, will keep you going right through your life. In fact, they'll take you right through into the next one.
Cracking the Christmas code
First published on Friday 24 December 2004:
In his seasonal message, the Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev Dr Tom Wright, contrasts the conspiracy theory of the Da Vinci Code with the stranger-than-fiction truth of the Christmas story.
THE 'hoax' theory about Jesus is big business right now. The Da Vinci Code has hit the best-selling lists on both sides of the Atlantic.
Maybe, we think, Jesus was just an ordinary man after all. Maybe, the later church just made it all up - Christmas, Easter, all that stuff about his being the 'son of God'. Maybe, after all, he was married to Mary Magdalene, travelled about, died a normal death. Maybe, the early church invented an elaborate fiction, and we've been taken in by it all these years.
Great thriller, lousy history. Like most conspiracy theories, this one thrives on the absence of evidence. In fact, some of the key elements of the 'hoax' theory, particularly the idea of Jesus's supposed marriage, weren't even thought of for well over 100 years after his lifetime, quite possibly much later still.
The Christmas story, though, was circulating within the first 60 years of the Christian movement; it was already there in two different versions by the time the gospels were written down (some time between AD 60 and 90), and must have been circulating earlier. The story of Easter, of Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection, goes right back to the beginning, to the earliest Christian traditions we have, dating to within a year or two of the events themselves (roughly AD 30).
Something in our culture today craves conspiracy theories, particularly ones which pretend to debunk the whole Christian story. If you've been keeping an eye on this scene for the last 20 years or so, you will recognise the genre.
In the early 1990s an Australian called Barbara Thiering wrote a blockbuster claiming that she'd cracked the code in the Dead Sea Scrolls and that Jesus was not only married but divorced and remarried. The newspapers gave her serious attention for five minutes; serious scholarship didn't even give her that.
Then in the mid-1990s a book called The Tomb of God cobbled together bits and pieces of recondite texts, and pseudo-archaeology, elaborate guesswork dressed up as historical research, all to make out that the Knights Templar had taken the body of Jesus and buried it in a hill in southern France (where, inconveniently, the owners won't let you dig). Again, the authors claim to have cracked a secret code and so got at the truth which the church had hushed up. Unfortunately, none of the theories agree as to what the code - or the truth, for that matter - was in the first place.
Now we see something similar with the Da Vinci twist. Once you've read one of these books you've read them all. Dan Brown, the best-selling Da Vinci author, is the best writer I've come across in the genre, but anyone who knows anything about first century history will see that his underlying material is laughable.
Truth, as often, is stranger than fiction, and makes its way not with a flourish of trumpets but with the slow, sure tread of actual evidence, accumulating like grains of sand rising into a mountain, while the conspiracy theories build houses of cards which get blown away in the first breeze.
The evidence for Jesus and the origins of Christianity is astonishingly good. We have literally a hundred times more early manuscripts for the gospels and letters in the New Testament than we have for the main classical authors like Cicero, Virgil and Tacitus. Historical research shows that they present a coherent and thoroughly credible picture of Jesus, with all sorts of incidental details that fit the time when he lived, and don't fit the world of later legend.
We are on solid ground when we talk of Jesus of Nazareth announcing God's sovereign rule, clashing with the authorities, and being executed by the most brutal method then available. Still more remarkable, we are on solid ground when we speak of him being raised from the dead three days later, with his dead body transformed into a new sort of physical life which couldn't be hurt or harmed any more. That's another story for another time.
But what about the stories of his birth? Surely (someone is bound to say) they are just the sort of things people might write up later about someone they have come to regard as a hero? Isn't the Christmas story just a mish-mash of pious legend?
That's the really odd thing. The early writers who tell the Christmas story - Matthew and Luke, to be precise - are both very much aware of misleading legend. And they are clear that they want to avoid it.
Matthew's gospel is firmly embedded in the world of Judaism, which was deeply suspicious of pagan culture with its legends of gods and heroes, some of whom of course had been born in, to say the least, unusual ways (Athena springing full-grown from the head of Zeus, for instance). Some of the pagan heroes, it was said, had been born from women without male intervention. This latter story was told of Augustus, who, significantly, was Emperor of the whole Roman world at the time of Jesus's birth. If you'd said the phrase "the kingdom, the power and the glory" around the time Jesus was born, everyone would have thought you were talking about Augustus.
Luke sets the birth of Jesus precisely at that time, playing off Jesus the King of the Jews (and therefore, for someone soaked in the Jewish scriptures, the Lord of the whole world) against the pagan emperor himself. Augustus takes a census, to collect taxes from subjects near and far. As a result, Mary is taken to Bethlehem, the ancient city of the royal house of David, and there her son is born to rule the world.
Both Matthew and Luke knew very well what people might think at the strange story of Jesus's birth. But they go ahead and tell it anyway. This is no fanciful legend, they say. At this point we are on bedrock.
Conspiracy theories are always fun: fun to invent, fun to read, fun to fantasise about. Truth is sometimes a bit bleak and harsh by comparison. That's part of the point; real life sometimes is bleak and harsh. And God came to share it, to take the worst that it could do on to himself. That's the point of the Christmas story.
Nothing Dan Brown or the other hoax-mongers have come up with can match this claim. Christmas isn't about pious legends or cobbled-together conspiracies. When we crack the Christmas code, what we find is truth at once sober and serious and mindblowing in its implications. It's about the living God being born as a baby, and growing up to conquer the world with the power of his death and resurrection.
Thrillers will last you a few days, but the excitement will soon wear off. The gospel story of Christmas, and all that follows from it, will keep you going right through your life. In fact, they'll take you right through into the next one.
Monday, January 03, 2005
Happy 103rd Birthday to J. R. R. Tolkien!
Well, there's no need to elaborate on that. It's going to be strange this year without a Lord of the Rings movie or DVD to look forward to. What a great pleasure the three movies were were, and so close to the spirit of the book.
Personal notes: a New Year's resolution to list book, DVD, and music purchases. I'm already getting to the point where I need to get them written down before I forget what I've got for '05 so far. Okay, so there have been gift certificates, and cash, etc., for Christmas, so the buying should slack off a bit shortly. And the time spent at work keeps me out of book and music stores.
First the books- A Patriot's History of the United States. Looks to be a good right-wing conspiracy accounting of US history, serving as a counterpoint to Howard Zinn. Helping to fulfill another New Year's resolution to read a good one-volume US history. Next, a couple of used titles, Shoot Out the Lights, an account of the New York Knicks first championship season (1969-1970), and Murder in Brentwood, the Mark Fuhrman account of the O. J. Simpson murders (allegedly). Still reading The Godfather Returns.
DVDs- Picked up a couple of titles at really good deals over the last few days: The Ben Stiller Show and The Ultimate Johnny Carson Collection.
Music-Ray Lamontagne:Trouble (a new ND artist with a style reminiscent of the young, acoustic oriented Van Morrison), Snatching It Back: The Best of Clarence Carter (Finally-a copy of Patches, but man, the other songs are great. ), Philly Super Soul Hits (a great one CD collection of Gamble/Huff productions), The Rip Chords: Hot Rod USA (a budget compilation of their better known songs), 45s on CD Volume 4 (1967-1969) a good collection of primarily sunny pop from the late sixties. Now I have some more songs to help round out Songs from the Front Room, Disc 3. I need to get some Larry Norman and Imperials CDs to bring in the Jesus Music element of my late sixties/early seventies listening.
Well, there's no need to elaborate on that. It's going to be strange this year without a Lord of the Rings movie or DVD to look forward to. What a great pleasure the three movies were were, and so close to the spirit of the book.
Personal notes: a New Year's resolution to list book, DVD, and music purchases. I'm already getting to the point where I need to get them written down before I forget what I've got for '05 so far. Okay, so there have been gift certificates, and cash, etc., for Christmas, so the buying should slack off a bit shortly. And the time spent at work keeps me out of book and music stores.
First the books- A Patriot's History of the United States. Looks to be a good right-wing conspiracy accounting of US history, serving as a counterpoint to Howard Zinn. Helping to fulfill another New Year's resolution to read a good one-volume US history. Next, a couple of used titles, Shoot Out the Lights, an account of the New York Knicks first championship season (1969-1970), and Murder in Brentwood, the Mark Fuhrman account of the O. J. Simpson murders (allegedly). Still reading The Godfather Returns.
DVDs- Picked up a couple of titles at really good deals over the last few days: The Ben Stiller Show and The Ultimate Johnny Carson Collection.
Music-Ray Lamontagne:Trouble (a new ND artist with a style reminiscent of the young, acoustic oriented Van Morrison), Snatching It Back: The Best of Clarence Carter (Finally-a copy of Patches, but man, the other songs are great. ), Philly Super Soul Hits (a great one CD collection of Gamble/Huff productions), The Rip Chords: Hot Rod USA (a budget compilation of their better known songs), 45s on CD Volume 4 (1967-1969) a good collection of primarily sunny pop from the late sixties. Now I have some more songs to help round out Songs from the Front Room, Disc 3. I need to get some Larry Norman and Imperials CDs to bring in the Jesus Music element of my late sixties/early seventies listening.
Sunday, January 02, 2005
My Personal Top Ten Albums of 2004
Artist/Title
1) U2/How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
2) Marah/10,000 Streets Under the Sky
3) Brian Wilson/Smile
4) Chris Stamey/Travels in the New South
Lloyd Cole/Music In A Foreign Language
6) Duran Duran/Astronaut
Hanson/Underneath
Patti Scialfa/23rd Street Lullaby
Tift Merritt/Tambourine
Trash Can Sinatras/Weightlifting
Honorable Mention
Artist/Title
Drive By Truckers/The Dirty South
Velvet Revolver/Contraband
The Notorious Cherry Bombs
Daryl Hall and John Oates/Our Kind of Soul
Brooks & Dunn/Greatest Hits Vol. 2
Jesse Malin/The Heat
Ricky Fante/Rewind
Various Artists/The Passion of the Christ
Tears for Fears/Everybody Loves A Happy Ending
Since the long lists from the message boards were posted yesterday, I figured it would be worth following it up with my own choices for this year.
My top two choices, U2 and Marah, were head and shoulders above everything else this year in the amount I listened to them. So much has been written about the U2 album, much of which I've posted here, that it seems almost superflous to say anything about it. Anthemic, soaring, hopeful, spiritual, and unapologetically Christian, it's the U2 album I've been waiting for for 20 years. Marah's album has the passionate sound of true believers in rock and roll reaching for their own brass ring. "I'm a sucker for someone who treats rock and roll as a religion, and romanticizes the hell out of mundane details," wrote Ariel Swartley about Springsteen in 1978. Twenty-six years later, I can say exactly the same thing about Marah.
Brian Wilson would likely have been my number one had it been an album of completely new material. Popular music this transcendent can be counted on if not the fingers of one hand, surely no more than one's fingers and toes. Hearing him sing "Heroes and Villains" on Smile, and realizing all the years and anguish he went through before seeing his masterpiece to completion, can easily make eyes well up.
The Chris Stamey CD is a great jangle pop album, a joyous, passionate evocation of the spirit of college radio in the early 80s. Lloyd Cole'a album is quiet and confessional, introspective and romantic, wry and cynical. In short, all of the things that have made him so great over the years. It is also as strong a set of lyrics as he has set to music.
The next five choices of the top ten were three fine pop albums and two superb female singer-songwriters. First the women: Patti Scialfa is a criminally overlooked artist. While I'm sure being Springsteen's wife works to her advantage in some ways, I can't help but think many more people write her career off as an example of nepotism. Her work at its best is as good as the best of Joni Mitchell or Rickie Lee Jones. Tift Merritt should be a star. I've never seen anyone who was not famous who combined looks, singing, songwriting, and overall charisma the way she does. Here's hoping the Grammy nomination she received keeps her career on an upward path.
The three pop albums are all different and all immensely enjoyable. The Duran Duran album is the best of their career: alternative dance pop with great production: John Taylor's bass kicks. Hanson's "Jenny and Me" was the best unknown single of the year, and their sunny rock album would have been one of the best of any year from about 1966 on. Trash Can Sinatras is atmospheric pop/rock with chiming Rickenbackers reminiscent of The Byrds, Teenage Fanclub, or any band that brings chills with airy, open chording and tight Beatlesque harmonies.
The honorable mention selections received a lot of listens, and depending on the mood I'm in, most of them could slip into that bottom five listing, The notable find was Ricky Fante, whose channelling of the spirits of Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam Cooke, and other great soul masters gave me a glimmer of hope for at least some small future for the classic R&B sound.
Artist/Title
1) U2/How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
2) Marah/10,000 Streets Under the Sky
3) Brian Wilson/Smile
4) Chris Stamey/Travels in the New South
Lloyd Cole/Music In A Foreign Language
6) Duran Duran/Astronaut
Hanson/Underneath
Patti Scialfa/23rd Street Lullaby
Tift Merritt/Tambourine
Trash Can Sinatras/Weightlifting
Honorable Mention
Artist/Title
Drive By Truckers/The Dirty South
Velvet Revolver/Contraband
The Notorious Cherry Bombs
Daryl Hall and John Oates/Our Kind of Soul
Brooks & Dunn/Greatest Hits Vol. 2
Jesse Malin/The Heat
Ricky Fante/Rewind
Various Artists/The Passion of the Christ
Tears for Fears/Everybody Loves A Happy Ending
Since the long lists from the message boards were posted yesterday, I figured it would be worth following it up with my own choices for this year.
My top two choices, U2 and Marah, were head and shoulders above everything else this year in the amount I listened to them. So much has been written about the U2 album, much of which I've posted here, that it seems almost superflous to say anything about it. Anthemic, soaring, hopeful, spiritual, and unapologetically Christian, it's the U2 album I've been waiting for for 20 years. Marah's album has the passionate sound of true believers in rock and roll reaching for their own brass ring. "I'm a sucker for someone who treats rock and roll as a religion, and romanticizes the hell out of mundane details," wrote Ariel Swartley about Springsteen in 1978. Twenty-six years later, I can say exactly the same thing about Marah.
Brian Wilson would likely have been my number one had it been an album of completely new material. Popular music this transcendent can be counted on if not the fingers of one hand, surely no more than one's fingers and toes. Hearing him sing "Heroes and Villains" on Smile, and realizing all the years and anguish he went through before seeing his masterpiece to completion, can easily make eyes well up.
The Chris Stamey CD is a great jangle pop album, a joyous, passionate evocation of the spirit of college radio in the early 80s. Lloyd Cole'a album is quiet and confessional, introspective and romantic, wry and cynical. In short, all of the things that have made him so great over the years. It is also as strong a set of lyrics as he has set to music.
The next five choices of the top ten were three fine pop albums and two superb female singer-songwriters. First the women: Patti Scialfa is a criminally overlooked artist. While I'm sure being Springsteen's wife works to her advantage in some ways, I can't help but think many more people write her career off as an example of nepotism. Her work at its best is as good as the best of Joni Mitchell or Rickie Lee Jones. Tift Merritt should be a star. I've never seen anyone who was not famous who combined looks, singing, songwriting, and overall charisma the way she does. Here's hoping the Grammy nomination she received keeps her career on an upward path.
The three pop albums are all different and all immensely enjoyable. The Duran Duran album is the best of their career: alternative dance pop with great production: John Taylor's bass kicks. Hanson's "Jenny and Me" was the best unknown single of the year, and their sunny rock album would have been one of the best of any year from about 1966 on. Trash Can Sinatras is atmospheric pop/rock with chiming Rickenbackers reminiscent of The Byrds, Teenage Fanclub, or any band that brings chills with airy, open chording and tight Beatlesque harmonies.
The honorable mention selections received a lot of listens, and depending on the mood I'm in, most of them could slip into that bottom five listing, The notable find was Ricky Fante, whose channelling of the spirits of Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam Cooke, and other great soul masters gave me a glimmer of hope for at least some small future for the classic R&B sound.
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